What a cutie. I’m glad I get to see him via a photo though, and not in the toilet bowl when I’m trying to pee — that must have startled whoever found him

Seconding this book recommendation. I started skim reading it a few months ago, and it was so entertaining it pulled me in.

That’s very wise; I’m proud of you for recognising this

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.

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.

It reminds me of how there is a gene that determines whether eating asparagus makes your pee stink, and there’s a different gene that determines whether you can smell it. I had a friend who didn’t have the stinky pee gene, but her boyfriend did, and she complained of the smell when she used the bathroom after him occasionally. He had the stinky pee gene, but not the gene to be able to smell the stink.

This came up in a random conversation with my friend, before she knew about the genes thing. I was so excited that I got to tell her about a cool science thing that I couldn’t speak for a few moments.

In a genetic sense, it is a dysfunction of the gene that causes this. It’s neat because we can actually trace the history of human migrations by looking at the distribution of this particular allele (version of a gene). We have analysed DNA from ancient remains of early Europeans and found that the A allele is absent. It appears like this version of the gene first emerged in an ancient East Asian population.

This gene also determines whether you have dry or sticky ear wax. It’s a neat gene because it’s uncommon for physical human traits to be controlled by one gene — most human characteristics are controlled by multiple genes (polygenic traits); ginger hair is another example of a monogenic trait. ABCC11 is neat because it affects multiple traits: sweat smell and earwax dryness.

It might also be implicated in breast cancer risk (I can’t tell whether that’s in an increased risk or decreased risk), but we don’t really understand yet how that would work. From skimming the research, I would say we generally don’t understand how this gene works at all. We do know some stuff about it and how/why it works, but we’re still a decent way off of actually understanding its implications.

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

Perhaps, but Swift’s endorsement might encourage people who were otherwise unlikely to vote.

It reminds me of the recent Crowdstrike fiasco: apparently kernel level access was needed for their anti-malware to be able to properly work (because that way their net can cover the entire OS basically), but that high level of access meant that when CrowdStrike fucked up with an update, people’s computers were useless. (Disclaimer, I am not a cybersecurity person and am not offering judgement either way on whether Crowdstrike’s claim about kernel level access was bullshit or not)

In a similar way, in order for identity theft monitoring services to work, they surely will need to hold a heckton of data about you. This is fine if they can be trusted to hold that data securely, but otherwise… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I share your unease, though I don’t feel able to comment on the correctness of your mindset. Though I will say that on an individual level, keeping an eye on your credit reports in general (from the major credit agencies) will go a long way to helping there (rather than paying for serviced that give you a score and other fancy “features”, you can request either free or v. low cost report which just has the important stuff you need to know.)

I also know that if you want to be extra cautious, you can manually freeze your credit so basically no new lines of credit can be opened in your name. This is most useful for people who have already been a victim of fraud, or they expect to be at risk (such as by shitty family, or a data breach). I don’t know how one sets this up, but I know that if you did want to set up a new line of credit, you can call to unfreeze your credit, and then freeze it again when your application for the new credit is all done. I have a friend who has had this as their default for years now because of shitty family.

I agree that there’s a strong incentive for even entirely self-interested people to cooperate. I was listing altruism as one of many pro-social behaviours, not as a subset or requirement for cooperation

I’d argue that capitalism is unnatural because even if we work from the assumption that resource hoarding is natural, it’s also necessary to take into account the fact that evolutionarily, humans got to where we are via traits like altruism, cooperation and forming communities. Capitalism is far from natural — it’s an insidious subversion of human nature

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

It’s almost funny how close he is to getting it; Kamala isn’t half Indian and half Jamaican, but 100% both of those things, and also this is in no way contradictory to the fact that Harris is American. Trump is a shortsighted dumbass but his confusion is actually legit here because what’s happening is his mental model of race and ethnicity isn’t compatible with the reality of how race, ethnicity and heritage is understood for many people. If only he would show a modicum of introspection, this confusion might’ve been a useful learning point. Unfortunately, he will allow himself no such growth.

Plus campaigning involves a lot of literal legwork. I have family who were involved in local politics (in the UK), enough that I’ve seen some of the behind the scenes of electoral strategy and I was surprised at how much it comes down to just sheer number of people campaigning. Door-knocking especially was valuable in gathering data and helping to figure out whether to bring in national campaigning resources (which usually came in the form of greater press coverage and a high profile person to come and campaign, because they can drum up a much larger group of volunteers — even this targeted support was mediated via volunteer labour)

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I never thought of this before, the parody song practically writes itself

Yeah, I agree with you. I should have elaborated in my comment. I’m not too opposed to Cloudflare (I even use them myself), but I sympathise with people who are concerned about how widely used Cloudflare is and that this risks making them a gatekeeper to the internet. My beef is more of an “all eggs in one basket” one, which feels especially relevant given that the recent (and in many cases, ongoing) Crowdstrike debacle was able to affect so many because of how the way enterprise level software often involves many eggs across not many baskets.