Oh boy it’s my time to shine!

I’m working in aging right now. Heard of Dr. David Sinclair since he was the corresponding author on a paper I was curious about… So this is what his lab is doing.

Two important disclaimers:

• Success in cellular research rarely translates to something viable in the clinic. A lot of chemicals don’t behave the same way in cells as in actual animals or humans. Heck, a good number of phase 2 drugs even fail, and these haven’t even made it into phase 1… so I wouldn’t be too optimistic about them.
• The journal Aging is not the most prestigious journal especially for someone working at Harvard Medical School (HMS) to be honest. I’d be more excited if this was published in Nature Aging or Nature Communications or something. If this ever gets published in New England Journal of Medicine (a very prestigious journal only for clinical studies) then we have some news.

The link between cell senescence and aging is something actively being studied tho.

And, if anyone is curious about this topic: I’m also very actively following Dr. Vadim Gladyshev who is also from HMS and is working in aging, I believe he is doing some wet lab-biology on a similar area as well. Feels like his research is sometimes a bit ahead of his time but I think his work has great potential.

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

Ah… I do use mailbox.org and I’ve self-hosted with docker-mailserver before.

I agree, selfhosting mail is a really big pain, and at least where I live most ISPs don’t open the ports necessary for mailservers, so I had to spin up my own server & it was more expensive than just using a mail provider. Could potentially be the cheapest option if I could host it from home & just use a RasPi or something

I’m happy with mailbox.org; the Standard Tier price is 2.50 Euro/mo if paid in full if that helps. Probably not the cheapest option especially since it’s not unlimited, but they do allow domain matches at Standard tier or above, and there are other goodies like calendar/video conferencing/cloud storage & stuff.

I don’t know all the differences since I didn’t write code for the project so… here are the contributors’ own words: https://codeberg.org/firefish/firefish/src/branch/develop/FIREFISH.md

Calckey is a Misskey (https://misskey.io/) fork, hence the name. Misskey is an extremely popular fediverse microblogging service from Japan with a lot of functionalities that Mastodon doesn’t have (quote toot, emoji react, …), in fact if you follow any Japanese accounts on Mastodon there is a good chance they are using Misskey instead

Basically Calckey diverged enough from Misskey (and I suspect Kainoa didn’t like the name) that they agreed to rebrand. Kind of a big deal tbh

I hope so too! I’m self-hosting Calckey via docker right now, and having one ready-to-go docker was something I found quite nice with Calckey. I hope this continues to be the case with Firefish

Daily drive Gnentoo, not sure if I could ever wholeheartedly recommend it since it’s not really accessible for beginners…

If I need a VM I’d probably spin up an Arch or Alpine since they are relatively minimal & are not that difficult to set up once you’re familiar with stuff (well Arch is one-command setup now). For servers… pretty much Debian always since that’s what everyone supports

Stability-wise… I guess it depends on what type of “stability” I want? If I meant stability by having stable programming environments then it’s not compatible with having new updates, Debian probably would be best for that. If I meant stability by the system not breaking too often, then most rolling release distros are probably fine? Arch/Gentoo have a lot more room for user error which is probably where most of the instability comes from, but otherwise they typically don’t have too many issues I believe. Fedora is great but there’s been some issue with RHEL going close-source, so I guess some ppl won’t want to support that endeavor

Yes and yes! Couldn’t contribute that much but I try to

I think having a highly important FOSS project that is not controlled by a company known for shutting down many of its beloved products (I’m talking about you Google) is pretty nice…

Also I think map quality is location-dependent. I live in a large metropolitan area in Southern US; OSM is usable, but there are no house/building numbers, and a good number of businesses are missing. In contrast I think the map is a lot better in Chicago which is a lot more pedestrian-friendly? Also, when I looked at Germany it seems OSM is on-par or better than Google Maps… in fact one of the larger rental websites use OSM instead of Google Maps (imagine Zillow doing it in US lol)

Interesting, I did drive for Uber Eats during the pandemic a bit…

I guess the main “backlash” is because these few companies have to pay minimum wage now? Drivers are gig workers so have been treated as independent contractors so far: a.k.a. no employee benefits, absolutely no minimum wage… The flexibility might sound alright to some on first glance, but the more you think about it the worst it gets. And yeah these companies basically made money by giving the false pretense that you can have a flexible work schedule but then squeeze profits out from both ends

So to get back to this… I guess these companies are arguing about this law not just because they are greedy for a few extra bucks, but because mandating them to pay minimum wage might straight-up bankrupt their businesses? I don’t mind tho… Uber got to where it is today by being a loss leader & drove out the cab companies. Might as well let 'em taste a bit of their own medicine for all the shitty gig economy they brought to us

Second this, as of right now Nebula is the only service I know which is even remotely comparable to Ytb’s scale… unfortunately is behind a paywall and is mostly only for infotainment content. Peertube is getting there but not yet. And ofc we don’t talk about the O site.

Out of curiosity… Anyone use the Steam Deck as a computer beyond just gaming? I don’t play games that much but I’d love a decent spec portable computer that I can also use to play video games, the price is quite generous given what its specs look like so…

So having all the mods quit is actually a viable way to protest? (writes down notes)

I had a good bit of thought about this too… This kind of mindset should never be allowed in customer-facing fields in the first place (cough cough all the social media privacy hellhole we are in today…), let alone ones that risk human lives tbh.

Not sure how much of it is “predatory” behavior and how much of it is just a combination of being a masterful salesman + being really, really dumb, “drinking his own Kool-aid”… The dude was piloting the sub on every expedition after all

Ah so there are some people on the fediverse who believe that any restriction is bad… Like the ppl who think domain blocks are too strict and stuff like that.

Pretty much everyone I’ve seen on Mastodon knows that Meta is bad. However, I’ve seen quite a few people echoing the sentiment that “hey I know Meta is bad but blocking is wrong & they haven’t done anything wrong on the fediverse”. The thought comes across as a bit naive to me but… to each their own.

From my paltry observations it seems like opinions about federating with Meta spread into the following:
1: All for-profit corporations bad, so no federation
2: Meta bad, so no federation
3: Meta bad, but wait & observe first
4: Growing the influence of fediverse is usually preferred
5: Free speech for all

Honestly the article resonates with me a lot. I assume many old-guards of Mastodon are ppl who are fully aware of how federation works & are somewhat left-leaning and anti-capitalist, so they have a tendency to not want to federate with Meta.

So it certainly doesn’t help that a few very influential people signed the NDA to join the Meta meeting, which would almost signal that they are more right-leaning (which is not what most people are like on fedi). Regarding the NDA part: people sign NDAs for too many things in pharma (my undergrad field) so I didn’t realize it was such a big deal… I think it probably rubbed too many people in the wrong way.

Also, for large general instances, I wouldn’t be surprised if many people have ideological differences with their admin or their neighbors, which probably resulted in some “fun” discussions.

Finally, PSA: I know some people hate their admins now but please do not ever send death threats to people, seriously

Well the Steam Deck’s OS is forked from Arch so.

I play mostly Indie so I couldn’t speak for stuff like anti-cheat/graphics but… the types of game I play, for the most part “it just works”.
If you’re into RPG maker games, they sometimes require workarounds (hint: you can hot-swap the contents of RPG Maker MV/MX/MZ into Linux’s native nwjs…)
I think the only games that struggle on my computer are mostly because of GPU (I’m on a laptop) rather than anything else Tbh