I just got a 5 figure check for two weeks of work reverse engineering proprietary protocols for a super high end centrifuge.
Geeze, scientists! How hard is it to rip apart the hardware, hook up a JTAG debugger, attach an oscilloscope to various PCB traces, capture the data (praying to Linus that it’s a switched protocol), find what might be some documentation from a sketchy Slavic website, call an ex who speaks Russian and have them translate, then reimplement the drivers in a modern operating system with modern realtime kernel modules.
Honestly maintaining or figuring out a migration method for these dinosaur systems would be my ideal job. I just love tinkering with these relics of the past but have no idea where to find this kind of work
At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud, does anyone ever wonder whether humanity is just moving too fast sometimes?
Centuries of slow, gradual, non-linear progress. Then the industrial revolution, electrification, computers, the Internet. The past couple hundred years have had incredible and ever-accelerating progress that has drastically improved our understanding of all sorts of sciences. You can find all sorts of global stats that show how humanity has benefitted from this time. But there have been drawbacks. Pollution and environmental destruction, climate change, rampant capitalism and exploitation. And now we have AI on the horizon: will it upend society or go the way of 3D TV? Are we at the point where we need to cool off “innovation” and take more time to figure out the things that we already have?
And I think that applies to much lower-stakes technology like what’s referenced in this post too. Looking at videogames: there were huge advances from 8-bit to 16-bit. From 2D to 3D. From CD to DVD. The jump from PS3 to PS4 and 360 to Xbone was still noticeable, but not huge. But did we really need a PS5 and Xbox Series? The Switch is definitely past it’s prime, but is the rumored 2028 PS6 really going to be necessary? The jump from 1080p to 4k is nice, but nowhere near as significant as the previous ones. I can’t imagine 8k ever becoming more than a niche application. Higher frame rates are nice, but I think anything higher than 120FPS is the same as 8K: always reserved for niche and enthusiast use cases.
Or you can look at phones. The market is finally slowing down, but for a while phones were only built to last 2 years. To the point where they stopped making user-removable batteries, and they’ve even stopped including SD cards on a lot of models. I have several old HTC and LG phones that are just as functional as when I bought them, but they can’t handle web browsing and most apps are no longer compatible with their operating systems. I could jump through hoops to install something like LineageOS, but that’s relying on a community of volunteers to help to circumvent the restrictions put in place by manufacturers who do not even make phones anymore.
How many different storage formats existed in all of history prior to 1900? Maybe a dozen? How many have been retired since then? Laser disc, 8-track, VHS, cassette, wax cylinders. Vinyl came, went, and has kind of come back again. CD’s peaked in the early 2000’s and are a fraction of what they used to be. Best Buy and Sal-Mart are going to stop selling DVD’s and Blu-Rays next year. Floppy drives have disappeared from computers, and internal optical drives are almost wiped out. Cars are replacing CD’s with Bluetooth and streaming services.
Humanity seems to be moving towards all science and culture being stored on the servers for a handful of huge corporations. All our science and culture at the whim of a billionaire. Library budgets are under attack. Copyright laws get more and more draconian, to the point where even saying something about an IP that it’s owner doesn’t like can result in that content being stricken from all but the most niche platforms.
I applaud organizations like Wikipedia and Archive.org, and of course all of the pirates out there. I’m trying to personally hoard enough physical media to satisfy myself through my lifetime. But it all just seems like a battle humanity is destined to lose with itself.
There are companies that still sell new machines of archaic operating systems for this reason. I’d really recommend anyone in the situation of justletmeremember to look into it, all that stuff could be backed up and given redundancies pretty inexpensively considering the risk.
And yeah, it’s really common. There is way more horrifying applications than research that rely on legacy machines. Everyone has heard that nuclear weapons required floppy disks until very recently, but it wasn’t some isolated case. Stuff like that is all over the military despite the insane amount of money it steals.
I thought about buying an xbox to install kodi on and play some games on the big screen. But when i saw their new trash ad interface and now this, i'll never buy any of their shit again.
That’s so stupid. If they made it like switching between warzone and multiplayer, that’d have been okay, although still unnecessary, but this just bad UX - again. Nobody believes their lie, that this is more than an update anyway, why pretend different?
Hasn’t evolutionary psychology been heavily debunked at this point?
I think it’s much easier to say that dudes have it hammered into their heads that girls are bad at games, so when they underperform and a girl is on their team, they feel emasculated. This isn’t too far off from when dudes end up losing their ‘bread winner’ status in their relationship. They were told they had explicit traits to exhibit and they failed to do so, so it hits them in their self esteem. Classic fragile masculinity.
Patriarchal conditioning makes way more sense than “caveman brain HATE competing with woman!”.
Hasn’t evolutionary psychology been heavily debunked at this point?
No. On the most basic level it shouldn’t really be terribly contentious that evolution has an impact on psychology, on a more detailed level, well, they have their hits and misses just as every other field.
Patriarchal conditioning makes way more sense than
…case in point “everything is socially constructed” is just as bonkers a position as “everything is biologically predetermined”. Why do people have to universalise their specialised area of investigation and “caveman brain HATE competing with woman!” is a rather cartoonish take on evolutionary psychology. If anything it’d be “young male annoyed he can’t hunt for shit while female age-peer can because he wouldn’t be able to provide for her while heavily pregnant”. Note that not being annoyed in that case doesn’t require better hunting skills, only sufficient ones, and “annoyed” can lead to “will work harder on his skills” or “is going to lash out” or “becomes depressive and walks into the desert” or “is going to look around, see all those capable hunters, and focus on hut building instead”. There’s a fuckton of behavioural flexibility left there.
Bad social conditioning then comes into that and shapes tendencies into caricatures of themselves, or good social conditioning comes in and, well, does good things. It’s not an either/or thing, pretty much everything is both nature and nurture.
I was about to point this out - evopsych is an essentialist pseudoscience. Human interactions are governed by culture at least as much as they are by biology.
The entire field of evolutionary psychology debunked? Do you mean the idea that our brains are subject to evolutionary forces like every other part of our anatomy? No, not debunked.
This is conflating specific methodological problems with theoretical claims. Yes, many have criticized the game theoretical methodology typical of evolutionary psychology. There are a lot of highly speculative junk claims out there. It’s also true that some (not all or even most!) cognitive scientists think that we cannot take the perspective that psychology evolved at all. But it is certainly untrue that there is some consensus that evolutionary psychology has been “debunked”.
This criticism is also a bit ironic given the highly speculative nature of the claims you put forward. Your guess sounds plausible I suppose, but I see no reason to think it’s any more methodologically rigorous.
That’s not how science works. I understand that you’re trying to criticize the field, but lack of predictions, even reliable ones, is not itself a problem it has. For one thing, even false theories can make reliable predictions, like Levoisier’s defunct theory of caloric in the 18th century which has now been replaced by modern thermodynamics. The caloric theory can be used to make mathematically accurate predictions, but the underlying theory is still wrong.
Similarly, evo psych can make a lot of reliable predictions without saying anything true. On the contrary, one criticism of the field is that it’s unfalsifiable because an evolutionary theory can always (allegedly) be proposed to fit the data. Which is to say, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
One example: it is proposed that the fusiform face area of the brain is a domain specific module evolved for face detection. It’s present in other animals that recognize conspecifics by their face. In humans, damage to the area leads to face specific agnosia. The theory makes accurate predictions, but is it true? It’s still being debated.
Without predictions and without tangible models you don’t have falsifiability. You unintentionally acknowledged my point without understanding it. The field isn’t a science, just philosophy trying to explain the results from actual sciences, but didn’t itself have any kind of proof of validity.
Your example is much more closely related to neurology and neuropsychology.
If you actually take a graduate level course on scientific methodology or on the philosophy of science, you will learn that “falsifiability” is no longer a viable standard for scientific validity. This is because, logically, no claim is falsifiable: one can always adjust background beliefs to evade a logical contradiction. See the Duheim-Quine thesis.
Moreover, if your argument were correct, we would have to reject evolutionary inferences altogether! What you say about the cognitive system is true for, e.g. the immune system or the endocrine system. But that’s ridiculous. Evolutionary claims are part of the bedrock of the so-called Modern Synthesis in the biological sciences of the last hundred years. Yours is similar to bad arguments made by creationists.
Your “No True Scotsman” response is just deeply confused about what evolutionary psychology even is. What a mess.
Well duh, curve fitting isn’t new, that’s why we try to make predictions before we know the result and try to keep the hypothesis simple. Of course falsifiability isn’t enough alone, but it certainly hasn’t lost its place.
Your comparisons are ridiculous because you’re comparing things which are testable (genetic variances, etc) with hypothetical differences between ancient brains we don’t know the structure of. We still don’t even know enough to make deep comparisons between brains of related animals. Until you can both synthesize and simulate the brain of ancient genomes you have absolutely no idea if you’re on the right track, you can’t know at all. There’s so many different ways a brain can implement the same behavior with so many different unpredictable side effects that you can’t say more than “they behaved in a way that kept them alive long enough” with any reasonable certainty. Do you know at what rate brains have changed biologically? No?
Ugh, your comments are everything I hate about the internet. Both of us know that only one us does research on cognitive science, and it’s not you. Yet, because it’s the internet, you think you can get by with bluster and false confidence.
Of the many mistakes you make: No cognitive neuroscientist would say, without huge caveats, that we can’t make deep comparisons between animal and human brains — not after all the groundbreaking work finding deep functional similarities between bird brains and human brains in the last 10 years. These are groundbreaking findings in comparative neurology, and it’s pretty obvious you know nothing about them. You go on to propose a standard of evidence which require that we can predict protein synthesis based on genetic variances, which is laughable. You also seem to be completely unaware of phylogenetic analysis, which is actually the standard way we make many of our evolutionary inferences.
Look, I’m not even an evolutionary psychologist. I have no skin in that game. But I do hate bullshit artists on the internet.
Why are you spending your time defending the least useful parts of your field? You’re just making it sound more and more like people taking findings from neuropsychology (a science) and making historical guesswork around it (trying to guess what caused changes with zero evidence of how animals behaved in past environments). I’m aware of phylogenetics, but it seems to lose it’s usefulness when most genes have such a weak correlation to behavior and when you can’t actually observe historical behavior. Brains have too high plasticity to predict why a certain region would exist if you don’t know the environment the animal lives in.
You seem to be confused. My claim is not that there are no challenges or criticisms to evolutionary psychology, or that the topic isn’t very hard to study. It’s that these are live debates in a live field because that’s how science works. It is misunderstanding and arrogance like yours that spreads misinformation online.
Your argument is akin to saying “something is hard to study so it doesn’t exist”. We can’t get evidence for how psychology evolved, so psychology didn’t evolve. This was the mistake of radical behaviourists like B.F. Skinner, who thought internal cognitive states were impossible to measure, so cognition must not exist. That is obviously an error in inference, but also a lack of imagination.
Making predictions and conducting manipulation experiments isn’t possible / practical in all fields of science. Medicine, astronomy, archaeology, evolution and climate studies are other examples.
Astronomy at least collects a lot of data from those one-time observations and try to model the physics, hoping to be able to see something similar again to calibrate the models. For medicine it varies, for rare disease and injuries that are unethical to replicate its a valid issue but they still have scientific models of the affected organs, etc, and similarly to above they try to model it and predict what treatments would work. And all your examples have historical data to some extent.
Evopsych have essentially zero usable historical data and adds no new understanding over regular psychology, and I’ve never heard anybody talk about how they expect behaviors to actually have formed over generations (nor does it meaningfully cover learned and taught behavior)
You explained the limitations astronomers and medical researchers face. Psychologists face similar problems, which is why all their results should be treated with a certain amount of scepticism. But that does not mean their work is worthless; just that it is hard. A lot of traditional psychology was based on what one person thought, rather than logical arguments or experimental evidence. Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to place the study of the brain’s workings in the context of evolution.
I’ve never heard anybody talk about how they expect behaviors to actually have formed over generations (nor does it meaningfully cover learned and taught behavior)
Individual human behaviours depend on a lot of other factors. All you can do from an evolutionary perspective is to explain some common trends. For example, in almost all cultures, some people are gay / ace. Traditional psychologists long thought of this as some sort of mental condition. But if you think of society in the context of inclusive fitness and r/K strategy, it makes a lot of sense to have a certain percentage of the population not reproduce. Is this why some people are gay / ace? I don’t know, and I don’t think we’ll ever know. But at least we can try to explain some things.
Yes. It is unethical to give someone a disease so you can study it. Best we have are case studies of people who got the disease and are being treated for it.
In climate studies, it is not practical to increase temperature or humidity by x% and see the effects. Again, you have case studies - either from the past or from parts of the world that are warming much faster than the rest. Or you can do mesocosm experiments where you warm, say, a square metre of grassland, and see the effects. But then there is a lot of uncertainity in scaling up the findings of such small-scale studies.
I tend to think the social angle is more credible Because the behavior of being a dick to female-sounding voices in games is not a universal behavior. Those who aren’t misogynists don’t act that way. How strange.
I honestly don’t understand why anyone buys major-publisher games anymore. There are indie games that are at least as good and that come without the garbage.
The games industry got fucking huge and most people are just mindless consumers who buy whatever is advertised to them. It sounds crazy, but people buy these $70 games, buy the 'deluxe' editions for almost double, then buy loads of cosmetics in game. And they do it every year. All these companies are going to do is milk this mindset, so triple A will never change.
Indie, as you say, is the way to go. Actual games made by passionate people, with (most of the time) no bullshit attached.
Why mindless? Why can’t I enjoy a multi-player arcade shooter without being called mindless?
I almost exclusively play AAA games, with the occasional indie in between. The indies I play are basically all the famous ones that got really big.
It’s my entertainment, my time. Why call me mindless? The only issue Lemmy has, this whole “rebel without a cause” attitude against everything that is mainstream :)
A friend of mine is a top level director on a recent AAA game that wasn’t very well received. I can assure you, he was very passionate about his game.
Fair enough. Even if I like cod, I’ll still bitch about the campaign this time around. It’s not original and not exciting at all. I still don’t regret getting it for the mp/zombies.
Sorry, I wasnt calling people mindless, you are right that anyone can enjoy whatever they want. I was referring to 'mindless consumerism', where people arent really frugal and just buy whatever thing the big companies want to you to buy.
And the passion thing, obviously theres a lot of passionate people at big studios, but the leads of such places usually dont and bring it all down in the name of profit for them and their shareholders. Triple A is a money making machine, there's not a lot of innovation there anymore and a lot of the games are very unimaginative, regardless of how passionate the individual developers are.
Most indie games just don’t draw me in. They’re usually missing some major mechanic that ruins it for me. I also enjoy quality graphics, and in my experience, that’s the first thing to go with an indie developer.
That’s not to say I haven’t found some I enjoy (bastion, sea of stars, stardew valley), but most of the time they just don’t do it for me.
I know we all don’t want to accept it but the truth is this will work. Until whales stop existing things like this will be around. These companies are forcing advertisements in every part of our lives and now they aren’t even trying to be sly about it.
Dude same, first Roku started putting ads on the main menu and now Microsoft is pulling bullshit. Just another reminder that we don’t actually own anything anymore
You know! That’s what I was originally going to comment but wasn’t sure it’d make sense. Purchasing a product just means another way to sell to you nowadays. It’s ridiculous.
How do the people working fore Microsoft even come up with this shit? Do they not play Xbox? How are they not infuriated with every idea like this that they come up with?
Ambitious exec promotion candidate has an idea, senior executive sees idea and sponsors it as they believe it will make them money, JIRA lands in dev backlog, devs moan about it, devs like having jobs, devs implement.
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