I hadn’t heard about bulldog ants before and was incredulous about your statement, but damn, yeah, bulldog ants are wild

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrmecia_(ant)#interaction with humans

and that she has seen it in the past

Damn, that’s just sad

I always find it tricky to understand how tools all relate to each other in an ecosystem and this is a great example of why: the fact that Ansible can do this task, but Teraform would be better suggests that they are tools that have different purposes, but some overlap. What would you say is Ansible’s strong suit?

Thanks for this recommendation. Diverse perspectives are important in underscoring that the Israeli people are not a monolith, and that they are distinct from the state of Israel.

I often see people online speaking about Israelis as though all of them are in favour of the ongoing genocide, when this is simply not the case. That’s not to say that Netanyahu’s control of the media hasn’t led to a depressingly high proportion of Israelis to see themselves as righteous victims — years of state propaganda has unfortunately had an impact. However, there are journalists and activists (Jewish or otherwise) who are working to challenge this rhetoric.

I like the way one of my university textbooks frames the particle wave duality thing: “A single pure wave has a perfectly defined wavelength, and thus an exact energy, but has no position. […] [Whereas a classical particle] would have a perfectly defined position but no definable wavelength and thus an undefined energy” ^([1][2])

I am currently in my bed. I have a lot to do today, but I’m not sure how much I will get done because I don’t know how much energy have. Thus I conclude you are right and that I am clearly a particle.

^([1]: Principles and Problems in Physical Chemistry for Biochemists, Price, Dwek, Radcliffe & Wormald, p282)

^([2]: I’m practicing being more diligent with citations, in hope that good habits will make it easier when referencing is actually important)

A big part of quantum mechanics is the fact that matter can show wave-like behaviour, which sort of breaks a bunch of “rules” that we have from classical physics. This only is relevant if we’re looking at stuff at a teensy tiny scale.

Someone else has already mentioned that electrons are a fair bit smaller than protons and neutrons (around 1840 times smaller) and this means they tend to have a smaller momentum than protons or neutrons, which means they have a larger wavelength, which was easier to measure experimentally. That’s likely why electrons were a part of this theory, because they’re small enough that they’re sort of a perfect way to study the idea of things that are both particle and wave, but also neither. In 1940, quantum mechanics and particle physics were super rapidly moving fields, where our knowledge hadn’t congealed much yet. What was clear was that electrons get up to some absolute nonsense behaviour that broke our understanding of how the world worked.

I like the results of some of the worked examples here: https://www.chemteam.info/Electrons/deBroglie-Equation.html , especially the one where they work out what the wavelength of a baseball would be (because that too, could theoretically act like a wave, it would just have an impossibly small wavelength)

TL;DR: electrons are smaller than protons/neutrons Smaller = larger wavelength Larger wavelength = easier to make experiments to see wave-like behaviour from the particle Therefore electrons were useful in figuring out how the heck a particle can have a wavelength and act like a wave

Same.

I used to really hate pink because boo, pink is girly. I’m really enjoying having grown out of that and now being in my pink-appreciating era

I saw an article recently that looked at the rates of suicide in Israeli soldiers. One guy, who featured heavily in the article, had killed himself after being an IDF bulldozer driver. The article tried to dial up sympathy for him, but additional coverage (in response to this article) highlighted that this guy had posted some pretty horrifying stuff on social media — stuff like videos and photos of him in Gaza, being pretty jovial as he drove through bodies and buildings. I wonder whether the PTSD he experienced afterwards was a sort of moral immune system, and that once he was away from the kind of military camaraderie that normalises atrocities, if he began to reflect on his part in this genocide. At least for him, we’ll never know.

A Jewish, anti-Zionist friend who lived in Israel for a while said that it was disturbing to see how much the Holocaust was leveraged to make people feel scared and insecure. I imagine many members of the IDF do genuinely believe that most, if not all Palestinians hate all Jews and want them to die. That way, they can enthusiastically participate, believing that they are on the side of justice.

I once punched a Nazi at a gig, and I did enjoy it, because it feels good to be righteous and angry. Enough so that it makes me anxious about how easy it would be to lean into anger if it feels righteous.

Quells surprise

Who is David Kinne and what did he do?

Congrats! I appreciate this post because I want to be where you are in the not too distant future.

Contributing to Open Source can feel overwhelming, especially if working outside of one’s primary field. Personally, I’m a scientist who got interested in open source via my academic interest in open science (such as the FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which are that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). This got me interested in how scientists share code, which led me to the horrifying realisation that I was a better programmer than many of my peers (and I was mediocre)

Studying open source has been useful for seeing how big projects are managed, and I have been meaning to find a way to contribute (because as you show, programming skills aren’t the only way to do that). It’s cool to see posts like yours because it kicks my ass into gear a little.

Though I do wonder whether a sufficiently good lawyer could argue that it’s not attempted murder if you knew they were immortal

I found linear algebra super hard until I learned it a second and then third time, from different angles. I found it harder to understand when it was taught in a pure maths context, but coming at it from the applied side made me go “oh, so that’s why that’s like that”

• When my house guests text “#wifi” to me, they get an auto reply with the WiFi password.

• NFC tag stuck to my medication pouch. When I boop my phone to it (or tap a shortcut on homescreen), I can select what medication I have taken. The medication and the time gets added to the bottom of a Google sheets spreadsheet, that I, or someone supporting me can check to get an overview of how frequently I’ve been taking medication (especially useful for spotting high pain chunks of time due to more frequent usage of PRN pain meds).

• Another aspect of the medication tracking above is that it also can tell me the last time I took medication. For example, if I take ADHD meds at 12pm, then my next dose would be 4pm. If I tap the shortcut at 3pm, it’ll tell me I last took meds at 12pm and I’m next due at 4pm. Alarms tend to either startle me or not be noticed, but when I had smart lights and a notification light on my phone, I could make a colour gradient where “you have just taken meds” = red and “you are due to take meds” = blue, and as time progresses, the colour slowly becomes more blue. This works well for me, because I like visual reminders

I was agreeing with you for the entirety of your comment (as someone with friends in healthcare), until you said

“What they call burnout, really is moral injury”

And then I was aggressively agreeing with you. I do not hear this aspect spoken about nearly enough. I was in hospital during COVID for non COVID reasons and I remember one terrible night where there was only one nurse on the ward, when two were needed to dispense medications like morphine. I was fortunate that I wasn’t needing medication like that, but many on the ward did. The entire night, sick and injured people were crying from pain as the solitary nurse sounded increasingly desperate as she explained to them that she needed to wait until she had backup and that she had been promised (and that, failing that, help should definitely arrive with the morning shift).

Prior to that night, my opinion of that nurse was that she was the kind of unpleasant that made me wonder “why has this person gone into healthcare when they seem to hate people so much?”. After that harrowing night, I realised the depth of the agony that her job involved and the inhumanity not just for the patients who were unable to receive medication, but for staff like her too. This was during COVID, so it’s unsurprising that the hospital was struggling for staff, but services were struggling long before COVID too.

I often think about her, and what she represents; I wonder how she was when she first started the job, and if perhaps her brusque manner evolved as the moral injury wore her down and hardened her exterior.

Definitely play it. Just remember that “You Died” doesn’t equal failure and dying a lot doesn’t mean you’re bad at the game. Dying lots is a core mechanic of the game.

I’m of the opinion that the difficulty level isn’t that bad, and I’m not saying this in a gatekeepy “git gud” kind of way. I enjoy these games because they feel fair, and whenever I have been struggling disproportionately, it’s either been because I was somewhere beyond my current level (especially in open world games like Elden Ring), or I was doing something “wrong” (like stubbornly using my preferred weapon even though I knew a quirk of the boss meant it was suboptimal)

If the game feels like it’s being unfair to you, take a step back and rethink your approach. Try a different weapon or strategy (this might mean having to go to an easier area to practice the new weapon). Look through your items to see if you have anything that might help (including potentially helpful lore in the item descriptions). If you’re not sure what a thing does, try using it and see — the game won’t explain things explicitly because it wants players to find out in play.

If you like the look of Bloodborne, 100% give it a go — even if I weren’t already a fan of Fromsoft’s games, I’d enjoy Bloodborne for the impeccable aesthetic.

Eh, there’s a reason that Mildly infuriating exists as a community — sometimes the best way to exorcise one’s aggravation is to give space to the annoyance by sharing it with other persnickety people.

That’s actually helpful, thanks

Tangentially related: I really enjoyed the EULA of Baldur’s Gate 3:

Something I find annoying is that being effective at SEO means being in a constant war with people whose literal job it is to be good at SEO to trap me in useless crap.