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?

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

Yes, you can add the Mozilla ppa and they offer a non-snap version. I think the Deb that you download from their website also isn’t snap, but I haven’t tried it

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

Would definitely not recommend KDE Neon. It’s more of a showcase of new KDE features than an actual usable OS. I currently use Kubuntu and it’s fine. I wish it updated more frequently but the update frequency isn’t slow enough to really be a deal breaker.

I disabled snap Firefox, not really because I’m ideologically against snap, but because snap Firefox is annoying to use. Other than that, the OS generally just works out of the box.

I’ve heard good things about OpenSUSE, but I’ve never tried it. My personal opinion is that I want to stick to the most common distros so that it’s easier to find troubleshooting advice

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

Found someone nice. It was sheer chance, really. Met with a new neighbor and she had a crush on me. Was friends for a while. Years later decided to get into a relationship with her.

Pretty sure that’s the point. It’s bait

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

I get very suspicious if a paper samples multiple groups and still uses p. You would use q in that case, and the fact that they didn’t suggests that nothing came up positive.

Still, in my opinion it’s generally OK if they only use the screen as a starting point and do follow-up experiments afterwards

Well, we are pretty big for insects

The two types of mentalities on display:

1. I’ll eat too much so I shouldn’t buy any
2. I’ll eat too much so I should buy more

Because the ones that we hear about are the ones that are good enough to have even made it out of Japan. If a game was bad, it wouldn’t be localized to an English-speaking audience, and we wouldn’t even know it exists.

It’s the same sort of thinking as asking why (insert media here) was better in the past. The answer is simple - good songs, games, movies, etc. tend to be more memorable, and so we remember the good ones and forget the bad ones. To put it briefly, there’s survivorship bias.

Patriotic duck

Braid. Sounds like a dress up game but it’s a puzzle platformers about time travel. I always have to explain it every time I talk about it

For me, everything is a belief unless it satisfies the following criteria:

1. It is generally accepted as true among experts
2. There is ample evidence that is both personally convincing and leaves no room for alternate interpretations (not the same as #1, since many fields have “commonly accepted knowledge” that is generally acknowledged as most likely true but has no evidence to back it up)
3. It is specific enough that it cannot be interpreted in a way that is misleading

I find that the one that trips up most people is #3, since some people speak in technically true but overly broad statements and the listener ends up filling in the gaps with their own biases. The listener leaves feeling like their biases have been confirmed by data, not realizing that they have been misled.

In the end, according to my criteria, very little can be categorized as true knowledge. But that’s fine. You can still make judgements from partial or biased data or personal beliefs. You just can’t be resolute about it and say that it’s true.