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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I think it really depends on your definition of what counts as year of Linux. Will Linux usage ever beat Windows or Mac? Of course not. But it can definitely get popular enough that companies have to think really hard about whether they need to support Linux or not. And meanwhile, Linux isn’t going to get popular overnight (or in a year, for that matter). So do you consider the year of the Linux to be the end of growth? Middle of growth? Or beginning of growth?

    For me, I think year of the Linux desktop already passed in 2021, with the launch of the steam deck (where I’m defining year of Linux to be the point where Linux usage picks up and will hopefully end at a point where companies have to take Linux seriously)




  • A broad statement like “trees consume carbon dioxide” would actually be an incredible paper to publish because it means that there is 1. a lot of interesting data that could back up a statement so broad and 2. extremely applicable to a wide variety of fields. When I say “uninteresting,” I really mean a very specific type of uninteresting, like "sunlight does not affect the growth of the fungus Neurospora crassa. " It’s uninteresting because it doesn’t really tell us what affects the growth of the fungus, only that sunlight does not. If you got this result, you likely wouldn’t even feel like it’s information that’s worth making public, hence the lack of papers that have these sorts of results. But, if it weren’t published, then grad students across the globe would keep testing sunlight and keep finding the same thing again and again, wasting time and money. Hence the argument that all data should be published, regardless of how useless the results are


  • No reason, I suppose. In my opinion it seems to just be a holdover from the previous systems of publishing. The prestige of a journal is ranked based on how often it gets cited (or in other words, how influential the papers are within the journal). Publishing insignificant/uninteresting data would lower a journal’s average citation count, which would make it seem less prestigious than other journals. Hence journals are incentivized to only publish interesting data. It’s a shitty system that everyone knows is shitty but nobody has a good solution for how to fix it


  • Survivorship bias is the idea that there might be an unknown filter that’s filtering the data before you even get to see it. In the case of the plane, that’s referring to a story from WW2, where planes returning from combat were recorded for where they were shot. Famously, the recommendation was to thicken the armor on places where the planes weren’t hit, because the “unknown filter” in this case is that if the plane were shot down, then you would never be able to record where bullets hit on that plane. Hence, the most important areas of the plane are actually the places that weren’t shot in the surviving planes.

    In the case of the graph, this is a graph compiled from looking through a lot of papers and recording how significant a result is. Essentially a measure of how “interesting” the data is. Here, the unknown filter is that if a result weren’t interesting, then it wouldn’t get published. As a result, there’s a gap right in the middle of the graph, which is where the data is least interesting. In recent times, there’s been a philosophical argument that even uninteresting data should be published, so that at least it would prevent wasted time from multiple people attempting to do the same thing, each unaware that it’s already been done before. Hence the reason why people made the graph in the first place


  • I was taught in my Micro course that lichen is actually a symbiosis between 3 organisms: fungi, algae, and cyanobacteria. The cyanobacteria produces energy, but more importantly fixes nitrogen into a more biologically available form, which would not be otherwise accessible in the environments that lichen grows in






  • My understanding is that automount is different from what you’ll need. The automount that you’re using is probably mounting when you log in, but you’ll probably want to mount when you turn on the computer.

    For that, you’ll want to edit fstab. That’s a file that tells the system that you need to mount this drive during boot-up. On KDE, there’s a partition manager software that can edit fstab through a GUI, but I’m not sure if there’s something similar in Mint. If not, the file is in /etc/fstab. Make sure to double check for typos when you edit fstab because errors can prevent your computer from booting up properly. Or just be proficient at terminal so that you can undo the changes when you make an error.

    Word of advice: use the nofail option for secondary/storage drives


  • Not finicky and Arch-based don’t really go together well.

    Just go with Bazzite or something, the exact distribution doesn’t matter (as long as it’s not Arch). The more important choice is the desktop environment, which is the user experience and looks of the distro. If you’re moving from Windows, I assume you’ll like KDE Plasma. It’s basically Windows 10 but modernized, with a more aesthetic and clean look. (It’s also paralyzingly hypercustomizable, so I would recommend using the default settings initially and slowly learning the settings, rather than diving into the settings headfirst the moment you install)

    I personally use Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE Plasma), but it’s slightly more annoying to set up than something like Bazzite



  • Your job is a job - you’re not really supposed to like it. The inherent problem about making a living is that at some point sooner or later, no matter what job you choose, you are going to have to do things that you don’t want to do. In a hobby, you can just choose not to do any of the tedious things. In a job, that’s what you’re paid to do, that’s what you have to do. Hence the advice: don’t make your hobby into a job.

    Now, I’m not saying that you should always be miserable in a job. There’s degrees to this. You can be soul-rending miserable, or just meh, or maybe even something resembling happy. If you genuinely are passionate about your job, that’s kind of a lucky catch and shouldn’t be treated as an expectation for a job.

    The way I think about it is that the money that you receive from a job is a compensation for the tedium of that job. You will need to consider this question: the money that you get paid in your current job, do you believe that to be a fair trade for the effort that you put in to that job? If the answer is yes, then I would recommend keeping your hobbies as hobbies, and using your job to pay for those passions.