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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • All your premises are wrong. The existence of trans people doesn’t reject biology, quite the contrary, advanced biology supports the notion that sex can vary beyond a binary and is quite distinct from gender and sexual identity (which are psychosocial phenomena). There is no organized dogma on the LGBTQ+ support community. If anything, in fighting, disagreement and diversity is what defines it, not homogeneity or conformity. Our understanding of sexual identities, gender and transexuality is the result of scientific discourse, through and through. From phenomenological descriptions, to anthropological, sociological, psychological and biological study. Our theories and understanding of transexual individuals has changed radically as new evidence has come forth and discoveries and theories evolve around it. It is quite the opposite of dogma. On heresy, there’s only one thing that is considered universally bad, and is the idea that a group of people has to die due to something they can’t control and aren’t at fault for. Like declaring murder against trans people for being born transgender, yes, that’s a definitive faux pas and you will be ostracized for wanting minorities dead. This is a moral stance, but that’s it, it doesn’t imply adhesion to any organized enforcement of belief. There’s also no censorship or apostasy in here. The concept of censorship doesn’t apply as the FFRF is not a government. Coyne is perfectly allowed to publish his ideas somewhere else, just not there. Finally, apostasy doesn’t apply because this is not an organized religion.

    The thing here is that Coyne and Dawkins want to declare themselves apostles of their anti-religion movement. Because that’s how they were raised and they lack the critical thinking skills to realize the irony of the situation they’re in. They are uncritically defending Anglican religious values and objectively acting against the anti-religion they claimed to champion. They’re exactly the kind of asshats they would’ve debated against 10 or 20 years ago.


  • Congratulations on your recency bias, then, I suppose. I guess then you have also read Graham on the philosophical definitions of genes, and Jameson about memetics and neo-Darwinism research were he categorizes several criticism from the social sciences on the concept. As well as Burman, who defends the concept but also calls it an “unscientific object”. Or the analysis on the alt-right ideological ties of neo-darwimism from Weikart. I personally find the most compelling the article from Benitez Bribiesca, for I do think memetics are a dangerous idea. But the most compelling is of course the analysis from Dennett elaborating how memes, on their own fail to explain social phenomenon that should, as proposed by Dawkins, be regarded as memes, but other forms of sociological analysis can indeed account for the entirety of the phenomenon without the need of extraneous theories. This is what I think leads Mayr to claim that the theory of memes is unnecessary and there are anthropological and sociological theories better suited to explain the phenomena of concepts. Because I have read all of those and many more, too much to list here, over the course of decades. But what am I saying, you just read Selfish gene, of course no one knows more about it than you. Dear lord, my thesis tutor was right, “for the average idiot, their ignorance is as good as your PhD, no matter how much evidence you produce”.



  • I can accept there’s people who like the concept but there’s a reason it didn’t take hold anywhere except pop science and is a theoretical dead end. It has a ton of epistemological flaws that make it useless as a scientific construct. It is unfalsifiable and it provides no venues for theoretical or experimental developments. As I stated, there are far more useful constructs in sociology and social psychology that allows the analysis of social constructs, cultural imagery, beliefs, values, worldviews, etc. With over a century of epistemological, theoretical and methodological traditions that have provided useful advancements to our scientific understanding, and provided tools for further development. Memes are barely a fun simile with genes that was cool to make YouTube videos about ten years ago, but that’s about it.


  • Yes, and it is the most useless concept ever committed to text. It’s ironic it was coopted by internet culture and then ridiculed and reduced to absurdity.

    He just tried to poorly rebrand the concepts of cultural imagery, and social constructs but with less evidence. It’s akin to me going “I propose the term garggle, it is water that flows down by gravity following the contours of the solid ground”. It’s like, yeah, we call it water and when it does that we call it a river, you would know if you opened a book about it anytime in the past century. You could summarize that book as “better read a book on sociology, it’s more useful”.



  • “Why should sex be changeable while other physical traits cannot? Feelings don’t create reality,” he wrote. “Instead, in biology ‘sex’ is traditionally defined by the size and mobility of reproductive cells. “It is not ‘transphobic’ to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights.”

    As a fellow psychologist, I must regretfully state that this is the stupidest thing ever written by a psychologist. Our entire science is built upon the notion that feelings indeed create and modify (social) reality*. Sex is not gender, and he fumbled the most basic differentiation of concepts.

    Heteronormative gender roles, on the other hand, are categorically a form of ideology and to defend them in place of basic human decency is a disgrace, good riddance to both asshats, I say. Specially with such a tenous biological argument that any good biologist can tell you is patently false. Gametes are not binary, there are hundred of thousands of intersex individuals for which this narrow definition doesn’t apply.

    Grant is absolutely right, but I don’t expect the mentally weak asshole who invented the word “meme” to ever understand social sciences. His book is a pathetic pseudo scientific intrusion in a field he doesn’t understand in the slightest.

    *: some philosophers would even argue that there’s no reality but social reality and both are one and the same.


  • It’s valid to get mad at the article being removed and not discussed. But I have to say, that argument calling “gender ideology” a religion and its justification reads exactly as a right-wing anti-woke argument calling science a religion. Or the way I like to translate it, “everything I don’t like is X” syndrome. Be it woke, religion, or anything else. It’s a blatant display of rigid thinking. Just because someone didn’t intent to hurt doesn’t mean their actions can’t hurt, and that’s a big part of critical feminist theory (of which they might not entirely understand much about). Our actions and words have material and social consequences that extend beyond our intentions. Maybe try to understand why they were injurious instead of throwing a performative tantrum.

    Edit: this comment is a reply to another comment and somehow got duplicated by lemmy as both a reply to OP and the comment. My apologies.


  • It’s valid to get mad at the article being removed and not discussed. But I have to say, that argument calling “gender ideology” a religion and its justification reads exactly as a right-wing anti-woke argument calling science a religion. Or the way I like to translate it, “everything I don’t like is X” syndrome. Be it woke, religion, or anything else. It’s a blatant display of rigid thinking. Just because someone didn’t intent to hurt doesn’t mean their actions can’t hurt, and that’s a big part of critical feminist theory (of which they might not entirely understand much about). Our actions and words have material and social consequences that extend beyond our intentions. Maybe try to understand why they were injurious instead of throwing a performative tantrum.



  • If you bothered to read the article, you’d notice that the charger was chosen by the manufacturers a decade ago in a summons by the European commission. If Apple had complied to do what they agreed to do back then, this law wouldn’t exist. But they got whiny and litigious. So, instead of an at will standardization program, the EU decided to make it mandatory by law, to shut Apple up, and anyone else who wanted to forcibly refuse to comply. The cool thing about European law is that nothing is written in stone. Not even constitutions are considered sacred, unlike in the Americas, and can be changed at any point or amended as long as proper procedures are followed. There’s nothing, ever, preventing the EU from calling another commission of tech companies to choose a new charger, if a better one ever shows up.



  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux suggestion
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    9 days ago

    Try Aurora DX (it means the developer edition). It’s KDE but with a Fedora base and immutability. It means that even if an update breaks something (unlikely but still) you will always have a working system available to fall back to. It does mean that development is meant to be done via containers, but I find this solution to be way cleaner and easier to work with than traditional package conflicts madness. Give it a go.




  • Unless we invent cold fusion between the next 5 years, they will never be economical. They are the most energy inefficient thing ever invented by humanity and all prediction models state that it will cost more energy, not less, to keep making them better. They will never be energy efficient nor economical in their current state, and most companies are out of ideas on how to shake it up. Even the people who created generative models agree that they have just been brute forcing by making the models larger with more energy consumption. When you try to make them smaller or more energy efficient, they fall off the performance cliff and only produce garbage. I’m sure there are researchers doing cool stuff, but it is neither economical nor efficient.


  • dustyData@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldruh roh
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    16 days ago

    Several tried. Nothing as elaborate as cross dissemination, federation or whatever. But at least 5 to 10 years ago it proved to be almost impossible. Platforms like Rooster teeth, which was 100% subscription based, I think never broke even and still relied on YT ads for the majority of the revenue. Some big and small channels tried to at least just catalog, archive and serve their own videos and the costs still became astronomical really fast. Whenever you see one of those very old channels, most of them don’t conserve copies, let alone original source footage of their entire material. Everyone just delete their videos once they’ve been on YouTube for a month or so now, and they have to download their own videos when they want to reuse old footage.

    Storage is cheap today, yes, but video really eats storage at an alarming rate. Specially now that 4k is the standard. So you have to reuse storage over and over. Transcoding is also really fast and optimized with modern algorithms, but it takes specialized graphical cards and data centers charge a premium to use servers with such capacities. Self hosting will never be able to satisfy a moderate demand. Get anything above 100 users simultaneously transcoding videos and a non-specialized server will halt to a grind just on IO calls to hard drives alone.

    Once you consider all those factors it is obvious why YouTube is such a miracle.



  • I mean, yeah, why not? There are international whatevers for almost anything, specially professional practices. It’s less cumbersome and cheaper than relying on regulatory bodies to organize and run conventions or seminars. Most of these chats are informal and born from that kind of events as well.

    Something I also learned from working with the health sector is that there are really very few 100% dedicated to their niche specialists in every area. Sure, there are many heart surgeons, but very few experts on ventricular septal defect surgery on children. And some of that stuff can be so complex as to be a sole area of dedicated study. It allows these kind of informal forums and encourages a strong mentor-apprentice dynamics. So it is not rare they hit the group chat every once in a while. I also learned there are over a dozen different ways to make a vasectomy procedure and some doctors know how to do a few but not all of them and there are reasons to prefer some over the others depending on the patient.