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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • My own classic was fiddling with the nvidia PRIME config to try and get rid of some very mildly irritating screen tearing. No graphics output at all. Now this is fixable of course, but it’s a pig.

    And I’d decided to do this 2 hours before an incredibly important progress review meeting for my PhD.

    Got it back with about 10 mins to spare and decided just to leave the driver config alone after that.

    Bonus round

    Also a friend managed to bork his ubuntu 16 laptop by trying to switch from unity to gnome and ending up with sort of neither. That was reinstall territory right there.


  • I mean, just give them money?

    Put it this way: getting a job is just one of many challenges facing homeless people.

    For example, if you get a job but are already living absolutely hand-to-mouth, can you actually afford to have that first month of work with no money coming in on a day by day basis. If you cannot afford to even eat how will you make it to that first paycheck?

    Even if you do, where will your job put that money? Many, many homeless people do not have a bank account, and what do you need to open a bank account? A home address and ID!

    Were you fortunate enough to become homeless with a copy of your birth certificate or other form of ID? If not oh that’s not a problem sir, it’ll cost you £35, and then it’ll arrive by recorded delivery to your home address. Where was that again?

    Pretty much no person is homeless by choice. Most are there by a combination of bad luck, violence, a lack of a social security net, mental illness, and many many other factors. Very few people would choose a life of danger and unprovoked violence. You wouldn’t want to be without a home, they don’t want to be without a home for the exact same reasons.

    So in conclusion, it is the very basics of human decency to feel bad for them. I would urge you to go further and try to help them, whether that be by direct contribution, by volunteering, by donating to a housing charity, or something else.


  • As mentioned by foggy, jazz harmony (which I frankly suck at) or counterpoint are both the things which will give a formal understanding of this sort of thing.

    That said I picked up a lot of it more from playing regularly with people who are much better than me at music. In the end if you immerse yourself in music that uses these ideas more regularly you start encountering strange chord notations and seeing patterns in why they are as they are. Finally it isn’t really a prescriptive thing, there will always be many ways to write the same chord, and it will usually be much of a muchness what is written vs what you actually play.

    In the case above I’d probably always write it as a D because for someone trying to learn it quickly they’ll know what a D is more instinctively than a weird augmented minor.



  • That reads to me as a F#m with an augmented 5th. The notes of a simple tonic triad of D would be D F# A. Meanwhile an F#m would be F# A C#. If you augment that C# to a D and take the second inversion of the chord then you again get D F# A.

    The actual reason you would write it like this would really depend on what you are doing musically in the piece more widely. If you were going F#m -> Bm through D as a passing chord, you could consider it as an F#m aug5, however this kinda would make more sense if the other parts of the piece implied that chord to be an F# chord.

    In general don’t worry about it too much as often you don’t really mean the alternative representations that it suggests, but there is some fun music theory underlying this.




  • Not at all, but it does add context. I’m sure you agree the phrase “build a wall” has a significantly different implication to what it had in 2005.

    Well a dictionary is descriptive, and so describes how people use words. It’ll change with societal meaning as it always has.

    I am very much a scientist here specifically I am a biologist but we weren’t doing science in this meme were we? More specifically we weren’t asking what gender the people in the image had.

    Nonetheless maybe it’s easier to think of gender like a name. You are given one at birth and you don’t get to choose it. For the majority of people they’re okay with their name. Others feel that their name doesn’t fit them and so change it. If you don’t know someone’s name then I assume you don’t just call them “Bob”, you probably ask them what their name is. Same goes with pronouns, you can just ask. Or if they seem like if you ask they’ll punch your face in, maybe just assume, that is okay in context.

    In the end we’re not very different in age, I do understand that the world changes and adds an extra load to the stresses you already face. That said it really is just a case of trying not to assume too much and bring chill if someone says “hey actually I’d prefer they rather than she”. You are really unlikely to get cancelled by anyone that matters if you just say “oh of course, I’ll remember that”.

    I say that as someone who has definitely put my foot in it many times before when not understanding a social nuance and making a faux pas.


  • Sorry, bit of a long one here, but bear with me ♥️

    Specifically it is more often in the phrase “biological females”.

    It’s a very unnatural way to refer to a person, and as such is usually a very specifically chosen wording. In a very literal sense everyone who can be described as female can also be described as biological, however here the term has an implied delineation in it. A “biological” and a “non-biological” or “artificial” female. This is where the anti-transness comes in; the appeal to nature of “artificial” women being inferior to the “biological” women.

    Now there’s an extra little bit of subtlety here in that it often is contextual. Usually you would not refer to a person as a female as a noun, but rather as female as an adjective. There is a significant subset of people thus who use “female” as a noun either as a substitute for “biological female” or sometimes just as a chauvinistic way of dehumanising women. Either way it’s rarely a good look.

    The anti-trans movement, and the right wing in general has a distinct trend in not quite saying what they mean too. So in the same way that the right wing will demonise “groomers”, “scroungers”, and “the woke left” (i.e. LGBTQ+ people, the homeless, anyone that will call them out), the TERFs will demonise the implied “non-biological” females.

    It is a parlour trick, an extremely thin veneer of plausible deniability that means they can go “nooooo you’re overreacting, I never SAID that I hate trans people, I just don’t like it when people deny that biology exists”. It’s a way of shutting down arguments so the right wing can say whatever they want with impunity.

    Tldr: some nasty folk use “females” as a shorthand for “biological human females” which is a very terfy phrase in the same way as “blood and soil” is very distinctly fascistic.

    In this particular case however I don’t think that the reddit OP was being a terf and the mods were definitely just flat out wrong. It probably warranted a post removal and a warning but not a ban.