I’m reminded of a clip that I’ve seen that originates on Tik Tok about a guy who says something similar to what you’re saying here, including a clip where the guy went and shouted at a neo-nazi to basically say “you’re not welcome here, fuck off”.

I found it interesting because he explained that this isn’t usually something he would do because he’s very much a voice against toxic masculinity and this means that generally he doesn’t want or need to take the role of the angry, scary man. In this instance though, of the many members of his community who were uncomfortable with a neo-Nazi spewing hate, this guy was best situated to challenge this. I found it especially interesting because there’s a particular kind of aggressiveness to it — like, obviously going up to someone and shouting at them is aggressive, but it was clear that this guy wasn’t going for a fight

I respect your approach. I bet you’re the kind of parent who apologises to their kids when you make mistakes

I always find it tricky to understand how tools all relate to each other in an ecosystem and this is a great example of why: the fact that Ansible can do this task, but Teraform would be better suggests that they are tools that have different purposes, but some overlap. What would you say is Ansible’s strong suit?

It’s frustrating how common IQ based things are still. For example, I’m autistic, and getting any kind of support as an autistic adult has been a nightmare. In my particular area, some of the services I’ve been referred to will immediately bounce my referral because they’re services for people with “Learning Disabilities”, and they often have an IQ limit of 70, i.e. if your IQ is greater than 70, they won’t help you.

My problem here isn’t that there exists specific services for people with Learning disabilities, because I recognise that someone with Down syndrome is going to have pretty different support needs to me. What does ick me out is the way that IQ is used as a boundary condition as if it hasn’t been thoroughly debunked for years now.

I recently read “The Tyranny of Metrics” and whilst I don’t recall of it specifically delves into IQ, it’s definitely the same shape problem: people like to pin things down and quantify them, especially complex variables like intelligence. Then we are so desperate to quantify things that we succumb to Goodhart’s law (whenever a metric is used as a target, it will cease to be a good metric), condemning what was already an imperfect metric to become utterly useless and divorced from the system it was originally attempting to model or measure. When IQ was created, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was. It has been made worse by years of bigots seeking validation, because it turns out that science is far from objective and is fairly easy to commandeer to do the work of bigots (and I say this as a scientist.)

This post has a title I can hear

It’s one reason why I like Lemmy so much — conversations around here are so small scale that I can be confident I’m talking to a human.

That’s an extreme case, but the point still stands. For example, right now, I’m pretty fat, because I haven’t shifted the weight I gained over COVID. Even though I’m visibly way larger than I was, I’m not much heavier than I was pre-covid, because I’ve lost a heckton of muscle. It’s insane to me that BMI will look at me pre-covid, and look at me now, and say “that’s the same picture”. Especially because I personally found that the best and safest way for me to lose weight was to focus on getting strong and fit first.

Who is David Kinne and what did he do?

Congrats! I appreciate this post because I want to be where you are in the not too distant future.

Contributing to Open Source can feel overwhelming, especially if working outside of one’s primary field. Personally, I’m a scientist who got interested in open source via my academic interest in open science (such as the FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which are that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). This got me interested in how scientists share code, which led me to the horrifying realisation that I was a better programmer than many of my peers (and I was mediocre)

Studying open source has been useful for seeing how big projects are managed, and I have been meaning to find a way to contribute (because as you show, programming skills aren’t the only way to do that). It’s cool to see posts like yours because it kicks my ass into gear a little.

Unfortunately, learning about things doesn’t always help. I’m still very scared of spiders, despite being big on team learning. Some fears are rational, some are irrational, and these have very different salves.

I have a running list where I have been collecting words that I like for the last few years.

“Shrewd” is a good word and it’s going on my list. Thank you for the contribution.

My late best friend was a metal head and I often joke that I hope he’s gone to hell, because as a queer nerd who loved TTRPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, he’d have a hell of a time there.

I went to a big, old university where there were many old chapels with excellent organs. I went to some services despite being an atheist, just to hear the pretty sounds echoing 'round a pretty room.

this type of ecological engineering

Do you count reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone to be the same type of ecological engineering? I haven’t checked progress on that for a while but the last I heard, it was too early to say whether it was successful. I highlight Yellowstone because of how cautious the effort was (it took years of planning and analysis) and this caution feels like it’s directly descended from the fuck ups of the past

It has one of the best on-screen depictions of a panic attack that I’ve ever seen, which I wasn’t expecting

• When my house guests text “#wifi” to me, they get an auto reply with the WiFi password.

• NFC tag stuck to my medication pouch. When I boop my phone to it (or tap a shortcut on homescreen), I can select what medication I have taken. The medication and the time gets added to the bottom of a Google sheets spreadsheet, that I, or someone supporting me can check to get an overview of how frequently I’ve been taking medication (especially useful for spotting high pain chunks of time due to more frequent usage of PRN pain meds).

• Another aspect of the medication tracking above is that it also can tell me the last time I took medication. For example, if I take ADHD meds at 12pm, then my next dose would be 4pm. If I tap the shortcut at 3pm, it’ll tell me I last took meds at 12pm and I’m next due at 4pm. Alarms tend to either startle me or not be noticed, but when I had smart lights and a notification light on my phone, I could make a colour gradient where “you have just taken meds” = red and “you are due to take meds” = blue, and as time progresses, the colour slowly becomes more blue. This works well for me, because I like visual reminders

I was agreeing with you for the entirety of your comment (as someone with friends in healthcare), until you said

“What they call burnout, really is moral injury”

And then I was aggressively agreeing with you. I do not hear this aspect spoken about nearly enough. I was in hospital during COVID for non COVID reasons and I remember one terrible night where there was only one nurse on the ward, when two were needed to dispense medications like morphine. I was fortunate that I wasn’t needing medication like that, but many on the ward did. The entire night, sick and injured people were crying from pain as the solitary nurse sounded increasingly desperate as she explained to them that she needed to wait until she had backup and that she had been promised (and that, failing that, help should definitely arrive with the morning shift).

Prior to that night, my opinion of that nurse was that she was the kind of unpleasant that made me wonder “why has this person gone into healthcare when they seem to hate people so much?”. After that harrowing night, I realised the depth of the agony that her job involved and the inhumanity not just for the patients who were unable to receive medication, but for staff like her too. This was during COVID, so it’s unsurprising that the hospital was struggling for staff, but services were struggling long before COVID too.

I often think about her, and what she represents; I wonder how she was when she first started the job, and if perhaps her brusque manner evolved as the moral injury wore her down and hardened her exterior.

To be fair, AlphaFold is pretty incredible. I remember when it was first revealed (but before they open sourced parts of it) that the scientific community were shocked by how effective it was and assumed that it was going to be technologically way more complex than it ended up being. Systems Biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi captures this quite well in this blog post

I’m a biochemist who has more interest in the computery side of structural biology than many of my peers, so I often have people asking me stuff like “is AlphaFold actually as impressive as they say, or is it just more overhyped AI nonsense?”. My answer is “Yes.”

That’s actually helpful, thanks

Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).