“we just get our way more often I think.”

Exactly! That’s why I find it so refreshing.

I love the French because every other country I have been to besides France where I have attempted to speak the language, people are super appreciative of my efforts, even if I’m shit.

Not so in France. There’s often an air of arrogant expectation, because making an effort to speak French isn’t considered going above and beyond, but is expected (and if your French is mediocre, then you are not meeting that expectation). This isn’t always as abrasive as I make it sound here, but it is a sharp contrast to my experience in other countries.

I weirdly like this though. It’s a reflection of how British people travel about the world with a default assumption that many people will speak English. I have a Norwegian friend, for example, who said that when he was travelling, he was grateful that he knew English, because there would often be some people who could speak at least some English in most places he went. Attempting to speak French in France reminds me of how much privilege I have when travelling, because the French are as stubborn about expecting people to speak French as the English are about English. But the French are mainly like this within France, whereas English folk carry their expectations everywhere with them.

France feels like our sibling — we have a tumultuous relationship that could easily give the impression that we hate each other, but it’s far deeper than that. One of my interests is fashion history, and it’s so funny how many instances there are of a trend originating in France that people in Britain take notice of and want to emulate — in part because it is French: trends that are developing in a different cultural context, and are thus exotic and interesting compared to British fashion. Sometimes there’ll be attempts to stop trends from crossing the channel, but that just makes them seem cooler. If you want an example of one such trend, this video from Abby Cox is great.

But the cultural exchange happened in the other direction too; sometimes a trend would start in Britain and slowly diffuse over to France. Stuff like this is why I see the French as being our family. For better or for worse, we are joined together by history.

Hero, thank you

I don’t think it eliminates it, but rather adds an additional, new dimension to social interaction that follows completely different rules. Pseudonymous communication being the norm, for example (which of course, contributes to people being assholes online).

But there are still rules and conventions that govern social interactions online, as well as different levels of enforcement. For instance, if I replied to you with a comment full of abuse, then you could block me. Additionally, you, or someone else on this thread could report my comment, which might lead to me being banned from this community. If I went and complained about this ban being the result of power tripping mods, people would be able to check the modlog and call me out on my assholeish conduct. And if I was consistently abusive across communities, someone might contact my instance admins (and if there were many abusive users from my instance and the admins didn’t take action, then other instances might consider defederating from my instance). It obviously functions completely differently to offline communication, but online social relations are just as real as offline ones.

This is one of the reasons why I have been enjoying the fediverse so far. We get to have conversations about how we should handle people acting shitty. Even though big tech also provides ways of blocking or reporting abusive users, there’s a distinct powerlessness due to the lack of transparency and accountability in how moderation happens. And I definitely agree with you that when we look at how the vast majority of people interact online, it does make it easier to not care about people, and to feel more disconnected with society. It’s why I find it so fun and interesting to be in a space where we can have these conversations

That feels to me more like Wisdom and Intelligence working together

I keep seeing Cory Doctorow everywhere on my feed nowadays. It’s so frequent that it might even be annoying — if not for the fact that he’s consistently spitting bars.

It’s a wonder what you can do when your main job helps you to refine your word craft, and also you’ve been campaigning on tech and internet issues for literal decades, giving countless chances to refine your rhetoric.

He’s a valuable voice in the current climate, and I’m glad that “enshittification” catching on got him a much larger political platform than he had before.

And Steve probably wouldn’t blame you for that either. He’d just try to soften your heart by being his usual, earnestly enthusiastic self.

Damn, this thread (and replying to your comment in particular) just hit me with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. I’m so glad that I got to grow up at the time when I did, because now I have the privilege of grieving for Steve Irwin. Steve will always be a part of my fond childhood memories.

I’ve found that I actually seem to use more em-dashes since they became understood to be associated with AI — it’s a defiance thing. I mostly type on my phone, and to type an em dash, I just need to long press on the dash.

But I, the barbarian, really wanted to hit someone with my axe this turn :(

This is a great example of the effectiveness of using a timer.

In addition to streamlining the session, I’ve found that it is also a massive help for roleplaying. Our party was once put on the spot in a similar way, and we ended up making choices that we deeply regretted. However, it was the kind of situation where there were no straightforwardly good choices, and we’d have probably agonised over the consequences either way. Our DM spurring us into action meant that we experienced the analysis paralysis (and subsequent regret) in-character as well as out of character

Yeah, this is especially useful for classes that prepare their spells from a longer list, like wizards or clerics. I like to use revision card size notes for each spell, so then when we long rest, I can just rifle through them and physically take the ones I’m choosing to prepare. It is more faff to make the notes than for sorcerers or warlocks, who only have to prepare a few notes each time they level up, but it massively streamlines sessions

This is why I love barbarians.

I deeply loved playing my delightful himbo. I only had two questions to answer: reckless attack (usually yes, because taking damage usually just makes me a more effective HP tank), and “do I want to hit them, or try to hit them really hard?” (Great weapon master feat — also usually a yes, mostly depending on healer availability).

I relate to your thing about a power fantasy of helping people. My guy had big “dad energy”, because he was older, and was deeply committed to putting himself between the squishy kids of the group (even if those “kids” included an elf who was twice his age). His mindset felt very paladin-y

Basically just to see if they can. We can think of the problem from multiple angles. The general problem is: “if we have a larger square with side length of a, what’s the maximum number of smaller squares (with side length of b) that we can fit into that larger square?”. If we have a larger square with side length of 4, then we can fit 16 squares in. If the larger square had a side length of 5, then we can fit 25 squares in. So this means that if we want a neat packing solution, and we can control how large the outer square is (in relation to the inner squares), then we want each side of the larger square to be a whole number multiple of the smaller square’s side length.

But what if that isn’t our goal? The fact that packing 25 squares into a 5x5 square is an optimal packing solution with no spare space means that it will be impossible to fit 25 smaller squares into a square that’s less than 5x5 large. But what about if we do have awkward constraints, and the number of smaller squares we have to pack isn’t a square number? The fact that this weird packing solution in the OP has 17 squares isn’t because 17 is prime, but rather that 17 is 1 more than 16 (it’s just that 17 happens to be prime).

This is a long way of saying that because packing 16 squares into a square is easy, the natural next question is “how large does the larger square need to be to be able to pack 17 squares into it?”. If this were a problem in real life where I had to pack 17 squares into a physical box, most people would just get a box that’s at least 5x5 large, and put extra packing material into all the spare space. But asking this question in terms of “what’s the smallest possible box we could use to pack 17 squares in?” is basically just an interesting puzzle, precisely because it’s a bit nonsensical to try to pack 17 squares into the larger square. We know for certain we need a box that’s larger than 4x4, and we also know that we can do it in a 5x5 box (with a heckton of spare space), so that gives us an upper and lower bound for the problem — but what’s the smallest we could use, hypothetically?

As a fellow autistic person, I relate to your confusion. But I’d actually wager that there were a non-zero number of autistic people who were involved in this research. It sort of feels like “extreme sports” for autistic people — doing something that’s objectively baffling, precisely because it feels so unnatural and wrong

The optimisation objective is to fit n smaller squares (in this case, n=17) into the larger square, whilst minimising the size of the outer square. So that means that in this problem, the dimensions of the outer square isn’t a thing that we’re choosing the dimensions of, but rather discovering its dimensions (given the objective of "minimise the dimensions of the outer square whilst fitting 17 smaller squares inside it)

Oh my God, I fucking love this. I mean, I absolutely hate that this is the optimal way to pack 17 squares into a larger square such that the size of the larger square is minimised. However, I love that someone went to the effort of making a waffle iron plate for this. High effort shitposts like this give me life

I’m more of a spooky scientist than a sparkly scientist, but this resonates with me anyway. There have definitely been times where I felt like expressing femininity was at odds with my identity as a scientist. I know that those elements can and do exist with me at the same time, but I used to feel like this would cause me to appear less legitimate as a scientist.

It turns out that the assholes who make science feel hostile to women don’t particularly give a fuck about how you dress (except perhaps to be creepy weirdos because obviously if a woman dresses nice, she must be doing it for them. Fortunately, I’ve not directly experienced this kind of creepiness, but I know it exists).

On the flip side though, refusing to be subsumed by impossible expectations has made it easier to connect with people who respect good scientists, regardless of their gender — whilst also working to be aware of how gendered oppression affects women’s experience in science. As depressing as it is to be constantly aware of the many obstacles that persist for women in STEM, I feel heartened to see how many people are fighting the good fight. Having good allies significantly reduces the mental and emotional burden of being marginalised. And these folks are way better scientists anyway (who’d have thunk? Being open to a plurality of perspectives is pretty important for science).

The past is grim, and the present often is too. However, me and my sparkly colleagues have shown that we will be a part of the future of science.

I’ve never been in a scenario where there was an emergency situation where I was on hand when someone needed to urgently take action to avoid a dire outcome, but I can only hope that I would have the courage that this guy had. Mad respect

It’s usually safe to assume that If there are people who seem to find a thing difficult despite you finding it easy, it’s probably difficult for them. For some reason or other, they have needs or struggles that you don’t have. You don’t need to understand why they struggle, just accept that they do.

Maybe they were working from a reference photo that had the balls be visible, and they felt it’d be weirder to not include them

You’ve just reminded me of a funny time when playing the game Eco with friends. It’s sort of like Minecraft but themed around ecological sustainable technological development, and the specialised labour necessary to make that happen. There were about 8 of us in total, and we would drop in and drop out over the course of a month

The way the electric power system worked in Eco is that in addition to dedicated objects you could place to expand the electrical grid, objects that use electricity could also act as repeaters, albeit with a much smaller radius. They didn’t even need to be physically connected up to power for this to work. They weren’t intended to be used as repeaters; the radius thing was just an artifact of how the electricity mechanic was implemented, to ensure that it wasn’t too complex to build an electric grid.

When we were short of materials and expanding our settlements, I ended up implementing a kludge solution of just placing a few unconnected water pumps between our power station and the place we needed to connect to the grid. It was only intended to be a temporary solution — but there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

nipped off the server for a little while, and when I came back, everything had gone to hell due to massive outages across the entire grid. After a while of fruitless troubleshooting, I happened to walk past one of the places where there had previously been a water pump, but there was no longer. I discovered that someone had removed it as part of routine tidying up the world.

Surprised and exasperated, I asked my friend why they removed it, and they (justifiably) responded indignantly with “Well I’m sorry! I didn’t know that it was a load bearing water pump!”. “Load bearing water pump” ended up becoming a recurring joke in my friend group, persisting long after we finished playing Eco. The situation really captures the absurd inevitability of this kind of change