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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • Right, some advice from an allo person with an ace family member:

    1. Dating and meeting people is hard, I’m sorry to say. Same as making friends, sometimes it just happens but most of the time it takes putting yourself out there in a meaningful and deliberate way.

    2. Liking someone and being interested in dating them does not usually hit like a bolt from the blue. It often grows over a while. You’ll often have to build a friendship with someone before you build a relationship.

    3. If you find someone tiring and boring, don’t date them. If you find everyone you meet boring and tiring after very little time then you have two options, either really challenge that preconception internally or consider whether you actually want to date.

    If you want to date but aren’t ready to actually put in the time and effort to get to know people then you are really going to struggle. Are you going to want to date someone long term when you don’t even want to be connected to them for more than a few days?

    There is also no guidebook, as much as it would be easier that way. People are individuals and dating requires you to see another as a person, not a puzzle to be solved. The only piece of advice that actually applies as a blanket is “be interested in them”. You need to actually take an interest in who they are, what they do, how they feel. Ask the questions and listen to the answers.

    Good luck, truly. Learning how to do friendship and relationship stuff is fucking hard. But getting interested in people is the most rewarding approach to take (at least in my experience, and that of my close friends).




  • 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.



  • Oh man, as someone who worked directly with the finance side of TFS alongside many other car finance houses (and manufacturers and dealers) this amuses and traumatises me in equal measure. This ain’t the letter you get from TFS, those do not gave grammar errors in them. They also would likely say the VIN or reg of the car that was coming off finance alongside likely your finance plan number.

    Fucking sovcits.



  • 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.





  • Very very long. I was entering a friend from Madeira into my phone a few weeks ago, and theirs was technically 7 names long.

    Add to that the “so, which is your surname?” and getting 4 possible answers, all of which are in fact surnames.

    There is also my friend who is half Spanish, half Portuguese. All his names shuffle around all the time depending on who he’s speaking to.


  • 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