I encourage everyone to check the mod logs. On one hand a carnist stating nonsense. On the other someone calmly explaining how synthetic taurine is widely used and modern evidence suggests cats can transition to properly formulated vegan food, while acknowledging that many bad formulations exist and that a whole food diet would kill them.

Unfortunately for the toxo brained admin who is definitely on the side of animals while claiming you can own them. This is unacceptable!

Gimble vice and a fleshlight?

She makes a handful of digital toys free. Slurs hurt real people. Keep this in context

MATLAB is just scipy for people that wear ties.

All the best linalg libraries are in FORTRAN.

Pretty sure numpy hooks into them. I don’t know anyone who uses computers for serious work that doesn’t use FORTRAN. It’s the best.

Sort of fallacious to go from one case of time to happen and derive probability from it.

I’m no biologist but I don’t think any of our models of super early stuff are sophisticated enough to speculate on what stages are the most or least likely.

Asafetida. People call it horrible unless cooked but imho it just smells like garlic++. It’s sulfurous, but so is garlic and a lot of food really. Sulfur isn’t necessarily an unpleasant smell to me. As far as I can tell the smell of asafetida doesn’t change when cooking, it just gets milder.

Healthy compost also smells kinda nice, rotting meat is awful but if you’re not getting putricene and co from anerobic nitrogen decomp decay mostly smells damp and warm and spicy.

Durian also smells amazing, but that’s a pretty popular opinion given the wild popularity of the fruit. Potentially more sulfur not aversive stuff there.

In the hate camp peanut butter. It is overpowering and early in the day makes me throw up. My wife adds it to coffee sometimes which makes the entire house smell of peanut butter for hours. It’s a very powerful and cloying smell.

Keep in mind our categories are pretty arbitrary. We have stuff like semimetals and so on. All bonding has multiple characteristics outside of extremes, e.g. covalent bonds with dipole character.

Metals are just our name for the broad category of bonding between extremes at conditions we usually find on earth where we live. They are soft squashy bonds that are kinda slutty because they’re just sort of average.

Actually within the metals we see some pretty different characteristics, especially with D orbital chemistry stuff but because of inertia we just keep these things all in the same category of metals because shiny squishy was a lot more obvious than fucky wucky complexing when people named them.

People read this stuff, get mislead, and get fucked up for the crime of wanting to watch a film from 60 years ago.

Using a condom doesn’t require trusting a third party to keep you out of gaol, and has lots of regulatory industry around it guaranteeing quality.

VPN companies are not ideological projects, they are businesses bound by the laws in the countries they operate in optimising for profit. They will abuse your trust if it makes them money or frees them from criminal liability.

Assuming the government defs doesn’t care and wont cooperate with lawsuits.

Yes and no. Knowing your IP is sort of like knowing a PO box you rent. It can be used to try and transmit stuff to you, it can also be crudely geolocated, or if the person you’re buying it from gives you up it can be traced directly to you as a person.

If someone wanted to, and you had terrible safety practices (such as opening mail you aren’t expecting, the digital equivalent would be having software listening to ports) they could send you something harmful but this is probably not very likely unless you are pissing powerful people off (e.g. you’re using that IP to distribute anti mossad documentaries or something :P). Your biggest threat is that somebody finds out who you are by going to your ISP and making them give you up.

If you are confident that this is very high effort and you are a small fish it’s not much of a risk.

If you actually need privacy you should use something like tor, or a box which you have access to that can’t or wont be traced to you (e.g. you have access to someone else’s by covert means, you bought a server with cash in the mail, you bought a server in a nation that will never cooperate with the nation you’re antagonising) which you tunnel to and use as a proxy.

A VPN is not necessarily very secure and doesn’t mitigate the most serious threats like phone home programs that will ID you over the clearnet later. Trusting a VPN is extremely dicey and should absolutely not be relied upon to keep you out of gaol. It’s better than nothing, but shouldn’t be over emphasised.

Sorry, could you be a little more explicit in terms of how you’re answering my questions? I don’t really want to get drawn in to some aimless rambling bullshit.

I haven’t mentioned tribalism, I don’t even know what you’re referring to or why you’re bringing it up.

I don’t know what you mean by how society is these days. Are you saying society has changed fundamental human nature? what is the relevance please?

With an authority or controlling wealth, everything results in an elite of some form to try keep a system in place, and that’s the start of failure.

you’re talking to an anarchist so I have no disagreement there. I do wonder if you’ve ever read Marx though. Could you please honestly answer with what publications of his you’ve actually read? if none, what publications about Marxism have you read? if that list is exhaustive the three most recent?

If a village of 100 has just 1 asshole, things can be ruined. Scale up to global populations and you’ve got your answer. No ism can keep the psychopathic, narcissistic, or competitive nature of these people from ruining whatever ism it is you’d like to have.

???

So there’s a very big difference between X hasn’t happened yet and X is factually impossible. Imagine standing there in 1750s and saying “we know for a fact that the human species is fundamentally incompatible with flight”. Very shortly you would look like the complete arse that making that statement made you.

I don’t dispute nobody has achieved the utopia Marx hypothesised, that is trivial to demonstrate, I’m asking how on earth you would establish fundamental incompatibility.

Actually the current prevailing theory is that primitive communism was the state humans lived in before the founding of the first proto states, so if anything your stance should be that evidence suggests humans are fundamentally compatible with communism, unless you mean to argue we have undergone some shift in our fundamental nature in which case I would again ask where your evidence is.

But what we know for fact is that the human species is incompatible with communism

Sorry what? How on earth would such a thing even be established as fact? This is a very bold claim.

Communism has failed every time.

I’m always really interested in what people mean when they say this. Is it that no organisation that has tried has managed to realise the utopia Marx predicted? Is it that they tend to lose wars with the USA? Is it that great suffering has occurred?

What is a system that has not failed? Like it’s pretty apparent whatever we’re doing now isn’t working. We’re in a mass extinction, the climate is destabilising, homelessness and sickness exist alongside people that personally own jet aircraft.

Genuinely I would love to know what specifically you mean because I see this a lot and it confuses the hell out of me.

Hopeful aside btw. Lord of the flies basically happened once except the kids all banded together and helped each other because humans are actually extremely pro social. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

whimper was a dovecot and postfix machine. Email isn’t very fun

I don’t have many now, just minstrel (it plays music) but previously they’ve always just be sounds. Rawr, groan, whimper, bark, moan, growl etc.

Except minstrel (it plays music) :p

Ah, an enlightened centrist

In terms of their work output and clarity of explanations could you highlight some cases where NDT is deficient when compared to Brian Cox? They seem very similar to me, possibly I would say Cox is a bit worse at explaining the technical side of things. They seem similarly pleased with their own appearance on camera too. Cox is a little more moderate with his religious stuff, and much less outspoken politically but it’s not clear to me either of those are necessarily virtuous.

You misunderstand what the poster means. It’s not people foaming at the mouth at seeing a black guy be successful, it’s people applying harsher judgement than is warranted to someone because on some level they’re perceived as an outsider.

Just think of how many smarmy, condescending famous people exist and how few have the same level of criticism leveled against them.

As far as crappy famous people go he shouldn’t even register, he’s not indicated in corruption, child sexual abuse, spouse beating, slavery, wanton consumerism etc. People single this guy out so unreasonably because he’s not perfect at his job.