Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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2 yr. ago

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He's more than just "a bit of a lolcow". He discredits science by being an arsehole and inserting science into places it obviously does not belong. He's the epitome of that stereotypical "STEM bro" that looks down upon the arts and humanities. Here's one anecdote about him I found:

Just saw a clip of his on Instagram about whether "fahrenheit units are better for the weather" as opposed to Celsius.

He starts off with "well, the weather doesn't care about how we measure it. It just is what it is, regardless of our units. What you mean is that fahrenheit makes it easy for us to understand the weather..." And then goes on to discuss it.

Like... Fuck off man. Everyone knows what the person meant, and he's just being a smartass about it.

He's also gone on "proving" that Santa can't be real with real physics. That's not stuff that makes people interested in science. It's just dickish and does exactly the opposite.

Here's an anecdote from someone who admits to overall liking him:

I still listen to [his podcast], but I'm gonna spoil it to you: just listen how often he interrupts people. Every question being asked he needs do change or add something and then "complains" that the section or question takes too long.

There's also a clip with Joe Rogan where he's not even listening but just rambles on, and keep interrupting.

And finally, I get annoyed by his words of wisdoms where he's recycling the same sentences in his genius complex voice.

The claim there is that this is just one "side" of NDT and that his "real" side, when it's allowed to show through, is a much better communicator of the wonder of science. My take is that we don't get to see this "authentic" version of him nearly often enough to give him credit for it.

He has that bad habit that a lot of smart people (particularly physicists, for some reason) have, which is to think that because they're smart in their one area, they must also be smart in others. He is certainly nowhere near as bad as some (looking at you, Sabine Hossenfelder), but he does have a nasty habit particularly when talking about the history of science (which, first and foremost, is history). One point that he's particularly fond of (having repeated it regularly online as well as including it in his Cosmos remake) is the mediaeval flat earth myth.

As for the sexual misconduct allegations, they weren't proven, but even if you take NDT entirely at his own word...it might not rise to the level of criminal misconduct, but it sure is creepy as fuck behaviour. Grabbing under someone's dress straps? Inviting a subordinate home for a private meal?

But it's not clear to me that we should just take him at his word. His own post defending himself, particularly the 1980s case, spends an awful lot of time attacking the character of the accuser. Whereas in the other cases he at least attempts to play it in the respectful "oh I can see how you might have gotten the wrong impression and I'm sorry" manner, here it's just "no, you're clearly my intellectual inferior and therefore why should anybody believe you?"

As for him being "cleared":

According to Watson, the so-called “investigations” Tyson was referring to consisted of the following: “I had one 30-minute sit-down with a Fox HR representative and a 45 minute-hour sit-down with a man from a private company. I gave them both lengthy lists of extremely reliable people who could corroborate my story, text messages from that time, emails NDT had sent to me, etc. None of the people I gave contact info for were ever contacted by these companies.”

In his defence, I will say, I've seen a lot of people accusing him of also getting the physics wrong on certain things. And at least one case of him getting into a conversation with Richard Dawkins where he supposedly got something wrong about DNA. My read on most of the situations of this sort that I've seen are that they're either minor errors that are naturally going to occur in off-the-cuff discussions, or stem from an imprecision of language where the actual point he is trying to convey was totally reasonable. Maybe, given he's a science communicator, he should try better to get these things right, and be ready to correct them in the comments or in editing when they happen and are pointed out, which is something he seems not to do. But I don't consider this a slight on him as a person at all. Not at the scale that I've seen.

Fwiw Nye does seem to be very chummy with Neil de Grasse Tyson, and that guy's issues are far more well attested to. From the smug poor media literacy, to reports of being professionally hard to work with, to his sexual harrassment allegations. I'm not especially inclined to give Nye the benefit of the doubt given the company he chooses to keep.

How so?

There's been no mention of it in articles that I could see, but that could be from a lack of perceived interest in it as much as because it didn't happen...

Did World's Edge suffer from this round of layoffs?

I just took a really quick look at it, but under Importing data from Nominatim it says "-country-codes allows to filter the data to be imported by country. Set this to a comma-separated list of two-letter language codes."

That's a different section from the Importing data from a JSON dump section, which is where it only mentions -country-code. But even that does seem to suggest it takes "all the parameters of an import from a Nominatim database". So it seems like either the documentation for one of them is wrong, or both are lacking (because in fact both the singular and plural work).

If you do not configure anything, then Reitti will skip Geocoding and only display Unknown Place.

Ah ok thanks. This is what I was wondering.

Two follow-ups:

Can you specify multiple COUNTRY_CODEs? (and if so, is the method

 yaml

    
environment:
  - COUNTRY_CODE=country_one
  - COUNTRY_CODE=country_two

  

or

 yaml

    
environment:
  - COUNTRY_CODE=[country_one, country_two]

  

or something else?)

And is this something that can seemlessly be retroactively changed? For example, if I set COUNTRY_CODE=au and it works fine for Australia, but then I move to NZ, can I add (assuming the answer to my first question is yes) or change to COUNTRY_CODE=nz and have all the NZ locations work on the already-recorded data, even if I made that change to my configuration after I had been in NZ for a few months?

Is that true even if you're not in hybrid mode?

I don't actually have any personally. I'm still with Google Photos for now and hadn't decided what to switch to, with Immich, Nextcloud, and the non-open Synology Photos being the top of my list. Legitimately, what a tool like this supports could be a factor I use to help decide.

How complicated is the code interfacing with Immich? Is it a piece someone not familiar with your overall code base could relatively easily pick up and make a pull request for?

I love that it supports multiple formats for important location as well as multiple geocoders. But that makes me wonder, would it be feasible to support multiple image libraries? There's a bunch of different FOSS photo libraries out there. I think Nextcloud is the main other one I've heard about 'in the wild', as it were. Or is there too much bespoke Immich code in there for that to be a simple plug-and-play option?

Oh interesting. I've just read through that link, and I was assuming that something similar to the "external only" option would have been the only way it worked. More specifically, I thought it'd just store a list of historical points and display those on an OSM overlay. But it seems like even "external only" is much more involved than that.

What happens with self-hosted Photon if you specify a country, but then also visit another country? (I assume in hybrid mode it's as simple as "use Photon in your country, use Nominatim otherwise?)

But yeah, definitely sounds like a Pi is probably not gonna cut it. I'll have to see if my Synology can do it, or if the weird OS restrictions Synology imposes prevent it.

Fuck yeah this is awesome! The detail of Immich integration is just the icing on top of an awesome cake!

How demanding is it on server resources? Am I likely to be able to run it on an old Raspberry Pi that's also running a couple of other relatively light tasks? How much storage does it end up using over time? I'm probably going to try and get it running either on my Pi or my Synology NAS, though the latter has had issues with Docker containers in the past depending on the container's dependencies...

I get it, but is there an ideological cause?

There's an ideology behind drivers who terrorise cyclists try to force them off the road, for sure. They should be labelled terrorists.

But vandalising a speed camera could just as easily be a selfish wish to not get fined.

Yeah I agree. Using the upstream source also helps keep the canonical URL so cross-posts and reposts can automatically be detected to show users where conversations about the topic may have already happened.

In what world is suggesting one army should attack another army not a "call to violence"?

Your rulings are just complete nonsense. There's no consistency. You're just applying it based on your own whims. One of which seems, based on how you're applying it, to be "genocide is ok when it's done to brown people".