By this logic, you and everyone else agree to climate change. Everyone in Venezuela agrees to Maduro.

It has nothing to do with majority, it's a collective action and balance of power.

Your plan can only help people on the lower end of the economic distribution. What we need is technology to let rich people live longer so that they can continue to enjoy the fruits of what can only be their completely deserved and meritorious wealth.

/s

I did not know that - my point is that system76 is not at all sketchy about it. They actively encourage tinkering, make it clear that you won't void your warranty, and have extensive technical documentation to explain how to do upgrades etc

Upgrading/tinkering doesn't void your warranty. Explicitly.

And their customer service is top notch. I thought I bricked my gazelle when I upgraded the memory, but their customer service walked me through how to fix it - didn't even bat an eye.

You are of course welcome to your opinion. Use whatever tools bring you joy. But I'm a huge fan of helix, and think zellij is great (though I prefer wezterm's mux server when I can use it).

I don't have any particular allegiance to rust, though once it's set up, being able to install through cargo rather than being to figure out whatever package manager or build system is nice, especially on various HPC environments where I don't have sudo.

Btop does look cool though

What I mean is that many of them have basically the same functionality with the same arguments. I don't mean I have pristine memory for the differences, but things like alias ls="eza" is basically a drop in replacement with some added features. So when I'm on a server without it, everything is basically the same, just less fancy.

Helix and fd are an example of the other pattern - they are huge improvements over existing tools, to the point that when I'm forced to use the basic ones, I'm actively crippled. But as an argument not to use the better tool day-to-day, this doesn't make sense to me. Why would I force myself to suffer 95% of the time to save myself from suffering 5% of the time?

I mean, for helix/vi it's even clearer. Vanilla vi is basically unusable for me anyway, and I needed a huge number of plugins to be serviceable - on a basic cluster environment, I'm going to be crippled anyway, so...

they either don't improve upon or add functionality that's not available, or simply add eye candy. Gaining pretty colors is nice, but not worth losing familiarity with ubiquitous tools.

The thing I like about a lot of these is that I don't lose familiarity with existing tools. When I end up on a cluster that doesn't have them, I'm a bit annoyed, but I can still operate just fine.

The principle exception to this is actually fd - I now find find (har!) almost unusable without having a man page open in a separate terminal. But that's because fd is so much more ergonomic and powerful, I would never give it up unless forced.

Yes. The only things I use regularly that aren't aliased to or replaced by a rust-built tool are mkdir, ln, and rsync.

• cd: zoxide
• ls: eza
• cat: bat
• grep: ripgrep
• find: fd
• sed: sd
• du: dust
• top/htop: btm
• vi: helix
• tmux: zellij (or wezterm mux)
• diff: delta
• ps: procs

Probably some others I'm forgetting

Wow, reading that left me quite confused until I realized that it's elder scrolls and not Buddhism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalpa_(time)

Your point stands regardless 😅

You agree that if you stop eating or eat less, you will lose weight. Great. We'll have to disagree on the definition of a solution

Cutting off someone's leg will also cause them to lose weight. This is pretty simple. Is it a solution to obesity?

A large nuke dropped on Gaza would end the fighting there. Also simple. Is it a solution?

No, no, I hear you saying, these actions would lead to other problems, don't solve the underlying complexities etc etc.

I'm having trouble believing that you can write in complete sentences but are too thick to understand how "just eat less" suffers from the same problems. So you must be trolling me - congrats! I'm ashamed it took me so long to recognize you're just playing dumb.

I've cited a bunch of scientific papers showing why just eating less isn't a solution. It may lead to temporary weight loss, but doesn't solve the issue long term, and causes other harms. If you want to provide any evidence for your claims or to dispute mine, go for it. Otherwise, cheers! The solution to your ignorance is you just need to learn more. Simple!

If you stop eating or eat less, you will lose weight.

Of course you will. This does not mean it's a solution to obesity.

Inarguably, eating less solves obesity and is simple to do.

Except it's not. It's not sustainable. Even with medical intervention, the vast majority of weight is regained.

It is within most people's personal power to control their appetite

Except it's not. The long term success rate of dieting (again, in the context ofa medical study) is 15%

Next, you just have to wrap your head around how simple eating less food is

Except it's not. And the repeated weight loss and regain experienced by most dieters is arguably worse for health than just being overweight.

You can keep simplistically stating that it's easy, despite all the evidence, and you will continue to sound as idiotic as a rich person floating on their inheritance and saying that poverty would be solved if people just weren't so lazy.

Eating less will solve obesity.

Not fighting would solve war. Wouldn't it?

You're wrong in equating war with someone carrying extra weight, they are not the same situation at all.

War is often a very complex problem without a simple solution.

Right. Exactly! And obesity is a complex problem without a simple solution. Eating less is a trivially correct solution to obesity just as not fighting is a trivially correct solution to war. Please see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-analogy/

What obese people understand and whether they get admonished is immaterial to solving their obesity.

My point is that if it were actually so easy, it wouldn't actually be a problem, would it?

If you're aware that you're making facetious arguments, then stop being facetious and implying false equivalents

I'm not implying anything, I'm offering analogies. And the sarcasm is a rhetorical device that seems to have flown right over your head. I'm sorry about that. I didn't think you would actually believe I thought that the solution to war and poverty and depression was easy. They're not. I'm trying to get you to see (argument by analogy, check the link again) that the solution to obesity is not either.

If your response is just "yes it is," if you think that the trivial solution hasn't been tried over and over again by millions of people who have desperately wanted to lose weight and keep it off, but have failed, you're being willfully ignorant.

Hunger is a primal urge. It's governed by a complex series of hormonal and neurological feedback loops. It's influenced by sociological and psychological factors as well as the non-caloric nutritive content of available and tolerated foods. Those factors are shaped by culture and economics and history etc etc

When I say all this and you say "eating less is the solution", it sounds just as silly and naive as when you talk about war being the result of historical factors, religious animosity, geopolitics etc, and I say the solution is not fighting. Which is to say, very silly and naive.

Misattributing your own false arguments to others doesn't prove you any less wrong.

And continuing to push your facile argument doesn't make you any more right.

War?

Fight less.

The facetious solutions you're proposing to stopping a war or ending clinical depression are not as simple as you imagine,

Of course not! That's what makes them facetious! But "fight less" is as useful a solution to war as "eat less" is a solution to obesity. Which is to say it's trivially right, but not actually a solution at all.

are actually impractical and will not work

Right. It's the same with obesity. Do you honestly think that obese people don't understand the link between eating and weight gain? Do you think that they don't spend their entire lives with people admonishing them for their weight?

Wait, you're saying that there are nuances and subtleties that my simple solutions don't take into consideration?!?

/s (I didn't think this was necessary, but given your response...)

Clinical depressionObesity, on the other hand, is caused by various complex chemical imbalances influenced by various environmental and social factors, so you can't simply disentangle yourself from those chemicals and circumstances

Yep, exactly!

Do you seriously think that eating - arguably one of the most fundamental and instinctual things that living things do - is not subject to complex chemical, environmental, and social factors? Really?

The solution "don't eat so much" really is as naive as telling a clinically depressed person "just be happier" or telling a poor person "just go earn more" or telling Israelis and Palestinians "just don't fight do much".

Yes, the solutions really are that simple, at one level, but pretending like the knowledge of this solution gets us anywhere in terms of actually addressing the problem is just silly.

The problem with poverty is easily solved: people just need to earn more. Easy!

The problem of depression is easily solved: people just need to be happier. Easy!

The problem of obesity is easily solved: people just need to eat less. Easy!

I can solve war too - people just need to fight less! And death: people just need to age less!

Man, someone get me a McArthur genius grant already!

Oops, thanks for the heads up! No idea where that came from

9 times out of 10, what I want is tldr (https://tldr.sh/). There are a bunch of terminal interfaces for it, I use tealdeer.

That's fair. Another example of what you describe that I'm more familiar with is Epic (medical records software). My hypothesis is that the differences that matter are:

1. Cost of switching is higher and/or
2. The people making the decision (business manager, hospital admin) are farther from the actual users of the software.

Could be lots of other reasons too, but these are the ones that jump out at me.

Really the only thing that I miss on Linux is creative cloud stuff. Yeah, gimp and inkscape cover 80% of the functionality of PS and Illustrator right out of the gate, and I bet I could get to 90% if I sank a bunch of hours into learning the differences. Which is amazing for open source software.

But there's a gap when you have a team of dedicated and highly paid developers and hordes of creatives testing everything out and demanding progress that's going to be hard to overcome.

That's basically how I use desktop files generally, the kde launch menu (similar to the old Windows "start"... I don't know what it's called) comes up when I tap super, and then I can start typing and find what I want to launch.

You can set that up to run custom scripts, but all desktop files are there by default.

Normally running a command does execute a binary.

I'm not certain, but I'm wondering if OP means that new programs don't automatically get a "desktop" app or whatever. I'm often annoyed when I have to manually create the file that lets me access software from the launch menu

"May" is doing a lot of work here. This is a low-level regulatory element of a systemic protein. It's a neat result - this kind of biochemical investigation is hard and worthwhile - but it's miles from any kind of therapeutic AFAICT

And if these smart academically inclined people can’t reason about the merits of the system beyond whether it has worked for them, then they are as I accused them … unintelligent or childish.

Nah, it's really hard to notice things that are against your incentives to notice. And if all of the people around you are prospering in the same system, extra hard. The myth of meritocracy is extremely compelling, possibly to an even greater extent in academia than elsewhere.

success in academia is its own reward with prestige that should not be underestimated.

No doubt. And listen, I'm on the tenure track job market at this very moment, having said that last year was definitely going to be my last attempt. There's some kind of cultish nature, all the more inextricable in that I can see it, and it doesn't stop me.

I guess my point is that it's obvious to most of us that that success is extremely rare, and getting rarer. The thing that keeps me in it is the sense that I can do more good pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake than work that is easier and more remunerative but less fulfilling. Call that stupid or childish? Maybe 🤷.

I do these things. I also refuse to review for-profit journals and paper mills, post all of my code in open source repositories, and advocate for these practices whenever I get the chance. When I had a popular science blog over 10 years ago, writing about this stuff a bunch.

But as long as hiring committees are scanning CVs for the number of Nature/Science/Cell journals, and granting agencies aren't insisting on different practices, this shit will continue.

I can understand why it seems the way. But the people doing academic research by and large could make a lot more money working less hard at some company, but choose instead to try to advance human knowledge.

The incentives are just terrible. When I was a PhD student, I railed against this system, but when it came time to publish, I was overruled by my PI. And I know now that he was right - success is built off publication, and the best journals have this shitty model.

I used to think that when I became boss, I wouldn't participate in the bullshit, but if any of my trainees want a career in academia, that stance would be screwing them over. The rules need to come from the top, but the people at the top, almost by definition, are the ones that have prospered with the current system.

I've also got a gazelle, nearly 5 years old - no complaints! I occasionally need to use it on battery and it's pretty power hungry, but if you turn off Nvidia graphics for those times, it's quite a bit better.

Really curious where you came across this - I (virtually) know Jakob from the Julia community (he and I are the primary admins of BioJulia), but I'm not aware of his reach elsewhere.

It's a really great post!

You said a bunch of things you like about cinnamon, and nothing that you don't. Is there something motivating you to switch?

The man has a way with words and is righteous about giving credit where due.

There are a lot of things that would be "pretty cool" as long as we don't worry about the suffering they inflict. I mean, in a sense, factory farms are pretty cool in their level of technical sophistication and efficiency of converting grain and energy into meat. The accomplishments of breeding to generate chickens with breasts so large they can't stand up or procreate without intervention, and grow so fast their skeletons can't keep up with their weight are amazing. The density of animals we can grow while keeping loses to disease acceptably low with antibiotics is also remarkable.

And yet, all of these things that are "pretty cool" are also horrendous on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Raising an intelligent animal like a pig just to harvest its heart for a human might be an ethical trade-off you're comfortable with - and given our treatment of animals for food I've no doubt that it's one society at large is fine with. If my own parent needed a heart transplant, I would likely have a hard time saying no if this were available. But from a Rawlsian perspective, thinking in advance, I don't think this is something we should be doing.

You know, it would also be pretty cool to have some kind of animal that could perform human-level tasks and ideally could understand human language. Maybe we could distinguish them from people based on some superficial physical characteristic like skin color 🤔

Well that's an excessively low bar.

OpenSUSE for pried from my hands because the college I work for set up a Cisco proxy server / 2FA that I couldn't get to work with openconnect, and Cisco's AnyConnect won't run on it.

After a few weeks on Rocky, I am desperate to go back.

I really understand this as a starting position, but it can definitely be taken too far. I feel like the details matter a lot.

A few years ago there was a big dust up in the Julia community when they wanted to add a small amount of telemetry to the package servers - basically the plan was to identify real users from things like CI runs, and to be able to identify the number of unique users , which matters a lot, especially for grant writing (and a lot of academics use Julia, so this would be a boon to the ecosystem).

The core devs were super up front about it, offered easy opt-out, and even were receptive to a plan that would switch from unique identifiers for downloaders to some scheme that would give an accurate count without the ability to trace a particular download to a particular user, but a couple of prominent members of the community were incensed.

Oh hello! I remember chatting with you in the comments section of my science blog (We, Beasties) over a decade ago 😊. Nice to see you in the fediverse

"backing up" biospecimens and other physical samples is not as easy as baking up data. Freeze/thaw often degrades things, and volumes maybe be quite small and not amenable to aliqoting.

Interesting... That may be in my future:

I've never seen a hosta with a stalk that high - the leaves are usually closer to the base, no?

This is an interesting perspective! Don't think I've looked at it quite this way - I want to believe that one can be a kind and also realistic mentor - that's what I strive for. But the people who manage to get faculty positions are, by definition the ones who don't heed all of the signals telling them that academia is a mug's game.

This is real. I'm a white guy with every advantage, a PhD from Harvard and nearly 10 years of research after my PhD,, but it's still rough out there.

I'm geographically limited - I'm sure if I were willing to move anywhere, things would be a bit easier, but still.