32 + 4 = 36

34 + 2 = 36

Am I missing something? Barring some extremely stupid math error, I don’t see how I’m incorrect

Democrats in the past 10 ish years have been absolutely horrendous at marketing, allowing Republicans to take up all of the media talking space, traditional or otherwise. TV, news, podcasts, social media influencers, YouTube, etc. are all generally Republican leaning.

Republicans control the talking points and co-opt anything that the Democrats say. Meanwhile, Democrats are either unable or unwilling to do the same.

Republicans’ control of the media allows them to get away with way more things than the Democrats. It allows them to essentially claim that they’re for the working class while simultaneously working against working class interests, especially when heard by people who don’t generally follow political news. Meanwhile, Democrats get called out for relatively smaller issues, and that makes them seem elitist and uncaring of working class issues.

One major facet of the Democrats being unable to control their marketing is their unwillingness to use populist rhetoric, even though by policy stances they should be (comparatively) more closely associated with populism than the Republicans. I’ve heard several takes on why Harris lost the election and the one that I most agree with is that she failed to use populist rhetoric and was unable to differentiate herself from Biden. People wanted change, and Harris offered the status quo.

Remember that the vast majority of Americans don’t pay attention to politics, and so voter impressions are decided by tone and messaging rather than specific policies

Most of the bras that my girlfriend gets fits on her first try, although she does tend to prefer sister sizes over her real size. If your girlfriend is having issues with bras fitting, it might be worthwhile to read up on how bra sizes are actually calculated and do a measurement yourself. Funny enough, most girls don’t seem to know how the bra size system works either and they just get their sizes through trial and error, which seems like what has happened here.

The letter by itself is fundamentally meaningless. A 32D is equivalent to a 34B! And most girls severely underestimate their actual size. What would colloquially be called a B or C is actually an E

I agree with you generally, but I strongly disagree that we today cannot understand the perspective of the time. We (Americans) just elected Imperial Supreme God Emperor Trump based on the same fascist ideas that drove people to Hitler back then

A bubble means that investors are putting in more money into a particular field than the field is really worth. How does that happen? Well, investors make money by investing money into small companies and hoping that they get bigger over time. And they need to make guesses in which company they think will actually get big. While investors generally try to make these guesses logically, there’s inherently a bit of “trust me bro” involved in making these decisions.

A bubble happens when investors increasingly rely on “trust me bro” to make their investment decisions. And so they put in more and more money into a field that might not really need or deserve that much money. Not to say that the field is intrinsically useless - just that the hype has overtaken the actual usefulness of that field. So when you see something that’s being hyped up, you should generally view it with caution.

AI as a field is currently very hyped up right now, and so there’s concern that AI might be a bubble.

How does a bubble pop? Randomly and without warning. The problem with bubbles is that they’re driven primarily by hype and “trust me bro,” and so if anything blows the hype, it will cause all the investors to snap back to reality and pull all their money. That’s a lot of money being pulled from a single field at the same time, and that’ll absolutely crash the field. A company going under might trigger a pop, or it could be a random news article that went viral saying that AI is a fraud, or it could be a lackluster product launch. Hype is inherently unstable, and so it can be difficult to predict when and why a bubble pops.

The implosion that happens during a pop isn’t referring to any particular company, it’s referring to the entire field as a whole. It could very well happen (though unlikely) that not a single company goes bankrupt during a pop. It’s merely that those companies would lose a lot of the investor funding that they have previously been relying on. As investors lose hype in AI, companies will no longer feel as strong of a push to include AI in their products. At the same time, AI companies will slow down their product development due to lower funding and so they won’t be able to make as big of a splash in the news when they launch a new product.

The observed effect is that one day everything is AI, and the next day, nothing is AI. Think about NFT’s and cryptocurrency - most companies that dealt with NFT’s and crypto survived, but we no longer hear about NFT’s because they lost their hype and so lost their funding

Mint personally didn’t stick with me, and I settled on Kubuntu. I felt like troubleshooting ended up being a lot more opaque and frustrating on mint than on kubuntu, and I felt like there were a lot of little accessibility features that were missing on mint.

Kubuntu (KDE in general) is more overwhelming at first, but I feel like it’s much more of a “set it and forget it” experience

I practically don’t read for fun. Not that I dislike reading, but it’s generally rare to find books that interest me, and I simply don’t have time to look for interesting books. Last I found an interesting book, I breezed through it in a couple days.

Anyways, most of my reading happens through academia, reading scientific papers and such. There’s a lot of interesting scientific research going on that flies under the radar because it’s not clickbaity enough for popsci websites to pick up on it. I have a feed set up on Pubmed to send me emails every day on new papers from different topics. Every day or two I glance through them and it there’s something that catches my eye, I’ll read it more thoroughly.

I wouldn’t generally encourage people to read scientific papers, since they’re really quite dense and requires a lot of practice to get good at reading, but it’s an easy way to read something while being productive. And I’ve become increasingly convinced over time that the general population needs at least some experience with scientific literature, given how much of the science gets twisted in the game of Science Communication Telephone

So will bacteriophages and viruses be snapped as well? Does it mean that scientists can utilize the Thanos snap to determine for good whether viruses are alive?

If you’re forced to act supportive, is that truly support?

Due to the HL Alyx retcon, Epistle 3 could still be argued as an alternate timeline semi-canon story. At least, I think of it that way

That’s a misinterpretation of the poem. The point was that both paths were equally valid but no matter what he picked, he would always think that the other was better. It was a poem about “the grass is always greener on the other side”

Just yesterday I had a CO2 valve close on me during an experiment while I was away for a moment. It takes effort to turn the valve so it couldn’t have just shaken closed or something. The valve was in the corner of the room and was blocked off by boxes, so nobody could have accidentally bumped it. And, besides, nobody was in the room anyways. Before the experiment I made damn sure that the CO2 valve was open, and even looking through the computer records (which records the CO2) says that the CO2 valve was open until I walked away.

I still have no idea how the valve could have closed on its own. Now, I’m not saying it’s a ghost, but I am saying that I cannot think of a single non-paranormal explanation. I’ve clearly angered the science gods and I would do well to sacrifice some more cells to the science gods to appease them

Hmm… Weird. Seems like my app cut off the bottom from the video

X axis label is cut off…

Mfw some barbarian listens to the Epic of Gilgamesh on their clay tablet without earphones in public

Without another name change, I don’t think that phrase will ever go away, for the simple fact that X as a name is too short and nondescript. In speech, X could refer to a someone you broke up with, or it could just be the beginning of another word, serving as a prefix. In text, it could refer to the actual letter itself, or the close button on a window, or a placeholder, or something NSFW.

There’s simply too many ways that X can be interpreted that even if people associate Twitter with X, people will still specify “formerly Twitter” just to avoid confusion

Science is like going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. There’s always more things to do and more things to check out. At some point you just have to draw the line and say that enough is enough. Other scientists are likely to ask why you stopped where you stopped, and so saying that “it’s outside the scope of the paper” is basically the nice way of saying that you stopped because you felt like it

Enemy base looks inefficient and should be easily bottlenecked. Would recommend building a more efficient factory to counter his. Also, automate more pieces than just pawns - they might use a lot of red circuits, but you’ll need the reds later anyways so you might as well automate that

Most PhD’s in university actually prefer to be called by their first name. As a graduate student, one of the most jarring culture shocks is to learn to call professors by their first names. At least that’s the case in the US, not sure about elsewhere

It’s a multifaceted answer for me, I feel.

Linux is weird, on a technical level. It’s funky and broken and has weird quirks you have to remember. But it’s not malicious. Wendel from Level1Tech said it best in one of his videos: the headaches with Linux are haphazard, the headaches with Windows are adversarial.

It’s not a perfect solution to Windows, but at least for some people, the respect that it has for its users (ie, no ads, not trying to fight you on everything you’re trying to do, gives you the ability and freedom to tinker as you please) offsets its technical problems.

Additionally, Linux is missing a lot of core applications. There’s many applications that do have a Linux version, and many that can run through a compatibility layer, and out of those that are left, many have really solid replacements. Heck, you might be surprised to find that some of the software that you use already were originally intended to be replacements for Windows-only applications.

But there’s still a handful of core applications that don’t work on Linux and don’t really have a good replacement, and even missing 1 can easily break someone’s work flow. No, LibreOffice isn’t a full replacement of Microsoft Office, no, GIMP can’t actually replace Photoshop.

As for terminal, there’s no way around it. You will have to open terminal at some point. To be clear, most, if not all, things that you might imagine yourself doing likely has some way of doing it through a GUI. The issue is that as a new user, you don’t know where the GUI is, or what it’s called, or how to even ask. And when the tutorials that you find online tell you to just use terminal, that ends up being the only practical way of getting things done. So it’s a weird Catch-22, where only experienced users who know where all the menus are will know where the GUI options are, but it’s the new users who need it the most.

My understanding is that Linux developers in the past several years have been explicitly trying to make the OS more accessible to a new user, but it’s not quite there yet.

Overall, I think Linux is deeply flawed. But seeing how Microsoft seems to be actively trying to make Windows worse, Linux ends up being the only OS where have faith that it will still be usable in 2 years.

If anything, the more people switch to Linux, the more pressure there will be to make the OS more accessible to new users, and also for software companies to release a Linux-compatible version of their software. Some brave people just need to take the dive first