He/him

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The pharmacist did say that it was to reduce the queasiness since both the antibiotic and the steroid I was prescribed are apparently quite rough on the stomach, so I have to take the pills with food, which I inferred to mean as a meal. Which was fine when I took them with lunch and dinner yesterday since obviously that’s gonna be tons of food to go with it, but then it came to this morning, and I don’t normally eat breakfast. I wasn’t sure if something simple like toast or a granola bar which I would take with the morning dose would be enough food to counteract it, since obviously I didn’t want to spend my morning with a miserable stomach.





  • Depends on how the fight resolved. Sometimes you get snippy for a bit but ultimately either come to an agreement or the fight resolves and that’s it. You rankle for a bit after, get over it, and move on.

    Sometimes the fight isn’t about what you’re fighting about. They’ve had a bad day and it manifests as some bitchy comments about how the dishes were done. You stop fighting about the dishes but you’re still upset because they’re taking their bad day out on you, or they’re still upset because they feel you don’t care about them. These can last much longer because the fight revealed bad blood, but didn’t do anything to address it.





  • I can’t help but feel like if we didn’t live in a capitalist hellscape, the increasing democratization of art would be unambiguously a good thing. I’d be more than happy to see “art as decoration” (as opposed to “art as a human means of expression”) opened to being something shunted off to machines, if it weren’t for the fact that this is a method that people currently use to make sure they have enough money to not starve to death in the cold. Advertising art of polar bears drinking Coke is nicer to look at than big block text saying “consume”, but it’s hardly a soulful expression of the human condition. Or maybe it is, which is even more depressing, but the ultimate apotheosis of this is pushing that sort of messaging to robots to make anyway.

    Meanwhile, giving people who aren’t necessarily “artistic” a vehicle to create art as a means of expressing themselves is also really neat, and in the hands of people who are artistic, it gives them a low-impact tool for pre-visualization, inspiration, and a new medium to experiment with. It also reduces barriers for people with disabilities to make art. I’d love to see artists training LLM systems on their own work as a way of sharing their “style” with the world — something which is difficult to justify in a world where your style is something that needs to be jealously protected against copyright infringement, which again comes down to needing to monetize your expression as a matter of survival.





  • I used to do land surveying in Canada and we’d use “decs” for decimetres when laying out points. You’d put down the rod, they’d tell you something like “dec and a half left” then you’d move closer and it’d be “two cents right” and you’d be even closer and then it’s like “3 mils right.” Then you’d take the shot and they’d tell you how much closer or farther you’d have to go to get the point. If you were way off to the point where you might have tens of metres, usually for rough layout we’d rarely use “dee-kays” for dekameters, but typically it would be just “30 metres north”.







  • Their arms are small, but beyond that there’s basically nothing similar between them and an ostrich’s wing. The muscular anchor points are not similar at all to winged creatures, who require significant musculo-skeletal connection to the breastbone even in mostly vestigial wings. You can see this in the ostrich skeleton as the large “blob” of bone in the middle of the rib cage. There is nothing similar in the T-Rex. Even more of a problem with this theory is that the T-Rex’s popularity is in large part due to the fact that we’ve discovered a fairly large number of T-Rex fossils in good condition and not substantially disturbed… It’s why we have famous models like “Sue” and “Black Beauty” that make such good displays in natural history museums. Unless you’re proposing that a dozen different skeletons from several different regions with different ages all had bones shift after death to end up in the same position…

    Our knowledge of what dinosaurs looked like is not perfect, but we’ve also come a very long way from the Magdeburg Unicorn or horned Iguanodons of the 1800s. Paleontology has largely moved past “puzzle piece” biology, where things are just haphazardly thrown together because they kinda look like they fit. There’s comparison to other species - not just reptiles- to see what are comparable modern equivalents or to other contemporary animals. There’s kinematics and musculature considered. Unless some fossil discovery is made that completely upends the evidence we have now, at least in the case of skeletal articulation of well-known and well-studied species like T-Rex, we can be reasonably confident that we’ve got it pretty close when it comes to what their skeletons looked like.


  • There are countless places on earth that I’m sure have seen as few or even fewer visitors - desolate rocks in the middle of the ocean, remote mountain peaks, areas made inaccessible due to vegetation or climate. Going to any of them would be infinitely cheaper and less difficult than going to the moon, and yet no one has, because unless you have a particular reason to spend the money and effort to get there, why would you?

    I’m sure there are scientists who’d love to run some sort of experiment on the moon, but aside from that it’s a lot of work for not much beyond bragging rights, and the US kinda got those by getting there first. There isn’t a lot of political will to spend billions right now to test things on the moon that we can reasonably simulate here much cheaper with computers.