I knew a guy who used to write loads of love songs. He had a problem with putting partners on pedestals. The first partner he had that he didn’t write a love song for ended up being the woman he married.

He also doesn’t get pissed off if you fail, so you can keep trying again and again

If I wanted an autistically over-literal answer, I’d either ask myself (or come to Lemmy)

Stochastic parrots is an excellent phrase.

I respect your approach. I bet you’re the kind of parent who apologises to their kids when you make mistakes

I always find it tricky to understand how tools all relate to each other in an ecosystem and this is a great example of why: the fact that Ansible can do this task, but Teraform would be better suggests that they are tools that have different purposes, but some overlap. What would you say is Ansible’s strong suit?

It’s frustrating how common IQ based things are still. For example, I’m autistic, and getting any kind of support as an autistic adult has been a nightmare. In my particular area, some of the services I’ve been referred to will immediately bounce my referral because they’re services for people with “Learning Disabilities”, and they often have an IQ limit of 70, i.e. if your IQ is greater than 70, they won’t help you.

My problem here isn’t that there exists specific services for people with Learning disabilities, because I recognise that someone with Down syndrome is going to have pretty different support needs to me. What does ick me out is the way that IQ is used as a boundary condition as if it hasn’t been thoroughly debunked for years now.

I recently read “The Tyranny of Metrics” and whilst I don’t recall of it specifically delves into IQ, it’s definitely the same shape problem: people like to pin things down and quantify them, especially complex variables like intelligence. Then we are so desperate to quantify things that we succumb to Goodhart’s law (whenever a metric is used as a target, it will cease to be a good metric), condemning what was already an imperfect metric to become utterly useless and divorced from the system it was originally attempting to model or measure. When IQ was created, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it was. It has been made worse by years of bigots seeking validation, because it turns out that science is far from objective and is fairly easy to commandeer to do the work of bigots (and I say this as a scientist.)

It’s one reason why I like Lemmy so much — conversations around here are so small scale that I can be confident I’m talking to a human.

Who is David Kinne and what did he do?

Congrats! I appreciate this post because I want to be where you are in the not too distant future.

Contributing to Open Source can feel overwhelming, especially if working outside of one’s primary field. Personally, I’m a scientist who got interested in open source via my academic interest in open science (such as the FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which are that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). This got me interested in how scientists share code, which led me to the horrifying realisation that I was a better programmer than many of my peers (and I was mediocre)

Studying open source has been useful for seeing how big projects are managed, and I have been meaning to find a way to contribute (because as you show, programming skills aren’t the only way to do that). It’s cool to see posts like yours because it kicks my ass into gear a little.

To be fair, AlphaFold is pretty incredible. I remember when it was first revealed (but before they open sourced parts of it) that the scientific community were shocked by how effective it was and assumed that it was going to be technologically way more complex than it ended up being. Systems Biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi captures this quite well in this blog post

I’m a biochemist who has more interest in the computery side of structural biology than many of my peers, so I often have people asking me stuff like “is AlphaFold actually as impressive as they say, or is it just more overhyped AI nonsense?”. My answer is “Yes.”

Something about potential wide scale fraud came out recently about a prominent Alzheimer’s researcher. This article covers it quite well: https://www.science.org/content/article/research-misconduct-finding-neuroscientist-eliezer-masliah-papers-under-suspicion

It’s grim, especially when considering the real human cost that fraud in biomedical research has. Despite this, like you, I am also optimistic. This article outlines some of how the initial concerns about this researcher was raised, and how the analysis of his work was done. A lot of it seems pretty unorthodox. For example, one of the people who contributed to this work was a “non-scientist” forensic image expert, who goes by the username Cheshire on the forum PubPeer (his real name is known and mentioned in the article, but I can’t remember it).

I need to add that to my quotes book, it’s great

I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.

I agree. Whenever I get into an argument online, it’s usually with the understanding that it exists for the benefit of the people who may spectate the argument — I’m rarely aiming to change the mind of the person I’m conversing with. Especially when it’s not even a discussion, but a more straightforward calling someone out for something, that’s for the benefit of other people in the comments, because some sentiments cannot go unchanged.

Elsewhere in this thread, you mentioned that Immich has great documentation. Are there any other FOSS projects that stand out to you as having great user documentation?

You’re right, that is pretty funny. I didn’t notice until you pointed it out in this comment

You’ve bamboozled my attempt to make the same joke at your expense by only mentioning one number in your comment, giving me nothing to add to it. From this point on, I conclude we should only ever mention one number in each comment, for clarity.

Thanks for sharing that post, it was super interesting.

I wish I could see behind the scenes in the Windows UI discussions, to see how we get to what we have today

Honestly, trying not to beat myself up too much is a big part of it. This sounds like a wishy washy answer, but for real, I improved a heckton when I started giving reasonably accurate updates.

E.g Before: I have arranged to meet with a friend at 4pm. My travel time is 30 but can be variable due to traffic. It takes me 30 mins to get ready. 3:15 rolls round and I still haven’t started getting ready. If I hurried, I might make it in time. I do not do that. I cringe internally and end up indulging more deeply in whatever distraction caused me to overrun. 4pm rolls around and my friend messages to check in. Either I cancel, or I tell a lie and start getting ready, hating myself all the while. My friend is irked at me, and I don’t blame them.

After: The same as before, but at 3:15, I message my friend to tell them I’ll be half an hour late (I round up to account for being bad at time). I end up being 5 or 10 minutes late nonetheless, but my friend isn’t annoyed, partly because I kept them in the loop about my progress. I still cringe at being late, but I find that over time, I get better at genuinely holding myself accountable, and at estimating time.