As for whether he forgives Morrissey, Carroll said: “I guess I would have to say yes in the spirit of forgiveness, reluctantly. But if I had to be a smartass, I’d say her apology holds about as much water as my canvas bag.”

Fantastic.

Some good answers in here already. It boils down to a couple points for me:

• Back when I started selfhosting, it was either nginx or apache, and I found nginx better and easier to set up
• All the nginx knowledge I learned years ago still works just the same as it did back then, so why potentially mess things up by switching if it all still works
• Basically every project has an example nginx config for reference, that can't be said about other proxies
• It is easier to find support online for edge cases that might pop up with nginx due to the ubiquity of its use and years of history

Intel confirmed on reddit that oxidation did impact some chips.

More than one thing can be wrong at the same time, so everybody can be right!

I am a big fan of content-specific instances. Some instances off the top of my head that fit this description:

• bookwormstory.social - Instance about the Ascendance of a Bookworm series
• ani.social - Instance about anime/manga/Japanese media
• slrpnk.net - Instance focused on the climate crisis and related issues
• programming.dev - Instance focused on software development
• startrek.website - Instance about Star Trek
• literature.cafe - Instance about books and writing

...and I am sure there are many others. I just think that having a focus like that provides a more interesting local instance environment than a large, generalist instance, though both have a place.

Watching TC do a video about something I do professionally has been a bit of a trip. For context, I work with freeze dryers (we call them lyophilizers) in pharmaceuticals rather than foods. I help design the lyophilization cycles for biologics and gene therapy products that get preserved through freeze drying. Until this video, I had no idea that people used these instruments for at-home food preservation (which is kind of insane imo).

The instruments that I work with are typically a much larger version of the bench-scale machine that he is using (usually one of the LyoStar line). However, I have used smaller, bench-scale units as well for some quick and dirty work. I included some pictures at the end behind a spoiler tag. Happy to answer any questions people have.

Some differences in how I use lyophilizers in a scientific setting as opposed to a home-use food setting:

• Typically, we only lyo products that are already filled in vials as opposed to a full tray like he's done.
• We don't pre-freeze our products before they go into the lyophilizer. Instead we refrigerate the shelf that the vials are sitting on to freeze the contents before we proceed to the drying steps.
• Speaking of the shelves, in our instrument, the shelves can move up and down. This is used to compress the vials after the cycle is completely done, fully seating the vial stoppers and sealing them before we open up the main door.
• Also speaking about stoppering the vials, we typically allow some nitrogen into the chamber before sealing up the vials, at a pressure moderately less than atmospheric pressure. This helps keep the vial sealed until it is properly crimped with a seal.
• When it comes to drying, we do it in two stages. The primary drying step is when our product is kept cold, but put under vacuum. This removes most of the water, but not enough for our purposes. The secondary drying step is when the product is heated while the vacuum is maintained. This removes the rest of the water. We typically shoot for a residual moisture of <1% for a good cycle.
• He talks about how long the process takes. I have worked on processes that take from 1-5 days. Typically, the lyophilizer is limited with how much liquid can be removed per unit time. This limit is determined by the geometry of the vent that connects the main chamber with your vials, and the chamber containing the condenser. Also, if you try to dry too quickly, it can damage the product you are trying to preserve.
• He has some discussion at the end about the end of the cycle and the progress bar. What the instrument is doing is comparing the vapor pressure in the chamber using two different sensors. One of those is sensitive to the vapor pressure of water vapor, and the other is not. So, when things are fully dried out, those two are going to read the same pressure. While drying is still occurring, the sensor that detects water vapor will read a higher pressure. So, the instrument will continue to extend drying until those two pressures are the same.

::: spoiler Some Pictures Benchtop lyophilizer that I have experience using. You can see some vials lined up inside the door. I have never used the bottle connections hanging off the side:

One of the trays of vials that is loaded before going into the lyophilizer. The vials that are partially stoppered in the middle of the tray actually contain the drug. All the vials without stoppers are empty and simply there to help hold things in place as well as distribute heat predictably through the tray. The stoppered vials in the corners are there to help distribute the weight as the shelves compress to fully seat the stoppers.

Here are a small number of vials that I ran on a benchtop unit without any spacer vials or the tray. I would never do this for any reason other than to take a picture like this. This is a good view of what a partially stoppered vial looks like. It allows a path for water vapor to escape out the top of the vial.

Finally, here is a vial post-lyophilization. The liquid has turned into a solid, white cake at the bottom of the vial. This is because most lyophilization formulations include sugars that provide structure for the cake and keep it porous. The sugars provide protection against freeze/thaw stress for the molecule of interest as well. The porosity of the cake allows for quick and easy reconstitution by adding water, usually in <30 seconds or so.

Everybody's pager went off in celebration!

Just for some background information on how most countries tend to rely on larger, more rigorous regulatory bodies...

I am in the pharma industry (not in vaccines though). Typically the two main regulators that most other countries look to as a reference are either the FDA or the EMA (the EU organization). This usually means that if you can satisfy the requirements of one of these bodies, then it is satisfactory for the other country as well. However, it isn't universal as each other country will usually have some modifications here and there for whatever reason. The most annoyingly particular ones I have dealt with in the past are China and Japan.

I am guilty of writing walls of text as comments, but I try to stick to my lane. You can see my most recent wall of text about freeze dryers as an example. There are a few things that I think need to come together to create a good, high-effort post:

• Passion - If you don't care, you aren't going to spend the time to write about something
• Knowledge - For some topics this may be less required, but I tend to create walls of text about technical issues. I have a PhD in physics, so that gives me a pretty good foundation of knowledge to work from in this regard
• Writing Ability - You need to be able to write effectively to make a wall of text worthwhile. This is a skill that gets better the more you do it.

The other thing I tend to do when writing a high-effort post is I actually proofread it before making it. I try to cut out unneeded tangents, reword things that might be confusing, or supplement things that aren't motivated enough.

For me personally, this doesn't take me too long to do since I have been writing and presenting about extremely technical topics for about two decades at this point. Like I mentioned above, informative writing is a skill that gets better with practice. So, doing it regularly as a significant part of my job as well as providing feedback to others on their writing/presentations, has provided me with tons of practice to improve these things.

If you want some formal guidance on scientific writing/presentations specifically, two books I have found informative (mostly on presentations) have been:

• The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley
• slide:ology - The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte

This largely depends on where you are in the US. I have moved a lot over the years, from dense city centers, to the dirt roads of rural America. Here are my experiences:

NYC would probably be the most comparable to your experience in London, but seeing as I haven't lived there, I can instead talk about Boston. When I lived inside the subway range in Boston (Somerville specifically), my experience matches up with yours. I was ~5 minutes from a supermarket and ~15 minutes from the subway/train stop by foot. I was even closer to a couple bus stops for lines that would take me to places like a mall, nearby universities, or the next subway line over (we don't have an equivalent of the Circle line).

I currently live in Boston suburbs (Metrowest for people that know the area) and can't really walk anywhere as my street and adjacent streets don't have sidewalks. I could try to walk on the street, but with the narrowness combined with the speed at which people drive through this neighborhood, it would not be fun. If I hop in the car, I am ~5 minutes from a strip mall with a supermarket, pharmacy, liquor store, etc. and ~10 minutes from the commuter rail train station that I use to commute to the city for work. If I want to head to a large shopping hub with a mall, then it is ~20 minutes away by car. There is a skeleton of a bus system in my area, but it would require traversing ~1.5 miles on streets without sidewalks to get to the nearest stop for me.

When I lived in a rural area (rural PA), things were very different. To get to the nearest supermarket (a WalMart), it took ~30 minutes worth of driving. If I wanted to go to the mall, it was closer to 60 minutes. I am sure there are even less dense areas than that in this country.

There is a lot of collaboration between the different instance admins in this regard. The lemmy.world admins have a matrix room that is chock full of other instance admins where they share bots that they find to help do things like find similar posters and set up filters to block things like spammy urls. The nice thing about it all is that I am not an admin, but because it is a public room, anybody can sit in there and see the discussion in real time. Compare that to corporate social media like reddit or facebook where there is zero transparency.

This lines up with my experience. I have nextcloud and wordpress on two different vps's and just checked their ram usage.

• nextcloud: 468 MB
• wordpress: 120 MB

Caveat to the above is that nextcloud is installed bare metal rather than docker and I have both nextcloud and wordpress set up to use object storage as the media back end.

edit: To add to this OP, the reason we are only talking about ram numbers is that the cpu usage for these applications (with primarily only a single user) is pretty much zero most of the time, so you aren't going to be limited by the single core machine.

Also, depending on your use case (large amount of data on nextcloud or large media files in wordpress), you might run out of disk space pretty quickly. In those cases, you should consider using object storage as your nextcloud or wordpress media backends as it is cheaper than block storage (there are plugins/tutorials to configure object storage and Linode offers it).

One recent example from a game that I ran is that my players caused a dust explosion using flour. I had to do some quick googling to figure out how big that might be to best gauge the damage (turns out it can be pretty big), but I awarded inspiration for the creativity (despite getting caught up in the blast themselves). This was also a bit of irony since the people they were attacking were assassins that ran a bakery as cover.

I work in pharma, regularly writing and filing things with the FDA (and other agencies), and this has been a topic of conversation at work. The good news for people is that the EMA is still a thing in the EU. So, at least the large pharma companies (like the one I work for), are likely to not really change much about their quality control/processes/etc. because we will still need to conform to the EMA guidelines which are typically in line with the current FDA (sometimes more strict, sometimes less so). The real quality concern would be smaller companies that only file for products in the US. They would only need to meet whatever new FDA guidelines come into effect (if they even do, changing stuff like GMP guidance is extremely complicated and time consuming) since the US is their only market.

Where the NSFW line is drawn varies depending on the moderator and community. If there are communities that are either not moderated actively enough or draw that line too far to one side for your taste, then don't subscribe or block those communities. Those tools exist there for a reason.

I would not consider the post you have linked to as NSFW. I also think that the NSFW tag has evolved over time, so perhaps my definition of NSFW just doesn't line up with what today's standard should be. There are plenty of anime characters in very popular shows that have a character design similar to that. There are big billboards of them some places to promote the show. Just because it might be NSFW in your work environment/region, does not mean it is everywhere.

This community used to be much more active, but there was a large exodus of the most active users after some far-reaching admin interventions (like this one) that saw a mod get removed from this community and the episode discussion bot unable to post here any longer. A lot of the activity has moved to a different instance/community. The reason people aren't linking it directly is because admins have previously removed any comments/posts that link to it (including over two months of the pinned weekly discussion threads). It shows up on lemmy community browsers like lemmy-explorer though.

I have hosted a wordpress site on my unraid box before, but ended up moving it to a VPS instead. I ended up moving it primarily because a VPS is just going to have more uptime since I end up tinkering around with my homelab too often. So, any service that I expect other people to use, I often end up moving it to a VPS (mostly wikis for different things). The one exception to that is anything related to media delivery (plex, jellyfin, *arr stack), because I don't want to make that as publicly accessible and it needs close integration with the storage array in unraid.

I am guessing a large portion of those might be inactive accounts as well. When the reddit exodus was at its peak, there were definite issues with the way 2FA worked in lemmy. I think it got reset at one point due to changes made in subsequent lemmy versions and users had to re-enable it.

Conmebol and Concacaf games are full of gamesmanship and this game had remarkably little of it compared to other games from this same Copa. I mean, did you watch Colombia's second half against Uruguay? Every team does it when they can. Also, it is very clear from the shot of Messi's incredibly swollen ankle during extra time that he actually fucked it up. Acting doesn't make your ankle look like that.

I think that @[email protected] was referring to the fact that a large portion of Musk's net worth is tied to the Tesla stock price. The age of easy money that the US economy has been living in for most of the past 15 years has led to many stocks to greatly explode in value much farther beyond what makes sense at a fundamentals level; Tesla being one of the most egregious examples.

The fraud surrounding Alzheimer's research continues... Not too long ago the fraud was related to amyloid (archive version). That article was even written by the same author and features many of the same investigators.

I work in Pharma R&D (on the manufacturing side) and the company I work for has run trials for Alzheimer's products based on research that has since been found to be fraudulent. As a published scientist myself, I would like to think that this level of manipulation and fabrication is the exception rather than the rule. However, I do think it is worth asking at this point what it is about Alzheimer's research in particular that has led to this being so prevalent and, more importantly, so impactful. Basically, how did it go so far before anything was caught?

I suspect at least part of the answer is due to the large influx of money into the field. Researchers were tripping over themselves to earn those grants and then, once they had them, produce results to keep them. I am not in academia, so I don't have great insight into the NIH, NIA or their processes, but this should be a wake up call to put up a certain amount of guard rails.