It’s been years since I’ve been in the lab but it really will depend a lot on the subject matter and the type of experiment.

If it’s a subject matter that is fairly well explored and defined, the alternative hypotheses might be fairly straightforward. Take, for example, an experiment from a while ago where entomologists suspected that desert ants navigate by using dead reckoning, effectively counting their steps, remembering their changes in direction measured by a biological compass, and integrating them together, in a process similar to “fusion” in electronic position sensors.

To validate part of this hypothesis, they needed to get more granular and isolate one part of it. So, they formulated a “sub-hypothesis” that stated that the ants had some sort of innate awareness of the distance that they covered with each step, knowing the length of their legs and this their stride length, similar to how cats know their healthy body width. The experimental hypothesis would be something like:

“Altering the length of desert ant legs will result in navigation failure with longer legs causing them to overshoot and shorter legs causing them to undershoot. The navigational trajectories should otherwise be identical.”

Building alternative hypotheses for this relatively simple experiment, prior to conducting it would be straightforward, as you appear to be suspecting. They could be as simple as:

“The length of the desert ant’s legs will have no impact on their navigation because they are not directly related. This will be apparent through the ants showing no discernable difference in the paths that they take when navigating, regardless of leg length.”

“The length of the desert ant’s legs will have some impact on their navigation but, they are able to compensate for discrepancies in stride length through some as of yet unknown mechanism. This will likely be apparent in statistically significant distance-related navigation errors in their paths.”

After the experiment, the data would be analyzed and checked for a match against the established hypotheses. If there is not a good match or there is an unexpected shape to the data, further experiments may be required to see if it is an anomaly or if something else might be going on.

(In this case, it was found that, yes, desert ants have some sort of innate awareness of what their stride length should be and changes in their leg lengths throw off their navigation, as expected.)

Now, when it gets to subjects that are less clear and established, alternative hypotheses can get a lot more challenging because often the difference between the data fit that proves or disproves a hypothesis can be miniscule. Or, the data points might form a completely unexpected shape that doesn’t match currently known phenomena.

Fuck off and give me the fiber that was promised and paid for decades ago.

Really? I hear it’s a steel.

JFC. What is wrong with people? I just want to write code that works, is interesting, and doesn’t have memory problems.

any change to shell scripts that isn’t posix compatible brings opinionated people out the woodwork.

Yo. Did I hear someone breaking POSIX-compatability over here?

First, I would like to give you some major props. Installing Arch, in itself, is a big deal. It is not a beginner-friendly distro. It is a very power-user friendly distro and has an incredible wiki that is helpful, at least to some degree, for many distros.

For a beginner distro, I would recommend Linux Mint for its easy transition and great focus on user experiences or Bazzite if you really want to install and get gaming.

When taking drivers in Linux, most are provided as either kernel modules (integrated into the kernel, so you don’t have to worry about installing anything) or packaged for the distro, in which case, once installed via package manager, they’ll auto-update whenever you update system packages. They are so much easier to deal with than Windows drivers (for the end user). For example, to use a Wacom drawing tablet, all one has to do is plug it in.

IIRC, there was a recent case of a malware being discovered and quickly taken down.

That’s been in sci-fi since before it was called sci-fi and before computers were a thing. So… probably centuries, if not millennia ago.

Fuck. My wife did work with Hanger 13 a while back. Really cool place and good people.

Someone downvoted because they don’t want to remember Bethesda’s shenanigans?

It’s the principle of committing wage theft, engaging in a contract (possibly verbal) and then keeping the promised compensation instead.

Lifetime plans are no longer available so, we’ve done you a favor and enrolled you in the pay-per-joke plan without your consent.

There should be criminal penalties for that kind of shit. Letting management off the hook without any personal consequences just encourages it.

It’s like they really don’t want me to use their pro-Nazi LLM, that I already didn’t want to use on account of the tweaks that they made to make it support nazism.

It is an unfortunately shared initialism. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Personally, I block pretty much all exclusionary communities for a few reasons:

• I frequently do not see the community name before looking at a thread and finding something interesting to converse on, partly because of my neurodivergences. This leads to breaking rules without intending to. Safer to block.

• I sometimes have experienced RSD as a symptom of my neurodivergences and thus intentionally take action to prevent it.

• I value inclusivity and anarchic social organization as fundamental parts of my ethical framework and find social exclusion based upon a person’s immutable traits incredibly offensive (the intensity of this is definitely related to my neurodivergences as well).

This is not to say that I don’t believe that women deserve a space where they have control and agency, especially with the immense amounts of misogyny on the Internet and meatspace. Nor do they need to consider my feelings nor any other man’s when deciding their rules and whether to be inclusive or exclusive.

I do, however, think that the hard-line exclusionary practices diminish the perspective, both for the participants and for men who could definitely use the insights into the bullshit that women have to continue to deal with. Lots of missed opportunity to build understanding and strengthen allyship. It also makes it easier for toxic exclusionary ideologies, like TERFs to take root (every group excluded makes it easier to excuse excluding another) while also preventing people who have not discovered their feminine gender identities from participating in conversation with other women in ways that could help them to uncover important things about themselves.

Anyway, enjoy and I hope that you find your space helpful to you, regardless of what myself or any other man feels about it. If the community does become inclusive, I’d definitely like to to know so that I can unblock it.

Maybe use satellite imaging or the like.

I think that they would be necessary still to respect the memory of the fiercely independent people and prevent corporate exploitation of the land.

“But if we avoid using the tools of democracy to create positive change and instead encourage people to not vote and be apathetic, we can make the human experience objectively worse for everyone. And, if we do it hard enough, and ensure that enough vulnerable people are sacrificed, it will magically turn those apathetic people into class l-conscious revolutionaries that are willing to die violent deaths for our version of utopia.”

I wish this were a “/s”.

Appinages are fine. Needing to apply changes as patchsets rather than just building normally sucks. Especially in deb and rpm distros.