Thanks!

I have heard of Kenny G, which is a strong indicator of basicness. Gonna give him a spin. I yearn for the peoples’ jazz.

Who’s the most basic jazz artist? the one everyone knows and yet everyone kinda looks down on. Who’s the The Red Hot Chili Peppers of jazz?

The alternative is not realizing it. Realizing how stupid you used to be is how you grow.

I have a similar relationship with iptables. Like, I can do it, but it’s the boring stuff I gotta get out of the way to make the interesting stuff work.

edit: thought of another one. Any time I’ve ever opened xorg.conf, I was having a bad time.

I have a problem with the way we currently think of “prison” which is the one reason I can’t honestly say “I think these motherfuckers should be in prison.” However, I think that controlling access to resources is power, and the punishment for abuse of that power must include the loss of that power. It can’t just be a fine. The only thing fines accomplish is to add a line item to the cost of doing abusive business, so you have to be more ruthlessly exploitative to compensate.

It doesn’t have to be full incarceration. But individuals should be disempowered from whatever power they were abusing, in a way that prevents them from immediately going back to whatever they were doing. The good ole boy networks need to be pruned and broken up continually or they grow too large, too entrenched. They’ll grow back, so once we clean up this current bloom we need to think about how to keep them from growing out of control, as they historically do, at intervals.

What’s your opinion of jazz?

Mine turned into people. Oh, god :(

I’m not fussed about that word in particular. It’s been slang for “basement dweller” since the movie C.H.U.D. came out in the 80s, and I feel like each generation attaches new meanings to it.

IME, it’s one of those slang words that has found purchase more in online conversation than offline, which I think makes it a signifier of being “internet fluent” among people who find pride themselves on being knowledgeable about the internet. Combine that with it’s origin as a description of underground creatures despised by the broader society, and I think it makes sense that it would resonate with internet communities that self describe as losers e.g. 4chan, incels, femcels.

Happens a lot. I remember when I could scroll through twitter and not see any nazis.

It’s something I think about a lot with the Fediverse: how to keep the nazis at bay. I think with Reddit, Twitter et al one of the main factors is that nazis also tend to spend money to show their allegiance, which is why you see things like Trump selling fake $1000 bills with his face on it. It’s very profitable to give nazis a space to be awful because they will spend money they don’t have to feel like they’re really part of the club.

I think it comes down to the same rules as running a bar. If nazis come in, you gotta kick them out right away, otherwise before you know it your bar is a nazi bar. I think that’s why “edgy” humor comms are particularly vulnerable, because they’re a good place for nazis to gradually push the envelope in the name of “humor” and once they get a beachhead, they’re hard to stop without decisive action.

I don’t remember the exact quote and I can’t find it, but I recall someone describing a similar problem on 4chan itself. There’s a thing that happens, in communities that emphasize edgy humor, to newcomers who don’t get the jokes and confuse them for genuine beliefs. Those who find them repulsive leave and don’t return, while those who find them tolerable (as genuine beliefs) stick around and have those beliefs normalized and reinforced. Over time, the sincere believers come to outnumber the jokers, and what was once a lighthearted satirical community becomes a cesspool of bona fide extremism.

I don’t know if it’s a fair analogy; as far as I can remember 4chan was always a cesspool of violence with a flimsy veneer of “it’s just a joke bro”. But I think it would be unwise to assume something like that couldn’t happen in a femcel community.

I think that’s so, but that relationship between theory and application exists for every technical discipline. Computer scientists vs software engineers, for example. The line is usually blurry; I tend to operate closer to the applied side of software, for instance, but I still think about and am informed by the theoretical side, just as theory is shaped by the experimental results of application.

“Mathematics” is an odd case because what people call “pure mathematics” is upstream of even the theoretical side of technical specialties. Like, what a theoretical mathematician might call an applied mathematician, I might call a data scientist, because they’re closer to pure theory than I am, but still closer to technical application than the theoretical mathematician. It’s a super-theory that underpins other theoretical domains.

Watch out. As soon as you retrieve the idol from the alter those blades are going to start falling. If you run flat out down the nave you might be able to slide under the portcullis just before it grinds shut. Don’t forget to grab your hat.

Yeah, true. I have a library that suits me now (not to mention… what comm we’re in) so I don’t feel the lack but I’m definitely not in the “new game” money nowadays.

Every video game I played growing up I played secondhand. I pawed through the bargain bins in high school, looking for games that I’d heard about. I got most of my own SNES games from a single lucky church rummage sale haul that, in retrospect, probably broke somebody’s heart. I borrowed games from friends. I didn’t have money for new games until I was out of college.

It makes me sad to think about that going away. I’m sure there are a lot of kids out there today that can only afford secondhand games.

If I have an old Roomba can I hack a new brain into it? I’ve got a Raspberry Pi and a soldering iron and a willingness to break them for science. Never done much hardware hacking though.

assigning error bars is purely subjective

I don’t know where you got this idea from but it is incorrect. Error bars are used to indicate uncertainty in measurements and they are used to indicate confidence (or lack thereof) in those measurements. Measurement is hard, and precise measurement is harder, so engineers of all stripes use error bars to indicate how precisely their data have been recorded. It’s not just a stats thing.

also this:

results change based on the lens through which you interpret the data

happens in every field, including pure mathematics. Look up the axiom of choice if you would like a lot of further reading about the implications of interpreting mathematics through that particular lens. Much as we may long for a “purely objective” language of the universe, free from the limitations of human interpretation, we haven’t discovered it yet. The best we can do for now is try to make good assumptions and build from there.

I think it’s good advice for beginners. If you’re inside a VPN you get a little more breathing room to figure out how to properly provision and wire up your services without having do deal with all the security and scaling concerns that can come from public hosting. Also, new hosters are really likely to set up their reverse proxy and not patch it and leave it open to known vulnerabilities that get exploited months or years down the line… not that that ever happened to me…

Anyway, I think inside a VPN is a good way to get your feet wet. Setting up a public website is fun but I wouldn’t advise it as a first step.

I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but in the US they aren’t “kinda considered” doctors, they are doctors. They have terminal medical degrees and practitioner’s licenses same as any other medical practitioner. They’re kinda segmented off from the rest of medical practice because of how dentistry evolved alongside other historical healing practices, but they are doctors.

Second, is statistics not a branch of mathematics? The courses I took on probability and statistics were taught by the math department. I don’t see how it can’t be. Is it “pure” math? Depends on how you define pure but probably not. Is it “easy” math? Arguably some of it is, though I think people who think stats is an easy science probably aren’t very good at it. All that I get. But the idea that it is (uniquely among technical disciplines) “not math” is… confounding to me.

Yeah I don’t think this is the burn on statisticians OP makes it out to be. Lots of technical disciplines use mathematics, like… all of them I think? I don’t know of any field that doesn’t incorporate math that isn’t purely artistic.

Also why are dentists catching strays?