@drmambobob@ecoevo.social
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drmambobob

@drmambobob@ecoevo.social

#palaeobiology #paleontology #dinosaurs #biomechanics #rstats #phylogenetics #samurai #datascience

I am an evolutionary palaeobiologist, focusing on evolutionary biomechanics and diversification of life through Earth history and across the tree of life over millions of years, with special interest in various groups of vertebrates including dinosaurs.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

drmambobob, to random
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So I get that you should use password managers but are there any good ones out there? All those top lists only mention paid services and their free versions are severely limited. I don't want to pay for more things than I am already.

drmambobob,
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@mike I use the one on Firefox! I just read an article promoting standalone password managers over browser based ones but they just link to paid services! So if the one on Firefox works well then I’ll just stick to that

drmambobob, to random
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All this wetness and humidity in the air reminds me that Britain should really be covered in temperate rain forest.

drmambobob, to random
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Remember, when politicians say “talent”, “skills”, “research”, or “innovation”, they don’t mean “smart”, “technically skilled”, “scientific research” or “technological advancements”, they just mean “rich people investing in things that make them and their friends more rich”.

drmambobob, to random
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To a single-celled organism, multicellularity must be terrifying. You don’t have individuality and you’re part of a collective.

drmambobob, to TheExpanse
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I'm watching (just started Season 4) and I've been enjoying it so far. I really want to read the books now...

drmambobob, to random
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Ads on Amazon Prime videos are incredibly frustrating. Just why???

ParadeGrotesque, to random
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Sign seen on the way to the office:

"Discover your horoscope generated by an advanced artificial intelligence!".

I think that massive extinction cannot come too soon... We have wasted our potential.

drmambobob,
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@ParadeGrotesque Wasted potential as a species, I presume? Because if it’s about generative AI then that’s their full potential right there.

drmambobob, to random
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Grant writing is a lot more of a fun and creative process when your job doesn't literally depend on it.
#AcademicChatter

drmambobob, to random
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If you're a student and you enjoy the content your lecturer provides you with, then let your lecturer know. Most voices we hear are the negative ones so it would make a difference...

drmambobob, to apple
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My #MacBook doesn't detect my external monitor any more after I installed some updates... It's drawing power from the USB-C connection but isn't detecting the display. Does anyone know how to fix this? I'm on Monterey so the fix I found on the #apple support page doesn't seem to be available on my mac...
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchla25b377d/mac

drmambobob,
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Baffling thing is that my MacBook detects my Iiyama monitor at my office which is connected through a USB-C hub to the HDMI port on the monitor, but it doesn't detect my Dell monitor at home which is connected directly through USB-C. A concern I have is that because it's a uni issued device that works with a uni-issued monitor, I won't get tech support for my home office monitor, but I'm not sure I can just upgrade to a newer OS...

drmambobob, to random
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I got aggressively beeped at by a BMW driver at a mini roundabout on campus. I was turning right at the mini roundabout having priority over a car to my left (straight in this case as there isn’t a left exit) but the BMW came bolting down from my right expecting to have priority over me even though I was already in the mini roundabout. I really hate drivers like this…they think they have priority all the time and everyone is in their way…

drmambobob,
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You’ve gotta be nice to other road users by default of course but this was on campus so I have to wonder if it never occurred to them that maybe, just maybe, they could be upsetting a colleague or line manager or lecturer???

drmambobob,
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@autumnjanai Oh I was driving today! So they were trying to exert their BMW driver status over me, a mere Ford C-Max driver…

drmambobob, to random
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I went to my 8yo son's class last week to talk about palaeontology and fossils. I brought some fossils and cast dinosaur teeth. The real fossils were just scrappy pieces of ammonite, belemnites and piece of a bovine limb, but the kids really loved them.

drmambobob, to random
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Got some textbooks last week. They're for the modules and lectures I'm planning right now for next academic year.

I was too excited that I took the top two books home over the weekend and started skimming through Vertebrate Life. Such a beautiful text book. This one's gonna be the model for my vert zool module!

drmambobob, to random
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Interesting video on whether AI is actually useful for knowledge workers (i.e., highly skilled consultant-level experts). TLDW is that AI tools boost productivity and quality of outputs, and closed the gap between underperformers and high performers, when the task was within the AI tool's frontiers; however, when the task was multi-faceted (e.g., multiple conflicting information; beyond the AI's frontier) then AI tools failed and non-AI users did better.

https://youtu.be/FTs35x-xUg4?si=g-4WOCKKOdhTuqVC

jonny, to random
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In infosec you would treat all the fraud that occurs in the academic publication system as vulnerabilities in the system that are in need of patches. but instead we treat them as individual rogue actors, and instead of questioning our reliance on Azure and its unwillingness to patch its vulns we ... oh wait it's the same.

drmambobob,
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@jonny I'm not in infosec so I might be being thick but uni IT departments treat academics as "vulnerabilities in the system that are in need of patches" and come down on us hard making computing very restrictive and difficult...

timClicks, to random
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Difficult for a job ad to have a red flag in every sentence, but not impossible apparently.

drmambobob,
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@timClicks It doesn’t read like it was written by an adult…

drmambobob, to random
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I see some people saying “billionaires are only billionaires because of their net worth, which is mostly assets that don’t count as personal income, so they shouldn’t be taxed much higher than they already are”, but they seem to assume that billionaires pay for things the same way we do, ie from post taxed net income. They can keep their salaried income so low because a lot of their expenditure can be written off as corporate expenses…

mpesce, to random
@mpesce@arvr.social avatar

This (rather long and rather important) article shows how completely the Web has entered its terminal phase of Late Capitalist enshittification.

Read it.

ping @pluralistic

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

drmambobob,
@drmambobob@ecoevo.social avatar

@mpesce
I was just looking for a kitchen appliance that I don't really know anything about (i.e., reputable manufacturer, what to look out for, etc), so was going through some review comparison sites and noticed most of them were clearly just pulling data straight from Amazon. The names of the products on the list are all long descriptive names you see for dodgy products on amazon...
My wife was asking me why it was taking so long and I said I can't find a page written by an actual human!

drmambobob, to LEGO
@drmambobob@ecoevo.social avatar

I really want to buy the bricks to build this #lego #moc

The Perfect Lego X-wing - Blue Leader MOC
https://youtu.be/HAIO9Znb754?si=7YzhyunwN9YDCo85

franco_vazza, to Astro
@franco_vazza@mastodon.social avatar

Help me find the solution to this mathematical paradox.

Today I started my teaching semester, and realised that not only the students are closer in age to my son (9yr old) than to me, but they actually are TWICE closer to my son than to me.

On the other hand, I feel and objectively am young and in my prime (44yr).

So, what is wrong with my derivation above?

Please help me find the mistake in the calculations!

🤔 🤔 🤔 🤔

#Academic #astrodon

drmambobob,
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@jaztrophysicist @franco_vazza @ThomasConnor
That just means we’ve transcended the meaning of life, the universe and everything

Daojoan, to random
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I love that “you sound scared” has become a way to shut down critics of AI.

…yes.

yes, I absolutely am scared of it.

No, I’m not ashamed of that.

I don’t hate AI. I don't believe it’s going to destroy us terminator style.

But I’m scared half to hell of the misinformation, political divisions, unemployment, manipulation, spam and deepfake porn and what it’s going to do to our world.

Like it or dislike it, everyone should have a healthy level of fear about what this technology can do.

drmambobob,
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@VinesNFluff @markmetz @radiojammor @mrotteveel @Daojoan
Yeah - I think a lot of people are confusing (or deliberately conflating?) bespoke machine learning models that are designed to solve difficult problems, with generative AI (including LLMs) that are designed to rapidly and endlessly generate something that only superficially resemble creative outputs.

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