mat's recent activity
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Comment on Canadian pet DNA company sends back dog breed results from human sample a second time in ~life.pets
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Comment on Canadian pet DNA company sends back dog breed results from human sample a second time in ~life.pets
mat You're the second person to say that and I'm honestly not sure how one might read it that way, but the best thing to read is the paper the article links to, which goes into much more detail and I...You're the second person to say that and I'm honestly not sure how one might read it that way, but the best thing to read is the paper the article links to, which goes into much more detail and I think is considerably less prone to ambiguity. It's not paywalled and it's not particularly long and it is quite interesting.
The link title I used is actually the title of another article about a different paper saying the same thing, which I wrote before failing to find a link for because I was in a bit of a rush and I think the article I'm thinking of has been locked behind a paywall. I will look again tomorrow.
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Comment on Canadian pet DNA company sends back dog breed results from human sample a second time in ~life.pets
mat I'm not sure "slightly more likely to x" is the same as "reliably does x"; nor is "genes are a nudge not a destiny" the same as being "a very good indicator". They're not saying you can't make...I'm not sure "slightly more likely to x" is the same as "reliably does x"; nor is "genes are a nudge not a destiny" the same as being "a very good indicator".
They're not saying you can't make some predictions, they're saying that most of the things people say about breed behaviour isn't correct, and those things that are right aren't very reliable. From the actual paper, not the (very short) article about it:
Behavioral factors show high variability within breeds, suggesting that although breed may affect the likelihood of a particular behavior to occur, breed alone is not, contrary to popular belief, informative enough to predict an individual’s disposition.
I have read elsewhere that the behaviours of working dogs tend to be more slightly reliably predictable, because we've been selecting for those useful traits like pointing and retrieving for thousands of years, long before breeds were a thing.
It's weird how much pushback this idea gets, despite the science being pretty clear. This isn't the only paper I've read on the topic, although I can't find the other right now there's plenty of information out there if you want to find it.
It doesn't seem very logical that a concept humans invented around 150 years ago (that of dog breeds) would have all that much predictability only a handful of generations later, especially given the vast majority of dogs aren't in breeding programs. Genetic influence on behaviour and the associated heritability is super complex and we are only starting to think about understanding it now, let alone for most of the times the Kennel Clubs have been selecting for dogs that can't breathe properly, or have distorted spines because that gives a nice profile.
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Comment on Canadian pet DNA company sends back dog breed results from human sample a second time in ~life.pets
mat Breed is not a reliable indicator of behaviour The best way to tell what a dog is like is to just live with the dog a bit. If you want to test for genetic diseases, ask your vet to do that....Breed is not a reliable indicator of behaviour
The best way to tell what a dog is like is to just live with the dog a bit. If you want to test for genetic diseases, ask your vet to do that. Getting a result that your dog is 10% Dalmatian doesn't really help you know if it's carrying the defective gene that leaves them prone to deafness. These "gene testing" companies are at best non-science and at worst active scams.
"Breed" is something humans made up a few hundred years ago for collecting and show purposes, it's not something that actually exists. We really shouldn't be encouraging the idea it's a thing at all, because ultimately the whole concept is harmful to dogs. If people weren't such dicks about it (looking at you, Kennel Clubs) then it might be OK but the idea of 'breed' combined with humans love of collecting stuff and putting things in discrete boxes is why we have abominations like pugs.
Sorry, it's just it makes me really cross, the suffering which has been wrought in the name of breeding the 'ideal' of each breed. Breeds suck. Dogs are awesome.
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Comment on House passes bill that could ban TikTok in the US, sending it to the Senate in ~tech
mat I think towing and toeing a line have very different implications regarding things like subservience and conformity of the tower/toer but if you are happy to choose one over the other that's up to...I think towing and toeing a line have very different implications regarding things like subservience and conformity of the tower/toer but if you are happy to choose one over the other that's up to you. I'm not sure you're communicating quite the same thing by doing so though.
For whatever it's worth, institutional sorts definitely still line up in neat rows. I saw some firefighters doing it only this morning, and they're not even soldiers.
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Comment on House passes bill that could ban TikTok in the US, sending it to the Senate in ~tech
mat Just a heads up that one toes the line. With your feet.Just a heads up that one toes the line. With your feet.
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Comment on Tildes Video Thread in ~misc
mat Lithuanian Potato Cake I think it's always a good sign with traditional foods when you find a recipe shot on a phone in someone's kitchen, with a grandmother doing the cooking. I have a lot of...Lithuanian Potato Cake I think it's always a good sign with traditional foods when you find a recipe shot on a phone in someone's kitchen, with a grandmother doing the cooking. I have a lot of time for the slick YouTube cooks like Adam Ragusea and Sorted and Babish and so on, but for traditional foods you can't beat an old lady. Anyway this is what I'm having for tea this evening.
Top Gun: Maverick editor, Eddie Hamilton ACE takes you on a tour of his AVID MEDIA COMPOSER timeline - not a thing I've ever seen before. Just interesting to see under the hood a little. My own editing experience is nothing on this!
What a World Champion Whistler Sounds Like - exactly as the title.
Going to a picnic when you're an adult - Aussie sketch comedy group Aunty Donna are very hit and miss but this is pretty much a hit for me.
CDK Somebody that I used to know by Goyte - haven't heard this track for many years, but CDK have done some amazing choreography for it. Worth four and a bit minutes of your time. Excellent wardrobe work too.
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Comment on Are Swedish dishcloths more environment-friendly than paper towels? We investigate. in ~enviro
mat That's a good idea, although I'm still using the towel I had when I was 17 (not to mention one over a decade older, although that's not daily use) so I'm not sure if I'll have any spare material...That's a good idea, although I'm still using the towel I had when I was 17 (not to mention one over a decade older, although that's not daily use) so I'm not sure if I'll have any spare material any time soon!
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Comment on Travelling to Japan for eleven days in May. Stay in Kyoto or Osaka other than Tokyo? in ~travel
mat I haven't been to Osaka to compare but Kyoto is incredible, in a very different way to the vastness of Tokyo. Obviously go up the tower, but that's a given in any city with a tower, I always...I haven't been to Osaka to compare but Kyoto is incredible, in a very different way to the vastness of Tokyo. Obviously go up the tower, but that's a given in any city with a tower, I always think. If you go to one place in Kyoto make it Ryoan-ji temple, which was the highlight of my entire trip to Japan. Get there early, as the doors open - it's well worth dragging yourself out of bed for. Probably the most tranquil place I've ever been. Nishiki market is also worth a visit, but I always go to markets (Tsukiji in Toyko good too, but more touristy) because I love a market. There are some lovely gardens and temples around Kyoto, if that's your jam. I have never been much into gardens but Japan does them very, very well and I enjoyed them a great deal.
If you want a very special meal in Kyoto, Kichisen is worth the money - although it is a LOT of money. I'm not sure about how easy it is to book from outside Japan (we had an agency make all our restaurant bookings in advance, some places are a bit funny about taking bookings)
If you can get a table at Salmon and Trout in Tokyo, that's also worth the trip. Sit at the bar.
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Comment on Are Swedish dishcloths more environment-friendly than paper towels? We investigate. in ~enviro
mat I use old t-shirts in my workshop and they're fine when used in one piece but when you cut them into smaller sizes they shed fibres almost constantly and fall apart fairly quickly. Also old...I use old t-shirts in my workshop and they're fine when used in one piece but when you cut them into smaller sizes they shed fibres almost constantly and fall apart fairly quickly. Also old clothing is nowhere near as absorbent as the towelling hand-cloths we use in the house (which started out being baby cloths but now get used for almost everything). Rags just don't work that well for general household use imo. They're great for wiping on finishing oil onto a piece of woodwork though.
We have a municipal compost collection but if we put paper towels in there, that load would be rejected. They take only plant matter. The reason is simply that there aren't sufficient resources at the council to sort each load of compost manually, which is what it would need - at a glance it's hard to tell a paper towel from a plastic bag and plastic in compost isn't good news. So sadly they just dump anything which isn't obviously plant matter. Hopefully this situation will change at some point.
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Comment on An opinion on current technological trends in ~tech
mat Um. That's a very unexpected context to put things in. If a billion people disappeared overnight I think we'd have far more issues than who is going to update the world's printer drivers. I'm not...Um. That's a very unexpected context to put things in. If a billion people disappeared overnight I think we'd have far more issues than who is going to update the world's printer drivers. I'm not entirely sure I understand how that's relevant.
it's probably for the best that we teach computer literacy the same way we teach general reading and math.
On that basis all vocational skills should be taught. Which is obviously ridiculous because people would spend their whole lives in school - there's too many things to learn. The whole point of school is teaching the basics so people can specialise later.
Every job/hobby needs maths and english to some degree, but only people who want to maintain computers for a living needs to know how computers work. Heck - I've worked with programmers who have no idea what a filesystem is, and they were perfectly good at their jobs.
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Comment on An opinion on current technological trends in ~tech
mat Even my late-70s parents know to turn it off and on again. That's been a meme for decades now. They aren't calling the doctor for a headache. Knowing to reboot is a decent amount of knowledge to...somebody calls a doctor if they've got a headache.
Even my late-70s parents know to turn it off and on again. That's been a meme for decades now. They aren't calling the doctor for a headache. Knowing to reboot is a decent amount of knowledge to have because it fixes a lot of stuff. Especially with modern systems which are just so much more stable than in the bad old days. I don't get calls from my friends and relatives any more asking to fix the computer, because the computer has been fixed already.
Computers became ubiquitous by being able to fix themselves (also by getting cheaper and more useful, but still) which meant they required less knowledge to use.
Absence of knowledge allows grifters to thrive. If most people understood that an NFT was just a reciept for a URL, I doubt the hype would have been able to liftoff the way it did.
See, I don't think that's computer literacy. I don't need to have ever even used a computer to understand NFTs/crypto/etc are scams if I have good skills at interpreting information. The work my wife does with scam-prevention groups don't have any focus on computing devices, it's entirely about understanding information.
Information literacy is incredibly important. Computer literacy, meh, not so much.
To go back to the car thing, computer literacy lets you fix a broken wiper motor; information literacy lets you avoid crashing into other drivers. I'd much rather the majority of drivers put their available skill points into the latter than the former!
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Comment on An opinion on current technological trends in ~tech
mat That's not a reasonable thing to expect of people, I think. It doesn't really make me a better driver to know how the car works [1]. It doesn't make me a better writer to know how my word...That's not a reasonable thing to expect of people, I think.
It doesn't really make me a better driver to know how the car works [1]. It doesn't make me a better writer to know how my word processor works. My headache doesn't go away faster because I know ibuprofen inhibits my cyclooxygenase enzymes.
Using a tool effectively is not the same thing as understanding how it works. It can be, but it isn't necessarily true. I don't think it's very reasonable to expect everyone to have the time/energy/interest to delve into figuring that stuff out when they mostly don't actually need to.
If, as you say, you don't expect car users to fix their own cars - which is a perfectly reasonable expectation - why would you expect the same from computer users?
[1] This is where the analogy breaks down somewhat because you can make a case when it comes to cars that it gives me a little more control over the vehicle if I have once stripped down a clutch or if I have some handle on the ionic mobility of lithium - but in a modern car it matters far, far less than it used to (same same for computers).
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Comment on WhatsApp announces messaging interoperability in response to Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA) in ~tech
mat It's been a lot of years since I worked in the tech industry but even back then there was an old tale, whispered behind server racks, that if you stood in front of a mirror and said "machine...It's been a lot of years since I worked in the tech industry but even back then there was an old tale, whispered behind server racks, that if you stood in front of a mirror and said "machine learning" three times then Mark Zuckerberg would appear behind you and offer you a job.
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Comment on WhatsApp announces messaging interoperability in response to Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA) in ~tech
mat Zuck got distracted by VR. Seriously. A few years ago he was all "messaging is the next big thing, we're going to own the space" and was planning to unify Messenger/IG messages/Whatsapp/Workplace...Zuck got distracted by VR. Seriously. A few years ago he was all "messaging is the next big thing, we're going to own the space" and was planning to unify Messenger/IG messages/Whatsapp/Workplace and so on, and add external interoperability - make Meta the messaging Google, essentially. It was a solid plan, I thought - he's got a few billion users over all those platforms, bringing them together would be a good move. Then someone showed him an Oculus headset and he pissed away at least fifty actual billion dollars and countless R&D person-hours on VR instead.
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Comment on The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro in ~tech
mat I suspect there is a reason there aren't any distros doing what you want. It's a buggerload of effort on the part of developers and package maintainers for something a lot of people just... don't...I suspect there is a reason there aren't any distros doing what you want. It's a buggerload of effort on the part of developers and package maintainers for something a lot of people just... don't care that much about. Most people simply don't need bleeding edge versions of everything and if you do, there's always compiling your own.
I agree about AppImage and so on, fwiw. Handy sometimes but I dislike using them on the regular.
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Comment on One in four school-starters in England and Wales not toilet-trained, say teachers in ~life
mat How are touchscreens not part of the real world? Adults use them all the time. They're definitely real! :) Seriously though, learning to use digital devices and interact with digital environments...How are touchscreens not part of the real world? Adults use them all the time. They're definitely real! :)
Seriously though, learning to use digital devices and interact with digital environments is important. Kids use tablets at school for all sorts of things - for example, last week in forest school, Kid was in the garden pointing the camera at various leaves to identify them. When we do fun stuff they often ask me to put photos on the class sharing portal so they can show their friends on the big screen at carpet time (this happened at nursery too), but having experience of basic device use is part of being school-ready. Digital devices are a life skill, albeit not one quite so basic as using the toilet.
There’s also some danger in the nature of smart devices in how they can act as endless dopamine drips.
That's where the "parenting" thing comes in. Enforced moderation. In the same way I don't let my kid sit and eat an entire packet of biscuits, I don't let them sit and play on the tablet from dawn till dusk. But one biscuit and 15 minutes of TuxRacer (current obsession is GO FAST) after school is perfectly OK. We have fun together doing it. I'm sure when they're older they won't want me there but they're not going to want me reading aloud to them either, so same same.
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Comment on The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro in ~tech
mat I'm not sure how you could meaningfully draw a line between "system" and "user" stuff with the way Linux works. What do you when the latest version of "user-app" Firefox needs a feature which is...I'm not sure how you could meaningfully draw a line between "system" and "user" stuff with the way Linux works. What do you when the latest version of "user-app" Firefox needs a feature which is only in the most recent version of Mutter, and that feature depends on a GTK hook which is currently only in the nightly builds and is seriously unstable? You can't update Firefox without updating it's dependencies and then you're introducing instabilities over other areas of the system. That's why package maintenance is hard, and why unstable/testing/stable tracks exist at all!
AppImage and FlatPak and Snap and so on attempt to bypass this by bundling everything into one big package but I'm not aware of a means of keeping them up to date automatically, although caveat to that is that I haven't looked into it because I don't need bleeding edge versions of everything.
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Comment on The more I use Linux, the more I hate every distro in ~tech
mat Run Debian, but track testing not stable. It's perfectly stable, it's just not Debian stable, which I've always considered "server stable" rather than a desktop. In testing you're usually only a...Run Debian, but track testing not stable. It's perfectly stable, it's just not Debian stable, which I've always considered "server stable" rather than a desktop. In testing you're usually only a few weeks behind bleeding edge and frankly that's plenty. Stuff breaks much more in unstable. Also if you really need bleeding edge you can apt-pin stuff from other repos. Although that can get a bit wobbly.
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Comment on One in four school-starters in England and Wales not toilet-trained, say teachers in ~life
mat I'm assuming "Pre-K" is pre-school childcare, in which case kids age 0-4 in the UK did have access to that. Nurseries and preschools opened up after a few months and then didn't close again -...I'm assuming "Pre-K" is pre-school childcare, in which case kids age 0-4 in the UK did have access to that. Nurseries and preschools opened up after a few months and then didn't close again - except occasionally on a per-setting basis if the staff had an outbreak. Schools (age 4-5 and up) took a bit longer to reopen.
My kid's nursery was emailing us suggested activities from pretty much day one, and there was loads of other stuff on offer via the library service, BBC and so on. Although I suspect the parents seeking out that kind of thing may not be the parents who weren't toilet training their own kids.
Turns out that the insurance companies are maybe not interpreting their data correctly (or possibly not interpreting it in the way we might assume - ultimately it doesn't matter to them as long as they make money)
I suspect what the "real world data" is telling us has much more to do with what sort of person tends to have which kind of dog than what a dog is likely to do. For example, no wannabe hard-man is buying a golden retriever to swagger down the street with, they're getting a bull terrier. So bull terriers show up more in biting incidents because of the kind of person who has them, not because of anything inherent in the dog itself. Anecdotally, every bull terrier I've ever met has been soppy af.