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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • “Publish or perish” is an expression that’s been around since forever and it’s well ingrained into every researcher’s mind so…

    What did society expect?

    (Not so) Fun story: when a friend of mine was doing her PhD she was trying really hard to reproduce an experiment published on Nature by two Harvard postdocs at the time. She was so frustrated because she couldn’t reproduce it, so she approached one of the authors during a conference and he candidly admitted the experiment was utterly wrong, since after publishing it they realized they made a fatal mistake in interpreting the result which invalidated their claims.

    They published the original paper honestly, since they were not aware of the mistake at the time, but they willingly decided not to retract it since a paper in Nature is always a paper in Nature and the citations piling up were too important for their career… How about that for the intellectual honesty that scientists project having as an aura?

    Anyhow, this nearly killed my friend’s PhD, but luckily she switched to something related she managed to understand and graduated…


  • I stopped using Windows in 2008 (juggling between a mixture of Linux and Mac OS). One of the reasons, is that at that time I thought Windows was legitimately a mess.

    Over time, I thought it got a bit better when seeing it on friends’s computers.

    Due to laziness, Windows 11 got installed on my office computer (which I use 1% of my time) and I thought it was honestly pretty good (as in, I never thought about switching back, but it was fine to use it when necessary).

    Now that they plug in ads, I’ll certainly want to switch back /s








  • OT but related to the discussion: is there a way to track if and how the fediverse is increasing?

    I looked on Wikipedia and it said it’s just about ~67000 users on Lemmy VS ~52 million users on Reddit.

    I’m spending most of my time on my phone on Lemmy (and about 5 mins on Reddit) every day now, but it would be awesome to be slowly attracting more users from Reddit over time.

    Sure, it’s better to be fewer users if it does lead to more quality conversations (which is what I find so far), but the fediverse still needs to grow!

    Edit: fixed grammar and clarity in the last sentence.