Something that I’m disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.

I’ve not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn’t diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.

So many people outside of academia are gobsmacked to learn the extent to which academic publishing relies on free labour, and how much they charge.

To publish a paper open access in Nature, it costs almost $7000. And for what? What the fuck do they actually do? If you want to make the data or code you used in your analysis available, you’re the one who has to figure out how to host it. They don’t provide copyediting services or anything of the like. I’d call them parasites, but that would be an insult to all the parasitic organisms that play important roles within their respective ecosystems.

Perhaps once, they served an essential role in facilitating research, back when physical journals were the only way to get your research out there, but that age has long since passed and they’ve managed to use that change to profit even more.

Sure, the individual researchers are rarely paying this fee themselves, but that’s still a problem. For one, it gatekeeps independent researchers, or researchers from less well funded academic institutions (such as in the global South or emerging economies). Plus even if the individual researchers aren’t paying directly, that money still comes out of the overall funding for the project. For the cost of 4 papers published in Nature, that’s an entire year’s stipend for a PhD student in my country. I’m using Nature as an example here because they are one of the more expensive ones, but even smaller papers charge exorbitant amounts (and don’t get me started on how people who justify the large fees charged by more prestigious journals don’t acknowledge how this just perpetuates the prestige machine that creates the toxic “publish or perish” pressure of research)

he most offensive bit though is that if you are doing government funded research, then you have to pay an extra fee to make that research available to the taxpayers who funded it. It’s our fucking research, you assholes! How dare you profit off of coerced free labour and then charge us to even be able to access what is rightfully ours. France has the right idea here — they have legislation that mandates that all government funded research must be open access. That doesn’t solve the root problem of needing to eradicate the blight of the academic publishing industry as it currently exists, but it’s a start.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but once I started writing, my rage overcame me and it was cathartic to scream it out from my soapbox.

This isn’t exactly what you asked for, but I really enjoyed this long piece from The Guardian that looks at the history of how scientific publishing became the massively profitable behemoth it is today. Reading it as a scientist (i.e. someone who has spent a while marinading in a broth of “man, fuck the academic publishing industry” rhetoric in my community) was mind-blowing.

190MB, according to the article. And when it was idling, it would be only tens of MB

I learned some Japanese from doing origami, because at the time, the best books I had access to were in Japanese. That may seem disconnected from your question, but I consider it relevant, because I feel that my love for origami and my love of programming stems from the same place in me

You see, it’s not racism if it’s based on real, empirical data a stubborn intuition driven bigotry based on thoroughly debunked science.

I’m reminded of a quote by Max Planck:

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die”

Or more succinctly paraphrased:

“Science progresses one funeral at a time”

Thank you for James Watson, for this final contribution to science. We are better without your festering bigotry.

Vim has long since won the war. I say that as an emacs user who is familiar with using vim because it’s installed by default on the vast majority of computers I interact with nowadays

Neat! This was so fun to learn about, thank you for sharing. Xiaolin Wu did not live in vain after all, because of nerds like us

I used to do this, because it didn’t seem to cause any issues — until it did, and I lost a lot of data.

I’ve heard climate scientists argue that most estimates they see are bullshit that isn’t grounded in the science and seems to exist purely to properly up the fossil fuel industry

It does mean something to them, but not in a way that will stop you from getting laid off; what it means is that after laying you off, they’ll quickly come to regret it and scramble to try to fill the knowledge gap they now have. I know a few people who were called up by the company basically begging them to help. A couple of people I know were able to leverage this to get a short term position contracting (at exorbitantly higher rates than their salary way), and a few others instead just cackled in schadenfreude.

Sometimes I do get YouTube telling me that I need to disable my adblocker to access a video, so they do try to block that stuff (though I suspect that the infrequency with which this happens combined with the fact that not everyone does experience it when some people do report this happening suggests that they’re just testing methods of detection and blocking)

Usually when it happens, I just go into my Ublock settings and update stuff. I can’t remember that ever not working. It feels like a low-key arms race, in a cold-war kind of way

A lot of them went into academia, the poor fuckers. My old university tutor comes to mind as the best of what they can hope for from that path. He did relatively well for himself as a scientist, but I reckon he was a far better scientist than what his level of prestige in that area would suggest.

There’s one paper he published that was met with little fanfare, but then a few years later, someone else published more or less the same research that massively blew up. This wasn’t a case of plagiarism (as far as I can tell), nor a conscious attempt to replicate my tutor’s research. The general research climate at the time is a plausible explanation (perhaps my tutor was ahead of the times by a few years), but this doesn’t feel sufficient to explain it. I think it’s mostly that the author of this new paper is someone who is extremely ambitious in a manner where they seem to place a lot of value on gaining respect and prestige. I’ve spoken to people who worked in that other scientists lab and apparently they can be quite vicious in how they act within their research community (though I am confident that there’s no personal beef between this researcher and my old tutor — they had presented at the same conference, but had had no interactions and seemed to be largely unaware of the other’s existence). Apparently this researcher does good science, but gives the vibe that they care more for climbing up the ranks than for doing good science; they can be quite nasty in how they respond to people whose work disrupts their own theories.

I suspect that it’s a case of priorities. My tutor also does good research, but part of why he left such an impact on me was that he has such earnest care in his teaching roles. He works at a pretty prestigious university, and there are plenty of tutors there who do the bare minimum teaching necessary to get access to perks like fancy formal dinners, and the prestige of being a tutor — tutors who seem to regard their students as inconvenient obstacles to what they really care about. It highlights to me a sad problem in what we tend to value in the sciences, and academia more generally: the people who add the most to the growth of human knowledge are often the people who the history books will not care to remember.

That’s incredible, thank you for sharing

This is supremely silly. I will never use it, but I’m glad that it exists; you’re delightful

Damn, I didn’t notice they were made out of lambdas. Guess I need to switch to NixOS

Yay, learning!

“TIL i do women people things. lol”

The point of “you don’t have to hold your farts in to be a woman” isn’t to suggest that only women fart, but that farting is a thing that people do, and that given that women are a subset of people, women fart (and that farting doesn’t make someone less of a woman)

There’s a balance. I have known plenty of women who felt it was not permissible to fart around people/in public ever. One would not even fart around her husband of 10+ years. Another would only fart when they were at home, in the bathroom. Another felt it was inappropriate to ever fart, even when she was pooping (as a result of this, she once was so constipated that she had to go to the hospital).

Whilst these are particularly extreme examples, they’re just instances of a general trend where women farting is stigmatised more than men farting. I interpret the image in the OP to be resisting that excessive pressure and unrealistic standard rather than advocating for disregarding basic courtesy and farting with impunity