• 1 post
  • 84 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 25th, 2023
  • Not top brass, but I’ve been in/am in mentorship roles. Not leadership in the strictest sense of the word, but I might as well pitch in. I think a big factor in what makes or breaks a good mentor/mentee relationship is acknowledging that your mentees have different goals than you. You may want a project to finish on time, but not everyone does. You need to cater to your mentees to make sure they’re getting what they want out of the relationship - you’re kind of working for them just as much as they’re working for you. It’s a lot of work to be a mentor

  • For the most part, yes. But also, I think if you dig into the details, it’s less that bacteria have the upper hand, and more that we’ve reached a truce with the bacteria.

    A lot of bacterial species need us to provide the environment for them to live, and our immune systems are pretty paranoid with our gut bacteria, especially if they getting too close to the intestinal walls. Also, our bodies are pumping out bacterial-killing compounds constantly.

    I would describe the situation as that our bodies can’t kill every bacteria, and bacteria can’t kill us (not easily, anyways), so we’ve reached an agreement that as long as the bacteria stay in their lane, they can stay, and we might consider doing some trading at a distance

  • Morally: never. It’s built off stolen property and destroys the world with its ecological consequences.

    Practically: as a placeholder. A real human will always outperform an AI, but if the intent is not quality but to just get the gist across, then it works in a pinch.

    To be clear, it’s not just the quality of the final product that matters. An AI-generated product is unmaintainable and uneditable. You can’t make variations of a generated product. It’s technical debt at its most fundamental

  • I’m not saying that what you’ve said is intrinsically problematic. I’ve said variations of “baby [object]” as well, there’s nothing wrong with that. The issue is that context matters, and in this context it’s condescending in a way that prevents open discussion.

    Any reasonable person would read what you wrote and interpret it as “do you think the show is bad, or are you inexperienced and like baby things?” In this specific case, I do happen to agree with your opinion on the material. But if there exists someone who does happen to like the show, they are now discouraged from commenting and sharing their opinions, because you have pre-emptively denigrated their views.

    Starting a discussion (it’s a discussion community, after all) requires more care than usual to ensure that you are fostering a fair and open discussion. With the way that the post is currently structured, I don’t foresee a way that a fair and open discussion can be had.

  • His response was not condescending, it was a constructive critique and solid breakdown of why you sound condescending.

    There are several things wrong with what you said:

    1. You don’t need to be serious to be condescending. On the contrary, your admittance that you view it as a joke is interpreted as a willingness to use “teenagers/young adults” as the butt of your jokes. Which is condescending.

    2. I acknowledge that you did not intend to be consciously condescending. But even ignoring that you openly admitted to it (see point 1), that does not mean that other people won’t see it that way. Just saying “I disagree with your opinion” doesn’t automatically cause everyone else in the world to change their interpretation of your words. There is a reason we are telling you that this is a real interpretation of your words, and refusing to accept it also reflects negatively on you.

    My advice: do what the other comment said. It’s an easy edit, and we won’t need to be having this conversation at all.

  • For context: Ross Scott made a video explaining the situation. The Commission has been meeting with lobbyists frequently and had been essentially stonewalling the initiative for some time now. This was the expected outcome.

    However, he still has the support of the European parliament, so they will seek to amend an existing law (which can be done through the Parliament), rather than create a new law (which must be done through the Commission). There is high confidence that this will happen, this path will just take longer

  • Am experiment that determines the relative amount of a given protein in a sample. It takes like 8 hours. Since it only gives relative amounts, in order to interpret any data, you need to do it multiple times on multiple proteins to determine what’s an “expected” amount and what’s an “unexpected” amount.

    It’s one of my least favorite types of experiments because of how mind-numbingly tedious it is. The only thing worse is qPCR

  • I don’t disagree with you, but it seems you’ve missed the point that I was trying to make. Yes, sure, the future has been predetermined in a deterministic universe. But if no person in that universe can ever figure out what that future is going to be, is there any practical distinction? To any entity within the universe, the future is completely unknown - the only thing that can be said for sure is that there is going to be a future. That is what I mean when I say that there can exist a practical free will in a deterministic universe

    In my eyes, any person who would feel dread over whether or not free will exists in a deterministic universe is splitting hairs over a thought experiment where all outcomes are practically equivalent