They should end in the style of the author’s notes from the fanfic My Immortal instead.

>try all the OS out there

>person you’re responding to is suggesting they try the other one of the two top DEs for Linux desktop before leading with “Linux Is Already Broken Before You Even Start”

This is a ridiculous strawman. I empathize with them and want to see accessibility improve (it’s something I do in the project I work on even though you wouldn’t conventionally expect that blind people can use it). If you’re going to talk in such broad terms about the Linux desktop, not just your specific distro/DE, the onus is on you to at minimum try GNOME and KDE. Instead they chose GNOME and MATE, the latter of which is barely maintained and has effectively zero relevance outside of users who abandoned GNOME ages ago during GTK3 or people whose hardware makes the Atari 2600 look like a supercomputer (it looks like the former here). It’s not 2017 anymore; Ubuntu with GNOME isn’t some near-universal Linux desktop experience. I’m not telling them “nooooo just try my specific config for NixOS bro I promise Linux isn’t that bad”.

This isn’t even to say that KDE will be better; I don’t know, which is why I wish they covered it. If KDE is also bad, then this is a stronger argument that Linux desktop contributors need more awareness of and focus on accessibility. If it’s just mediocre, KDE devs can see it and learn how to improve. If it’s good, then GNOME and MATE devs have a lesson in how they can improve.

I don’t expect anyone to exhaust every DE on every distro, but when the userbase is so firmly concentrated around GNOME and KDE, I expect you to at minimum include KDE (let alone if you include MATE). You don’t have to, but I’m free to criticize your essay if you have such a massive hole in it. If you don’t want to try KDE, literally just find+replace “Linux” to “GNOME/MATE” and solve the problem that way.

Just rewrite curl in Rust so you can immediately close any AI slop reports talking about memory safety issues. /s

You’re right. We should support developers.

Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page.

The $90 million in venture capital can nourish the leeches at Plex just fine.

Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page.

I’m really disappointed not to see Okular there. It’s FOSS, and it’s very cozy and useful.

Psychology has an embarrassing history.

It really doesn’t?

Half their studies aren’t reproducible.

Replicable*, and also see here.

Their most famous study is basically a fraud.

Do you mean the Stanford prison experiment, which is famous because of how terrible it was? The one that’s taught in Psych 101 classes as a lesson on ethics and how not to design an experiment? Because while I would argue it’s not the most famous study, the entire reason it’s famous is because it was so shittily designed that psychologists going forward took lessons from it. No one’s holding that up to say “Wow, look at this great study we, the field of psychology, collectively did.”

They’re behind lobotomies

That was psychiatry and neurology, but I don’t expect you to know the difference.

They’re behind the Satanic panic

That a random quack psychiatrist came out and publicized this doesn’t mean that “the field of psychology” is behind the Satanic panic. Dr. Oz is a fraud who used his platform to sell bullshit supplements; does that make the field of medicine “behind” homeopathy?

They’re behind eugenics

This literally isn’t true, or at least it’s a ridiculous half-truth to put psychology at the forefront of eugenics. Eugenics is – surprise, surprise – rooted in biology after inheritance became more widely understood (read: we knew just enough to be dangerous). Eugenics had its hand in basically every natural science, and so you’ll find occasional psychologists like Henry H. Goddard showing up, but you’ll see biologists, statisticians, politicians, and so forth. Eventually eugenics spread into fields like psychiatry (note: different from psychology), but “they’re behind eugenics” is absolute fucking horseshit that you fail to back up with literally anything.

I’m not anti-intelectual [sic] or a Scientologist or anything

Uh-huh…

I guess what I’m trying to say is that psychologists like Jordan Peterson might want to clean up their own room before trying to lecture the rest of us.

Why are you bringing up Jordan Peterson? Peterson is widely despised among psychologists, he no longer works at the University of Toronto, and instead of contributing research to the field or engaging in clinical practice, he puts out self-help sludge. “I’m not an anti-intelectual, but I’m going to take an entire century-old field of science and compress it into Philip Zimbardo(?) and Jordan Peterson so I can say that science bad actually.”

You understand that the “hard sciences” are also affected by this crisis, correct? “Soft science” is a borderline meaningless term that stigmatizes entire fields of science to the sole benefit of anti-intellectuals.

Even when we take into consideration that the problem is currently worse in sciences like psychology, economics, sociology, etc.: “these results support the scientific status of the social sciences against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree.” Social sciences are science.

You don’t belong to “the hard sciences crowd”; you belong to a Sheldon Cooper-esque stereotype who devalues work you don’t understand.

The replication crisis is real, but I’m going to give some pushback on the “ssssh” like it’s some kind of conspiracy “they” don’t want you to know about™. We live in an era of unprecedented and extremely dangerous anti-intellectualism, and pushing this as some kind of conspiracy is honestly really gross.

• The entire reason the crisis became known is because scientists have and are having the integrity to try to replicate results from existing studies. They want the science in their field to be sound, and they’ve been extremely vocal about this problem from the minute they found it. This wasn’t some “whistleblower” situation.
• Arguably a major reason why it took so long for this to come to the fore is because government agencies which administer grants focus much less on replicating previous experiments and more on “new” stuff. This would ironically be much less of a problem if more funds were allocated for scientific research (i.e. so they weren’t so competitive that researchers feel the need to publish “new” research lest their request be denied). This “ssssh” rhetoric makes the voting public want the exact opposite of that because it tells them that their tax dollars are being funneled into some conspiratorial financial black hole.
• This happens in large part because concrete, replicable research on humans is extremely hard, not because the researchers lack integrity and just want to publish slop. In CS, I can control for basically everything on my computer and give you a mathematical proof that what I wrote works for everything every time. In physics, I can give exact parameters for my simulation or literal schematics for my device. A psychological or sociological experiment is vastly more difficult to remove confounding variables from or to properly document the confounding variables in.
• This doesn’t invalidate soft sciences like anti-intellectuals would want you to believe. While some specific studies may not be replicable, this is why meta-analyses and systematic reviews are so important in medicine, psychology, sociology, etc.: they give the “average” of the existing literature on a specific subject, so outliers get discovered, and there’s far more likelihood that their results are correct or close to correct.
• This is actively being worked on, and researchers are more aware of it than ever – making them more cognizant of the way they design their experiments and discuss their methodologies.
• One of the major reasons for problems with replication isn’t actually that the original studies were bunk within the population they were sampling. Rather, it’s that once replication was attempted on people from diverse cultures rather than the narrow range of cultures often sampled in many (especially older) papers (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”), the significance observed disappeared. As noted in the linked article, 50% given that fact is actually not half-bad. With much more extensive globalization in the modern day and a larger awareness of this problem, it should become less and less severe.

EDIT: I just noticed that they also got their facts wrong in a subtle but meaningful way: the statistic is that 50% of the published papers aren’t replicable, not reproducible. Reproducibility is taking an existing dataset and using it to reach the same conclusions. For example, if I have a dataset of 500 pictures of tires and publish “Tires: Are they mostly round and black?” in Tireology, claiming based on the dataset that tires are usually round and black, then I would hope that Scientist B. couldn’t take that same dataset of 500 tire pictures and come to the conclusion that they’re usually square and blue. However, replication would be if Scientist B. got their own new dataset of say 800 tire pictures and attempted to reach my same findings. If they found from this dataset that tires are usually square and blue but found from my dataset that they’re usually round and black, then my results would be reproducible but not replicable. If Scientist B. got the same results as me from the new dataset, then my results would be replicable, but it wouldn’t say anything about reproducibility. Here, a lack of replication might come from taking too narrow a sample of tires (I found the tires by camping out in a McDonald’s parking lot in Norfolk, Nebraska over the course of a weekend), that I published my findings in 1985 but that 40 years later tires really have changed, that there was some issue with how I took the pictures, etc.

This user’s entire history (username included) is spent signal-boosting attacks against Wikipedia. (Incidentally, they just deleted one from this very community because they got called out for it). This user is a ridiculous troll and should be banned from communities for their transparent, bad-faith agenda. I’m sure if there’s a story worth posting, somebody other than “wikipediasuckscoop” can post it. It’s so transparent that in an age where the Internet is blanketed with far-right disinformation, one of the last remaining bastions of truth that refuses to compromise and bend to said disinformation will come under attack by bad-faith, far-right actors desperately flailing to discredit it. This user doesn’t give a single shit about gender equality; they simply aim to discredit a resource standing in the way of their agenda.

A gender gap is a longstanding and severe issue on the English Wikipedia, but there’s a lot this article leaves out about its monumental and ongoing efforts to increase its coverage of women and to welcome more women into the project. This especially includes WikiProject Women in Red, far and away Wikipedia’s largest collaborative project whose entire purpose is to create new biographies about women. A large part of this biographical underrepresentation stems less from a bias in the editors themselves and more from the way that historical women have often been left out of published, reliable sources, and it’s taking scholars enormous efforts to bring those women to the surface today. It also says: “just 10-15% of its editors are female.” What this fails to acknowledge is that there’s an option simply not to declare your gender at all. To be clear, the ratio is atrocious, but 10–15% is likely an underrepresentation: women may be substantially less likely to self-declare their gender on the Internet than men. The Wikimedia Foundation has outreach, activism, etc. focused specifically on recruiting women to the project and has for well over a decade now. Wikipedia really is trying, and its experienced editors are constantly aware of this.

The article does put forth three hypotheses for why this gap exists, but I don’t think they put forth compelling evidence for the hypothesis that it exists because of the culture on Wikipedia or that it’s – in general – Wikipedia’s “fault”.

This user’s entire history (username included) is spent signal-boosting demonstrably false, bad-faith attacks against Wikipedia. I have no idea how this post has a ratio of 28–0 when the article’s premise is that the ADL of all organizations is a good arbiter of what is antisemitic when it comes to coverage of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The article starts with “This past March, researchers from the Anti-Defamation League accused Wikipedia of biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Newsflash: it isn’t. The ADL consistently treats anyone who dares to challenge Israel’s genocide as antisemitic. This user is a ridiculous troll and should be banned from communities for their transparent, bad-faith agenda. I’m sure if there’s a story worth posting, somebody other than “wikipediasuckscoop” can post it. It’s so transparent that in an age where the Internet is blanketed with far-right disinformation, one of the last remaining bastions of truth that refuses to compromise and bend to said disinformation will come under attack by bad-faith, far-right actors desperately flailing to discredit it.

Edit: I’d like to point out that when the article says “propagandists” (i.e. people opposed to Israel’s genocide) and arbitrarily delineates them from “editors”, what it’s failing to point out (likely because a) its author doesn’t understand shit about fuck or b) its author doesn’t care) is that any article related to a conflict between Israel and Arab countries is extended protected by default (on top of other heavy editing restrictions). This means that it can only be edited 1) on a registered account 2) which is at least 30 days old and 3) which has made at least 500 edits. This isn’t 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 typing “Izreel sux lololol” or even just some random sockpuppet account trying to insert anti-Israel bias. You have to be an experienced editor to make changes to these articles. Every single one of these even remotely controversial public changes is put under a microscope and discussed ad nauseum by other experienced editors on the corresponding talk page – not just to make sure that it’s covered without bias per NPOV but that its claims are suitably backed by reliable, independent sources.

I read this as “incinerate”. A principled, pragmatic opposition to the death penalty in any case I can think of is the only reason I would disapprove.

And this boulder could generate huge amounts of energy if I pushed it up to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and let it roll down.

44 upvotes and 0 downvotes for a comment that doesn’t understand that energy density measurements like this tend to measure the useful energy of a system.

They also don’t account for the fact that vaccination isn’t a magic block against getting COVID. Vaccination reduces the likelihood of infection and, if you do get infected, the severity. COVID can still break through that and have serious, life-altering consequences. Fuck putting my kids’ health in danger so awful parents can continue to abuse their kids with no consequence.

Edit: btw, I’m referring to the original comment in this thread. The person you’re replying to wants to vaccinate the kids against the parents’ will, which is a good thing if they can be.

I was wondering why a certain word wasn’t showing up…

So the map is more accurately titled “How American Twitter users refer…”

Not only that, but we make it goddamn trivial for not just Wikipedia but for other Wikimedia projects. Doing this is just stealing without attribution and share-alike like the CC BY-SA 4.0 license demands and then on top of that kicking down the ladder for people who actually want to use Wikimedia and not the hallucinatory slop they’re trying to supplant it with. LLM companies have caused incalculable damage to critical thinking, the open web, the copyleft movement, and the climate.

My lab doesn’t have a retro encabulator for that yet, unfortunately. 😮‍💨

It’s crazy how much Adam has grown since he left BuzzFeed.

I knew who this was going to be before I even clicked, and I highly suggest you ignore her. She speaks well outside of fields she has any knowledge about (she’s a physicist but routinely extrapolates that to other fields in ways that aren’t substantiated) and is constantly spreading FUD about academia because it drives clicks. She essentially hyper-amplifies real problems present in academia in a way that basically tells the public not to trust science.