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Contramuffin

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Contramuffin ,

Desktop. Gaming laptops end up being the worst of both worlds when it comes to power and portability. Weaker than a desktop, heavier and bulkier than a laptop. Makes it hard to game, and hard to carry.

Contramuffin ,

Wait what’s the deal with Amanita muscaria? I don’t understand how answering question 13, no matter how wrongly, could ever lead to a conspiracy

Contramuffin ,

Former child in a bilingual household. The time that your child spends outside of your home has by far the biggest influence on language fluency. You can have your child speak a language at home, and they would be able to understand it and speak it, but it would be limited - likely conversationally fluent, but not natively fluent.

If you can find a community for that language and culture that you visit every once a week, it will help reinforce that language. There might be language schools run by people from that culture - it’ll be an easy way to get in touch with other people from that same culture

Contramuffin ,

This answer might be somewhat unusual, but honestly? I would continue working. I like to keep busy, and I feel like I would get bored quickly. Sure, a break might be nice for me to catch up with personal projects, but in the long term, I would like to work.

I suppose it also helps that I’m a rare case where I enjoy the work that I do

Contramuffin ,

I’m not necessarily sure if that can be correct, depending on the definition. If you are defining a disease or disorder as being abnormal, then perhaps it may have a case there. But many diseases and disorders are defined by whether or not a trait disrupts quality of life. A person may be abnormal, but it doesn’t affect how they live. Therefore, no disease. With this definition, many people can be normal

Contramuffin ,

Found the AI

Contramuffin ,

Modern biologists naming genes: sanic the hadgehodge

Do you use both a personal desktop and laptop?

I’m moreso curious if laptop functions have been offloaded to phones. If you have a full gaming desktop, do you see the use case for an additional laptop? or if most people here don’t see the need for the increased processing power of a desktop, do you just use your laptop and a phone?...

Contramuffin ,

Desktop, laptop, phone.

Desktop for heavy workloads and work when at home

Laptop for work when at work

Phone is useless for any sort of meaningful work and is used for Slack and/or browsing memes.

It’s not necessarily even that phones are too weak for work, it’s that it’s god-awful to try to get any work done on a phone when the only input method you have is touchscreen.

Contramuffin ,

My understanding is that there is always color variation because they don’t color their sauces with food coloring, and as a result, the sauces made at the beginning of harvest season will have a different color than the sauces made at the end of harvest season.

But also they no longer use the same chili due to greed, so that may not apply anymore

Regarding sleep quality, why did humans evolve to require full darkness?

I know evolution is governed by chance and it is random but does it make sense to “ruin” sleep if there’s light? I mean normally, outside, you never have pure darkness, there are the moon and stars even at night. In certain zones of the Earth we also have long periods of no sunshine and long periods of only sunshine....

Contramuffin ,

A question that I’m an expert in!

I study circadian rhythms (the process that is responsible for getting us to sleep in the night). Specifically, how circadian rhythms influence how easily we catch diseases, but that part is less relevant to the question.

So since Earth rotates and has day/night cycles, life on Earth evolved to try to predict when the day and night comes. That’s what circadian rhythms do. This is really important, since day and night aren’t just associated with lightness/darkness. Day and night are associated with a ton of different environmental differences. For instance, it’s colder at night, so animals need a way of keeping warm at night. There’s more UV light at day, so animals need a way of resisting DNA damage in the day. There’s some evidence that the bacteria in the air are different at day vs. at night, so animals will need to have different levels of immune system alertness.

We as humans live in artificial houses with artificial lighting, so we can lose track of why this is really important. But if you’ve ever went camping or tried to stay out at night you’ll probably understand why it’s really important for animals to be able to predict the time.

Circadian rhythms end up getting reinforced on a community level, since if it’s easier to see in the day, an animal is more likely to forage in the day. Then predators will notice that prey is more plentiful in the day, so it will also be more likely for predators to hunt in the day as well.

Anyways, the end result of all of this is that animals have a huge evolutionary pressure to pick either the day or night to be their active period, which is the time where they look for food and in general just be awake. And whatever they don’t pick, that’s their rest period, the time where they sleep and recover.

But how do animals know that their circadian rhythms are predicting the correct time? Imagine a mouse in its burrow - it wouldn’t be able to tell what time it is just by looking at the sky. And even just stepping out for a second to check would be very dangerous if it ended up being the wrong time. Animals need a way of reading what time it is when their out and about and then correcting their circadian rhythms if the rhythm is inaccurate. There’s a lot of different measurements that animals use to read the time, but the key here is that the measurements that they pick must change significantly between day and night. In other words, it must be a very obvious signal, like “oh, I see this signal, so there is no doubt that the time is day.”

Vast majority of the time, the most obvious signal ends up behind light. And it makes sense - if you see bright light, that is the clearest indication that it is day outside. So for many animals, light is the primary measure that animals use to read the time.

So to wrap back around to your question, it’s not necessarily that light ruins sleep because evolution just decided to go “nae nae,” it’s because predicting time is incredibly important for keeping animals and humans alive, and up until very recently, light has simply been the easiest and best proxy for the time

And to answer your bonus question, yes, other animals have their sleep messed up by light too

Contramuffin ,

This is untrue - we have explicitly evolved to sleep in the dark. Sleeping in the light is a learned behavior that’s more or less an exploitation of a loophole in the circadian clock

Contramuffin ,

Oh trust me, I know way more than you think. It is literally my job to study circadian rhythms. I can very comfortably say that you’re wrong

Contramuffin ,

Ah, so this goes more into the nuance of what exactly determines the time of the circadian clock. It is very well documented that animals in the arctic circle still have circadian clocks even if it’s perpetual light or dark. I left out for simplicity that the level of light matters - that is to say, if there’s a time where it’s slightly dimmer and a time that’s slightly brighter, that is enough to adjust the circadian clock to the correct time. The adjustment process will be slower and weaker than usual, but it does happen.

Also, I hinted that animals do take in multiple measurements to determine the correct time, and that plays a role in this case. In general, light tends to be the measurement that animals will default to, but where light variation doesn’t exist, animals can and do utilize other measurements to determine the time. Eating (among other things) turns out to be a relatively strong signal, so circadian rhythms end up being somewhat self-reinforcing. After all, I would expect that you only eat when you’re awake.

But in general, circadian rhythms and the ways that animals adjust their rhythms to the correct time is a huge rabbithole

Contramuffin ,

No need to use quotation marks - it is scientifically confirmed that night owls and early birds exist (among a number of other, less-well-known circadian types). We call them chronotypes, and it’s an active field of study. Unfortunately it’s not something that I specialize in, so I can’t comment too much on it.

However, it is very well acknowledged in the field that modern society is built on an early bird schedule and that completely screws over night owls. (To my memory, night owls tend to score lower on tests, pursue higher education less than early birds, tend to be less promoted and generally less successful than early birds. Inversely, night owls tend to do better in evening classes than early birds.)

Contramuffin ,

I’m pretty sure that’s the general hypothesis in the field, but as you might imagine, it’ll be very difficult to prove. There was a study done sometime (I don’t fully remember when) where researchers collected data on when people go to sleep and when they wake up, and they found that there was a remarkably normal distribution in the population for when people wake up and sleep.

My personal interpretation is that chronotypes (what you call early birds and night owls) are genetic in some way, but I don’t specialize in this area, so don’t take my word for it

Contramuffin ,

Yes, but your wikipedia link doesn’t prove that animals are only sensitive to blue light, only that they are more sensitive to blue light. That is a very well-documented phenomenon. But there is plenty of evidence that red light can entrain circadian rhythms as well, dating well back to the 80’s. There has even been a study that identified different mechanisms of entrainment to low-wavelength and high-wavelength light in bacteria, which you can find below. My point is that it is very scientifically irresponsible, and in fact, blatantly wrong, to claim that humans are sensitive only to particular wavelengths of light, when in fact humans and other animals are sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light.

Beyond that, I don’t necessarily know why you seem to be claiming that the intensity of the ambient light does not matter for photic entrainment, when this is a highly documented and, in fact, highly studied phenomenon in the circadian field. Yes, the moon reflects light, but this is dim enough that mammalian SCN’s can interpret the difference between that and the full daylight. See below for some papers that look into light intensity and their effects on entrainment.

Here is some reading if you are interested:

Contramuffin ,

You’re right, I can’t give medical advice. But having abnormally long or short circadian days is a known thing - called circadian diseases. It’s not really my specialty, so I can’t comment too much on it, but my understanding is that many of them are genetic. These genetic variations can cause the circadian clock to run slower or faster than normal (which happens to be adjacent to what I study, so I can talk about it in excruciating detail if desired)

The Familial Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome (FASP) is one such genetic circadian disease that gets a lot of attention among the circadian field, but you almost certainly don’t have it, since FASP makes your clock run shorter than 24 hours, whereas you seem to imply that yours runs longer.

The key thing to remember is that the circadian clock is not psychological. There is an actual, physical, molecular clock running in your brain and in nearly all the cells in your body. If this clock has imperfections, then that will directly lead to consequences in your circadian rhythms and your sleep cycle. The circadian clock is a real thing that people with the right equipment can measure and read. It wouldn’t even be particularly hard - just a blood sample or a swab would be sufficient. To be honest, I myself would like to study your cells to see if there really is anything out of place, but that would probably break so many research and ethics rules.

Anyways, to answer your question, I would recommend getting a medical opinion - it might be worth specifically bringing up that you suspect you have a circadian disease. I’m not too sure about treatment options, since my impression has generally been that we kind of don’t have any treatments for circadian diseases. But it’s not really my specialty, so maybe there is. My memory is that melatonin is a masking cue, which basically means that it makes you sleep but it doesn’t actually affect your circadian clock (which probably explains your poor experience with melatonin).

Contramuffin ,

Yeah, crepuscular animals are weird. They have circadian rhythms (the circadian clock is incredibly well conserved across vertebrates and to a lesser extent, across invertebrates), but I’m not actually entirely sure how their circadian clock work to get them to wake up at dawn/dusk

Contramuffin ,

Yeah, sure! This happens to be my field of research.

So I was referring to this particular paper, which unfortunately (to my knowledge) didn’t get much follow-up.

Tangentially, there is much other evidence that circadian rhythms have evolved in part to deal with differences in microbial pathogens at the day vs. at night. However, whether it’s because the composition of bacteria in the atmosphere is different, or because animals are more likely to get themselves exposed to pathogens when they’re foraging, or a mix of both, is unclear. My favorite paper that demonstrates this effect is this one, where the circadian clock affects how strongly the immune system responds to bacteria in the lungs. I’ll also include the seminal paper here that first kickstarted the idea that immunology is fundamentally circadian, although frankly I didn’t like how the paper was written. It looked at how mice responded to Salmonella infection at the day vs. at night and found a difference in immune response that then led to a difference in how severe the infection got.

Contramuffin ,

To my knowledge, a similar study has never been repeated with other biomes. Which is a shame, since I can almost guarantee that a similar diel cycle exists in virtually every biome.

Contramuffin ,

Physics-based combat? This feels very immersive-sims-y

I’m looking forward to it

Contramuffin ,

It depends on the field. My understanding is that in physics, it’s accepted to put the PI first. Seems weird to me, but I’m coming from biology, which is a PI-last field

Contramuffin ,

I’m at a complete loss - even with the labels, I can only see a rock. I can’t figure out what part is supposed to look like what body part

fathermcgruder , to asklemmy
@fathermcgruder@jorts.horse avatar

What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I'm having a stroke?

Maybe they're used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn't explain the emails I've had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics' messages?

@asklemmy

Contramuffin ,

Not exclusive to old people, unfortunately. I’ve seen many instances of texts from decidedly young people that make me question if the language being used was some derivative of Old English.

But to answer the question specifically, I generally find that old people have a higher tendency to type or use speech-to-text and then not check for accuracy. It makes it generally pretty common for autocorrect to completely mess up meaning of the message. Also older people seem to either spam or avoid punctuation entirely with no in between.

Contramuffin ,

I mainly use mine for emulation. So technically yes, but you’ll need to provide a way to download and install it easily

In our post-AI era, is job security strictly mythical? Or How to believe in careers as a concept worth doing?

With the lastest news of AI layoffs, I’m struggling to understand how the idea of a career still holds. If careers themselves effectively become gambles like lottery tickets, how do we maintain drive and hopes in the longterm endgame of our struggles?...

Contramuffin ,

There are certain careers that can’t be replaced by AI - anything that requires working with your hands will not be replaced by AI unless robots suddenly get invented. But if robots exist, then there’s likely bigger things to worry about than your job.

I would look for non-routine jobs that require a lot of handiwork. Non-routine because it will be hard to replace with general, non-AI automation, and handiwork because AI is currently digital only.

Carpentry, plumbing, engineering, laboratory research, teaching all likely fall into the safe category

Contramuffin ,

The OP consistently shows extreme bitterness toward seemingly everyone in her own family. To the point where she actively talks about disowning her son and suing her mother. I think she probably deleted a lot of those comments, but it definitely recontextualizes a lot of her posts not as jokes, but as earnest, passive aggressive hatred for her family.

Contramuffin ,

I’m not sure I understand the analogy. A lot of annoyances that people regularly deal with on computers are either intended mechanisms to stop human bad actors or unintentional bugs passing off as features. You can’t really say the same about demons.

I suppose you might be talking about ritualization, or the idea that the people who build protocols are so removed from the people who follow them, that the people who follow the protocols don’t know why they do the things they do, but only know that bad things happen if they don’t follow the protocols.

But even then, the analogy seems somewhat strenuous, since the point of occultism is exactly to try to study demonology and understand how to work with demons - ie, to try to understand why the protocols are the way they are.

If you wanted to talk about ritualization, there are significantly more apt comparisons. Most examples of culture or religions could be argued to be practical protocols that ended up gaining momentum and becoming more spiritual than they initially were.

Contramuffin ,

Nowhere have I said that programs are perfectly fine. In that exact quote that you have quoted me on, I even said that unintuitive features may be bugs passing off as features.

I am making the claim that no matter how much technical debt there is in a code, it is not remotely comparable to occultism and demons. If you read and understand what I have said, I make clear that it is not even that programming and occultism are dissimilar, but more accurately that the two cannot even be categorically compared because there is nothing to compare. You are not comparing apples to oranges, you are comparing apples to chairs.

Contramuffin ,

Sure, I get that, which is why I make the point that the OP may be taking about ritualization. But that isn’t made clear in the original post, and especially with how the post is presented, the OP appears to be actively discouraging that notion. The last sentence is particularly confusing because it’s implying that most if not all company protocols are just as arbitrary and supernatural as attempting to summon a demon.

Contramuffin ,

Thunder. It feels most similar to what I used back when I was still using Reddit.

Contramuffin ,

How does immunology work?

Pro tip: nobody understands immunology and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying

Contramuffin ,

My field of expertise is bacterial pathogenesis with a particular interest in pneumococcal pneumonia.

And it’s true, immunology is ridiculously complex that no one person can ever hope to fully understand it. Immune cells are helpful or detrimental depending on the context, and sometimes even both. And we don’t really fully know why. The problem is that pathogens and humans have been in an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, and unraveling all of that evolutionary technical debt is Fun™

To give an example, Toll-like receptors are one of the most important pathogen-detection mechanisms, and they were discovered just about 25 years ago and people only really figured out their importance about 20 years ago. There are researchers who have spent the majority of their careers before the discovery of one of the most crucial immune pathways.

We really don’t know what’s going on with immunology and to say otherwise is, as I’ve said, an outright lie. People seem to overestimate how much we know about the immune system, not knowing that we are still very much in the “baby phase” of immune research. The fact that we are able to do so much already is really kind of a testament to human ingenuity than anything

My personal experience is that people who claim to know completely about how the immune system works is more likely to be a science denier (or more likely, naive)

Contramuffin ,

The screen size matters significantly. More specifically, what humans care about is pixel density. A 24 inch 1080p screen does not look the same as a 27 inch 1080p, which does not look the same as a 32 inch 1080p.

A 24 inch 1080p screen is perfectly fine. A 27 inch 1080p, you can start to see the pixels more clearly. A 32 inch 1080p IMO is unacceptably bad.

I would say the standard should be 1080p for 24 inch or under, 1440p for 24-27 inch, 4K for 27 inch or above

I personally run a 24 inch 1440p screen because I’m pretty picky with pixel density, and the monitor was relatively good deal.

Contramuffin ,

Games, as with all creative media, by default improve over time as people learn what makes something enjoyable. I think people tend to forget that. So I think for older games, you have to keep 2 “ratings” in your head - how was it compared to the games at the time, and how is it compared to games now?

I loved GTA3 when I played it. But that was back then. I’m not sure if I would say the same thing now, comparing it to modern games.

I get that people like to clown on all the remakes and remasters that are coming out, and for the most part, rightly so. But I also think it’s really important to encourage high quality remakes for this exact reason - when a good game ages poorly, it doesn’t feel quite right to just tell new, younger players to deal with it if they want to figure out what the hype is about

Contramuffin ,

That’s incorrect - this question is literally what the study of inorganic chemistry is about.

Contramuffin , (edited )

I’ll try my best. I’m not an inorganic chemist, but I did take a class on it once, and I’ll try to remember as much from it as I can.

Metals are metallic mainly because they’re able to form these vast networks of bonds between many atoms. All the properties that we associate with metals - shiny, conducts electricity and heat, such as that - arise because of how this network of bonds interacts with the environment. For instance, having a network means electrons can go from one side of the network to the other which we observe as being electrically conductive.

In other words, the metallicity of an object is an emergent property that’s dependent on how large this network of bonds is and what types of bonds make up the network. As a side note, because we know that the network is the basis of metallicity, we can kind of cheat the system by making networks out of otherwise non-metallic objects, and if we make these networks act similarly to the networks found in metals, we get a non-metal that looks and acts like a metal (what we would then call a semiconductor)

It turns out, the higher energy orbitals that you find on heavier atoms have the tendency to form networks. I don’t fully remember why, but I think it has something to do with the fact that when you get so heavy, you have so many orbitals that you can just form a ton of bonds at once (I was surprised to learn that metal atoms can form more than 3 bonds with another metal atom)

So basically the lighter elements tend to be non-metals because they don’t have the number of orbitals to form a cohesive network (outside of select cases) and the heavier elements tend to be metals because they have so many orbitals that they kind of have to form networks.

Contramuffin ,

That’s blatantly incorrect. The properties of metals is an emergent property that arises from how atoms interact with each other.

Dense network of bonds with a lot of electrons -> higher chance of absorbing incoming light of a particular wavelength -> electron gets excited to the precise energy level of the incoming light due to the dense network of molecular orbitals -> electrons releases the exact amount of energy absorbed when it falls back to ground level -> a photon with equal wavelength to the light that was absorbed is emitted -> we observe that as something being shiny.

There’s nothing fundamental about why metals are metallic - inorganic chemists don’t just spend their entire day looking at elements and categorizing them as metals or not. Their entire job is figuring out why metals are the way they are. If you want to debate about why quantum mechanics (which is what ultimately causes atoms to interact in a particular way) is the way it is, then sure, we don’t know that yet. But then you’d be talking about an entirely different topic than the one that was asked

Contramuffin , (edited )

I address this in the last sentence of my previous post.

To reiterate, your argument does not matter because if you keep asking why, you are no longer answering the question that is being asked, but an entirely different question altogether. You can answer why there are so many metals. We might not figure out why the laws of physics are the way they are, but if you’ve gotten to that point where you’re trying to answer that question, then you’ve deviated so far from the original question that you weren’t even trying to respond to it to begin with.

Contramuffin ,

The question is designed to be as divisive as possible. It categorizes large swathes of people into just 2 groups - man or bear. The man group contains mansplainers, but it also contains regular people who simply view humanity as naturally altruistic. The bear group contains people with concerns about men overpowering women, but also contains people who earnestly believe that most if not all men will try to do it if given the chance.

The problem is that people either are unable to or unwilling to acknowledge that these categories are not monolithic. And in claiming that all people in the man group are incels, you are inadvertently insulting everyone in that group. Likewise, in claiming that all people in the bear group are misandrists, you are inadvertently dismissing everyone in that group.

It is not productive to make claims about people based only on their answer to the question. In fact, it appears to be entirely the intention of the question to divide even rational people by exploiting the general human inability to see subgroups within larger categories

Contramuffin ,

Unlikely for there to be bubbly bits. These are bugs, so we know their shape because their exoskeleton (which is what fossilizes) is their shape. Fish haven’t evolved yet

Contramuffin ,

So, I agree with your general points, but I think part of the reason Nintendo is so harsh towards Yuzu is because, as far as I’m aware, Yuzu does actually contain proprietary code from Nintendo.

My understanding is that the Yuzu team used a Switch development kit instead of reverse engineering the Switch as they had claimed, so the entire code is essentially tainted because it’s unclear which parts came from the development kit and which parts came from true reverse engineering

Contramuffin ,

I tried looking for it, but all my searches are flooded with articles about this current takedown wave. I did find a forum post talking about it, though, so I know I’m not crazy.

I might try searching again later, in which case I’ll edit this comment.

Also, I know this isn’t really relevant to the question, but the Yuzu team was doing some really shady stuff, even ignoring the development kit usage. For instance, they were collecting telemetry data from all of their users and were using illegally obtained roms to optimize Yuzu, to the point where the Yuzu team was able to get games to work before the game’s official release

Contramuffin ,

I would agree with you, but there was apparently evidence that specific patches were made that allowed TOTK to work. And then if you take a look at the link, there were screenshots of the Nintendo documents to suggest that TOTK apparently was not the Yuzu team’s first rodeo when it came to patching for pre-release games

Contramuffin ,

Doc Seismic from Invincible

Contramuffin ,

It also crawls into the snail’s eyestalks and starts dancing in the snail’s eyes

Contramuffin ,

Extremely disappointed. They had some very passionate people on the project and I was hoping that they’ll turn things around over the next several years.

Contramuffin ,

I’ve switched to W11 on my main rig, since Linux doesn’t have the sort of compatibility that I can rely on for my work. I installed explorer patcher to restore W10 start menu, task bar, and right click menu. I combed through the settings to deactivate all the data collection settings.

On my laptop, I dual boot W11 and KDE Neon.

It’s the best that I can do given the circumstances

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