Sure, it always just starts with “I’ll just solder a few resistors here; what’s the problem?”, but before you know it your kid is gonna be out there giving acid baths to PCBs.

Exercise for the reader: Assuming average human eyesight, how many picoseconds away from a collision are you if you can read that size of text and the relative velocity between you and the car ahead of you is large enough that the red label is sufficiently blueshifted to look blue?

So it’s gonna be burnt out and addicted to coffee?

Is this one of those things where you pick 4 to protect you, while the rest try to kill you? What about all the other plants which are trying to kill me in spring?

I didn’t realise that /r/fifthworldproblems had migrated to lemmy

Oh god, I can already see the massive flamewars happening in PRs to change laws.

o lawd the chonky photon is coming

I love Hollow Earth theories. There’s some truly insane worldbuilding that’s gone into describing what’s inside there. Sometimes it becomes this bizarre multidimensional thing with layers of magical effects the deeper you go, and some sort of a primordial chaos forest or something at the bottom. edit: The primordial chaos forest is also infinite, which is important

I tried to find my favorite long-winded text on the topic which goes really deep into the weeds with histories of various alien civilizations and shit, but this is the best I could quickly find.

It’s such a sorry state of things in the modern world that every fluid gets declared super just for participating.

Super participation trophies smh

The universe created life just so it could finally have a wank.

Checks out.

I don’t know about chemistry stuff, but as a leftie this would make me thrilled because of the labeling side.

So often the labels on various unsymmetric things are on the side which would face you if you’re holding the thing right-handed. I’ve lost count of the number of times I pick stuff up on the opposite side of the handle just so I can look at the label.

Don’t you just hate it when actual patients tend to have some stupid skin all over their muscles

Assuming there’s no one else in that part of the universe looking at it from closer up, you could probably play around with fudging some super-duper low-resolution (compared to being there) LoDs on that part of the sky to make it look and behave good enough.

Childless man here, I work mostly remotely.

I don’t miss any sense of community.

You can’t just open up with that and not share some leptopoma perlucidum facts.

In a university there was a lab. And in this lab there lived a postdoc. One day in the third month of their the postdoc heard a rap on their door. It was the professor! They said the postdoc would soon be approached by 12 undergrads, and…

<300 pages of worldbuilding later>

“You must take the samples! And throw them into the synchrotron! I am too old and burnt out to do it!” pleaded the old postdoc to the phd student.

<500 pages of more worldbuilding>

“I did the testing, but the results are not meant for me. I must now travel to the West, into the Private Sector.” said the PhD at their graduation party.

Maybe if the academic world behaved like that, I wouldn’t have burned out and fucked off to the IT sector a decade ago.

Kind of adjacent to this, years ago around said burnout I kept floating this idea around my head where I was thinking if there was some way out of this tradition of creating these giant monolithic papers every time -even if your effective research result could be distilled down to a paragraph with some numbers and preliminary handwaving- where you need to pad the whole thing out with a big-ass literature review to keep the citation circlejerk going.

So why not just have “papers” consist of effectively a few paragraphs? The citation tree of how you got there is still relevant, but you can put all of that stuff in what’s effectively metadata and not clutter up the whole thing with it.

Have an idea for a lab experiment? Publish the methodology as-is, and link it to whatever other tidbits of knowledge make it relevant. Did the experiment and got results? Publish the data, and link to the experiment. Got some new theory out of the results? Publish the theory and link to the experiment results in the metadata. And so on.

Maybe this would have weird side effects of its own, but I can’t help but imagine this would make the whole process so much less painful, and allow also for better organizing of the knowledge produced.

I didn’t ask “Can you imagine something better?”, but “Do you think they would be replaced by something better?”

Edit: And that’s ignoring the fact that the EU hasn’t even existed for centuries to do any of that colonialism or other stuff which you think merits its dismantling.

You think they would be replaced by something better, if they were somehow dismantled now?

Instructions unclear, now the universe consists of nothing but an oven preheated to 375F