Best conclusion from today's programmer training was the programmer mantra, which is "I'm thrilled you're having a great time, DO NOT make me do it with you".

This is actually my reaction to like 90% of Tumblr also.

Grandmas were so right about puzzles and knitting and crocheting and solitaire and reading slow and slippers and baking and watching deer in the backyard send post

Working site security it's wild to me how many people when called out will say "I've been doing this for years and you're the only security person to bother me about it", as if to say, "you're an idiot on a power trip", when the admission really is, "every other security person who has seen me do this has taken one look at me and immediately decided that I seemed exhausting enough o deal with that they'd risk a reprimand to avoid me"

I love visiting tiny rural libraries because I put an adblocker on their browser and I'm God now to like 5 or 6 entire organizations. This rules

weird little brain tweak/reframing that helped me out. i Often find that advice that seemingly helps Everyone Else doesn’t make any sense to me, in ways that are hard to describe, and it can be really frustrating. but when i find a way to explain it to myself that finally seems to break through and make it click, it feels really good

i need “Happier than a necromancer in a natural history museum” to become a known phrase immediately

it's so fucking frustrating to be in college and know everyone uses chatgpt and to be tempted by it constantly while also knowing intellectually that it doesn't work and it's a bad idea. like, i hang out in the library a lot, and i see people using chatgpt on assignments almost every day. and i know it isn't a good way to learn, because it's not really "artificial intelligence" so much as it is an auto text generator. and it gives you wrong information or badly worded sentences all the time. but every week i stare down assignments i don't want to do and i think man. if only i could type this prompt into a text generator and have it done in 10 minutes flat. and i know it wouldn't work. it wouldn't synthesize information from the text the way professors want, it wouldn't know how to answer questions, it just spits out vaguely related words for a couple paragraphs. but knowing my classmates get their work done in 10 minutes flat with it while i fight every ounce of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in my body is infuriating.

tiffany in i shall wear midnight makes me so fucking sad. like. she's the witch of the entire chalk. she rarely laughs. she calls people NOT EVEN 3 years younger than her 'kids'. she deals with things not even grown man could stomach. she comforts her own father multiple times when he tries comforting her bc she feels BAD for him. she constantly keeps herself in check around EVERYONE. she hates herself for oversleeping or sleeping at all bc she could've DONE things in that time people NEED her. she takes away people's pain every day. she witnesses a murder and its not the first time and she buries the baby and saves the abusive father bc she doesn't want her people's conscience to be tainted with his murder. she plants flowers (WHICH SHE BUYS WITH HER OWN HARD EARNED MONEY) on the grave of an old woman who died bc people said she was a wicked old witch and turned her out of her own house so they wont EVER forget. she has to do it all alone and she wishes she hadn't. she finds in herself sympathy for EVERYONE, no matter how bad they treated her or others. when they lock her in the dungeon her biggest concern is other people . she opened a school bc she wanted ppl to find out who they are like she did. she's not even 16.

Dear professor this assignment did not nourish my fundamentally curious soul so i did not do it No penalty full 100 points please Goodbye!

General question to reblog and tell me in the tags;

You go into a used bookstore - what are the two sections you head to first?

@tardis-stowaway making them go rural is mean, I love it. Wishing all developers a very get yelled at by a farmer whose truck is older than you are because he put his password into the email field again.

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy's laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn't work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.

I'm sorry... snake paper? Are things heating up in the snake researcher fandom?

16 February 2024: A team of researchers (including a generally well-respected anaconda expert) found minimal and partly contradictory genetic differences in green anacondas over an enormous area, summarily dismissed all previous work on the taxonomy of green anacondas, and gave the mitochondrial lineage concerned a new name, along the way making some huge fumbles that show plainly that they have no idea how taxonomy works or what certain technical terms mean. They published the work in a journal from a suspect publishing house that is known to rush, skip, or ignore peer review as and when it suits them. And apparently there was some suspicious funding involved, though I don’t know much about that. They made a media storm with ‘a new anaconda!’ but within minutes there were people raising huge red flags about the paper, for the reasons enumerated above and others.

The response from ‘the community’ has been swift and harsh, but mostly fair, in my view. The discussion on ResearchGate reflects this pretty well. There are some bad takes about keeping ‘wokism’ out of science; I would argue that it remains critical to incorporate native peoples, knowledge, and languages into taxonomic work—just not the way this was done, in flagrant and intentional conflict with the established methods and protocols. There are also responses in the discussion by the lead author that show that he is evidently impervious to all of this criticism, and stands by the belief that the work and taxonomic reasoning is sound.

19 March 2024: two papers were published simultaneously in Bionomia, that both enumerate and rebut the problems of the original paper. And I know there are more on the way, though I don’t know if they are all going to be completed now that two responses have already been published.

The one thing I would weigh in on from my perspective is that it is the *taxonomy*, and not necessarily the evidence presented in the paper, that is the biggest problem. Species are described based on mitochondrial data alone all the time. Some of the results are quite interesting. But the taxonomy of the paper is a mess, full of contradictions, cherry-picking, and terminological errors. In the hands of competent taxonomists, the work might have been much more difficult to dispute. But also, no competent taxonomist would have assigned a new name to this lineage; there are too many existing names that would have priority, if it is worth recognising.

Undoing public perception of there being a new anaconda species will take years, if it can ever really be achieved. Always easier for media stories to go around than corrections.

TL;DR big snake paper made big mistakes, and within a month was dismissed. It has probably done lasting damage to perception of anaconda diversity.

OMG it does!! I was doing something similar to that, I think, but I added extra steps somewhere in simplifying it that far and got something just wrong enough from mixing up numbers that I no longer trusted the entire method.

I can put this in a spreadsheet, now... 😍

i really do my best with literary fiction but the problem is that they keep sneaking edutainment in there but there's not like, a blacklistable tag for that, that tells me i don't actually want to read this and would be better off reading nonfiction on the covered topics. i'm sure this seems like a specific complaint but it's happened like three times in the last year and i only managed to finish one of them.

like does this book actually have queer representation in a way that will make me feel seen, or will this book have a part where the main character seems to look at the straight person they're expecting to exist beyond the fourth wall in order to teach them about stonewall or whatever. are they going to start 'as you know bob'-ing actual history at me. why does this keep happening. do the writers actually want to do the fiction equivalent of those youtube channels that just read wikipedia articles, or can i blame bad editors to make myself feel better