Something that I’m super chuffed with is that a few years back, one of my most cheapskate friends asked me for advice on buying a new laptop. When I presented their options to them, they were reluctant to cheap out and get a mediocre laptop that wouldn’t last them very long, but they also balked at the price of even the midrange laptops (they weren’t keen on spending more than £250 on a laptop, which wasn’t enough to get anything that they’d consider to be decent and worth the effort/cost).

As a long shot offer, I told them that I could always try installing Linux on their laptop if they wanted to wring another couple of years out of their existing laptop. I was a tad surprised when they opted for this, and even more surprised at how well they took to it; I jokingly call them one of my “normie” friends, because they’re one of the people whose perspective I ask for when I’m trying to calibrate for what non-techie people know/think. I only had limited experience with Linux myself at that point, having only played around with things on live USBs before. I had heard that Linux could give new life to slow computers, but I was surprised at just how effectively it did this.

(A small amusing aspect to this anecdote is that when I was installing it, I said that one of the side benefits of running Linux is that it could boost nerd cred amongst folk like me. They laughed and said that they didn’t expect that this would be a thing that would ever end up being relevant. Later that year, they got a girlfriend who saw that my friend was running Linux, and expressed approval, which is quite funny to me)

That’s sad. Regardless of whether it’s one of the reasons for Microsoft’s nosedive, it does make me feel some unexpected sympathy for Satya Nadella. I also feel pity, because most high up CEOs do not seem happy with their lives — Many of them spend an absurd amount of time at work, even if they never seem to actually do much work, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be to weather grief under such conditions. No amount of money can buy you more time with a lost loved one.

It really seems like a hollow existence.

Being anti-capitalist is entirely fair, but I think being opposed to all businesses is a less justifiable position to hold.

Yeah, this really was an excellent answer. I’m impressed by how he used this example to illustrate the wider strategy without it feeling like a weird kind of “we will cut programs like this and then everything will be fine”. It gives the sense that this is being used as an example because it’s simple enough to be at the top of a large pile of potential savings, which will take time and work to dig through.

To put it a different way, his answer abstracts away the right stuff. He doesn’t pretend that everything will be as simple and easy as cutting this one program was.

Often the promised cost savings never materialise, because when the chatbot fucks up, it’s humans who need to clean up the mess.

I don’t understand what your issue is here. If it was a political post, then I’d agree that we should be cautious of a new account, but this is super innocuous. What reason is there to be suspicious of a new user in this context?

The joke is that a single egg is obviously not a meal, and as such, the person in the comic was reasonable to say “needs something more”. However, a single egg with a lone slice of cheese on top doesn’t much improve the situation.

The humour is in the anticlimax of the only addition being the slice of cheese, as well as the ambiguity of not knowing whether the person added the cheese because that’s all they had available, or because they genuinely felt that the cheese was the “more” that they had been hoping for. If it’s the latter case, then that recontextualises our original assessment of this person as being reasonable.

When I was sad and didn’t have much in the fridge, I cut a few slices of red Leicester and melted them in the microwave until it was just a gooey pile of cheese. Before eating it, I noticed the chives growing in a pot on my windowsill, and sprinkled a few chopped chives on top. I liked the absurdity of a garnishing such a basic “meal”.

Same energy as the comic

Glad you liked it. I always appreciate an opportunity to practice my science communication skills (I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO FIND THIS STUFF AS DEEPLY FASCINATING AS I DO. I AM EXTREMELY NORMAL.)

Yup. A friend of mine almost died last year from bladder complications that ultimately stem from being assaulted almost 20 years ago.

To an external observer, rape may not seem likely to leave lasting physical trauma, but that’s because the injuries aren’t as likely to be visible, or things that peopl feel comfortable speaking about openly (plus society has a bad track record on how it treats survivors of SA)

My point is that the whole psychological Vs physical trauma question is a false dichotomy when we’re talking about sexual assault. Rape can and often does leave a person with lifelong physical trauma

So until around 1902, it was near unanimously agreed that light was a wave, because it does all the stuff that waves do, like diffracting — we wouldn’t have rainbows, or the cool Pink Floyd album cover with a prism splitting light into a rainbow otherwise.

What changed in 1902 is that an experiment (called the photoelectric effect, if you’re curious) produced results that would have only been possible if light was a particle. The photoelectric effect had been observed a bunch of times through the 1800s, but in 1902, a variant of the experiment produced results that would be impossible to explain if light were a wave. So then people start asking “okay, maybe we were wrong, maybe light is actually a particle”. Except that didn’t square with the centuries of evidence showing that light was a wave.

It turns out that light is both a particle and as wave. Or maybe neither. Because the key concept here is that particles and waves don’t exist. They’re just conceptual categories that we made to put boxes around phenomena to make them more understandable, much the same way that binary gender is a simplifying framework that works until it doesn’t.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the underlying phenomena, like light being diffracted, or the photoelectric effect, aren’t real. The problem was in our framework of how we labelled them. Once physicists got their head around the possibility that light could be both a particle and a wave, they realised that there were a bunch of other situations where we could model light as a particle and discover interesting stuff. Most people don’t need to understand this, because the simplified model of everything being either a particle or a wave works well enough that even if it’s not correct, it’s still useful — these categories developed for a reason, after all. By analogy, it’s like if I said “women have breasts”. It’s true in most instances, so it can still be a useful observation, even if it’s not strictly accurate.

However, it gets even more interesting. At first, scientists thought that light must just be a special kind of phenomenon, able to exhibit both particle and wave characteristics. But then, in the double slit experiment, they found that under certain circumstances, electrons (which were near unanimously considered to be particles) could diffract — i.e. act like waves. This was the result that really drove home the notion that when we’re studying stuff that are super small and specific, our existing rules and categories sort of fall apart. It’s even been suggested that other things that we squarely consider to be particles could show wave nature too, but the larger you get in scale, the harder it is to observe quantum phenomena (which basically just means that our rules work well when they’re applied to the circumstances we developed those rules under. “Quantum phenomena” mostly just means “shit that happens when we’re so zoomed in that our existing frameworks stop working”)

In a sense, we could say that light behaving as a particle is analogous to a non binary man, and electrons behaving as a wave is analogous to a non binary woman. Maybe it would be more sensible to dispense with these categories entirely, but there are many phenomena and many people who find the terms useful.

“(assuming no HIV etc)”

That’s not a safe assumption though, and the dread of waiting to find out whether you’ve been infected with something awful is a part of why rape is so traumatising. It can take weeks for tests to come back.

You’re right that car accidents happen pretty frequently, and carry a high risk of lasting harm to those involved. This is why people have to pass a test in order to be allowed to drive, are legally required to have insurance, why speed limits and other road safety features exist, and why one of the roles of the police is to monitor and respond to dangerous drivers. Despite all these measures, road traffic accidents happen all the time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do these things to try to reduce the likelihood and severity of car accidents. None of these precautions are airtight, but they do reduce the risk that road users face. We don’t ignore the risks of car accidents, we just do what we can to mitigate those risks and get on with our lives as best we can.

That’s how things are for the majority of women. Most of us are far from petrified of unknown men, we have just learned that there are things we can do to reduce the risk of us being harassed or assaulted — many of which don’t take much additional effort and are entirely reasonable precautions to take. Having to do these things is just a background annoyance for most women, because it sure would be nice if we didn’t have to spend time or energy of these things, but most of us have enough lived experience with having to interact with predatory men that it would be irrational not to take precautions.

There certainly are some women who do feel a much higher level of fear, but this is often associated with specific trauma, and is no different to how someone who had been in a bad car accident may feel uneasy driving at first. Risk exists everywhere, and learning what precautions you can easily take to reduce risk, and incorporating them into our lives isn’t us being controlled by fear, but quite the opposite. It can become harmful if it dominates too much of our thinking, but dynamically responding to mitigate risks is something that we all do, every day, to keep ourselves safe and well.

A fun probability fact I like is around the question “what is the likelihood of consuming any given water molecule twice?”, so like, consuming that water molecule, then excreting it somehow (sweating, urine etc.), and then consuming that same molecule again. The probability of that happening for a given molecule is so ridiculously small that it’s basically zero.

However, the probability of that having happened at least once in an adult’s life is effectively 1, — i.e. it’s almost certainly happened. This is because one cup of water contains around 144,531,378,240,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water, so we get a lot of chances to consume a water molecule twice.

The chances of being kidnapped or otherwise assaulted or harassed is quite low for any given interaction, but despite this, it’s something that a concerningly high proportion of women have experienced. I think for most women, it’s not a case of literally being terrified, but more than we take a wide variety of steps to reduce our risk, given that it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate oneself from every man who could possibly assault them. It’s no different to how people of all genders will often do things like taking a slighter longer, well lit route, or refraining from listening to music through headphones when walking through a city at night.

If I had a husband or partner who was available to go pick up something on my behalf, then that’s a straightforward and trivially easy thing I can do to reduce the amount of unnecessary risk I’d be exposing myself to. If that wasn’t something that was available, it wouldn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t pick up the item myself, but I would be a bit more cautious.

The culture of fear you describe does feed into how individual women perceive and manage risk associated with unknown men, but it’s also important to realise that that culture of fear exists in large part because of the direct lived experience of women who have learned that these kinds of precautions are necessary. For my part, whilst I’ve never been assaulted when picking up items from online sales, I have had a few instances of men being extremely creepy in a way that made me regret not being more careful. I had to change my phone number once because an Uber driver kept sending me dick pics, and a friend once had to get a restraining order against a delivery driver who kept coming back to her home and lurking outside her window. It’s only a small minority of men who do these things, but because our daily lives expose us to so many people, then it ends up being a very rational choice to take precautions to protect ourselves.

Edit: my comment cast a wider net than just “risk of being kidnapped”, because that felt to me like a hyperbolic euphemism designed to avoid saying the much more likely forms of harm that women face from predatory men. However, I want to add that the number of traffic accidents I’ve been involved in is non-zero, and equal to the number of times that an unknown man has attempted to kidnap me.

That’s unironically a good way of thinking about it.

One of my proudest achievements in life is having used particle-wave duality to explain non-binary gender to a bunch of cis-het physics-bros, and also using non-binary gender to explain quantum physics to queer folk. I’m disproportionately pleased with having been able to use this explanation successfully both ways.

(I also think it says a lot about me that I have found myself in situations where it isn’t uncommon that I get an opportunity to attempt this. Explaining gender to passively bigoted cis-hets feels like it’s part of my ethical duty to the world, but menacing my friends with quantum physics monologues is just for fun)

That sounds super cool! Do you have any pics?

So many features like this have gotten so much worse over the years. Google assistant is the big stand out one for me. I first switched to Android in 2014ish, and I got heavily into tinkering and automating stuff. I could say “Okay Google, make a coffee”, or “pop a coffee on please”, and Google assistant would hear this, parse it and understand that this wasn’t a command it knew. This would lead to that input being passed over to Tasker, the app I used for automating stuff, and that would then do the behind the scenes magic of turning on the coffee brewer as I was on my way home (It was very funny, because I didn’t have a fancy smart coffee pot or anything — I just used a ball bearing on a track to hit the on button)

Nowadays, I say something simple like “Okay Google, make a note” and it will say “I’m sorry, I don’t understand that” more often than not. The speech recognition used to be so good, especially after training it on your voice for a while. Now it’s just shit.

It makes me disproportionately sad. Like, enshittification is everywhere, but this is something distinct, even if it is linked to enshittification. If they were gating better voice recognition behind paywalls, I’d be annoyed, but much less sad, because at least that functionality still exists. Modern software, especially that produced by the tech giants, has gotten so complex that I wonder whether even the most proficient engineers in Google understand their software nowadays.

I’m only fluent in English, but I know fragments of many different languages. I get jumbled sometimes, and it’s weird. When I’m in a lot of pain, I tend to speak or think in German, for example. This is unfortunate, given that I don’t actually know much German. I often slip into French when speaking or thinking about time — for this reason, the vast majority of my friends have learned that “Quelle here est-il?” means “what time is it?” due to how many times I’ve accidentally asked that question in French

I love how affectionate this comic is. I’m really feeling for the old laptop, but I’m feeling the appreciation and understanding from the human