Ask me about:

  • Science (biology, computation, statistics)
  • Gaming (rhythm, rogue-like/lite, other generic 1-player games)
  • Autism & related (I have diagnosis)
  • Bad takes on philosophy
  • Bad takes on US political systems & more US stuff

I’m not knowledgeable about most other things

  • 6 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2024

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  • My main social media app is Mastodon (technically Firefish which I will soon migrate to Iceshrimp… but those details are less relevant)

    I consider Lemmy less so of a “social media” and more of a link aggregator/discussion forum… but yeah otherwise I try to use Lemmy a bit too. I still browse Reddit quite a lot, but only for individual communities that don’t have equivalents on Lemmy, and I no longer post there

    I never used much social media to begin with tbh… I feel pretty decent about the Fediverse. Despite all the drawbacks (blocklists, fedi drama, etc), I think people collectively managed to make an objectively better social media platforms compared to the previous corporation-dominated ones (at least by my personal metrics)


  • I… think this question is a bit more complicated for this community. Following are only my personal opinion

    Prescribed medication? I think so, I’d rather be physically and mentally healthy rather than have the other alternative. And usually medication (even ones with noted negative effects) are meant do do more good than harm so…

    Recreational drugs… the line between this and the above is surprisingly not as clear-cut as it seems. I believe there are active lines of study of using various psychedelic compounds to treat mental disorders or other conditions… Personally I would take medically prescribed psychedelics if I am 1) under medical supervision and 2) based on evidence it would help my mental health (maybe that’s the answer to the question?)

    Hard drugs: I don’t see how they can make anyone a better person, and no








  • So it was the physics Nobel… I see why the Nature News coverage called it “scooped” by machine learning pioneers

    Since the news tried to be sensational about it… I tried to see what Hinton meant by fearing the consequences. Believe he is genuinely trying to prevent AI development without proper regulations. This is a policy paper he was involved in (https://managing-ai-risks.com/). This one did mention some genuine concerns. Quoting them:

    “AI systems threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society. They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance”

    like bruh people already lost jobs because of ChatGPT, which can’t even do math properly on its own…

    Also quite some irony that the preprint has the following quote: “Climate change has taken decades to be acknowledged and confronted; for AI, decades could be too long.”, considering that a serious risk of AI development is climate impacts


  • Oh my… I had a slightly similar incident. New phone number, had a bunch of random strangers texting me (some even calling!) asking for Ethan. My name is not Ethan, I didn’t know who Ethan is

    No idea what was on my mind back then, but I somehow got the contact info of this mysterious Ethan, called him (hilarity ensued since he got a call from someone on his contact list named “Me”), confirmed his up-to-date number, and promptly referred everyone looking for Ethan to the real person for over a year…

    Life is strange sometimes







  • I have actually never heard anyone say it this way specifically where I grew up… so technically the answer is “no”?

    I tried to dug around and found a Reddit post saying this:

    “The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the term as “twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; constantly”. It lists its first reference to 24/7 to be from a 1983 story in the US magazine Sports Illustrated in which Louisiana State University player Jerry Reynolds describes his jump shot in just such a way: 24-7-365.”

    So this might be a fairly new idiom? Which would explain why it’s not really a thing in a lot of cultures… but I assume they have their ways of referring to this.

    number of hours and days are the same

    Ok akktually Japan has a rather interesting 30-hour day thing in the context of businesses… but jokes aside, the 24-hour, 7-day week system is indeed quite universal


  • I realized that I had allergies during the height of the pandemic… so the short answer is it gave me way too much unnecessary stress because I was constantly worried whether I got COVID-19.

    • Depends… I felt most times it was just “did I finally catch covid or is this just allergy?”, there was once or twice when it got really bad though.
    • There was once when I had such a bad allergy that my eyes both flared up and I could barely see… It was bad enough that I reached out to the allergy department of my provider as soon as I was functional & got me into immunotherapy.
    • Not meds, but I did 3+ years of immunotherapy: 1+ year of getting allergen injections every week (thankfully still had a car back then), and then once per month of maintenance after I reached the highest dose. Had to stop because of relocation/insurance nonsense… but I think the treatment worked.
    • No you’re not being a big baby, please take your health seriously and stay safe & healthy.


  • I guess I forgot to take that into consideration… I’m not worried about Google banning my IP since I essentially don’t use any Google services at all and my home IP is hidden behind a wireguard tunnel, but yes that is a valid concern

    But I mean someone can just spin it up on their home network so… No way 192.168.0.1:3000 can get someone into trouble right


  • The elites don’t want you to know but “[y]ou may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home)”

    Following their guide gives a local Invidious client, don’t forget to 1) copy their production compose file instead of using the one on git and 2) change “hmac_key”… from my experience setting up cron (crontab -e) to restart the docker container once per day keeps the Invidious docker healthy


    Edit: here are some alternatives for popular Google services. Not in anyway related to the above (smirk

    • Google itself: SearXNG (try searx.be first), one of the easiest services to self-host
    • Gmail/calendar: a lot of people seem to swear by one of Proton Mail, Tutanota or Mailbox.org. Self-hosting is possible but challenging
    • Google Drive: You mean Nextcloud?
    • Google maps: Organic Maps is actually getting pretty good now
    • Google Chrome: at the very least there is Chromium… obviously there is Firefox and Firefox forks (such as Librewolf), as well as other smaller browsers
    • Google Play: F-Droid hosts a lot of FOSS stuff, and there are alternative ways to access Play (such as Aurora Store)
    • Android: a bit more difficult… but there is LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and similar stuff