#stack exchange

[31suitboots]

small rant time:

i got my computer used off ebay. system76 galpro for 200 bucks, came with 2 chargers and guy was super helpful, booted up popos, works like a dream now and my only complaint is battery life, but i think that's an issue with the age of the thing. probably i'll just have to replace said battery.

anyway, when i first turned it on, i didn't know shit about booting up a new system and the seller couldn't remember his password so after hours and hours of searching how to get into it, how to reset it, maybe doing something physical with the machine, i decided to post on i believe stack exchange. i didnt think i would get an answer because of how specific the problem was, but some mod just locked my post because it "wasn't specific enough", whatever that means. dude was kind of a jerk about it too, i posted my question as clearly as i could without having interacted with linux before at all and dude said something like "you can't just say 'I need help!' without giving context" like my guy. i did give context. i told you everything i knew and you gave me a vague ass answer and locked the post.

anyway after that i went to reddit (only time ever, immediately deleted account) and got an answer in like 45 minutes. literally he could have just said "you need a thumbdrive. get a thumbdrive, download desired os, boot up BIOS and select drive" and been done with it but no so im never touching a programming forum again i guess. dude even found the reddit post and decided to give the exact same vague and unhelpful answer while pointing out that i had crossposted my question

[teslafactory]

we need to stop calling [tumblr] the most autistic userbase. that title very firmly belongs to stack exchange.

[vanilla-voyeur]

Had a didn't believe it was true until it happened to me moment on a Stack Exchange site.

People complain that Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange closes questions for no reason. I have had a small number of questions closed before, but it's always been for a reason in hindsight that I thought was good.

Until this time where my question on the Open Source site got closed, in part because I researched my question before asking.

One of the other reasons was because the person recommending my question get closed couldn't find the answer after searching for it. Hmmm bro maybe if you don't close the question someone else who does know the answer can enlighten both of us. So sorry you're an ignorant piece of shit, but it happens to the best of us.

The main reason they gave for my question being closed was that it was asking for software recommendations. Except that I explained 3 times that I wasn't doing that. There is an objective answer to my question. I legit cited their own docs 3 times to explain that my question was 100% on-topic.

I think the difference might be that I look like a new user on Open Source SE and they're hostile to new users. I posted my question the same day I got my account. I've been on SO for over a decade. I was able to start gaining karma way back when privileged users were less hostile to newbies.

I always assumed that new users were complaining about getting questions closed because they didn't research existing answers or their question was off-topic. But now I realize it's more likely because you just joined yesterday and that means you must be excised from the private VIP club.

[revretch]

For everyone frustrated with more and more knowledge being closed off in Discord, remember that Stack Exchange is a question and answer site with a broad variety of topics and answers that go into great detail! Next to Wikipedia and Google Scholar (paired with Sci-Hub, so I can unlock the papers, of course), it's my leading information resource.

[fall-the-beast]

tfw when your stack exchange question doesn't get any answers

[camwyn]

The Disturbing Fate of a Planet Made of Blueberries

You'll never look at blueberry jam the same way again.

Anders Sandberg, of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, describes himself as an “academic jack-of-all-trades,” and on arXiv.org, a gathering place for pre-prints of academic papers, his contributions include work on risk estimates, supersized machines, neck tie-knots, the Fermi paradox, and the energy required to run a brain as compared to the energy required to run artificial intelligence.

His latest work is a disturbing thought experiment that ensures that anyone who reads it will never look at a blueberry pie the same way again.

Sandberg is a user of Physics Stack Exchange, where anyone can ask a physics-related question and hope for an answer. One user, Billy-bodega, asked the following:

Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen from the perspective of a person on the surface?

And Sandberg, eschewing the usual can’t-be-bothered attitude of Physics Stack Exchange towards such whimsical questions, decided to give the question serious consideration. “The end result,” he writes, “is a world that has a steam atmosphere covering an ocean of jam on top of warm blueberry granita.”

[fruitsoftheweb]

“To simulate the pumping, the bones in the center of the left atrium, the right atrium, left ventricle, and right ventricle are scaled. Over the timeline, these bones are scaled between 0.9 and 1.1. In the animation that follows, the bones in the 4 chambers of the heart are animated by scaling the bones, this causes the rest of the mesh to smoothly pump. Because the other bones are kept in the same position and with the same scale, the veins and arteries stay relatively still. Looking closely at the [animation] shows the small changes in the bones driving the changes in the mesh.“

[eka-mark]

TIL that every orientable 3-manifold is parallelizable! Normally you would need, on top of orientability (i.e. the first Stiefel-Whitney class vanishes), compatibility with a spin structure (i.e. the second Stiefel-Whitney class also vanishes), but apparently the latter condition is redundant (in 3 dimensions). Qiaochu Yuan says he doesn’t have a good intuitive explanation for why this happens, so maybe there isn’t one (yet).