skeletorfw

I’m sorry, I’m confused here. I’m obviously all against race science and greenwashing, but I was talking about the quoted study in my post.

That aside, it definitely is good to have more people talking about the inherent subjectivity and impermanence of science though!

Honestly (and I see you do recognise this in your comment) but this really seems like a kinda crappy study that I’m surprised made it into plos.

For instance I couldn’t find any evidence of them considering that the dietary choices of the guardian may affect the attitudes of the guardian to vetenarians (and thus the self-reported health of those animals). To take this further, in the scenario that a cat guardian believes their choices make their cat healthier, especially when going against vetinary orthodoxy, the guardian is probably less likely to take the cat to the vet for minor issues. This confounds the analysis of “healthiness” as performed by the authors.

Furthermore any cat that is not an indoor cat is likely also not fed a purely vegan diet (as they do hunt), so they should possibly account for that via a sort of bootstrapped approach. Generally the stats were okay though, and don’t make super strong claims from some pretty weak data. Though GAMs were a pretty odd choice and I’d have preferred some sort of explicit model fit with Bayesian fitting or NLLS.

In the end all of this points to the sort of thing where they should really have been doing perturbational research. I.e. feeding cats different diets in a controlled lab space. This is not the sort of research that lends itself to surveys and that seriously impacts the actual practicality of its findings.

Also as an aside, I really cannot abide anyone who includes a questionably inspirational quote that they said themselves in the fucking French Alps on their own website. That’s just pure wankery. The only people I usually see doing things like that are scientists like Trivers, which is not company one should wish to be in.

Informal tenancies seem to be state-dependant from what I can find (more concrete in california and florida), though I’d be fascinated to see if this has been legislated or litigated upon more generally. Of course verbal contracts are valid contracts, but that’s the sort of thing that would probably have to be sorted out in court.

In the end as advice for OP, I stand by the opinion that “they can’t kick you out without notice” is not a good idea to base one’s decisions on. You could be kicked out, whether it is legal or not, and the legality of such a no-notice kick out on a verbal and informal contract is certainly not an entirely non-disputed concept in all states.

OP could get kicked out, and maybe they could take their mother to court to try and get that solved eventually, but in the immediate they would end up houseless and in a pretty dire situation.

Fair indeed.

Point still stands (at least depending on state) that without a residential lease agreement in the US then generally you would be considered a guest in your family’s house if over the age of 18. As such OP could be fairly easily evicted.

Depending on where OP is, that’s not strictly true. If you are in a situation such as this, at least within the UK, you are not strictly entitled to the rights of a tenant if you do not pay rent nor do anything in lieu of rent.

Basically in the UK if you do not have a tenancy agreement, cohabitation agreement, or license to occupy, then it can start getting very complicated. If they were named as a property owner, or had a common understanding of financial interest in the property, they might be able to fight for a stake of the house, but that isn’t really the point here. In the end whether they can be kicked out legally is a complex issue (at least in the UK) and not really a question we could answer here.

Roland CS-10-EM are excellent binaural mics for a very low cost :)

To be fair though, the people who fund the research are not the people who lose out if the publisher isn’t paid their £30. They are very often governmental or inter-governmental research agencies and programmes. Realistically it is rare for anyone except from the publisher to care about free distribution. The publishers are however pretty vicious (e.g. Swartz’s case).

Yup, it depends on the person but at least in my life many male friends are physically affectionate. Admittedly some of these are affectionate via general sparring, which started in our teens and never went away.

My personal view is that trying to find one single measure of cognitive capacity is a fool’s errand. Modern IQ tests are battery tests (ie multiple tests in one), but still end up mapping to a single dimension in a normally distributed manner. That is my major problem. In my opinion IQ tests tell us something but I have not seen compelling evidence that particular thing is in fact intelligence.

So short answer: no; long answer: we shouldn’t be looking for one single measure.

Fucking “dysgenics”? What in the actual scientific racist eugenicist 1920s bullshit is this?!

I mean there’s the fact that he’s attempting to use IQ as his response variable without acknowledging that it is pretty flawed and heavily environmentally influenced.

Secondly… I mean come on, he’s trying to relate intelligence to population genetics via admixture. It’s kinda paradoxical to try and make a non-racist argument for intelligence differing significantly and across populations by genetics.

Thirdly specifically the phrasing “human biodiversity” is often used as a pretty strong dogwhistle by current scientific racists alongside ranting about replacement. We are really not at the risk of major genetic bottlenecks across the world right now. (Also biodiversity is a term used specifically to mean the richness and abundance of disparate species, it’s fairly nonsensical when applied to a single species)

Bonus point for the quantitative biologists around: if you’re resorting to pcas, you probably either don’t understand the mechanisms behind what you’re trying to show, or it is an effect only visible by considering the small effects of many other variables. Usually it’s first worth some plotting followed by a glm (in this case a spatially explicit glm).

What? How in the world is that your conclusion from my point? Are you seriously advocating for mob vigilante justice systems? I agree in essence that these crimes are abhorrent and must stop, but what are you proposing as a functional justice system?

The question really is what do they need to be protected from? If they must be heavily protected from physical harm that certainly implies that there is a threat of grave physical harm to them on a regular basis. That doesn’t sound like a sweet life to me.

So here’s the rationale that is generally used: If you are in a country that utilises the death sentence then the only system that can decide that is the legal system. Vigilante justice, even when morally justified in the immediate, is not a rigorous or systematically moral justice system. Ergo if anyone is in danger of being killed then they must be protected, even if they are a terrible person, as they have not been sentenced to death (or even if they have, that sentence is not to be meted down by just some other random person).

If you are in a country with no death penalty, you as a society believe that no-one should ever be killed as retribution or as an example to others, thus the argument for protecting people from serious harm is obvious.

These same basic arguments apply for corporeal punishment.

Those who are believed to have committed horrific crimes such as those you mentioned will be in extreme danger because their crimes are fairly universally considered reprehensible (because they… You know… Are). The danger is that there is no perfect justice system. Miscarriages of justice do occur and whilst you may believe that actual perpetrators should be killed or maimed in prison, the risk is that innocent people may be subjected to a horrific and irreversible punishment for no crime at all. That is not acceptable to most people within most justice systems.

Even as a Brit that’d be fast. Here you’re funded for 3.5y with 6mo unfunded “writing up time”.

Yeah I think flat enough is the right phrase. Their bass is definitely lacking but with a well configured sub (I set the crossover at about 80Hz I think) you can compensate. My only feeling about producing with a sub is unless you’re in a very well acoustically treated room, it’s worth checking your mix on good headphones and a few sets of speakers to make sure your interesting sub bass parts are actually coming through nicely. They are good though to really work out what’s going on in the sub frequencies of your mix. Also makes it really obvious when those areas are getting muddy.

Honestly as far as cheap small monitors go, I really don’t mind the Eries. They’re not perfect for sure but they give a generally balanced sound and I paired them with a nice mackie sub to get pretty decent frequency coverage. Certainly perfectly decent for producing a variety of music and generally for listening to things.

I do love that tidal power is actually just moon power. I think we should call it that more often.

My own classic was fiddling with the nvidia PRIME config to try and get rid of some very mildly irritating screen tearing. No graphics output at all. Now this is fixable of course, but it’s a pig.

And I’d decided to do this 2 hours before an incredibly important progress review meeting for my PhD.

Got it back with about 10 mins to spare and decided just to leave the driver config alone after that.

Bonus round

Also a friend managed to bork his ubuntu 16 laptop by trying to switch from unity to gnome and ending up with sort of neither. That was reinstall territory right there.

Yeah as an ecologist that same thing made me giggle. I suppose why not the lesser-spotted 🍆warbler :P

In terms of exposing it only to bots, that is a frustration, unless you make it seamless then it does become kinda trivial to mitigate. Otherwise the approach I’d take to mitigate it is to adapt a lemmy client that already does the filtering or reverse-engineer the deciding element of the app. Similarly if you use garbage then you need it to look enough like normal words for it to be hard to classify as AI generated.

The funny thing is that LLMs are not actually much good at telling whether something is ai generated, you need to train another model to do that, but to train that ai you need good sources of non-corrupt data. Also the whole point of generative AI language models is that they are actively trying to pass that test by design so it becomes an arms race that they can never really win!

Man, what a shitshow generative ai is

Radical and altogether stupid idea (but a fun thought) is this:

Were lemmy to have a certain percentage of AI content seamlessly incorporated into its corpus of text, it would become useless for training LLMs on (see this paper for more technical details on the effects of training LLMs on their own outputs, a phenomenon called “model collapse”).

In effect this would sort of “poison the well”, though given that we all drink the water, the hope would be that our tolerance for a mild amount of AI corruption would be higher than an LLM creator’s.

This poisoning approach amusingly benefits from being a thing that could be advertised heavily, basically saying “lemmy is useless for training LLMs, don’t bother with it”.

Now I must say personally I think that I don’t really think this is a sensible or viable strategy, and that I think the well is already poisoned in this regard (as I think there is already a non-negligible amount of LLM-sourced content on lemmy). But yes, a fun approach to consider: trading integrity for privacy.

I mean, just give them money?

Put it this way: getting a job is just one of many challenges facing homeless people.

For example, if you get a job but are already living absolutely hand-to-mouth, can you actually afford to have that first month of work with no money coming in on a day by day basis. If you cannot afford to even eat how will you make it to that first paycheck?

Even if you do, where will your job put that money? Many, many homeless people do not have a bank account, and what do you need to open a bank account? A home address and ID!

Were you fortunate enough to become homeless with a copy of your birth certificate or other form of ID? If not oh that’s not a problem sir, it’ll cost you £35, and then it’ll arrive by recorded delivery to your home address. Where was that again?

Pretty much no person is homeless by choice. Most are there by a combination of bad luck, violence, a lack of a social security net, mental illness, and many many other factors. Very few people would choose a life of danger and unprovoked violence. You wouldn’t want to be without a home, they don’t want to be without a home for the exact same reasons.

So in conclusion, it is the very basics of human decency to feel bad for them. I would urge you to go further and try to help them, whether that be by direct contribution, by volunteering, by donating to a housing charity, or something else.