Man, I hate people like you, because I am constantly reminded of how I really need to get round to checking out Searx, but I never get round to it.

(I am joking, because the only person who is putting pressure on me about this is me, and that’s because finding time to do this is something I want to do. Thank you for reminding me, even if I will keep procrastinating)

Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don’t know of any communities, perhaps because I’m a scientist who loves maths rather than a mathematician.

However, I will use this opportunity to share some fun stuff from people I like.

https://youtu.be/H0Ek86IH-3Y by Oliver Lugg on Youtube is great. His channel is very eclectic though, and there isn’t much pure maths. I love his shitposting tone though, and he has a discord community that were pretty mathsy when I was in it.

A blog-type site that I enjoy is Tai-Danae Bradley’s https://www.math3ma.com/about, largely because I’ve discovered many other cool researchers through her site.

I also really enjoy Eugenia Cheng’s books, especially as someone who is interested in understanding how to write good scientific communication that is accessible without “dumbing things down”. I recently finished “The Joy of Abstraction”.

Apologies that this isn’t what you actually were looking for. I share your distaste at Reddit: I have used Reddit occasionally for those niche communities that aren’t available elsewhere (yet!), but the atmosphere is increasingly toxic. I fear that smaller communities that flee are congealing in harder to discover places, like Discord.

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As a gamer, I was anxious about switching to Linux as my daily driver, but I needed to fully immerse myself to improve at Linux, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how few gaming related problems I’ve had.

I have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I’ve just imported get a tag of “new”, which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don’t do it at time of import).

Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I’m wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I’d have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might’ve known which was which, but if there’s a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I’m quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I’ve been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I’m still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it’s easy to forget why I’m reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I’ve read also.

Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn’t make it one of my books, ‘taking it home’ and putting it away on my ‘bookshelf’ makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn’t really work and that pruning little and often helps more.

I was learning python as a wee scientist in training, and my variables were beyond dreadful. I tried naming a list “list” and the interpreter told me I couldn’t, so I opted for “listy”. When I needed to name a new list but listy was taken, I’d often resort to “listyy”.

Scientists who work with computers without having much (if any) targeted training on how to code can write the most horrendous programs.

That’s a really cool idea actually. I knew a guy who used to install viruses for fun on a separate machine that wasn’t networked. I bet a more creative person than I could probably figure out a fun learning activity for kids using a “disposable” system

Comment that I’m adding on a couple of friends’. One lives in Norway, one lived in India. They told me that both of these places have an issue with accessing media and other digital goods legitimately, often finding themselves willing but unable to pay for something (I was surprised to hear this about Norway — my friend speculates that Norway is small enough that it might simply be forgotten about when big media companies negotiate rights). They both said that VPNs and piracy are way more normalised in their home countries, because it was either that, or miss out on loads of stuff.

Feel it’s useful and important to highlight that the degree to which piracy is normalised depends on where you are.

Ah, you must have access to the same internet library that my Dad used whenever I’d give him my iPod and a list of music, and he’d return it to me full of music. I don’t remember when I realised that he was pirating stuff, probably about the time that I started pirating stuff.

I’m not sure. I don’t plan on having kids, so this is a purely theoretical question that I won’t have to answer in practice, but I think I probably would, at least to some degree.

I had a pretty iconically millennial childhood when it comes to tech; I remember my mum being on the phone to the internet people and asked “he’s offering me an unlimited packaged for [money] extra. Is that good, do we need that?”, to which my brother and and I vigorously nodded. We were young enough we didn’t know shit, but unlimited sounded good and we weren’t paying the bills. My mum probably realised we didn’t know what unlimited Vs metered internet meant in practice, and opted for unlimited as the safe option, because if she felt the need to ask her children for advice, she wouldn’t be great at managing a metred connection. That’s the context in which I grew up and is why I’m as techy as I am today.

I learned the hard way, and whilst I don’t think that’s necessarily the best way to learn, I don’t know how one might teach people how to recognise which “download” button to press, and when a dodgy looking site is actually dodgy. It’s like internet street smarts, but what that means has changed since I was a kid, and I don’t necessarily know how I’d teach that beyond the basics, like installing adblockers and other common sense things.

My friend died before he was able to get a vaccine dose. He was young and fit and healthy, enough so that his death was covered in a local newspaper. He’d have probably have gotten his first vaccine dose if we’d caught COVID a couple weeks later, and that might have been enough to save him. I’ll never know, and maybe he’d have still died, but I’ll always resent people who have/had the choice to be vaccinated but choose not to.

I reluctantly agree with you. Though I think the reluctance is just because there’s something in me that’s viscerally offended by the concept of time itself (probably the ADHD)

I think that what ryathal was getting at is that there’s a distinction between the kind of shouting that happens in the arguments one expects in a regular relationship, vs the kind of shouting where its one person shouting at the other for a long time. I don’t even know if I’d count that latter one as “an argument”.

The distinction can get muddy and it’s not always clear where the line is, but some people grow up without any sense of that line existing at all. Because of my childhood, for example, in my first relationship, I was terrified of any conflict, because I had internalised that “argument” meant “screaming obscenities at each other”. I had to learn how to have arguments, a key part of which was learning how to disagree on an emotionally fraught subject without having to shout, plus developing a sense of when some shouting may be justified).

I agree with your sentiment that people who think of love as being a perfect, clear sailing thing are setting unreasonable expectations, but I don’t think I’m on board with the idea of a person being “perfect for you”, or that love means accepting them as they are. I think there’s a bit of that, sure, but I also think that there’s a lot of learning to grow together, and actively putting work into the love that exists between two people.

Never used Trakt, but I’m a big fan of ListenBrainz. It’s a large part of why I felt able to cancel my Spotify subscription

That’s a really interesting question, I don’t know what that might look like.

As a biochemist, my brain naturally goes to the different hierarchical levels of increasing complexity in life. Like how eukaryotic amoebas are freed from some of the challenges that constrain bacteria (mitochondria really are awesome), and how similarly, the complexity ceiling is much higher for multicellular life than unicellular life.

I just think a systems view of stuff is neat, and it’s cool to see how modularisation, coupling and specialisation work together

Thank you for making this make more sense.

Thanks for linking to the tracker site, I’ve been meaning to find more ways to audit the amount of trackers in my apps for a while now.

Thanks for asking the question! I’ve never needed to know it, and I’ve done enough android tinkering that I’m fairly sure I could find it quite easily if needed, but I enjoy my social media being peppered with bits of learning wherever possible. I’m a big fan of ambient curiosity

For anyone curious but not reading the article, a large part of the “something ingenious” seems to be RICO charges.

"Ms. Willis ties them all together by levying one charge against Mr. Trump and each of the 18 other defendants under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, or RICO, accusing Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators of functioning as a criminal gang.

American law has long recognized through the crime of conspiracy that combinations of criminals are more dangerous than lone wolves. RICO is conspiracy on steroids, providing for stiffer penalties and other advantages like bringing multiple loosely connected conspiracies under one umbrella.

Georgia has one of the most capacious RICO statutes in the country. "

It does sound exciting, maybe this will have been worth the wait. I’m not even American, but I don’t think it’s overstating things to say that the fate of the world is (at present) pretty tied into the fate of American democracy. Even the indirect ripple effects from something like this are huge

(Edit: quote formatting)

I’m glad there is at least one serious answer on this thread.