ganafagol

> Could you imagine ants finding a method to annihilate themselves?

It's not very hard for ants to collectively commit suicide.

Exactly. These are social and political problems. They won't be solved by expanding. On the contrary, expanding makes them worse.

There are other alternatives beyond "spreading out" and "sitting on our hands".

Solving world hunger does not need expansion. Stopping climate change does not need expansion. Preventing the upcoming antibiotics crisis does not need expansion. To the contrary, expansion makes all those things worse or has even started them in the first place.

Maybe it's being downvoted because it is simply wrong?

If tomorrow all ants disappear then most land-oriented ecosystems would just collapse.

We humans are having so egoistically anthropocentrical world views that it's not even funny anymore.

I'm confused. Do you mean the millions of "long covid" cases which already exist today? Or the estimate that about 70% of all people who got the vaccine will be dead within 3 years?

I know which of these two I consider gaslighting.

Your parent comment was written in a way to discredit vaccinations as a concept and insinuate that it is cult-like. You may want to double-check your understanding of sarcasm. It works exactly the other way around.

> you would treat it with antibiotics and be fine.

Funny how you are confirming the sentiment in the article. I'd suggest you read it.

You are welcome to compare the number of cases of suspected-but-not-confirmed side effects with the number of people getting Lyme every year.

You may find a difference of a few orders of magnitude.

Why don't they just solve world peace and faster-than-light travel?

Because these things are hard. Lacking the ultimate solution, a small step is better than nothing.

Or do you only walk because cars and trains are too slow to get you to the next solar system so why bother ...?

If you consider enjoying nature as "reckless behavior" then the shared understanding needed as a basis for a conversation may be missing. Lying in the grass looking at sky and stars, running through the forest with your dog, go pick mushrooms. That's very natural behaviour, not "reckless". Of course you can sit indoors all day, but I prefer a vaccine and enjoy nature instead.

Not sure this is meaningful. It's similar to asking "I wonder if the stock market could cope with Elon Musk dumping all his Tesla shares at once. Do it!" Of course the stock would crash. Of course it would create a panic among not just Tesla shareholders but investors across the board. Of course the FTC would go and try countermeasures. And similarly, of course BTC would crash, at least temporarily. It's still a market with human actors in it.

Gnome Shell anybody? I'm surprised nobody brought it up yet.

About 10 years ago I switched from Gnome 2 to 3. Because my distro did. It was a huge drop in features. Over the years I had tuned my desktop experience on Gnome 2 with different panel apps, layouts, some custom hacks. It worked great. Gnome 3 ended all this. It was really simple, so that it was almost dysfunctional. It was new so I thought the community would soon catch up. But it never did. The experience is still much worse that in the Gnome 2 days. Even a few extensions that try to mimic the Gnome 2 experience can't really compensate, and many of them break with every other update. It's such a shame.

"We thank the anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback that we used to improve the article." Standard phrase, credit where credit is due, no need to make some definition worse just to not trip off a plagiarism filter.

Unless this very phrase does the tripping off. Having to rephrase it would be pretty ridiculous though (and illustrates your point).

I'm fully on board with fighting plagiarism down to that level.

But that said, I've often times wondered if this requirement of having to "rewrite in your own words" may do a lot of harm too. It obfuscates that things that people are talking about are actually exactly the same, or make it fuzzy what the exact differences are.

In a particular academic CS area I've witnessed people reproduce again and again the essentially identical description of setting and assumptions, but in being afraid of plagiarism accusations, they over and over re-formulate things which made it nonobvious that things are the same as from other authors or even from their own earlier work.

How about the common daily anxieties "Will I ever find true love?" and "Damn poop stinks"?

This criticisim is slightly misguided. Let's say you have email notifications turned on too, and Joe could be standing next to you. Do you expect everybody to start email conversations with "whats up?" just so you can establish a confidential environment?

It's all about the topic discussed. Most of the time you just need to get the question out there. It's not confidential but you don't want to waste time with an extra round trip. So just write it down. No matter chat or email.

And sometimes something sensitive comes up. Then you take precautions, like booking a meeting, or having an understanding within management that your mail inbox/chat contents/.. are considered confidential (which they should) or similar.

"unless it is misleading" which could be considered to be the case here.

If somebody is trying to stand out by having a github with two projects, one is a merge sort implenentation they typed essentially 1:1 from a book during an algorithms 101 class and the other is an almost-trivial shopping list app that neither compiles nor they can explain anything about it, and then put a link to this github at the top of their resume, then they'd have been better off not having created that github account at all. It's easy to see through this nonsense and the filter of evalutating this helps avoiding wasted time of a few interview hours.

And yes, I'm totally preducied agains people with those kinds of github contents. That's my whole point.

"Ridiculous job market"? The job prospects for devs in todays market is an essentially 100% guarantee that you get a job. The demand is huge and there are more jobs to fill than candidates available. You may not get into the company of your dreams, but overall, what's ridiculous is not how low the job chances are, but how high the demand is. If you do 100 interviews and 0 offers then you have an issue. It may not be your fault. Maybe it's a visa problem or some medical/psychological condition that makes it hard for people to see a good future colleague in you. But in the general case, there should be no problem getting a job if you're not too picky. Compare that to many other industries where it actually is ridiculously hard to even interview.

My suggestion is to go for quality. Only put up on you github stuff you are genuinely interested in or proud of or do. Not some mandatory exercise which is obviously only there to check a box.

> You get negative points for being a dick.

Giving you the benefit of doubt, I'm assuming this was a "generic you".

> Build a small personal project and put the code on GitHub.

This has lost its effect and partially turned it upside down. In school people seem to be instructed "have a github with personal project" to improve hiring chances so now everybody an their mother has an account with a bunch of meaningless crap projects that they have 0 intetest in but put it there to try to boost interview chances.

Don't. Whenever I screen a job candidate and go to their github, if I find that this is just there so you can tick off "projects on github" from your employability checklist, you get huge minus points from me. Then better not have it at all.

That's more than what Trump got in 2016. Still nobody compared the U.S. to Belarus.

> If there is one single lasting international effect of Orbán and his party, it's how he demonstrated how EU is completely helpless against rouge states (as well).

Helpless and hypocritical. If Orban rolls out surveillance he is a dictator. If UK or Germany do it, it's the noble fight against terrorists, pedophiles and kids downloading moviez from the internet.

Let's not conflate security and safety here. The boards hailed by the article are all about investigating safety failures, and so is the advocated invetigation board. Security is a different beast. It's sub-par in many airplanes/power plants/... too.

That makes it sound like Ph.D. graduates are a homogenuous bunch. That's nonsense. Somebody with a Ph.D. degree is just that -- a person with a certain degree certifying a certain competence. Apart from that, it does not say anything. Not what background the person has, how they think, what they like. It's part of a Ph.D. degree to aquire knowledge and skills alone. "Self-taught" if you will.

The distinction you make does not exist in that sense. The only actual difference is that the "extra" 3 Ph.D. graduates have had a certification for a somewhat structured education in some research field, while the youtoube fans don't. So, everything else equal, that group has an advantage.

> The next victim of US military incursion will be oil rich country. There's no reason for incursion if it is not going to be profitable for the US.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. See e.g. https://www.worldoil.com/news/2010/1/27/haiti-could-have-lar...

The comment was not about heterogeneous or not. It was about Ph.D. or not. Everything else equal, I'd prefer a heterogeneous bunch of Ph.D.s to have designed and built the thing that's put inside my brain over a similarly heterogeneous bunch of "I've taught this myself in 1 year using youtube". Snobs or not.

Ph.D.s are trained in two things. "Reasoning about an unknown" is one of them. But the particular niche knowledge they acquired while training this is the other. That niche can save my life if the niche matches the thing to be implanted into my brain. No matter how many youtube-educated wannabe-experts take issue with formal education.

(I have many issues with the academic system, but this kind of critisism is ridiculous.)

Looked cool, until i scrolled further down. Not only is any info lacking on how it's done and what the status is. There are even a bunch of "community projects" listed. Among them "Real Vegan Cheese and Narwhal evolutionary genomics" and "Mushroom Lovers". Not judging those, but that's far off from "let's provide the poor with safe and affordable insulin". Feels dishonest, tbh.

Maybe when putting things into peoples brains, competence is a highly necessary requirement. It's not enough to have "liked coding since high school" and "read a bunch of blogs" and "taught myself javascript" which may suffice for the average web shop, but when opening skulls, a broad and deep education definitely helps. Those crying about gatekeeping tend to be firmly on one side of the gate without putting in the necessary sweat.

> The next target will be also rich in oil, although it would be definitely said that it's only because of lack of democracy in the said country.

Haiti.

Then you are participating in a self fulfilling prophecy. The oil and gas lobby won't stop calling. Nor will the car industry lobby and all the other industry groups. So if you don't call (or vote, for that matter) the cause is lost and what you think about politics. But you contributed to it by inaction, so don't blame others.