sga

TL;DR - why do we need so many terms? can we all not use just a simplified pronoun system (as explained below, or if someone else comes up with something better), and can we stop adding a sexual preferences as a part of gender, as that is something too personal in my opinion?

I primarily want to understand how it relates to a person's identity.

Before starting, let me partially introduce myself. I am a male, and If I get my terms correctly, I am possibly Aero Ace. I am (possibly) coming of a privilige that my percieved gender identity is same as that of what I accept myself to be. Also, I have not read any literature or watched much content about this stuff. I am not asking anything about why would someone have a "different gender". I just want to understand how it relates to you as a being.

And before going ahead, I am not sure gender is the best word or not. If it is not, please correct me. And I am sorry in advance in case I say stupid or bizzare or straght wrong stuff. Please forgive me if possible.

Also I am quite ramble-y, so reading and understanding what I write may be hard, or non-sensical, so pardon me for that too.

My first question is, why do we have so many terms? I know the answer is somewhat obvious, that everyone has there own preferences, and it may not align with someone else, so to identify themselves, they would get a different label. (kinda like names, if everyone had same names, it would cause confusion) But I also want to ask, Is using a label not somewhat alienating?

Try to understand my perspective, I have almost never mentioned my gender to anyone. Possibly it is because my "attire" says it. Or maybe it is because I am not a very social person, or the fact that I have never had a "personal" conversation with some other person. My general conversational idea is how it goes with siblings - slightly informal, a lot of stupid slander, and jokey stuff, and the actual stuff. If someone comes to me, and mentions there gender, I kinda do not know how to process it. because as I understand, 1 part of gender ideentity is what "orientation" (sorry if it is a bad way to put it, but I want to mean how they dress, or how they want to adressed as) and another is sexual preferences. I understand that If I know there gender, I can atleast address them as they prefer (also I do not know how to do it in general. I am an old school guy, I use they/them/their for people older than me (as a form of honorification), with small children (it is somewhat amusing, and also children like it when they get respeect) and whenever I do not know what gender a person is, or how does that gender prefered to be addressed). But this gave me the thought, that why do we not use the same pronouns for everyone (for example they/them), or maybe 2 pairs, one for formal, one informal, or 1 more pair, for singular and plural. Why do pronouns have to depend on gender?

The second part is sexual prefernces. I do not know much about sex or sexual preferences. I am a young adult, and have not had to know about this for any person that I have met yet. I have never had the interest to know about this for someone, neither have I retained this information. I understand that if you are looking out for partner/s, then you would have to share this, so we would have to use some words for it. But why do we have to keep this as a part of gender. As in, why would I want to share this information with my governments (who do census), or for my visa applications. Should this not just be something personal?

I understand that one reason to have some words for it is inclusivity. If, for example, we want some group to better assimilate with society, and we want to do some "positive discrimination" (I do not know if this is appropriate wording or not, what I mean is for example, reservations, or some other kind of actions to integrate some people in society), then we would need some terms to make rules with. And that makes sense, but then again I feel that revealing your preferences is a bit too revealing. Am I overblowing this? I also understand that completely ditching the sexual part from gender might not be possible today. It would probably require a more accepting society. For example, in most places, gay marriage is still illegal. I do not know why laws have to have laws defining marriage (it may have something to do with subsidies going for marriages, or definitions of families/spouse being used by insurance companies or any other banking system, where your spouse also gets certain benefits/rights), or gay adoption is illegal, but can we not make something like - any reasonable person/s can adopt anyone (where reasonable part is just to maybe seculde criminals, or people with prior histories of child related offences, or if they are not financially stable - but all this is very separate discussion)

If a person tells me their gender, how should I react/respond to it? Is my current line of actions appropriate (just address them with their preferd pronouns, and if I do not know that, use they/them; completely ignore the sexual part of it)

Another thing that I want to ask is, why do some groups use different acronyms? I remeber hearing about this the first time, and the word used was LGBT. Then I heard LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA+, and today I heard LGBTQ2. I presume that since more people are getting aware, and they are trying to express themselves, they need some newer words, and hence the acronym would keep on evolving, if so, is it not a endless exercise? Am I being insensitive If I use one over other (for quite some time, I have been sticking with lgbtqia+, in hope that + means extensions, as in, others, so hopefully it is less excluding than others, but if that is not the case, please correct me.)

edit - moved my summary to the top as tl;dr

Most people either use google as their search engine, or one of the "privacy friendly ones" (ddg, qwant, brave, startpage, ...), or use self hosted or publicly available metasearch engines, like searxng, or whoogle, etc.

This websites lists out websites which have their own indexes, and which depend on big providers.

Why YSK?

It is good for your privacy to not use a big provider like google, which now prefers to serve you ai generated ssummaries, which are based on a few giant websites, and this is not good for a open web.

I am also a person who almost always uses "(insert query) reddit" to get better results, because I mostly do not want SEO spam, and reddit results used to be human generated content. Now even that is hit and miss. Also, reddit made a deal with google, so for newer results from reddit, you can only get them from google.

Then we have the "privacy friendly ones" which most of the time are wrappers for other bigger indexes, for example ddg famously uses bing, brave "suppliments" (read this suppliments as almost always) it's results from google, startpage is basically a google frontend, etc. Brave, qwant, and few others also claim to have their own indexes, but they are small and not rich as google and bing. Also, wwhen you think about it - what is their business model - how do they get money for the search apis - most either serve ads or have some form of tracking. Also, bing has "kinda" closed it's search api (not really clear about this), so many of these privacy friendly options will have to either switch to google, or only serve using their indexes.

Meta-search engines kinda seem like better options, as you can run searxng on your own machine, or use the public ones, but it still has problems. You are still bringing the big providers traffic, which makes their advertisement clients happier and prefer them over smaller search engines. If you use a public instance, then it is good for your privacy, but the public instance would now generate a lot traffic, and often get banned or rate limited, and hence you can not rely on them. If you use your personal instances (I did this for a long time), you will still be tracked as your IP is still visible. You avoid their annoying ui and popups but still are tracked.

So what should you use?

You can only decide this. I would prefer something which has a reasonable business model - if they do advertisement, that should ideally be non tracking. Ideally their client and server code should be foss (so you can verify their claims), or have paid plans or apis if you do not want ads.

For example, Kagi has only paid plans, but I do not prefer or use them, because they are expensive (5 dollars for 300 searches per month or something similar. I am from one of third world countries, and 5 dollars is a lot. plus 300 searches seem less to me) but that is subjective, and your privacy has a price, so this is not neccessarily a objectively bad thing. But their code is closed source, and they do not completely use their own indexes.

I have also used Mullvad's Leta search engine for about a month, and they are now effectively frontends for brave search or google (you can choose). Their business plan initially was that Leta was only available to their VPN clients, and VPN subscription would supplement the search cost. Now they have it available for free, so I do not really understand their business plan (maybe the number of clients they have is large enough, and number of leta users is small, that they can afford to run leta for loss, and maybe as possible advertisement for mullvad. Mullvad to me is a good privacy centric company. I am not their client, but they seem to be trust worthy. You can try them, but you would still support some big provider.

You can also try the independent search providers listed in the article. They are often small, serve bad (subjectively speaking; your taste regarding search engines is also heavily tuned to google like results because of years of exposure to it) results, but using them also supports open web (you would often find that these smaller providers do not have good indexes for big websites, and sometimes it is intentional, sometimes it is a byproduct of them being careful, or the websites banning/rate limiting then).

I have now started trying stract, and will try others too. You should also consider trying some independent search engines.

In my personal case - I have a offline setup where I have large sections of wikipedia and a few other websites (like programning language docs, or my favorite manga wiki, will be adding much of stack overflow soon) available offline, and I use my custon launcher to search through them (faster then searching them online). I bookmark a lot of sites (~ 2000) and do this to stop searching the same stuff over and over again. This has reduced at least 30-40% of all my searches. But I still need a search engine for anything I do not have currently, or stuff I do not/ can not get. I am trying stract, because it is open source, they seen to have some fine plans for business in future (non tracking, current search term related ads or subscription service ; currenlty they are running on previous funding from nlnet); search results are acceptable (not good, but servicable); and finally - it is written in RUST (I an a rust fan). I am not affiliated with the project, but just spreading a good word because I just found them, and could not find much online.

PS: I am not used to writing much, and not a good typist. Please forgive the brevity. Feel free to correct me, both on spellings and content

For me, fitgirl installer does not work with wow64 (where you do not have to install 32 bit libraries). I had earlier also tried with wine-wow64 package from chaotic aur repo, and it did not used to work back then, and now arch linux has made the default wine package wow64 version. This has benefits (smaller package size, you can disable mulitlib repo, etc), but now installer does not work. It gets stuck as soon as any decompression is about to begin. And to me not much is clear. My guess is the freearc compression that fitgirl uses, its decompressor does nto work in wow64. Has anyone else tried for whom it works? Maybe I have to add a separate dll for this and create a override. Fitgirl faq does not mention it (probably since wow64 is still relatively new).

If this is not a right community for this, then sorry, I do not know of a better one. (wine team would not handle requests related to pirated installers, fitgirl or related communities in general do not do linux much, and of them, only a small fraction would be using wow64)

For testing purposes, You can grab almost any installer, I went and sorted by size (smallest first) and got it, and it does not work. (I am not going to provide link here for somewhat obvious reasons)

Many people might already be knowing this, for example people who use custom keyboard layouts, or people using different keyboard layouts, other than US, which most manufacturers and operating system and desktop environmnets use as default.

Most of my applications use vi like bindings, so pressing shift + ; to get : was a bit annoying, and so i was trying to find a way to swap them, and while doing so, I added most of greek alphabet, makes my technical writing a bit more easier (instead of doing $alpha$, I can do alt + a to get $α$), If you use TeX, then you can use #XeTeX to enter unicode, I use Typst, so I can directly use them, and they are used appropriately in text and equation mode. This also is helpful if your notes system does not have some math mode rendering (like plain markdown, without any katex).

If you are multilingual, but don't write much in the other language, this approach works well, if you write comparable amount in both languages, then you should consider setting a keyboard shortcut in you DE/WM config to switch the keyboard layouts

The following procedure is linux specific (or maybe other posix systems too, if they use xkb to manage keyboard stuff (this also works on wayland)), but I am sure windows and macos will have something similar (though i have not bothered to check for it, sorry for that). This does not work as a daemon sitting in between, this is using the standard way to modiify keyboard layout.

You can start by making a file like the following, and you can start with /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us (or the base language of your choice, for most european language layouts, base is /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/latin). You have to save it in the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ directory (in my case, my original file is in config dir, and I have symlinked it to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us-custom). For list of valid symbols (most of unicode, the thing we want is the correct names) please refer /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h. You can choose what modifier you want to use with include "level3(ralt_switch)" - I am using right alt as the third modifier, so to get the third layer, I go alt + <key>, for 4th layer, mod3 + shift + <key>. Then you can set to use this custom symbol map in your DE/WM config, in my case I have added xkb_layout "us-custom" in my sway config (for input keyboard).

// parent system is US, with a lot of greek sybols appended, and some more
// ; -> :, : -> ; - mostly for vim modes (easier to do : now)
default partial alphanumeric_keys modifier_keys
xkb_symbols "basic" {
    name[Group1]= "English US - Custom"; 
    include "level3(ralt_switch)"

    key <TLDE> {[ grave, asciitilde ]};
    key <AE01> {[ 1, exclam, exclamdown ]};
    key <AE02> {[ 2, at ]};
    key <AE03> {[ 3, numbersign, Greek_pi ]};
    key <AE04> {[ 4, dollar, trademark ]};
    key <AE05> {[ 5, percent ]};
    key <AE06> {[ 6, asciicircum ]};
    key <AE07> {[ 7, ampersand ]};
    key <AE08> {[ 8, asterisk, Greek_PI ]};
    key <AE09> {[ 9, parenleft ]};
    key <AE10> {[ 0, parenright, degree, schwa ]};
    key <AE11> {[ minus, underscore ]};
    key <AE12> {[ equal, plus, plusminus ]};

    key <AD01> {[ q, Q ]};
    key <AD02> {[ w, W ]};
    key <AD03> {[ e, E, Greek_epsilon, eacute ]};
    key <AD04> {[ r, R, Greek_rho ]};
    key <AD05> {[ t, T, Greek_theta, Greek_tau ]};
    key <AD06> {[ y, Y ]};
    key <AD07> {[ u, U ]};
    key <AD08> {[ i, I, integral ]};
    key <AD09> {[ o, O, Greek_omega, Greek_OMEGA ]};
    key <AD10> {[ p, P, Greek_phi, Greek_psi ]};
    key <AD11> {[ bracketleft, braceleft ]};
    key <AD12> {[ bracketright, braceright ]};

    key <AC01> {[ a, A, Greek_alpha, ae ]};
    key <AC02> {[ s, S, Greek_sigma, Greek_SIGMA ]};
    key <AC03> {[ d, D, Greek_delta, Greek_DELTA ]};
    key <AC04> {[ f, F ]};
    key <AC05> {[ g, G, Greek_gamma, Greek_GAMMA ]};
    key <AC06> {[ h, H, Greek_eta ]};
    key <AC07> {[ j, J ]};
    key <AC08> {[ k, K, Greek_kappa ]};
    key <AC09> {[ l, L, Greek_lambda, Greek_LAMBDA ]};
    key <AC10> {[ colon, semicolon ]};
    key <AC11> {[ apostrophe, quotedbl ]};
    key <BKSL> {[ backslash, bar ]};

    key <AB01> {[ z, Z, Greek_zeta ]};
    key <AB02> {[ x, X, Greek_xi, Greek_XI ]};
    key <AB03> {[ c, C, Greek_chi ]};
    key <AB04> {[ v, V ]};
    key <AB05> {[ b, B, Greek_beta ]};
    key <AB06> {[ n, N, Greek_nu, ntilde ]};
    key <AB07> {[ m, M, mu ]};
    key <AB08> {[ comma, less ]};
    key <AB09> {[ period, greater ]};
    key <AB10> {[ slash, question, questiondown ]};
};

I ask this question because of this comment chain (and totally not because I got down voted and my ego is too fragile, it is most definitvely absolutely positevly me asking for the science. I swear)

https://lemmings.world/post/23635250/14708515

If you can go through it, please do, there are some references for some claims, if not you can go through the following ai generated summary (if it helps, it is a local llama)

The original poster (sga) expressed concerns about the practice of trimming cat nails, comparing it to declawing and suggesting that it may cause trauma for the cat. Other users (Bamboodpanda and Chairman Meow) responded that trimming cat nails is a normal and necessary practice, especially for indoor cats, to prevent overgrown nails and damage to furniture. sga argued that cat claws are an essential part of a cat’s predatory nature and that trimming them may impair their ability to hunt and defend themselves. Chairman Meow countered that cat nails are not as robust as sga suggested and that trimming them does not impair their usability. sga provided several sources suggesting that indoor cats often engage in predatory behavior outdoors, despite being fed at home. SupremeDonut responded that the sources sga provided referred to free-range and feral cats, rather than indoor house cats. sga provided additional sources to support the claim that indoor cats also engage in predatory behavior outdoors. sga also mentioned the hypothesis that some amount of injuries or exposure to allergens can be beneficial for children’s immune systems, and provided a source to support this claim.

It is somewhat of xy problem too, so please read the post for more details.

A bit about my background - I am currently doing Bachelours of Technology (last semester) from a somewhat reputed university. (If you belive in those sham rankings - it is in top 200 in world).

I want to do a doctorate (and stay in academia/research, not interested in industry). I am still not fixated on a particular research field (intersted by many things) but I have a strong inclanation towards one, so currently that only.

One option is to do phd in my current uni only, but thing is that my uni is not that great in terms of research (can be generalised to country as well to some extent) - mostly it comes down to lack of funding and lack of students interested in doing research, most people are interested in joing some or other industry.

Other option is to go abroad. Considering the current environment, my current preference would be "Europe only".

From what I know, doing a doctorate in most european schools requires masters.

Also before anybody says this - I know for doctorate, the school matters less, and a good supervisor matters more. I understand this, but I can not really find any way to find a good supervisor. Maybe it is my ignorance, but I have never really paid attention to any names, and If I staart looking up names, there are tons. Also, I don't really know how to rate people. One thing would be to find someone with my interests, and ask them, but I do not know anyone. One is to rank them by their publications, but that definitely does not feel right to me. Some people just have a easier chance to get in bigger journals. I know at the end of the day, citations do not depend much on journal, but still it does not feel right. Also, most newer profs are definitely handicapped here (because they just have not had enough time to get enough citations, or may be their research may not be justly appreciated)

Another thing is, I would prefer to do masters in the same institution in which i would be potentially doing my phd, mostly because I do not want to spend a lot of time relocating (I am lazy).

Another thing is - I would really prefer a school where there is no or low academic fees (for low, lets say 1000-1500 Euros, because that is roughly what I pay currently). I do not really want to burden my parents anymore, and not having to pay a exorbident amount would be a great help.

I have done some lookup - in europe, from what I can find, it is mostly german uni which are offering no tution fees (I know that is not a general statement, for example I checked TU Munich has my prefered interest as masters program, and also no tution fees, but there are more)

I have tried doing "interest" phd and "interest" masters and a billion results come, mostly reasearch groups - but they all seem good to me.

One way to compare is use the said "sham" rankings. I think they do a good-sh job in rough categorisation, for example if they say some school is top 10, and some school is 1000+, I would generally accept that (but I think in that sense, most people would be able to tell that, sometimes just by having a look). But how their rankings swing wildly for some schools, where nothing really changed, and also, they don't put out weights for individual components, they say they use n number of components to judge, and also claim n components have n different wieghts, but we don't know them. They also sometimes give subject/domain wise rankings, which is better, but there is still a fundamental problem - their sources for ranking, and being private ventures, potential for being swayed by "some people" is deal breaker for me. So I can not blindly depend on them. I would much rather prefer human opinion on forums. Reddit has helped to some extent - but there are definitely both sides of opinions present, and I can not compare.

Also if anybody wants to know how did i choose when I did for bachelours - well I did not choose. In our country we have a nation wide entrance exam, for our best schools, and you are alloted based on ranking in that exam. So only choice I had made was to give that exam.

I want to know both - in general - how to compare different schools/supervisors and more specific to me - what should I do (for this part, name of schools/programs would be helpful)

I had this effectively a shower thought idea - why don't we have ceramic 3d printing?

Let me clarify - before posting, I looked it up, and I could not find exactly what I was looking for. There are already commercial offereings for Clay 3D printing, but that is not forming the ceramic in situ, we are depositing what is effectively ceramic in a solvent, and drying it. What I was thinking was making the ceramic on site.

Here is a example setup

• Imagine a regular polymer 3D printing setup

• imagine instead of filament, we have a tank of Ca(OH)~2~ (calcium hydroxide, or slaked lime) (not necessarily just this, but for example, consider this combination)

• imagine we instead of droping a full thread like layer of semi-solid polymer, we form a trail of really tiny water drops

• we sprinkle in Ca(OH)~2~ onto the drops (or this step can be skipped if we can pre mix it with water, and then somehow figure how to deposit really tiny drops of what is effectively a very strong base

• now we let CO~2~ in, and form CaCO~3~

• deposit a layer to fill voids in this layer (we dropped a non continous strings of drops earlier)

• evaporate remainning water

• repeat this step until this layer is complete.

• repeat process for next layer

Now I can think of many problems here

• how to handle very strong base - maybe a tip of refractory alloys, or something like Inconnel (or Ni Cr alloys in general), or ceramic (maybe alumina) coated metal (probably cheapest, but hard to make)

• how to control solidification - we are effectively doing a solidification reaction, and growth of crystal would largely be dependant on the crystal facettes, and we would not be able to have any sharp angles. Also, we would not be able to have a very small width with this.

• surface tension of water will not allow to easily create uniform small dots - only thing I can think of is using something mechanical to hit the water droplets at tips to effectively launch tiny droplets. (Imagine shuriken (stars or blades) breaking droplet, and water landing) - still we would not have control

• how to control solidification rate in exothermic process - maybe easy, but we would need something like fans or coolant, otherwise we would form big drops at a spot due increased nucleation rate

• how to introduce CO~2~ fast enough - we would have to have a very strong CO~2~ environment, somehow not let it solidify at tip. Also this reaction is very slow (maybe that is only the case at bulk solidification). Maybe the whole process would be very slow

Does this process already exist? If it does - any resources related to it would be helpful. If not, Why? Is it because we have not been able to solve the issues I listed, something I did not list? Would this be practical (economically)? I can definitely see both artistic and engineering use cases, and both of those can allow some big budgets.

This is (in my opinion) one of the single biggest achievements of humanity.

Image of Sagittarius A* black hole at center of our Galaxy, taken by Event Horizon Telescope team. This one is also refined with magnetic field lines.

I don't remember what was the exact source for me, but one of the possible ones is https://s3.amazonaws.com/cms.ipressroom.com/173/files/20247/66c7d3d62cfac2492a9bdd54_Sagittarius+A/Sagittarius+A_hero.jpg. I just made it grayscale, some dimming, and resizing, to not cover whole of screen.

Dreams are basically simulations of our lives that we run, sometimes with different physical constants, resulting in different worldly behaviours. Fever dreams (not necessarily during a fever) are when we are sweeping over a range of constants, so behaviour keeps on changing.

Old title - Tolerance - Is violence ever justified?

For reference - https://lemmings.world/post/19791264 and all comments below the post about tolerance and non-tolerance

is it too naive for me to believe any and every lives matter? I do understand if someone is coming for my life, and i stop him by retaliating back, most nation's laws would deem me innocent, maybe even most people will - but was it right?

It has not happened with me yet, and this is post is not politics related, a general discussion about tolerance, but I dont know how will I respond to such a situation, Is there a correct approach?

I know in a imaginary utopia - we can have a society where everyone thinks any violence, or for that matter, any evil deed is evil. And I know real world is far from being a utopia, but i believe most people can differentiate between good and bad. In my opinion, most people who do such acts are not really doing it because they enjoy it, some do because they have to, some think they have to, and they have been brain washed.

I also think if we ask a binary (yes/no) question to everyone - Is violence justified" - most people will vote no. I know there would be some exceptions (even in perfect utopia's like N. Korea, lords only get like 99% majority)(/s).

Now if we change question - "Is violence ever justified" - many will now vote yes, and start listing out situations where they think it is valid.

This question was also brought up in Avatar. For people who don't know - should Aang (a person with firm opinions, and more importantly a child - 12(112) years old) kill Lord Ozai (for now, consider him embodiment of evil for simplicity, but still a human). Many shows get away from asking, by basically having monsters (non human) as the opponent, so it is does not feel morally wrong. But here the question was asked. His past lives (in this world reincarnation exists, and aang is the Avatar - person who can control all elements) also suggested he should kill him, and he is tethered to this world, and this is no utopia ......... In the show they got away with basically a divine intervention.

Maybe here is my real question - Is it correct to have your morals be flexible?

Now for my answer, I have almost never felt correct labeling people good or bad, I have almost always treated people depending on what the situation expects me to (maybe how I feel I should be treating). In some sense I have a very flexible stance, and in some others, I dont. For example - I never cheat on exams or assignments - I can't justify cheating, If I am getting poor marks, then I should prepare well. But If someone else asks me to help them cheat (lets say give assignment solutions) - I dont refuse either, as I have understood, even though judging people by a few numbers is bad, world still does that - mostly to simplify things, and in that sense, a higher grade for anyone is better for them.

I dont even know what can be a answer. I dont know if it exists, or it can exist, I am not really trying to find it either, consider this just a rant at clouds.

edit - I am not asking a binary question - you are not expected to answer a yes or no, see the line just above this edit. It is not even really about violence - it is about morality

edit 2 - Changed title, old 1 is still here for full context. I dont know why I chose that title. I am not blaming anyone who answered on the basis of title, It was my bad to have some title, and ask a "not really orthogonal but generalised question" in the middle, hoping people answer that, some one did, I thank them. Many people have written (or in similar vein) - violence should be be avoided, but not when it the last thing. I understand this general sentiment - but according to me - having a excuse to ever do violence allows you to have loop hole, just blame the circumstances.

Someone gave a situation where they would do violence - someone trying to assault a kid - and I agree I would too (If I would be in such a situation).

I had a small back and forth with someone about morals - my stance is morals are frameworks to choose if a action is moral/immoral. And then the question is really how rigid should your moral framework be, and should it depend on background of people in consideration?