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Joined 2 years 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.


  • 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.



  • 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.


  • 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).



  • 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.


  • skeletorfw@lemmy.worldtopics@lemmy.worldThe Moon
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    1 year ago

    That would be a 22° halo, a fairly uncommon atmospheric phenomenon where light refracts through hexagonal ice crystals in the atmosphere resulting in an average deviation from the angle it comes in at by around (funnily enough) 22°.

    There are lots of other interesting atmospheric phenomena including sundogs, moonbows, and the much rarer 46° halo!




  • Even when reading the paper there was very very little meat. It’s conjecture built upon conjecture but very little of it seems to stand on its own for me. It’s another theoretical framework that is nice to write about but doesn’t actually even try to explain much.

    Their argument seems to be that there is selection working on everything to increase complexity. Even cursorily there seems to be major problems with such a conjecture. They feel to me like they confuse persistence with drive.

    A thing that lasts longer is more likely to be observed by someone born at a random point in time. This is persistence. This doesn’t mean that things try to get to a state where they last longer, particularly not chemical structures!

    This reminds me a lot of that assembly theory paper that came out a week or so ago and was (in my opinion deservedly) battered by most reputable evolutionary biologists.