🌸🌹2ck 🌱🐇 @2ck@qoto.org

@ZachWeinersmith I think the difficulty is that qualities I care about aren't captured well in text. make me a robot that can travel around tasting things with my taste preferences wired in, or a robot that can test drive cars and tell me if they handle similarly enough to my current car to not annoy me.

maybe if you can design an AI that will tell me what combination of computer parts will let me play game X at the lowest price point, that would be good

what I really hate though is how quizzes and test markings are locked after the first viewing or after a day. it's idiotic and inconvenient

I've really soured on the online courses I'm taking. The lack of engagement from my instructors is extremely annoying. At least in a physical school, I could stalk outside their office until they respond to me.

@izaya cool. I was wondering how I interact with other players on the server? Should I see other avatars or is it single-player for everyone?

@izaya I got disconnected when I tried to punch some kind of plant up on top of a mountain or whatever.

Is there any goal to the game or is it just open world exploration + try not to die?

@izaya I'll give it a shot. thank you

@izaya yes! that would be great. Please let me know what I need to do

@izaya do you let other folks on your minetest server? I want to try it and maybe play with a friend

"This disorder, which was eventually called encephalitis lethargica or von Economo's sleeping sickness, swept through Europe and North America during the second decade of the twentieth century; by the end of the following decade it had apparently disappeared, as only sporadic and unconvincing reports have appeared since. [...] *the virus that caused it was never identified*"

There was a passage in one of the Foundation novels where an armchair scientist described his doing science in terms of comparing the writings of various authors, and Salvor Hardin (I think) appraised the man's perspective on science negatively. I've always remembered that, and took on Hardin's attitude, but since I've actually had to do research...honestly, that's actually a lot of it. There is, perhaps, more effort that must go into systematizing one's own knowledge in parsing the various studies rather than just comparing the relative "authority" of the authors of different studies as I believe the armchair scientist was doing, but, significantly, it's not all just observation and experiment: there's theorizing that has to happen too, which depends on close reading and critically comparing results.

I'm not sure if I'm really arguing against anyone's actual perspective on how science is done here (I barely remember the passage from the novel in the first place.), but I just wanted to make a record of this way of thinking that I suppose has caused me a measure of embarrassment in years past about not being more hands-on in my research.
#science #research