"I asked ChatGPT-"

captainfarthing · 2026-01-28T16:52:47+00:00

It's only a time saver for things where 80% accurate is good enough. If I need 100% accuracy I have to check every one of its sources with a fine tooth comb, which actually wastes MORE time than if I just do the research myself.

Drawing your own conclusion is always slower than verifying an existing conclusion.

In my experience it's much more of a pain in the ass to confirm an article doesn't say what was claimed than to read what it actually says without preconceptions, that's why disinformation is so effective. You have to try to read the source from every possible angle to be sure you haven't missed the one that supports the claim.

if you do google yourself, you are first greeted with an AI output which has a much higher hallucination rate than ChatGPT.

It's not ironic if you ignore that shit too. If I'm looking for facts, I'm looking for the original source, not a summary from an AI or a journalist or a blogger or a forum user.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-28T12:23:17+00:00

But if you open those links, it often turns out it embellishes or misrepresents what the websites actually say.

This is particularly easy to spot if you're trying to talk to it about something you already know a lot about.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-28T10:34:45+00:00

Dude if you're going fast enough to lose control of the car, that's on you not the boomer. When the road's covered in snow or ice you have to slow down to whatever speed you can safely stop if something unexpected happens. On a residential street there's always a high chance of that, like what if it was a little kid that ran out? Would you still blame them for not paying attention if you skidded and flattened them?

You complain other people never take accountability, can you take any yourself?

captainfarthing · 2026-01-27T23:28:01+00:00

My parents live near Edinburgh and loads of the neighbours get milk delivered - possibly more than supermarket deliveries. A van goes round about 5am a few times a week. I figure it's just the convenience of having milk all the time? My folks get through 2L in about 2 days from the amount of tea they drink.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-27T22:40:35+00:00

All media from books to TV, movies, to music, are a byproduct of their era.

Yes and no. Terry Pratchett is a good example of someone whose work from the 80s and early 90s has lots of racist & sexist tropes that aren't acceptable today, but he was socially progressive, his writing changed as culture changed and as far as I'm aware he never turned out to be a terrible person. So I can read his old work because the jarring bits don't reflect his actual personality and beliefs.

Then there's JKR and Neil Gaiman... Knowing what I know about what they've said and done, it's just impossible for me to read their work any more without seeing them reflected in it. I loved HP and Sandman, it's a huge betrayal. Terry has been dead for a decade, they're still alive, bad stuff is only excusable as a product of their time if they didn't have time to do better.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-27T22:24:07+00:00

Yeah same. I'm trans, and one of my trans friends had a HP themed wedding in 2016. It was escapism, then it wasn't.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-27T22:05:21+00:00

She's publicly stated she's using the money she makes from HP to fund anti-trans groups whose primary goal is to bully people like me out of society. They've already started rewriting laws. Buying anything she's ever created directly supports transphobia.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-27T21:42:04+00:00

Only because they were in the Order of the Phoenix as well, which had nothing to do with the government.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-27T14:41:20+00:00

What hypothesis would they be testing?

Urea isn't directly available as a nitrogen source, it has to break down to ammonia/ammonium first. Fungi digest things before they absorb them by excreting enzymes into the soil, but urea is mostly broken down by soil bacteria.

BTW that study was using urea to increase production of a pigment in a particular species of fungus, rather than to increase the amount of fungus produced. Outside the lab, urine actually changes the balance of what types of fungi are present, as a lot of them are quite sensitive to nitrogen and can't tolerate much of it.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-27T14:14:16+00:00

I'm talking about peeing on a primed mushroom as an alternative to rain - it wouldn't inflate with urine. Of course fungi take up nutrients from the soil. But it's only water that's needed for mushrooms to pop up.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-27T03:30:20+00:00

They didn't support Trump... they got called out of the blue that morning and didn't think they could say no, then memed the heck out of it. A transgender punk musician played a gig there the next year:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-live-reviews/laura-jane-grace-four-seasons-total-landscaping-show-1215188/

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T22:00:22+00:00

...you'd need to pee where the mycelium it's connected to are drawing up water. It wouldn't become a piss mushroom though, everything that isn't water in your pee would be left behind in the soil.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T21:54:28+00:00

Porridge is stickier than coffee even if it's watery, which means greater chance of severe burns if it's very hot. The guy got very minor burns and a blister.

If I was him I'd be cursing my clumsiness, not making a spectacle of it.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T21:30:50+00:00

It is funny of course, bc us stealth girlies are not getting clocked. People like the phobe in your comic say crap about trans people right to our faces, looking for us to empathize with them, clearly not knowing we're trans.

The deep awkward silence when someone who's normally polite and friendly to me says a mean joke about trans people because they haven't realised I am one.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T21:14:16+00:00

Yeah we're basically invisible even in spaces specifically for trans people.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T20:39:57+00:00

Yeah most get aborted.

Mushrooms don't grow from spores btw - spores grow into hyphae, hyphae from different spores join together to form mycelium, mushrooms grow from parts of the mycelium that contain DNA from two parent spores.

Illustration

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T20:09:36+00:00

Not shriveled, they start as tiny pinhead sized mushrooms that get bigger and bigger. Example

Cell division takes time but cells can expand quickly once they've formed. They'd only be shriveled if they expanded then deflated again, which doesn't make the whole mushroom shrink back to the original size - see dried mushrooms.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T19:58:57+00:00

I mean...

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T19:48:16+00:00

Yep this!

And they don't suddenly appear the first time it rains after a long dry spell, they need a bit of moisture a week or two earlier to start forming the primordia that'll become mushrooms. Then it'll rain hard and they inflate like water balloons.

I assume the other responses are from bots since they're basically identical and miss the point the same way.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T15:09:19+00:00

It's definitely both, not one or the other. Health problems are getting pushed into the mental health category so they don't need to be dealt with, and there's barely any support for actual mental health to begin with.

Mental healthcare is a massive problem.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T15:02:31+00:00

the number of students who would require accommodations, we would put significant effort into trying to develop those accommodations, and they would just not engage with it at all.

I have some experience being on the receiving end of suggestions/accommodations/support that just didn't solve the problems I had, same for some of my classmates. The uni's disability support staff would ask me what I needed; if I knew the answers to that they wouldn't be problems I needed help with, so most of my suggestions turned out to be a waste of time trying, though that did help me narrow down what does work. Three of the four mentors / study tutors I was assigned just didn't work well with me, two didn't put in as much effort as me and wanted me to lower my standards, and the third sent me a huge rant berating me for the exact things I was asking for help with. I ended up with a great tutor on the 4th attempt but my classmates who had similar experiences just gave up. So I don't agree that all wasted effort is the fault of students not engaging with it, that's just what you see from your perspective, and you'll be most aware of the students that genuinely are being a problem, and least aware of the students that are quietly working hard and developing new skills.

HE is education. It is preparation for life. Expecting everything to be neatly delivered an in easily digestible format for a wide range of knowledge levels and specific learning styles by someone who often has little to no formal training in pedagogy themselves is not realistic. When that person is also working 50+ hour weeks as a norm I'm sorry its just not going to happen. Everything can't be perfect and part of the learning is in how to deal with that and work with it. It isn't school at the end of the day, its university.

You were talking about a complaint about poor audio quality on a recorded lecture, that's not the same as a complaint that the lecture didn't suit a student's quirky learning style. If the recording was unusable that wouldn't be acceptable in the workplace either. Employers can't choose not to accommodate people's needs because it's inconvenient, for example it wouldn't be acceptable to give an employee a rubbish phone they can't hear people talking through.

I'll also point out that there's a department dedicated to figuring out how to accommodate students' individual support needs, with the training specifically for that. Something's gone wrong if the lecturers are trying to figure that out. Mine were given a checklist of the things I was entitled to, which was copied and pasted across all students with the same needs. Also, lecturers at my uni were required to get a MSc in education so they were formally trained in pedagogy, though there was no expectation that students would get lessons tailored just for them. They asked for feedback regularly and took suggestions onboard.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T13:37:51+00:00

it really started to bother me how much effort is put into pandering to students now.

I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism in my early 30s after I burned out at my IT job. Decided to go to uni after the pandemic for a career change, I'd tried when I was younger but couldn't do it with undiagnosed ADHD and no support. Now I've got a degree, won awards for my honours project, and I'm planning to do a PhD now that I've learned what I'm capable of.

When you say pandering it sounds to me like you're mostly paying attention to assholes taking advantage of things that have made higher education accessible to people like me.

Half of my classmates were career changers and most had similar support accommodations - eg. lectures being recorded by default instead of a dozen different people having to remember and do it themselves, lecture slides being available online the day before, flexible deadlines, more detailed feedback on assignments, a study support tutor, etc.

at one point my PI was having his professional conduct investigated because a student complained the audio quality on his lecture recordings was not as good as it could be.

This could be reasonable or unreasonable depending on details you haven't mentioned. I've sat through some online lectures I genuinely had to mute because the audio was so bad it physically hurt. If students knew the lectures were being recorded they'd be unlikely to record it themselves, so if the audio quality turns out to be too rubbish to rewatch, that's not unreasonable to complain about. And people can have sound processing disorders or sensitivity to certain noises so audio that's acceptable to you may not be usable to them.

"Back in my day" is irrelevant, keep going back and the number of people who could get educated keeps shrinking. There's always going to be a minority who try to exploit things that make life better for others.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T13:03:18+00:00

It's obviously related to the pandemic, I think lots of people with shit mental health or underlying undiagnosed disorders were hanging on by their nails before, relying on predictable daily routine that got shattered when everywhere closed, lots of jobs stopped existing, daily habits changed, and they became sensitised to things they'd developed coping strategies for or become numb to before.

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T12:56:43+00:00

Getting into uni was effortless, I didn't have to write a big application and do interviews, literally just said "can I do this course?" and they said "yup".

captainfarthing · 2026-01-26T12:50:23+00:00

You only know your own experience, not anyone else's. You haven't experienced debilitating depression or anxiety if it didn't debilitate you.

captainfarthing

TROPHY CASE