I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing.

You’ve got to be careful with rolling your eyes, because the parallelism of the two eyes means that the eye roll can be twice as powerful ^1

(1) If measured against the silly baseline of a single eyeroll

I read this article a few months ago that I found quite interesting: Original link Unpaywalled link

The manufacturer in this blames the DEA, and whilst I don’t trust a pharmaceutical company to do anything other than ruthlessly maximise profits, in this case I’m inclined to believe this depiction of the DEA as the overly persnickety bad guy (because I have even less reason to trust the DEA)

I like area-of-effect damage as a framing device.

It’s a bit more complex.

The bacteria causing this (Streptococcus pyogenes) causes hundreds of millions of illnesses each year, ranging from the mild “strep throat” to the extremely severe scarlet fever. Whilst there have been a few outbreaks of antibiotic resistant strains of this bacterium, that doesn’t appear to be what’s going on in this outbreak, so thankfully the underlying streptococcus infection should be treatable with standard antibiotics.

Unfortunately, the condition that’s actually killing people (Streptococcal Toxic Shock Syndrome (STSS)) is caused by exotoxins released by the bacteria, and killing the bacteria only stops further exotoxins from being produced — antibiotics can’t do anything about the exotoxins that have already been secreted by the bacteria. If you’ve ever wondered why we can’t cook spoiled food to make it safe to eat, this is a large part of why — exotoxins are often better at sticking around than the bacteria that produce them. It doesn’t help that exotoxins are often super potent toxins (Botulism is a particularly potent and well known example).

It’s not clear what causes some cases of Streptococcus pyogenes to escalate and non-eventful cases of strep are common enough that treating every case with antibiotics is implausible. It’s tricky because if symptoms are severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of STSS, then things will have already progressed enough that the exotoxins present s risk to health even if antibiotics are administered. This outbreak of many cases of the severe STSS is concerning because it might indicate that the strep bacteria has evolved to be more deadly, but we really don’t know why there’s such a cluster of severe illness in one place.

You might enjoy Freya Holmér’s videos - I mostly know her for her excellent mathsy video essays, but she has loads of videos about “maths for game Devs” that might be useful.

I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

I couldn’t believe it when the portrait was revealed. The first time I saw it was actually in a meme made by Elden Ring fans, which put the portrait in the context of scarlet rot afflicted Caelid. It was hilarious how not-out-of-place it looked

When I was at university, the student union had a small fund for creative projects that weren’t related to your degree. Many of the people who applied for cameras also included Adobe licenses on their funding application, because many of them were new to film or photography so they defaulted to what is “industry standard”, because that’s what the majority of online tutorials are available for.

I’ve been meaning to check out matrix, so thanks for making this post, maybe it’ll push me to do it finally.

Also, I love your dress, it’s got such a cute pattern and fit (and speaking of fit, masterful camera work/posing — I can never figure out how to do a flattering shot when taking full body pictures, but this is great)

Oh, one Discord feature I really like is how it doesn’t have the ability to mass mute servers so that you’re not pinged awake at 3am by someone tagging @everyone. You can either turn off notifications for everything, or go through servers one by one.

/s

Fuckin’ savage.

I think that furry sex stuff can seem very queer in this way. To clarify what I mean, as well as being the Q in LGBTQ+, I’m also invoking queer as in queer theory. For example, prominent queer theorist Eve Sedgwick says that queer can mean “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps…and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically”. Another less verbose definition, from Michael Warner (who I’m not familiar with, pulling these words from Wikipedia): “Queer gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual.” (Source: Wikipedia article for “Queering”)

The way that I think of this is that I’m bisexual because I’m attracted to both people of my gender and not of my gender. I’m queer because as a chronic punk, I relish the chance to leverage my bisexuality to challenge societal norms and assumptions — I got a hell of a lot cooler once I pushed myself out of the closet because it was fear around fitting into moulds that was driving a lot of my internalised homophobia. That’s my personal take on the distinction between gay/bi and queer. Personally, I don’t necessarily think one has to be LGBT+ to be queer, but that’s a somewhat contentious opinion.

This isn’t to say that all furries are queer, though I’m sure some people would argue that. Just that I think I think a lot of furry culture makes more sense if you’re familiar with queer theory and queer culture.

This is all a long winded way of saying that there’s a sense in which furries are punk as fuck, and coming from someone like me, that’s an indication of respect

The way that I make sense of fursonas and fursuits is to just reflect on the various silly things I have done as part of my hobbies. I made a chainmail skirt/dress for a party a while back. It took many many hours and the result is great, but I mostly did it because I like having a project to work on, and the event I was making it for was a great opportunity for people to tell me about how awesome the new thing I made was.

I’m also friends with a bunch of LARPers (Live Action Roleplaying, for anyone who doesn’t know — like Dungeons and Dragons, but with more hitting people with foam swords in fields). I’m not really into LARP myself, but I’ve been to a few because it’s really cool when you know enough people that you feel a part of a community. A couple of times, I wasn’t even playing, but helping out as crew, which meant putting up tents, ensuring everyone got food, helping put secrets into envelopes. LARP is one of those hobbies which is like, objectively weird (I say this with affection), but having existed in that sphere, the reason why most people do stuff is because they want to make cool shit that other people will appreciate, and they want an excuse to hang out with friends for a weekend in a field or a ballroom.

Non Credible Defence is a community on Lemmy (I forget which instance) that seems to be about the Ukraine-Russian war, favouring the Ukrainian side (I think). I’m uncertain of this because the most distinctive aspect of NCD is the “shitposty” approach to what is sometimes really dark war stuff, which makes discerning their “stance” difficult. I’ve seen some people denounce NCD and argue that it’s inappropriate to make light of the realities of the war with memes, but I can also see the argument that NCD is at least partly satirical, and that people have been coping with the horrors of war by making light of it for millennia. I haven’t spent much time in that community myself, so take my explanation with a pinch of salt.

It’s easier to answer your first question about Raytheon. They’re an American (I think) military manufacturer who are profiting absurdly from Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestine. Arms manufacturers and other corporations putting rainbows on stuff during June is always a bit cringe, but it’s more offensive than ever. N.b. I don’t know if Raytheon has actually done any pride branding or if that logo in the image is created for meme purposes.

We might have seen the same comment, because a similar sentiment has stuck with me. I’ve found it very useful for self reflection because I am not a furry and I don’t understand furries. My instincts tell me to be weirded out and judgemental of furries because I don’t get it. I then consciously work to override that instinct because it’s silly and it’s actually much easier to not be an asshole about things. I am glad for anyone who has a hobby and a community that brings them joy and fulfillment.

That’s a hilarious reply, and I can’t think of a witty response to match it

Yeah, I’m super salty about the hype because if I had to pick one side or the other, I’d be on team “AI is worthless”, but that’s just because I’d rather try convincing a bunch of skeptics that when used wisely, AI/ML can be super useful, than to try talk some sense into the AI fanatics. It’s a shame though, because I feel like the longer the bubble takes to pop, the more harm actual AI research will receive

Eh, it depends on what we count as “AI”. I’m in a field where machine learning has been a thing for years, and there’s been a huge amount of progress in the last couple of years[1]. However, it’s exhausting that so much is being rebranded as “AI”, because the people holding the purse strings aren’t necessarily the same scientists who are sick of the hype.

[1] I didn’t get into the more computational side of things until 2021 or so, but if I had to point to a catalyst for this progress, I’d say that the transformer mechanism outlined in the 2017 paper “Attention is all you need”, by Google scientists.

It’s an outfit from a particular episode where she sings a song that’s one of the first overt gay hints

Edit: https://youtu.be/h28xpNvW9Yw it’s a bop