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Nearly 50% of researchers quit science within a decade, huge study reveals
  • Absolutely. It’s a shit show.

    And interestingly, making the general public more aware of this is likely quite important. Because 1, they have very idealistic views of what research is like, and 2, just about everyone is entering research blind to the realities. It’s a situation that needs some sunlight and rethinking.

    IMO, a root cause is that the heroic genius researcher ideal at the base of the system’s design basically doesn’t really exist any more. Things are just too big and complex now for a single person to be that important. Dismantle that ideal and redesign from scratch.

  • Beyond enshittification, why does tech oftentimes suck?
  • There was an article by Google about the security of their code base, and one of their core findings was that old code is good, as it gets refined and more free of bugs over time. And of course conversely, new code is worse.

    https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html

    Generally it seems like capitalism’s obsession with growth is at odds with complex software. It’s basis in property also.

  • Happy 12 million!
  • It’s not too hard. There are a bunch of different platforms one might experiment with as well as instances. Some will use multiple accounts for different needs or interests. On lemmy, multi accounts are useful for have different feeds, for example. I probably have 7-10. I’ve probably forgotten about a few of them. If you’re curious, it happens.

  • Is there a setting for instances to disable voting from Local or All feeds?
  • Yea. Even nicer if it could be adjusted on a post-by-post basis (however viable that is).

  • Holy Hell, The Social Web Did Not Begin In 2008
  • By the same token Evan seems a bit self centred and egotistical about his projects. Of you look at his comments about BlueSky it seems he’s pretty bitter that someone dared to make an alternative protocol that so far has a decent amount of users, when a acceptance of multiple systems experimenting and borrowing from each other for the good of the open web is right there as a natural position.

  • Is there a setting for instances to disable voting from Local or All feeds?
  • It’s definitely an interesting and relevant idea I think! A major flaw here is the lack of ability for communities to establish themselves as discrete spaces desperate from the doomscrolling crowd.

    A problem with the fediverse on the whole IMO, as community building is IMO what it should be focusing on.

    Generally decentralisation makes things like this difficult, AFAIU. Lemmy has things like private and local only communities in the works that will get you there. But then discovery becomes a problem which probably requires some additional features too.

  • Diwan 2, Rachid Taha

    I’d almost forgotten about this album, rediscovered it today, and fuck I love the vibe and energy.

    0
    What is your favourite open source software that you discovered in the past year, that you can no longer live without?
  • it's the sort of tool that is really just fundamental now and should be ubiquitous and promoted and taught and talked about every where there is knowledge work. Even more so as there's a great open source version of the tool.

  • Trams are expensive here
  • Oh yea, I hear you.

    What your point does though is open up the discussion about whether enforcement makes financial sense in isolation. And once you open that door, the whole becomes uncomfortable for a lot of people who are stuck in a simple black-and-white justice mentality, where "do what you're supposed, pay what they charge, or be punished" is all there is to making the world work well. You know, "law and order" types.

    You're trying to talk about incentives. For many though that's a very dangerous slippery slope. So I'm trying to get a head of that and wonder if the end of that slippery slop is actually a demonstrably good thing.

  • Trams are expensive here
  • I remember hearing rumours during the role out that tech employees were found asking for help on forums in ways that weren’t promising for the health and talent of the people building it.

    But yea, it’s the embarrassment of this sort of stuff that must be masking the real financials of PT and how viable a free system would be.

  • Trams are expensive here
  • Yea I’ve kept track of how often I’ve encountered inspectors, and most of the time it’d be worth it to not get the ticket or not tap on. Sometimes though I’ve noticed an increase in the number of inspectors that would definitely shift the equation. Also train stations with gates complicate the matter.

    I don’t know if it’s out there, but I’d personally like to know how the finances come out for making PT free. You obviously lose revenue, but also all the overhead of paying for inspectors and for all of the ticketing infrastructure. I also wonder if the part that makes the finances work is all the fines collected, which would be pretty fucking shithouse if true.

  • Is Bluesky (going to be) as community-run as Mastodon?
  • The catch is that the whole system is effectively centralised on BlueSky backend services (basically the relay). So while the protocol may be standardised and open, and interpreted with decentralised components, they’ll control the core service. Which means they can unilaterally decide to introduce profitable things like ads and charging for features.

    The promise of the system though is that it provides for various levels of independence that can all connect to each other, so people with different needs and capabilities can all find their spot in the ecosystem. Whether that happens is a big question. Generally I’d say I’m optimistic about the ideas and architecture, but unsure about whether the community around it will get it to what I think it should be.

  • The most watched Netflix shows in their first 91 days
  • I don’t recall seeing ads in Netflix

    Didn’t they start an ads tier ages ago?

    And yea I wasn’t commenting on the shows, just that I’d been away from Netflix for so long I haven’t even had a chance to see any of these.

  • The most watched Netflix shows in their first 91 days
  • It's funny how long I've been off of netflix ... I haven't seen any of these (even despite wanting to watch Stranger Things S4 just to finish it).

    Something about netflix just burned me. I tried subscribing again after they introduced ads and the amount clunkiness and incompatibility they'd introduced through that basically burned me for good. I subscribe to some things here and there but I'd lost track of how much netflix is basically off of my radar.

  • cohost to shut down at end of 2024
  • Suspicion is totally fair re BlueSky IMO. The system they’ve design seems to me (and others AFAICT) to have the potential to include interconnected components or sections with various degrees of independence.

    The elephant in the room, which I point out on BlueSky whenever I can, is that no one seems to really be trying to build the hard parts of that out. Which is a shame because it could be interesting.

    EG, there’s a chance that a hybridised system running both BlueSky’s protocol and the fediverse’s could be viable and quite useful. Add to that the integration with some E2EE, and it finally feels like an actual attempt at building something new for the modern internet.

    Fortunately there is some noise around these ideas, so hopefully their system can outlast their finances. But yea, a rug pull is definitely not out of the question.

  • uv under discussion on Mastodon
  • Oh I’m with you there! And otherwise totally understandable.

  • Neil Gaiman Offers To Step Back From ‘Good Omens’ Season 3
  • I'm not close to Gaiman or the fandom or the story, at all ... but I did manage to pickup on some of the whisper network through mastodon, where I read a couple of posts or blog posts by people who seemed to be close to the fandom and even be friends with him (in one case). The vibe was very much he's likely a womanising guy and has been his whole life and likely has standards "below" what most would consider normal. There also seemed to be a bit of introspection about how much the fandom around him was kinda culty and that that clearly enabled whatever he did, as a common enough pattern seemed to be that someone would go through something unseemly, but because it was Gaiman and all their friends were fans, they presumed it was them or their fault and never wanted to open up about it.

    Like I said though, this is essentially gossip, so don't take it seriously or anything (also I don't have any links or anything).

  • uv under discussion on Mastodon
  • I think for python tooling the choice is Python Vs Rust. C isn’t in the mix either.

    That seems fair. Though I recall Mumba making headway (at least in the anaconda / conda space) and it is a C++ project. AFAIU, their underlying internals have now been folded into conda, which would mean a fairly popular, and arguably successful portion of the tooling ecosystem (I tended to reach for conda and recommend the same to many) is reliant on a C++ foundation.

    On the whole, I imagine this is a good thing as the biggest issue Conda had was performance when trying to resolve packaging environments and versions.

    So, including C++ as part of C (which is probably fair for the purposes of this discussion), I don't think C is out of the mix either. Should there ever be a push to fold something into core python, using C would probably come back into the picture too.


    I think there’s a survivor bias going on here.

    Your survivorship bias point on rust makes a lot of sense ... there's certainly some push back against its evangelists and that's fair (as someone who's learnt the language a bit). Though I think it's fair to point out the success stories are "survivorship" stories worth noting.

    But it seems we probably come back to whether fundamental tooling should be done in python or a more performant stack. And I think we just disagree here. I want the tooling to "just work" and work well and personally don't hold nearly as much interest in being able to contribute to it as I do any other python project. If that can be done in python, all the better, but I'm personally not convinced (my experience with conda, while it was a pure python project, is informative for me here)

    Personally I think python should have paid more attention to both built-in tooling (again, I think it's important to point out how much of this is simply Guido's "I don't want to do that" that probably wouldn't be tolerated these days) and built-in options for more performance (by maybe taking pypy and JIT-ing more seriously).

    Maybe the GIL-less work and more performant python tricks coming down the line will make your argument more compelling to people like me.

    (Thanks very much for the chat BTW, I personally appreciate your perspective as much as I'm arguing with you)

  • uv under discussion on Mastodon
  • Yep! And likely the lesson to take from it for Python in general. The general utility of a singular foundation that the rest of the ecosystem can be built out from.

    Even that it’s compiled is kinda beside the point. There could have been a single Python tool written in Python and bundled with its own Python runtime. But Guido never wanted to do projects and package management and so it’s been left as the one battery definitely not included.

  • uv under discussion on Mastodon
  • I feel like this is conflating two questions now.

    1. Whether to use a non-Python language where appropriate
    2. Whether to use rust over C, which is already heavily used and fundamental in the ecosystem (I think we can put cython and Fortran to the side)

    I think these questions are mostly independent.

    If the chief criterion is accessibility to the Python user base, issue 2 isn’t a problem IMO. One could argue, as does @eraclito@feddit.it in this thread, that in fact rust provides benefits along these lines that C doesn’t. Rust being influenced by Python adds weight to that. Either way though, people like and want to program in rust and have provided marked success so far in the Python ecosystem (as eraclito cites). It’s still a new-ish language, but if the core issue is C v Rust, it’s probably best to address it on those terms.

  • Rings of Power thoughts after ep 4 [Spoilers]

    How are people feeling about it? I was disappointed by season 1, but happy to keep watching as I'm a die hard fan from childhood.

    Season 2 had me excited at first ...

    spoilers (and ranting)

    The first two-three episodes at least had me even a little pumped.

    The dark wizard in the east very much signals to me that the stranger could be a blue wizard, along with the dark wizard, which is honestly very cool and a nice way to split the difference around Tolkien's "speculation" on what happened to them.

    Getting more complex Sauron manipulation and moving the plot along too seemed nice.

    But after episode 4, I don't know. I came away from it thinking it might have been the worst tv episode I've watched since Picard S2, which was very strange given how much interesting shit they did. Ents, Bombadil, Wizards, Hobbit origins (actually I don't care for the amount of hobbit stuff in the show at all).

    But there was something just boring about it all for me.

    The only way I can explain what I think I'm seeing, and why it's fundamentally flawed, is that the writers/directors want to take Tolkien seriously and even feel rather pressured to do so ... and so in many ways they're actually writing/filming that sense of seriousness rather than a well thought out adaptation style.

    The clue for me is how the whole show is at once strangely grounded and somehow "elevated" at the same time. The elves, such as Galadriel and Elrond, are kinda normal people doing normal things a lot of the time (compare LoTR trilogy Galadriel basically being mind-crushing and haunting most of the time) ... but talk as though they're reading directly from the bible or Silmarillion. Same for Halbrand/Annatar/Sauron. The construction of the rings is a clue into this I think, where they've attempted to portray it as powerful and important, but there's absolutely no sense of how in the world they're magical, no indication that there's some special elven craft behind them. Just "add mithril and get powerful rings".

    Bombadil's dialogue seemed the same to me. Talking about being the eldest as though he's talking about what happened last week. Now in that character this sort of approach makes the most sense. But even so, there didn't seem to be any joy, jolly or aloofness about the character to signal how old he must be to be casual about witnessing the beginning of time. And there's always the concern the show should have for making us the viewer feel what's happening on screen ... and I don't think we felt Bombadil's mysteriousness much at all. Compare with, in the LoTR books, Tolkien using a wonderful way of showing that ... the one ring had no affect no him whatsoever to the point that he could see Frodo while he was wearing it.

    The only breath of fresh air so far has been the dark wizard, which clearly takes cues from Saruman. It's probably been the only sense stylistically I've gotten that we're in a lost age of a fantasy world.

    One take I had from season 1 was that RoP's biggest problem might be that it's being made after Game of Thrones not before it. That GoTs is absolutely the wrong influence for a show like this and yet is likely to have one due to its pervasive success. And I feel like I may have been right about that. The Tolkien world and GoT "politics and intrigue" are not compatible. Moreover, I suspect the GoT style may have run its course somewhat. A show like RoP was a chance to try something interestingly mystical and I don't think the creators were up to the challenge, perhaps not at all.

    8
    TIL there's a known massive oil reserve in antarctica discovered only earlier this year (2024)
    www.newsweek.com Russia just found huge oil reserves in Antarctica

    The reserves uncovered contain around 511 billion barrels worth of oil.

    Russia just found huge oil reserves in Antarctica

    While territorial claims are and will likely be heated, what struck me is that the area is right near the Drake Passage, in the Weddell Sea (which is fundamental to the world's ocean currents AFAIU).

    I don't know how oil drilling in the antarctic could affect the passage, but still, I'm not sure I would trust human oil hunger with a 10ft pole on that one.

    Also interestingly, the discovery was made by Russia, which is a somewhat ominous clue about where the current "multi-polar" world and climate change are heading. Antarctica, being an actual continent that thrived with life up until only about 10-30 M yrs ago, is almost certainly full of resources.

    67
    First "Every frame a painting" video in 8 years: The Sustained Two Shot

    It's funny, at time of posting, many of the YT comments are very nostalgic about how much has happened in this 8 year period ... and I can't lie, I feel it too god damn it.

    5
    Have neutrinos ever been used in some sci-fi premise?

    Seems like fertile ground for coming up with something fun and interesting ... a whole shadow universe that barely touches ours ... but I don't think I've ever seen it.

    24
    About THAT one obviously bad part in Alien Romulus [SPOILERS]

    Rant …

    spoiler

    I’m talking about Ash/Rook, obviously.

    Just saw the film recently, and while it’s a bit of a love it or hate it film I think, the Rook character is I think objectively egregious.

    The idea is good, IMO, in a number of ways, and I can understand that the film makers felt like it was all done with love and affection for Holm and the character. As a viewer, not necessarily onboard with how many cues the film was taking from the franchise, I noticed the silhouette of Rook pretty quickly and was quite happy/hyped to see where it would go.

    But OMG the execution is unforgivable! And I feel like this is just so much of what’s wrong with Hollywood and VFX, and also indicates that some execs were definitely intervening in this film. Somewhat fortunately for the film, it had a low budget (AFAICT, by Wikipedia) and is making a profit.

    But it’s no excuse to slap some bad CGI onto shots that were not designed for bad CGI. Close ups on the uncanny valley! Come on! AFAICT, bad CGI is often the result of a complete disconnect between the director and the VFX crew, in part because the VFX industry is kept at arms length from the film industry, despite (it because of) its massive importance.

    That CGI is not something you do a close up on. No remotely decent director would have done that knowing the CGI looked like that. This is likely bad studio management creating an unworkable situation.

    What could have worked much better IMO is don’t have the synth functioning well. Have its facial expressions and movements completely artificial and mechanical. Rely on the likeness of Holm and the AI voice (which did and generally do work well). Could have been done just with a well directed animatronic coupled with some basic CGI to enrich some textures and details. Instead we got a dumb “we’ll do it in post” and tortured some poor editor into cutting those shots together.

    For many the film was a mixed bag. For me too. But this somehow prevents me from embracing it because I just don’t trust the people who made it.

    … End rant.

    16
    Corridor Crew compare VFX in Fury Road and Furiosa (at 11.20)

    A nice and fair comparison I thought. The main difference, it seems, was the styles of the two films, where a bunch of stylistic choices rather disparate from whether CGI was used or not separate the two.

    My take after seeing furiosa was that it's biggest flaw was that its makers struggled with the expectations of Fury Road and I think these stylistic differences kinda support that, where I'd guess they felt like they had to go with a different look and not simply repeat Fury Road's aesthetic when in the end there may not have been much of a coherent artistic purpose behind those changes.

    0
    INDIA METAL - Chano (Nooran Sisters x Andre Antunes)

    New genre just dropped!

    I've liked some of the other things this guy has done, but didn't get into this track at first. As I kept watching though, I got more and more into it and am certain I'd be down for an album of this stuff.

    4
    Fallout TV Show ... not vibing with eps 1,2 ... what am I missing?

    Yes, I'm slow, sorry!

    Now this may very well be excessive expectations. I had heard a few people say it's this year's Andor. IE, you should just watch it even if it's not the sort of thing you think you'd be into. Also, I've never played the games

    I've just finished the first 2 episodes, and, for me, it's not bad, it's a kinda interesting world ... but there's a distinctly empty feeling and awkwardness to the show for me. Sometimes scenes feel like they're either filling time or still trying to find their rhythm. I'm not sure any of the dialogue has caught my ear (at all). I'm not sure I've picked up on any interesting stakes or mysteries. And I've often wondered about the directing (where I can't help but wonder if Jonathan Nolan's directing is more about trying to compete with his brother).

    The soft tipping point for me was the Knight's fight with the Ghoul (episode 2) ... it just felt pointless and childish. The whole scene seemed to strangely lack any gravity or impetus. And I find myself ~2.5 hrs in and not caring about anything that's happening. It's a post nuclear apocalypse world, with some mutants, a naive bunker person, and a manipulative corporation or two doing sneaky shit ...

    ... dunno ... what am I missing? Should I just keep watching?

    31
    Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes VFX Interview (Corridor Crew, potential spoilers)

    Watching this, and seeing more of these types of interviews from Corridor Crew, it struck me that it's filling the void left by death of DVDs/BluRays and their special features.

    0
    What's the "Show Notifications for New Posts" option in settings?

    I looked around and struggled to find out what it does?

    My guess would be that it notifies you of when new posts are made to communities you subscribe to. But that sounds like a lot, so I'm really not sure.

    Otherwise, is it me or does the wording here not speak for itself?

    20
    AI Survey: Four Themes Emerging

    Report showing the shift in AI sentiment in the industry. Relatively in depth and probably coming from a pro-AI bias (I haven’t read the whole thing).

    Last graph at the bottom was what I was linked to. Clearly shows a corner turning where those closer to the actual “product” are now sceptical while management (the last category in the chart) are more committed.

    0
    Minor whinge about the All feed and community building

    Generally, the lens I've come to criticise any/all fediverse projects is how well they foster community building. One reason why I like and "advocate" for the lemmy/threadiverse side of things is precisely because of this and how the centrality of the community/sub/group is a good way of organising social media (IMO).

    Also, because of that, I recently came to be skeptical of the effects that the "All" feed can have. I didn't even realise that people relied mostly on the All feed until recently.

    I think I've reached the point now of being against it (at least tentatively). I know, it's a staple and there's no way it's going away. And I know it's useful.

    But thinking about the feature set, through the community building lens, I think it'd be fair to say that things are out of balance: they don't promote community building enough while also providing the All feed which dissolves community building.

    Not really a criticism of the developers ... AFAIU, the All feed is easier to implement than any other community building feature ... and it's expected from reddit (though it isn't normal on forums AFAICT, which is maybe worth considering for anyone happy to reassess what about reddit is retained and what isn't).

    But still, I can imagine a platform that is more focused on communities:

    • Community explorer tool built in.
      • Could even be a substitute for an All feed ... where you can browse through various communities you don't know about and see what they've posted recently
    • Multi-communities (long time coming by now for many I'd say)
      • Could even be part of the community explorer tool where you can create on-the-fly multi-communities to see their posts in a temporary feed
    • Private and local only communities (already here on lemmy and coming for private communities)
    • Post visibility options for Public communities (IE, posts that opt-in private)
    • More flexible notifications for various things/events that happen within a community
    • Wikis
    • Chat interface
      • I'm thinking this is pretty viable given that Lemmy used to use a web-socket auto-updating design ... add that to the flat chat view and you've got a chat room. There are resource issues, so limiting them to one per community or 6hrs per week per community or something would probably be necessary.

    A possibly interesting and frustrating aspect of all of these suggestions/ideas above is I can see their federation being problematic or difficult ... which raises the issue of whether there's serious tension between platform design and protocol capabilities.

    18
    Nice video on classic pre-CGI "analog" VFX from 70s-90s

    There are also some gems in there about how old and constant underplaying the amount of VFX in a film is.

    From the video, Stand By Me had a VFX shot (the train bridge scene, of course) but no one was allowed to talk about that. And of course The Fugitive train crash scene had to have "real trains" even though it's all mostly miniatures.

    7
    Fedi Film Club Live Watch Thread - Sun, 7pm CT (Central Time, USA) - July

    Lets try this experiment

    Start watching Big Trouble in Little China at 7pm, Central Time, USA (as precisely as you can) ... and come here for live posts as you watch!

    This is ~24 hours from the time of this post

    Here's a timeanddate.com link to the timezone(s) involved.

    ---

    @AVincentInSpace@pawb.social jas volunteered to run a live watch on cytube the day afterward (approx 7pm Monday). Posts and links should be coming (and see comments below on the idea).

    9
    Fedi Film Club Live Watch Thread - Sun, 7pm CEST (Central Euro Summer Time) - July

    Lets try this experiment

    Start watching Big Trouble in Little China at 7pm, Central European Summer Time (as precisely as you can) ... and come here for live posts as you watch!

    This is ~17 hours from the time of this post

    Here's a timeanddate.com link to the timezone(s) involved.

    1
    Fedi Film Club Live Watch Thread - Sun, 7pm AET (Aus Eastern Time) - July

    Lets try this experiment

    Start watching Big Trouble in Little China at 7pm, Australian Eastern Standard Time (as precisely as you can) ... and come here for live posts as you watch!

    This is ~9 hours from the time of this post

    Here's a timeanddate.com link to the timezone(s) involved.

    ---

    A little short notice, it's more of an experiment this time. I've got my DVD and will most likely pop in.

    3
    NeoDB is a Review System for Culture
    wedistribute.org NeoDB is a Review System for Culture

    NeoDB is a review system with some remarkable tricks up its sleeve, and may provide a way forward for decentralized content discovery.

    NeoDB is a Review System for Culture

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18372054

    > Today, we sat down and reviewed NeoDB, a Fediverse review system that lets you track books, movies, music, tv shows, games, podcasts, and more. There's some really incredible ideas beneath the surface.

    4
    Making music ... the easy way (Kmac2021)

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/18310802

    > Fun to see him (kmac2021) making shit again

    2
    Making music ... the easy way (Kmac2021)

    Fun to see him (kmac2021) making shit again

    0
    maegul maegul (he/they) @lemmy.ml

    A little bit of neuroscience and a little bit of computing

    Posts 155
    Comments 2.6K
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