I really respect people who edit comments to acknowledge when they’re wrong, but leave the original mistake intact (but usually strike through). Like this:

I delete my comments when I’m proven wrong because it’s embarassing and I don’t want to perpetuate misinformation

Actually, I’m leaving my mistake up, because then people can follow the conversation easier and see how I came to realise I was wrong

I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.

I agree. Whenever I get into an argument online, it’s usually with the understanding that it exists for the benefit of the people who may spectate the argument — I’m rarely aiming to change the mind of the person I’m conversing with. Especially when it’s not even a discussion, but a more straightforward calling someone out for something, that’s for the benefit of other people in the comments, because some sentiments cannot go unchanged.

You’re right, that is pretty funny. I didn’t notice until you pointed it out in this comment

You’ve bamboozled my attempt to make the same joke at your expense by only mentioning one number in your comment, giving me nothing to add to it. From this point on, I conclude we should only ever mention one number in each comment, for clarity.

A friend of mine came out as straight to his parents, because he understood that this is someone one does when becoming aware of one’s sexuality, and as a young teen, he had his first crush on a girl. A few years later, he came out as bi.

Edit: just finished reading your story properly and it’s really sweet, thanks for sharing. I find the split model of attraction (romantic/sexual) super useful because of situations like your friend’s; like many bisexuals, I had a period of being “am I ace tho? What even is attraction?” and even though I’m securely bi now so nothing has changed, I appreciate some of the terms and frameworks I’ve picked up from the ace community. Invisible members of the queer community solidarity!

Memes that are autistic memes without explicitly mentioning autism

Thanks for sharing that post, it was super interesting.

I wish I could see behind the scenes in the Windows UI discussions, to see how we get to what we have today

In accord with the other person who replied to you, I enjoyed learning about the design process for packaging of the Xbox accessible controller. Had to find an archive link for it, but here: Link.

Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don’t know of any communities, perhaps because I’m a scientist who loves maths rather than a mathematician.

However, I will use this opportunity to share some fun stuff from people I like.

https://youtu.be/H0Ek86IH-3Y by Oliver Lugg on Youtube is great. His channel is very eclectic though, and there isn’t much pure maths. I love his shitposting tone though, and he has a discord community that were pretty mathsy when I was in it.

A blog-type site that I enjoy is Tai-Danae Bradley’s https://www.math3ma.com/about, largely because I’ve discovered many other cool researchers through her site.

I also really enjoy Eugenia Cheng’s books, especially as someone who is interested in understanding how to write good scientific communication that is accessible without “dumbing things down”. I recently finished “The Joy of Abstraction”.

Apologies that this isn’t what you actually were looking for. I share your distaste at Reddit: I have used Reddit occasionally for those niche communities that aren’t available elsewhere (yet!), but the atmosphere is increasingly toxic. I fear that smaller communities that flee are congealing in harder to discover places, like Discord.

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It reminds me of the recent Crowdstrike fiasco: apparently kernel level access was needed for their anti-malware to be able to properly work (because that way their net can cover the entire OS basically), but that high level of access meant that when CrowdStrike fucked up with an update, people’s computers were useless. (Disclaimer, I am not a cybersecurity person and am not offering judgement either way on whether Crowdstrike’s claim about kernel level access was bullshit or not)

In a similar way, in order for identity theft monitoring services to work, they surely will need to hold a heckton of data about you. This is fine if they can be trusted to hold that data securely, but otherwise… ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I share your unease, though I don’t feel able to comment on the correctness of your mindset. Though I will say that on an individual level, keeping an eye on your credit reports in general (from the major credit agencies) will go a long way to helping there (rather than paying for serviced that give you a score and other fancy “features”, you can request either free or v. low cost report which just has the important stuff you need to know.)

I also know that if you want to be extra cautious, you can manually freeze your credit so basically no new lines of credit can be opened in your name. This is most useful for people who have already been a victim of fraud, or they expect to be at risk (such as by shitty family, or a data breach). I don’t know how one sets this up, but I know that if you did want to set up a new line of credit, you can call to unfreeze your credit, and then freeze it again when your application for the new credit is all done. I have a friend who has had this as their default for years now because of shitty family.

I agree that there’s a strong incentive for even entirely self-interested people to cooperate. I was listing altruism as one of many pro-social behaviours, not as a subset or requirement for cooperation

I’d argue that capitalism is unnatural because even if we work from the assumption that resource hoarding is natural, it’s also necessary to take into account the fact that evolutionarily, humans got to where we are via traits like altruism, cooperation and forming communities. Capitalism is far from natural — it’s an insidious subversion of human nature

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

I’ve read the book and I found it okay, but I read it not long after Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, which I think tried to explain many of the same things that Technofeudalism does, but I feel Zuboff’s take feels more fitting (though the two models aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive)

A couple of times, Steam Achievements have been a deciding factor in me not pirating a game. I know it’s dumb but ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I don’t think I’d be running Linux as my only daily driver if not for this. I was slightly dreading switching because I feared spending hours trying to fix broken games, but it’s been astonishingly straightforward (which facilitated me learning to live in Linux in a way I hadn’t been able to when was dual booting with Windows)

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I never thought of this before, the parody song practically writes itself