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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Morally: never. It’s built off stolen property and destroys the world with its ecological consequences.

    Practically: as a placeholder. A real human will always outperform an AI, but if the intent is not quality but to just get the gist across, then it works in a pinch.

    To be clear, it’s not just the quality of the final product that matters. An AI-generated product is unmaintainable and uneditable. You can’t make variations of a generated product. It’s technical debt at its most fundamental



  • For context: Ross Scott made a video explaining the situation. The Commission has been meeting with lobbyists frequently and had been essentially stonewalling the initiative for some time now. This was the expected outcome.

    However, he still has the support of the European parliament, so they will seek to amend an existing law (which can be done through the Parliament), rather than create a new law (which must be done through the Commission). There is high confidence that this will happen, this path will just take longer


  • Am experiment that determines the relative amount of a given protein in a sample. It takes like 8 hours. Since it only gives relative amounts, in order to interpret any data, you need to do it multiple times on multiple proteins to determine what’s an “expected” amount and what’s an “unexpected” amount.

    It’s one of my least favorite types of experiments because of how mind-numbingly tedious it is. The only thing worse is qPCR






  • Oh, I’ve got such a good one. In high school, I was in Science Olympiad (basically a science club). I was always kind of a wishy-washy member, never really a serious or particularly reliable member. But one day, the club needed designs for a new shirt, and they decided to ask the members for some designs that the members would then vote on. I decided to submit a satire shirt.

    I obviously can’t share the full design for privacy reasons, but I went ahead and made it jingoistic/military themed. Fighter jets flying overhead, tanks rolling through. To make sure that people knew I was being totally serious about this clearly relevant shirt, I put a stick figure holding a science-looking flask in the corner of the shirt. And then to make sure that everyone knew that we were smart, I put the equation: “3+3=6.” All text in comic sans, of course.

    Anyways, no one got the joke. My design got 1 pity vote. I don’t think anyone even believed me when I said that it was a joke, which out of everything was kind of the saddest part for me.



  • Perhaps euthanasia is cruel, but the alternative must also be considered.

    My cat died from some sort of cancer. We noticed blue welts growing from her face years ago, but the vet said that they were harmless, some sort of allergic reaction. They got bigger over time, and more started to appear. Tests were done, but the vets still said that it was nothing to worry about.

    Over time, her personality changed. She was never really extraverted, but she still liked attention. Over time, she started hiding from people. She only came out to eat, then went back to hide again. We never saw her walking around like she did in the past.

    The night when she died, she pulled herself to visit the bedroom, then crawled back out into the living room and curled up onto the sofa and waited to die there. We knew something was wrong when we woke up the next day because she left a trail of blood that led us to her. At that point, it was already too late.

    In hindsight, it was clear - she was in constant pain for years. It was why she was hiding from people, why she seemed to start avoiding attention, why she stopped doing anything that she enjoyed. That night, she knew she was going to die, and she paid everyone a final visit before resigning herself to die on the sofa. It was an undignified, likely painful and slow death, that was preceded by years of debilitating pain. If she were given the choice, would she have chosen euthanasia? I’m not sure, but it feels clear to me that she knew she was going to die and was suffering for years.