I think there’s a word “paying into the budget in exchange for closer ties and access”.

It starts with the letter M, I think.

Technically correct, but not extremely useful, info

I joined .ml because the devs are there.

Then I interacted with people, and realized that was a big mistake.

Spent some time on LBZ, but the admin is making a few too many choices for the users (I’ll block my own assholes, thanks)

So now I’m on sh.itjust.works

It might be quitter talk, but I just haven’t found the regiment i like.

We can apply a purity test here (ie. what qualifies as a university) but… why except for pedantry?

Well, because it’s only true for a veeeeeery narrow definition of “university”. If you include other schools, there are British ones that predate it by three centuries. If you don’t require current operation in the same building, or allow name changes, there are ancient Greek ones that predate it by more than a millenium.

Of course not, friend computer, communism is illegal!

In the satirical Paranoia tabletop RPG, there are Experience Points. This is a post-monetary society where nobody has a job, so you don’t earn “Money” by “working”, you earn voluntary Experience Points by doing your mandatory voluntary assignments which you can then exchange for goods and (voluntary) services.

I live in the Netherlands, where we don’t have water fluoridation because of legal principles. Our laws don’t allow medication without knowledge and consent, and fluoride is considered part of that. So if one person disagrees, you can’t do it, so we don’t do it.

As a result, we have markedly worse dental quality than in places that have naturally high fluoride content

You can absolutely ruin your palette with oversalting, or over-MSG-ing your food though.

I mean, I definitely don’t consider prozac part of a meal.

MSG also forms when glutamic acid meets tablesalt. That’s why tomatoes or beef with a tiny bit of salt are so damned tasty, they’re full of glutamic acid. Same with cheese (which is usually pre-salted for that lovely MSG-flavour).

Tomatoes and beef already contain MSG naturally, but adding a few grains of salt produces far more.

Edit: This is why walnut oil is amaaaaazing for savory flavours. It’s full of glutamate. Just like grape juice, or shi-take. Even potatoes to a lesser extend. And this is why we love combing all those foods for “winter foods” with game and in stews.

The Danish people must be salty about that.

Actual AI development has been held back a decade at least with all the bullshit spending on LLMs, and once the bubble pops hard it’ll be a huge effort to get any more into real AI development again.

What is that supposed to represent???

I recently tried to compare data on morbid obesity, but most countries don’t even have a rate, or only include the data as a sub- 1% share of the obesity.

And the US it’s 9.5%

As in, 30% of the US has a BMI between 30 and 40, and 10% is over 40.

Z values are measurement of how many standard deviations something is from the mean. 95% of your values fall between -2 and +2. Most “interesting cases” are about outliers, something that’s very uncommon. If it’s common, you don’t tend to write a paper about it. Nobody cares if someone had a slightly above average tumor, but if they have 50kg tumor, that’s publishable.

The survivorship bias plane shows a world war 2 chart of where the bullet holes were on planes. The conclusion famously isn’t to armor those parts often hit, but to armor the parts that weren’t hit, because no planes hit there returned to be recorded.

It’s almost as big as the Xbox360. We can reuse all the all the old memes

Next up: space boats in the space water.

Well no, I wouldn’t have it in me to send anyone to Birmingham.

Not having kids also saves a lot of money.