It’s been years since I’ve been in the lab but it really will depend a lot on the subject matter and the type of experiment.

If it’s a subject matter that is fairly well explored and defined, the alternative hypotheses might be fairly straightforward. Take, for example, an experiment from a while ago where entomologists suspected that desert ants navigate by using dead reckoning, effectively counting their steps, remembering their changes in direction measured by a biological compass, and integrating them together, in a process similar to “fusion” in electronic position sensors.

To validate part of this hypothesis, they needed to get more granular and isolate one part of it. So, they formulated a “sub-hypothesis” that stated that the ants had some sort of innate awareness of the distance that they covered with each step, knowing the length of their legs and this their stride length, similar to how cats know their healthy body width. The experimental hypothesis would be something like:

“Altering the length of desert ant legs will result in navigation failure with longer legs causing them to overshoot and shorter legs causing them to undershoot. The navigational trajectories should otherwise be identical.”

Building alternative hypotheses for this relatively simple experiment, prior to conducting it would be straightforward, as you appear to be suspecting. They could be as simple as:

“The length of the desert ant’s legs will have no impact on their navigation because they are not directly related. This will be apparent through the ants showing no discernable difference in the paths that they take when navigating, regardless of leg length.”

“The length of the desert ant’s legs will have some impact on their navigation but, they are able to compensate for discrepancies in stride length through some as of yet unknown mechanism. This will likely be apparent in statistically significant distance-related navigation errors in their paths.”

After the experiment, the data would be analyzed and checked for a match against the established hypotheses. If there is not a good match or there is an unexpected shape to the data, further experiments may be required to see if it is an anomaly or if something else might be going on.

(In this case, it was found that, yes, desert ants have some sort of innate awareness of what their stride length should be and changes in their leg lengths throw off their navigation, as expected.)

Now, when it gets to subjects that are less clear and established, alternative hypotheses can get a lot more challenging because often the difference between the data fit that proves or disproves a hypothesis can be miniscule. Or, the data points might form a completely unexpected shape that doesn’t match currently known phenomena.

I honestly don’t understand why everything has to be taken so goddamn uncharitably by the regulars on that instance. It blows my mind how they manage to always act in bad faith. Always.

It’s pretty straightforward, imo, they built a feedback loop into their instance culture that encouraged social dopamine junkies to participate in toxic behaviors, valuing things like “dunking”, othering, and dehumanizing the out group (non-hexies) over things like factuality, good faith, and not being dicks.

The UK government has been systematically destroying its healthcare system for a while now.

Hey. How’d you get my notes?..I forgot where I put them so if you have some kind of trick or magic, it would be most helpful.

Fuck off and give me the fiber that was promised and paid for decades ago.

I may not know that many Jewish people but all of my hebros and hebroettes oppose genocide.

In my experience often detriment. Most of the images for projects that I have been encountering as of late - hell, most Dockerfiles that I’ve been encountering - have hardware-specific config and packages. I just want a Dockerfile or maybe a docker-compose.yaml that is hardware neutral by default and doesn’t use the shitty throttled Dockerhub for its base image.

#!/bin/bash
# Build image and push to registry
docker build -t myproj:latest . && docker push myproj:latest

Benchy’s real purpose.

I hope that a band of 1950s western content enthusiasts follow him around so that they can play the Rawhide theme song every time he begins a journey.

The House is supposed to provide proportional representation, per the US Constitution. It has not since the early 20th century. Instead, it gives significant increased representation to people in lower population states.

You nailed it, IMO. However, I would like a real artificial sentience of some sort just to add to the beautiful variety of the universe. It does seem that many of my fellow humans just want chattle slaves though. Which is saddening.

Do you actually hold these views on politics and AI or are you just a social conflict junkie? I see you jumping to conclusions on things that, from your commenting and post history makes me think that it is intentional. I’m starting to suspect that you’re really not but engaging anywhere in good faith.

I, for one, really love HTTP over

apache2.conf
conf-available/
conf-enabled/
mods-available/
mods-enabled/
sites-available/
sites-enabled/
envvars
magic
ports.conf
sites-available/
sites-enabled/

Thank you!

Þere’s an Esperanto variation on Shava which is really handy.

That is pretty amazing. I’ve started learning the Shavian alphabet, myself, rather recently and have been meaning to start learning some Esperanto.

Absolutely. I’m just accustomed to seeing the currency sign on the left and prefix abbreviation on the right (ex. €300k). Generally, it gets “expanded” to thousand, million, etc. So, three-hundred thousand euro. The things that amused me is thinking of a kiloeuro as a measurement unit, rather than a currency unit.

IIRC, there was a recent case of a malware being discovered and quickly taken down.

put yourself in Putin’s position - it’s a complete non-solution. You don’t fold after going all in.

That’s literally no one’s problem but Putin’s. He has committed crimes. He should accept the personal reprecussions. You’re basically making the “affluenza” argument for someone who has been committing war crimes and murdering civilians because they dared to want to have a representative government.

Easy. Get disappeared by ICE instead.