IrritableOcelot

@IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org

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IrritableOcelot ,

Nothing against wasps, but they do not make honey.

IrritableOcelot ,

I've tried to use scribus, but the interface is pretty clunky and it doesnt react well to high-dpi screens in my experience.

IrritableOcelot ,

I'm curious about what you think is missing from Inkscape. I use it and illustrator for design work all the time, and I've never run into issues with something missing from Inkscape.

IrritableOcelot ,

At least according to Wikipedia, small amounts of carbon (< 2.14%) in the final alloy are an important component in controlling the ductility, which agrees with what I thought I remembered from materials classes (although I am not a materials scientist). Obviously not using the Bessemer process drastically reduces the amount of carbon necessary, but trace carbon is important.

IrritableOcelot ,

tl;dr: science is in the eye of the beholder, you can only know if it's science if the methods are transparent and you have access to data, as well as critiques from unbiased parties.

This thread seems to have formed two sides:

  1. unless it's published, peer reviewed and replicated it's not science, and
  2. LeCun is being elitist, science doesn't have to be published. This point of view often is accompanied by something about academic publishing being inaccessible or about corporate/private/closed science still being science.

I would say that "closed"/unpublished science may be science, but since peer review and replication of results are the only way we can tell if something is legitimate science, the problem is that we simply can't know until a third party (or preferably, many third parties) have reviewed it.

There are a lot of forms that review can take. The most thorough is to release it to the world and let anyone read and review it, and so it and the opinions of others with expertise in the subject are also public. Anyone can read both the publications and response, do their own criticism, and know whether it is science.

If "closed" science has been heavily reviewed and critiqued internally, by as unbiased a party as possible, then whoever has access to the work and critique can know it's science, but the scientific community and the general public will never be able to be sure.

The points folks have made about individuals working in secret making progress actually support this; I'll use Oppenheimer as an example.

In the 40s, no one outside the Manhattan project knew how nuclear bombs were made. Sure, they exploded, but no one outside that small group knew if the reasoning behind why they exploded was correct.

Now, through released records, we know what the supporting theory was, and how it was tested. We also know that subsequent work based on that theory (H-bomb development, etc.) and replication (countries other than the US figuring out how to make nukes, in some cases without access to US documents on how it was originally done) was successful and supported the original explanations of why it worked. So now we all know that it was science.

IrritableOcelot ,

Trick question -- Elon Musk being anything but an arrogant asshole is impossible under the Standard Model.

IrritableOcelot ,

Hmm I hope it lives up to the hype. I wonder what this new display tech is.

IrritableOcelot ,

I mean yes you can use beamer to make slides, but it is a lot less flexible than ppt/LibreOffice Present.

IrritableOcelot ,

What's the issue with binaries in git? Just that diff'ing binary files is useless?

IrritableOcelot ,

Doing a study like this with no funding whatsoever is...suspect at best

IrritableOcelot ,

Oh that would be so fun but my brain can't math that...

IrritableOcelot ,

You also can't mention it to the Dutch, they'll get way too excited.

IrritableOcelot ,

The thing about green photons having too much energy isn't really true, though it's commonly talked about. Blue photons are significantly higher-energy than green, and are very well-absorbed. There's speculation that our sun (being a greenish star) just produces too many green photons, and absorbing so many so fast would be detrimental, but I haven't seen that definitively proven yet. People are trying, though -- there are all sorts of papers about making artificial supplementary antennae to absorb in the green region.

There are a couple proposed reasons to reflect green, which range from information theory arguments about decoupling different parts of the photosynthetic mechanism, to the 'purple earth' hypothesis mentioned in another comment, to the 'green sun' idea. My point is, the why of green photosynthesis is not a settled matter.

Also, the absorbance of red and blue photons isn't because red and blue photons have useful energies, specifically. The photons excite electrons in a 'high energy' path and a 'low energy' path, yes, but the elections excited by these photons don't directly do chemical work -- these exitons are in a quantum-coupled system which is very complicated to understand (I won't even pretend I understand it fully), and the reduction potentials further down the line are only indirectly (and not proportionally) connected to the energies of the original photons.

Basically, we have studied photosynthesis really intensively for like 50+ years, and in some ways it's still basically magic. The more we study it, the more information we have, but more often than not that leaves us more confused, because it's just a crazy system. And I, for one, think that's pretty damn cool.

Will edit later with sources.

IrritableOcelot ,

Open board is unmaintained, heliboard is the fork, and has added some great features IMO.

IrritableOcelot ,

Laziness. That figures.

IrritableOcelot ,

That is generous on what you can lick...

About half of the green ones would still probably kill you, just...slowly.

IrritableOcelot ,

Photoshopped, unfortunately. They change, but not that much.

IrritableOcelot ,

Ahhhh it's a humpy, I stand corrected. Not familiar with them. That's absolutely wild!

IrritableOcelot ,

Hmmm, he says, reveling in his pedantry: Speedometers actually measure net displacement, and since thermal energy causes collisions on the small scale, but results in very little net movement for the particles, its not quite like a speedometer.

I like to think of it as a ball pit with one of those super bounce ball stacks in it.

IrritableOcelot ,

I've tried multiple times to get the song ID to work, but the birdsong has to be so loud in the recording for it to detect it that I rarely get close enough to a bird for it to work. I was sad about that, it seemed so cool.
And to be honest, for visual ID, I still prefer a bird book. Maybe it's just a me thing.

IrritableOcelot ,

Sorry, I can't figure out how to upload a non-image file.

IrritableOcelot ,

Well, yeah. The earth is a better reference frame, but the orbital velocity of the moon (3679.2 km/h) is no less impressive.

IrritableOcelot ,

One might say geocentric...Aristotle was right y'all.

IrritableOcelot ,

All kobos use a custom OS built on Android...8 (lol). Its not recognizable as Android, but it is the base.

IrritableOcelot ,

That's true, but I get easily more than that on my current kobo, which has a similar advertised battery life. I can get easily 5-6 days of reading 8h a day on it.

IrritableOcelot ,

No, I forget where exactly it was, but at some point last year I was deep in Rakuten's documentation and it referenced that the Clara HD's OS is based on a modified Android 8 kernel.

IrritableOcelot ,

It's possible that there's a reason it requires lossless audio, in that it requires uncompressed signal to work. For instance, if the ML model is trained on uncompressed data, it may need audio which has never been compressed.

IrritableOcelot ,

I can only assume they're trying to talk about concrete 3D printing, but oh boy is that not ready for anything which needs strength.

IrritableOcelot ,

Oh it should be roughly equivalent. But really, what besides a slab can you build without worrying about tension?

IrritableOcelot ,

Do you really think you could build a tower without tensile reinforcement? The hoop stress on the base of a cylindrical tower is no joke, especially when made from something as dense as concrete...

What non-FOSS software have you been unable to quit?

For me, Google video search, Google books (Internet Archive is good, but doesn't always have the same stuff), Adobe InDesign (but in the process of learning LaTeX), and Typewise. As for the Google stuff, I liked Whoogle a lot, but almost all their instances seem to have been blocked or shut down. Also, apologies if this is...

IrritableOcelot ,

Man, I tried to learn FreeCAD, but coming from the Inventor/Solidworks paradigm it was hard.

IrritableOcelot ,

Just a comment -- for InDesign-type work, I find something like Inkscape (or Scribus) easier to work with than LaTeX. I usually only use LaTeX for things where the layout needs to be pretty but not customized. Its possible to use it for design, but not a good use of time.

Is there anything unsavory about ProtonMail?

For some reason I have it in the back of my mind that they were at one point accused of being a honeypot for US intelligence because of their association with MIT. Probably complete BS, but maybe not. Are they as open source as they claim to be? Looks like they're on github. F-Droid seems to think they have some Google libraries...

IrritableOcelot ,

Yeah I remember that conspiracy theory. Iirc, the claim was basically that any company which had any relationship with any US institution must be a honeypot. It was pretty out there, and as far as I'm aware it was very much debunked.

I'm pretty sure that the Google libraries F-droid are things like the push notification service, which afaik almost anything with notifications uses, even signal.

I've never actually compiled from source, but AFAIK they are open source. Its been convenient to use for me, just make very sure you don't lose your password!

IrritableOcelot ,

Yeah, it's a funny meme, but a basic understanding of physics reaaaallly flips it on its' head.

IrritableOcelot ,

Original for context:
.

IrritableOcelot ,

If you're OK with using inkscape and GIMP, if the background color is different than the chicken, you could apply a color filter to simplify the image to "chicken" and "not chicken" (basically, reduce the number of total colors to 16 or less), then use inkscape Trace Bitmap in Colors mode.

Tracing a bitmap to an SVG is really only practical if it's a line drawing or if it has less than 16 (preferably less than 8) colors, because each color becomes a different vector object. Its really not intended for full on photos, unfortunately.

IrritableOcelot OP ,

Unfortunately, that's definitely not it. I've never read anything by Tricia Levenseller. None of the other names align either. :(
Thanks for the input though!

IrritableOcelot OP ,

Oh the Dark Lord of Derkholm is amazing! I went on a DWJ binge a couple years back and finished almost everything of hers, except Dalemark.

IrritableOcelot ,

I grew up on Lackey, she's great!

IrritableOcelot ,

They're ways to search on a specific site from the engine's search bar. For instance, !gsch cows will search for cows on google scholar from DuckDuckGo. I don't know how stamdardized bangs are across engines, but they're super useful if you use a bunch of obscure search tools on the day to day.

IrritableOcelot ,

Looks like it from the readme!

New to Linux? Ubuntu Isn’t Your Only Option ( www.howtogeek.com )

Ubuntu's popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I've highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.

IrritableOcelot ,

I mean anything but the atomic distros will dual boot just fine. GRUB is GRUB. I have the most experience with Debian-based distros, but they all dual-boot just fine.

IrritableOcelot ,

That is weird. I don't think i've ever seen a sample dewar that couldn't last two weeks, most are fine for a month or more. How the hell are they designing their sample storage system, that it's only go of for four days? Are they insulating with Styrofoam?

IrritableOcelot ,

I can answer questions 2 and (tentatively) 4!

When freezing samples, they are cooled rapidly to form vitreous (noncrystalline) ice. If the ice warms enough (and that temp is still well below 0°C), it can transition into a crystalline form. This makes the ice expand and become spiky, which can damage proteins and cells.

For differences in LN2 usage, not every dewar is created equal. Age, the degree of vacuum between the walls, and the distance between the inner and outer walls can substantially affect the thermal conductivity, and thus the boil-off. Differences in how they are capped (which by nature can't be vacuum-insulated) can also change their efficiency.

IrritableOcelot , (edited )

Yeah I can explicitly not recommend modern HP or Toshiba laptops for reliability reasons. I've had serious hardware and structural issues with both.
Also, in general 2-in-1s will break at the hinge in less time than other laptops. Lenovo 2-in-1s specifically have known issues with the hinge which can shatter the screen. If you want durability, go for a more traditional form factor with no touchscreen.

Edit: oops thought you said 2-in-1

IrritableOcelot ,

You're going to get a million answers, mostly people saying to use which distro they're currently using. In my experience, KDE works just fine on any distro that allows you to install it out of the box, so I would choose based on other attributes of the distro, such as:

  • Package manager: which are you used to?
  • Update cycle: KDE 6 is out soon, so you want something which updates often enough to get it fairly quickly (at least semiannual).
  • Stability: unless you want to have to manually maintain your system and learn how it works, avoid arch and arch-based distros. I have run it, its fine, but it's not "normie", and unless you really know what you're doing, daily driving it can be stressful. Manjaro has the same issues, but takes away some ability of the user to fix them.

For instance, I personally like Debian and apt, but I would not recommend base Debian right now, since KDE 6 is about to come out and Debian will take a loooong time to get it.
I have not personally used Kubuntu, but if it gets rid of any the bloat canonical has been adding to Ubuntu lately, it sounds pretty good to me.

Scribus Gets Huge Update (but the toolbar buttons are still too small to see!) ( www.omgubuntu.co.uk )

I want to like Scribus, but every time I hear about it getting updated, I download it, open it, only to find these tiny toolbar icons that have no apparent way of being made bigger. This is always what prevents me from trying it out! Seems like kind of a basic design no-brainer. Grrr. Does anyone else have this problem? I'm on...

IrritableOcelot ,

This is my exact situation! It's not just uncomfortably small, either -- it's flat out unusable. I think its a hiDPI issue, but from the forum posts it sounds like its been an issue for 5-6 years. I even tried changing the QT startup settings, but no luck.

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