Oooh, very cool. Thanks for the link, I’ll check it out

A form of wage theft that’s common in the US (and elsewhere) is that workers are expected to still do work when they have already clocked out (such as closing up the shop).

I have a Japanese friend who told me that it’s not uncommon that if your work colleagues are going to the bar after work, you are expected to go along. If you don’t, it shows a lack of commitment to your job. As it’s not a formal requirement, of course you don’t get paid for this, despite it being functionally mandatory. What’s worse is that you can’t just stick around for one drink and then head home — you are expected to stick around at least as long as your boss, even if he (let’s face it, the boss is probably male) is still drinking long into the night. I consider this to be an especially egregious form of the wage theft I described above.

It sounds so exhausting that I would likely be unable to do anything besides pretend to work, and even that would lead to inevitable burn out. I had heard that the work culture in Japan was bad, but I had no idea how bad until my friend shared some first hand experiences with me.

Corporations are not our friends, even when they seem friendly, like Steam. However, they can be useful allies, so I’m glad to see this response from Steam.

I love that you have multiple people replying to you asking for technical details on how you ranked the flag entropy. This is how you know that you are amongst your people here <3

I’m surprised by how much I know. It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given that I have both autism and ADHD and that makes me enthusiastic about learning basically everything, but I’m chuffed with how well rounded my knowledge is.

I studied biochemistry at university, but over the last 5 years or so, I’ve been doing a lot more reading in topics like the history and philosophy of science, philosophy more generally, political theory, disability theory, queer theory, economics, design, programming etc… My knowledge in each of these areas is relatively shallow, but I seem to be pretty good at forming lateral links between things I know, which means I can be quite fun to have in depth discussions with. It helps that I got a hell of a lot smarter when I stopped being so attached to my identity as a smart person and learned how to say “no, I haven’t heard of $thing, tell me more” or “I think I’ve heard of that, but I’m not sure — remind me?”

A year or so ago, a friend who studied English called me “well read” and it gave me a bit of an existential crisis. “But I don’t actually fully read most of the books I talk about. Many of them I just skim them until I find a chapter or two that’s most useful to me!”. Turns out that that kind of reading strategy is typical of people who are well read.

My late best friend was a historian, and one of the things I loved about our friendship is arguing with him about random shit. His background meant he often approached an issue in a completely different way to me, and we’d often ask questions or make points that would require the other to go away and think about it for a while before forming a response. I think he’d be really proud of me (and also aggravatingly smug due to him being a significant driving force behind me getting more into history).

Were you running it with the unofficial patch? I don’t remember what it was that was causing me problems, but it’s possible that was it.

"I made a mod that replaces cliffracers with Thomas the Tank Engine. […] I am incapable of learning lessons whenever it involves corporations, because I fundamentally do not view toy company CEOs or media CEOs as people.

In between working on my game and dying of various accidental injuries, I sometimes feel like I need to milk a particular joke until its inevitable demise. I will do this no matter how many legal threats, actual threats, black vans with the Mattel logo on them, or severed Barbie heads are mailed to me.

This is because I have issues with authority, particularly authority derived from intimidation. I kicked a lot of bullies in the nuts when I was a kid.”

Idgaf about silly mods like this, but this is iconic

I was going to comment this, so I’m glad to see that you beat me to it. Benzene is so cool.

Meme: Virgin cyclohexane in chair conformation vs. Chad benzene, a planar ring

To be fair, the first part of the game is by far the best. The unofficial patch adds back in a heckton of content in the late game, but even then, it feels sparse. I have very fond memories of exploring Santa Monica though. The game felt huge and exciting, even playing it for the first time in 2019.

Damn, I should try install it again. I’m running Linux now, and if I recall, I had some problems getting it working. I should take another crack at it.

The problem is that’s not what they’re doing, even after people who volunteered time to work on localisation have asked for the AI to not overwrite existing human-translated documents. That’s the bare minimum, but it seems like it’s too much for Mozilla

I was going to comment with a wry joke that shared in your frustration, but I felt very tired and sad as soon as I started typing.

Instead, I’ll just say “Solidarity”. I’m proud of you for trying to get better, even though the system is making that very hard. I’m proud of myself too, but I find it’s easier to feel proud of people similar to me than directly feeling proud of myself.

Symbols are powerful things. I’m not an American, but something that surprised me with Mangione was how people on the left and the right seemed to support him. It was a rare case of example of political unity amongst regular people.

I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.

I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.

I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.

When we’re talking about the form of a character that we can see, then I feel like the most relevant sense of “body type” is one that includes the whole picture of both the underlying bone structure/musculature, and how fat is distributed on the body.

Linking things back to the original image, I personally find it absurd that even the body type described as “full figured” still has a thigh gap. Even people who are slender rarely have a thigh gap, so this depiction is ridiculous. I would interpret “full figured” as describing someone who is on the larger side of the healthy range (or is a bit overweight) but is not obese, so this image is silly even without getting into discussions about whether obesity constitutes a body type (though I would argue it does, for the purpose of a drawing guide that is showing the difference between how different body types are drawn. A better drawing guide might even have included references for characters who are overweight and/or obese — after all, obese people are people who exist in the world, and thus I would expect them to appear in fiction also.

Aha, this worked for me. Thank you. I legitimately have a disproportionate amount of appreciation for you and the person a couple comments above you who also posted a diagram — although theirs didn’t help me, I am glad that I was able to find people who had attempted to make diagrams (else I would’ve felt compelled to try make one myself, because it’d drive me mad otherwise)

This was a really useful trick, thank you.

It sort of worked for me. As I was turning my phone, I was able to see it in the alternative mode, but as soon as my phone reached the 180 degree position, it was like something clicked into place and I saw the cube in the same way I originally did. The clicking reminded me of when you see textures load in on a video game — it feels really trippy.

That’s a cool way of thinking about it.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend the other day. I was trying to ascertain whether other people experience mild, easily dismissable intrusive thoughts, as I do. It feels weird to call them intrusive thoughts if they’re easily dismissed — I feel like that phrase better describes thoughts that stick around and cause distress due to not going away. What I experience is fairly frequent thoughts that are like “imagine if you did [awful thing]”, and then I mentally reply “yes, that would indeed be awful, which is why I have no interest in doing that”, and then I’m fine.

I like your framing of it as self check diagnostics. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but that feels like an accurate description of what goes on internally for me.

Not all memory foams are equal. I’ve found that quality makes a huge difference. Unfortunately, the good stuff can get pretty pricey. It sounds like you’re talking about memory foam insoles, and I know that a lot of those tend to be the rubbish kind

That’s so funny. I feel ridiculous enough owning one (the reason I own it was because I went to a weird university where fancy white-tie events were common and most students probably went to at least one of those in their time there. )

This particular dog is fortunate enough to have shoes