I am a person online.

  • 18 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • There’s been scientific and philosophical debates for a long time about which cognitive traits are specific to humans and which are shared across species, and which trait is specific to each group. This is just another element to add to this debate.

    If you’re wondering how this can be applied, it’s not the researcher’s job to know. A lot of the time, a discovery’s practical applications are only found decades after the discovery itself. Some are never used, but we can’t know in advance which knowledge will be useful.

    So ideally, those who work in fundamental research needn’t consern themselves with the potential use of their work, they seek knowledge for itself. If there’s useful stuff in there, applied scientists and engineers will pick it up later. Ideally, but unfortunately, researchers may need to convince a patron that their research will be useful if they need private fundings, which can be a problem. Sometimes, they’ll have to put a little bullshit in their pitch for companies. But since this probably wasn’t a very expensive study, maybe public grants were enough. Or maybe they convinced some company that they could use it to promote cat antidepressants.




















  • I would not recommend Arch for beginners. I like it, but it’s best for someone a bit familiar with Linux already. Yeah, the install is pretty simple now that Archinstall is a thing, but it’s not the method recommended in the Arch Wiki and if there’s something wrong with your install and you complain on the Arch Forum they might not be super helpful.

    More generally, the mood on the Arch forum and Arch communities at large isn’t super beginner friendly, and thay’s understandable: In a distro meant to be user friendly and aimed at general user, if the user does what seems natural to them and the system break, the community will feel a responsibility towards them, because the system wasn’t stable and user-friendly enough. In a distro primarily aimed at power users and devs, if the user does what seems natural to them and the system breaks, then the user is a fool and should’ve read the wiki.

    Because it is a very fast rolling release, some updates can break stuff. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen at a bad time and be a big problem for someone who doesn’t know how to deal with it.

    Debian is more stable, and easier if you go with a D.E, but you still have to make several choices during the install, which might be a bit complicated for a beginner who doesn’t know what any of these options mean… Tho of course, it’s possible to go with all the defaults and it’ll be alright.

    But my prime recommendation would be Linux Mint.