No, not weird at all. PhD’s are pain, but certain people like the pain. If you’re good with handling stress, and also OK with working in a fast-paced, high-impact environment (for real, not business talk BS), then it may be the right decision for you. The biggest thing that I would say is that you should really, really think about whether this is what you want, since once you start a PhD, you’ve locked the next 6 years of your life into it with no chance of getting out

Edit: Also, you need to have a highly sensitive red-flag radar. As a graduate student, you are highly susceptible to abuse from your professor. There is no recourse for abuse. The only way to avoid abuse is by not picking an abusive professor from the get-go. Which is hard, since professors obviously would never talk badly about themselves. Train that red-flag radar, since you’ll need to really read between every word and line to figure out if a professor is right for you

Found the AI

Modern biologists naming genes: sanic the hadgehodge

It depends on the field. My understanding is that in physics, it’s accepted to put the PI first. Seems weird to me, but I’m coming from biology, which is a PI-last field

Games, as with all creative media, by default improve over time as people learn what makes something enjoyable. I think people tend to forget that. So I think for older games, you have to keep 2 “ratings” in your head - how was it compared to the games at the time, and how is it compared to games now?

I loved GTA3 when I played it. But that was back then. I’m not sure if I would say the same thing now, comparing it to modern games.

I get that people like to clown on all the remakes and remasters that are coming out, and for the most part, rightly so. But I also think it’s really important to encourage high quality remakes for this exact reason - when a good game ages poorly, it doesn’t feel quite right to just tell new, younger players to deal with it if they want to figure out what the hype is about

Doc Seismic from Invincible

It also crawls into the snail’s eyestalks and starts dancing in the snail’s eyes

It’s like boiling a crab - people don’t realize how much they’re getting shafted if you enshittify slowly enough. And frankly, I fully predict that it’ll continue to get worse. Social media execs have proven themselves to be brazen enough (and dumb enough) to so openly exploit their userbase

Didn’t expect that, but what a welcome surprise

Bought it when it came out! Great game. The antialiasing is really funky, though. There’s a lot of ghosting no matter what antialiasing option you use. I suspect it’s probably a software bug. It does kind of detract from the visual quality aspect of its marketing.

Regardless, I don’t think puzzles sell well in general - bit of a niche genre

Heaven’s Vault, Hardspace Shipbreaker, and both Subnautica games.

Heaven’s Vault is a puzzle game where you have to learn to translate an unknown language. Haven’t gotten too deep into the game yet, but I picked it up because I liked Chants of Sennaar, which has a similar premise. Chants is 25% off right now, so I think that’s a decent recommendation

Hardspace Shipbreaker is a casual game where you break down spaceships for parts. It seemed fun, and I wanted to have something casual to balance out my library, which currently has more intense games than I would like.

Subnautica is a survival game where you’re stuck on an ocean world. I’m honestly not too sure if I would like this one too much, since I’m not too much of a fan of survival games. It just seemed unique enough from the other survival games, and it had a decent deal, and it was in my wishlist for a while. So I acted a bit on impulse and bought both games (Subnautica and Subnautica Below Zero)

I wonder if the wording depends on the field.

As a microbiologist, I would have phrased it like:

• The sample was destroyed during handling and was not considered for further analysis.
• The animal was not amenable to handling and was excluded from sample collection.

If it’s emotional you want, you can’t beat To the Moon and its sequel, Finding Paradise. They’re walking sims, but they’ve got great stories that’ll make you ugly cry

To be clear, the issue that many people have with Threads is not that Meta can’t be trusted with our data. It’s true, but that’s not the main issue. The main issue is that there is no reason for Threads to try to federate with us unless they are trying to kill the Fediverse.

Meta is a big company, they can attract users on their own and support their own ecosystem. Isn’t it strange that they would try to federate with us? We are much smaller in comparison, and we won’t help their user activity just simply because we are much fewer in number compared to the users on Threads. The only reasonable explanation is that Threads is trying to federate with us because they are pre-emptively trying to kill the Fediverse before it becomes a serious competitor.

This is a very standard practice for tech companies, so much so that it has its own name: EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). If a tech company notices an up-and-coming potential competitor, they will adopt the same technology as the competitor by passing it off as a partnership (embrace).

Then, they’ll slowly start introducing changes to the technology, and they’ll introduce those changes in such a way that it’s intentionally difficult for the competitor to implement something similar (extend). This could be anything like making an extension to the ActivityPub protocol that only works with a Threads account (proprietary extensions) or publishing the change but intentionally obfuscating the documentation for that change, so that the competitor’s implementation is buggy (sabotage). This all occurs behind the scenes, so the users will start to wonder why the competitor seems so buggy and slow. They start to switch to Threads because it’s more stable and fast, not realizing that the whole reason why Threads appears more stable is due to sabotage.

Then, once the competitor has developed a bad enough reputation and once enough users have jumped ship, Threads will defederate. The sudden loss of users and the bad reputation that the competitor picked up during the “partnership” will destroy the competitor so much that they will never fully recover (extinguish).

If a big tech company comes to you with a partnership deal and it’s not apparent what exactly they’re getting from the deal, you can generally be sure that they’re only offering because they want to destroy your brand. I don’t trust Threads.

To be clear, the Fediverse doesn’t mean that everything is interconnected. It means that everything can be interconnected, but most sites will only do a very minimal form of interconnectivity. And that’s mainly due to personal choice. You wouldn’t want to have Instagram posts on your Reddit feed, and you wouldn’t want Tumblr posts on YouTube. You can do that, but why would you?

So most sites will only interconnect with other sites that they deem to be similar enough in content style. Lemmy interconnects with Kbin because both are Reddit clones. Kbin interconnects with Lemmy, but it also interconnects with Mastodon. Apparently the developer of Kbin thought that Mastodon is similar enough in content style that people would appreciate having Mastodon posts appear on Kbin. And this happens for all the other sites. The Fediverse is less like a tightly connected network, and more like a loose connection of sites that could operate together, if they ever chose to do so. Like a federation, if you will

Basically, if you’re on Lemmy (which you are), you’re only going to see Reddit-like content

Hacknet. You play as a novice hacker who investigates the disappearance of a character by hacking into other people’s computers to gather information.

The hacking mechanic is fairly realistic and requires you to use the terminal a lot, so it really makes you feel like a hacker. Pretty short and sweet game, and the soundtrack is pretty good as well

The guy’s got a point, but I don’t think it can be fully generalized as that “you don’t need fast travel, otherwise your game is boring.” I think there are legitimate instances where you just need to get to places quickly. I think the problem is less that fast travel exists, and more that a lot of games nowadays put so many fast travel points that you can go through the entire game without having stepped foot in 99% of the map.

I like the concept of “limited fast travel.” Witcher 3 is a good one, where you can fast travel, but only if you’re at a signpost and you can only travel to other signposts. Hollow Knight does this as well. I’m also pretty partial to how Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom does it, where you can fast travel to any shrine at any time, but shrines are never perfectly where you want to go - you’ll still need to make a 1 minute jog to get to the town/point of interest that you’re trying to get to.

That’s why I’m waiting for the remake!

Witcher 3

I think that’s a fun concept. I love dealing with the mechanism of realistic hypotheticals.

If I were to answer, I think it’s straight impossible for all of social media to not be funded through advertisements. There must be, to some degree, some site that clings on. But we can modify the prompt to say “the majority of social media will not be funded by advertisements.” In this case, I feel like there are a couple potential mechanisms, of varying likeliness:

• people collectively become more aware of their browsing habits and start using non-advertised sites (highly unlikely)
• the government steps in and collectivizes major social media sites (highly unlikely)
• the Fediverse, or some other alternative, becomes so popular that it becomes the primary social media site (not likely, but not impossible)
• social media sites shift their business structure so that users have to pay for social media usage, but in return they get no ads (actually possible with a not-insignificant chance of this actually occurring)
• social media sites find some other way of exploiting users that is currently considered either implausible (not likely, but I wouldn’t put this one out of the realm of possibility)