Pull a page out of Disney’s book: dead parents.

In what way could this character have lost his parents in this universe? Vary the emotional damage to fit the theme you want (you can even have the character’s parents die in a stupid way if you want the story to be somewhat humorous)

Create a villain (or hero) to have committed that act—or use factions you already thought of—and voilà you have a character revenge arc set up.

You can repeat this with basically any universe, and it still feels fresh if you just keep changing a few things around.

Did it happen recently to this person or a long time ago? Maybe change it to be a different family member or a friend. Maybe this was a massacre where there are multiple survivors seeking revenge. Maybe instead of seeking revenge they are really just trying to hide because whatever villain took their loved ones is hunting for them still.

Hell you can even push the entire thing into the past, turn the revenge arc into the lore of the world if the completion of that revenge arc would have had a large impact. Then the main quest could be trying to undo what has been done, or trying to stop another group from trying to undo what has been done. You could even obscure the actual events and make legends that all are loosely based around the truth but contradict each other so your characters need to uncover what really happened. (Cultures like having myths that make them seem better than they actually were)

When you need random characters to play roles in the plot, its often fun to just pick a random race/culture/class in your world and then say “how could a person from this group have ended up where I need them to be and with the skills I need them to have?”

Reliable OS: Debian is the standard, or try Fedora if you want to get the latest software features

Alternate DE’s: xubuntu is a classic and it’s fast. LXQT is also lightweight but not as modern feeling imo. Debian install disks should let you choose either of those DEs (or some others) when installing

I knew a kid who would do datura. Surprisingly normal dude for someone who would occasionally decide to microdose hell itself lol

Abbott: “So say you’re 40 and you like a girl that’s 10. Well you’re really too old for her because you’re 4x her age. So let’s say you wait 5years. Now you’re 45 and she’s 15, so you’re only 3x as old as her, but that’s still a bit much, so you wait another 15years and now you’re 60 and she’s 30. Only half your age now.

How long do you have to wait till you’re both the same age?”

Costello: “Well 4 then 3 then 2… at this rate she’d better be willing to wait for me too.”

Abbott: “what do you mean?”

Costello: “Going like this, eventually she’ll be older than me and she better wait for me to catch up.”

Abbott: “Why would she wait for you?”

Costello: “WELL I WAITED FOR HER!”

When I started trying to learn a new language I was learning Spanish in school, and also trying to learn German, Mandarin, and French on my own. Honestly it worked pretty well, I could even keep them separate in my mind easily which was surprising since people told me I’d get them mixed up if I learned them at the same time.

Anyway, it was only for a year or so because I eventually lost the hyper fixation on language and stopped learning all of them, but yeah I kinda did the same thing you described.

When I’d get bored with one language I’d move on to another. Sometimes I’d spend a whole day on just one, sometimes I’d switching between each of them in the same day.

My first project in Rust was replicating this paper because i wanted to learn rust but needed a project to work on because i hate learning from tutorials.

Of course, I had intended to go the OOP route because that’s what I was used to and this was my first time using rust… that was a bit of a headache. But I did eventually get it working and could watch the weights change in real time. (It was super slow of course but still cool)

Anyway I’ve started making a much much faster version by using a queue to hold neurons and synapses that need updating instead of running through all of them every loop.

It’s like lightning fast compared to the old version; I’m very proud of that. However, my code is an absolute mess and is now filled with

Vec<Arc<Mutex<>>>

And I can’t implement the inhibition in a lazy way like I did the first time, so that’s not fun…

Let’s fucking goooooooo!!!

I am so ready for another Remedy game

This isn’t my field but like it shouldn’t be horrible to drink a little sip of this right? It’s just salts and amino acids and sugar, so I’d expect worst case scenario you majorly throw off your electrolyte balance and possibly give your kidneys and liver a lot of amino acids to get rid of. But that’d probably require drinking a significant amount yes?

Anyone with more bio knowledge want to correct or confirm this hypothesis?

If you go with Lenovo make sure to get one with a real barrel power jack not just a USB-C. Several models with only USBC are plagued by multiple problems from possibly frying the board to mosfets literally coming unsoldered.

I bought one with those issues. It’s still a great laptop, but it stopped charging till I took it apart and did a hack soldering job shorting the mosfets lol

Ah I think I know what this is about now. If you come from a country like Canada where “Engineer” is a protected designation, then I can understand you thinking it’s a lie and I apologize for that misunderstanding.

In America and my state specifically, the word “professional engineer” is protected and requires certification, but “engineer” does not. There were several people in the civil engineering firm in my hometown who were called engineers and only had highschool diplomas, but that didn’t change the fact they were experienced engineers and called engineers.

In other fields of engineering, like software engineering, you’ll find lots of people with the title of engineer without a degree.

I’m sorry that you felt mislead by me calling myself an engineer despite the fact I’m still in school and only an engineer by title for my research. But that was not an intentional deception, simply a discrepancy between our cultural definitions of the term/title.

Also, I have made it far and will likely continue to push on in academia (though I’d like to get out of this country before starting a PhD so that complicates things).

Anyway, I’m sorry that I’ve offended you and that my attempts to explain/defend myself have come off as petulant. I’ll stop engaging with your comments and you should feel free to block me if you don’t want to come across my posts and comments again.

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to explain things more clearly/calmly sooner and for what it’s worth I’ll try to avoid calling myself an “engineer” without a qualifier stating I’m a student or researcher now that I know some places are more strict about the term.

Edit: Might be important to mention that there are still regulations in civil engineering (and other fields) that require certification at some step. Like any design of infrastructure in my state (and I think most others?) requires the stamp of a certified Professional Engineer. You can create designs without the certification but if it’s going to be used by lots of people or affect them adversely through failure, you are supposed to get it checked off by a PE before it gets built / put into use.

Necrobumping this because @chloroken@lemmy.ml linked to it with a misleading description.

TL;DR: @chloroken@lemmy.ml purposefully misrepresented the argument in his link. I didn’t lie nor did he ever prove me wrong, nor was I talking out of my ass in this thread or the other. I share science I think is cool and I find all sorts of science cool even if the research is outside my main field of study. I’ll even admit when my claims are proven wrong or are less certain than I thought (which you can see if you read this full comment section about liver vitamin A).

I’m not “talking out of my ass” in this thread. (Read it btw I mention interesting science) I was doing the research, just like I said, for a personal project on trying to structure a Spiking Neural Net more similarly to human vision, just like I said. This lead me to look into visual processing in the brain and to the structure of the eye since the initial pre-processing of vision actually might start within the retina.

I never mentioned “cuttlefish” but I guess that’s the only cephalopod he thinks of because this was the initial theory of @chloroken@lemmy.ml.

Did you just see that other post about Cephalopod eye anatomy and write this?

I ask because you have a poor grasp of how evolution actually is when you say “evolution makes a mistake”. The truth is that our eyes are one of many layouts in the animal kingdom, it’s not some binary thing like you’re making it out to be.

This was in response to my casual comment about how evolution fucked up our eyes. Obviously evolution can’t really make mistakes because it isn’t conscious but it is the general consensus that our eyes are “inverted” because by the time it became an issue, the system was too complex to easily flip back around (the recurrent laryngeal nerve is another good example of this kind of “fuck up”).

Also obviously there are more kinds of eyes, I never said there weren’t nor did I mean to imply (or think I even accidentally implied) this was binary. Idk why chloroken got the impression that’s what I was saying…?

Anyway, I actually am (and was) doing graduate level research despite being an undergrad. And guess what: you don’t need to have a degree to learn things or read research papers.

I do not write bullshit for people to “be dazzled by the academic tone” (in fact I’ve heard I write to casually in my papers), I “write bullshit” because science is cool and I want to share what I’ve learned with others. Who cares what field of science it’s in, it’s fascinating no matter what.

Do science. Share what you learn. Tell people like @chloroken who just want to be mad at you to fuck off instead of engaging them like I have lol (good advice if they are being purposefully aggressive but it seems like this specific case may have started as miscommunication so I’ll x it out)

Oh and to defend myself (and actually brag a little haha) as of now I’ve officially prototyped a real, novel, mechatronics system for use in prosthetics and augmented reality systems, and there’s now a paper in the works with my name first. Point is I don’t think it’s wrong to call myself an engineer. Especially to strangers on the internet who don’t need to know whether I’m a grad researcher or working for a company.

Also I’d go into more detail about my research (the federally funded ones not the hobby ones) but @chloroken@lemmy.ml seems like the kind of person who’d stalk/doxx me. So I really should be more careful about what I say about my personal life.

I haven’t intentionally misrepresented myself in this comment section or the previous one or any others as far as I can think of.

I also have not lied.

So, what is the real reason for the aggression mate?

Ah yes my wildest fantasy: to find out that the ideas I think are new and original have been studied well beyond my level of understanding by other people lol

I hope you’ve never worked in academia. You sound like you really like discouraging people from enjoying science unless they meet your arbitrary education standards.

Anyone can do science. Sure, sometimes people who don’t know a lot learn a little and think they know a lot, but you shouldn’t just shut them down. If someone has a passion for exploration you should encourage them to keep going, catch their mistakes sure, help them question their thought process, but remind them that making mistakes or thinking an idea is novel when it isn’t is something everyone does and they shouldn’t be ashamed for it.

You’re right, we build on the backs of giants. The issue is, typically, anything I discover myself is typically very far below the level where new science can be done OR it is far enough above my current knowledge that I just don’t even know where I’d begin.

Bi intuitionistic logic is the latter category. I was expecting truth tables and instead had to add a ton of words to my vocabulary like “Heyting Algebra” and “Kripke Frame” etc. just to understand what the paper was saying (not that I do fully understand what the papers are saying lol)

First, I said the “new things” were already discovered by dead guys. They’re new to me, not to the world. That’s the point of the comment.

Secondly, I am an engineering undergrad and I don’t think I ever claimed to be working with “ocular algorithms.” I had been experimenting with spiking neural networks and was replicating a research paper on using a two layer inhibition structure to recognize MNIST numbers.

That lead me to question how images were processed in the brain which lead me to read up on the structure of the eye (which you tried to call me out on previously) as well as the structure of the neocortex and the supposed function of each of the visual processing areas of the neocortex.

I’m sorry if I’m coming off as condescending or as “an intellectual giant” I’m a kid with ADHD and curiosity. I like explaining the cool things I’ve recently learned.

As for “what would happen if a professor for an undergrad lab you work at saw the way you write” they definitely already know. In fact my supervisor is pretty supportive of my random tangents into other kinds of science (so long as it doesn’t distract from the work I need to get done). Oh and remember how I said there might be an application for spiking neural nets in one of the grad students projects? My supervisor thinks so too! (though it’s not the one I was thinking of lol)

Edit: Also, I don’t think I ever mentioned cuttlefish in that comment stream you linked…? You mostly just said I didn’t know what I was talking about and then after I showed you the sources I’d drawn from you started asking questions about my research and education. Are you just upset that people downvoted you in that thread?

Yeah I am an undergrad in engineering not math or physics or bio or anything like that. I just get curious and end up going down rabbit holes of niche science.

Bro I’ve been forgetting to set aside doses that I skip. So when I ran out of my last bottle two days ago I like actually ran out. And yeah turns out I have to make an appointment to get a refill. Have to call to make appointment.

Couldn’t call friday because I noticed after hours. Likely won’t be able to call tomorrow because I won’t be medicated.

Oh also I have an exam tomorrow that I planned to study for over the weekend but couldn’t. I low key want to curl up in a ball and die. But I can’t do that to my mechatronics teammates lol

Nothing kills my motivation more than discovering something new in math and then finding out some dead guy beat me to the punch by several centuries lol

Then again sometimes it’s worse when I expect there to be literature on a topic and then discovering there isn’t even a wiki page for it.

Hell, most recently it was bi-intuitionistic logic. Originally studied in the 40s by one German guy who took bad notes. Main body of work done by a single math grad in the 70s (Rauszer) culminating in her PhD. Turns out there were errors discovered in her proofs and it was proven inconsistent in 2001. Only for two relatively young mathematicians to clear up that there are two separate versions of bi-intuitionistic logic which are consistent. This discovery and proof are found a paper that was published only this fucking year.

I asked a simple question about dealing with uncertainty in a logical system and instead of finding a well studied foundation of knowledge I was yeeted to the bleeding edge of mathematics.

Edit: in case it isn’t clear, by “new things” I mean new to me not new to the world; hence the aforementioned dead guys with published works on the topic. And when I say I was yeeted to the edge of math, I should mention that edge is well beyond my capacity to further. I had to learn a lot about notation for logic just to parse the paper, and I’m sure I still don’t fully understand it.

Why an AI slop image when any number of readily available meme images would work?

I’m an engineering student researcher with a CS minor and ADHD; this kind of research is what I do with my freetime lol.

To be fair this is kind of a shared hobby project/topic between me and my friend (who is a biophysics major now in med school).

Anyway, point is that you don’t need to have a real “purpose” in order to be curious. I work in a robotics/medical lab at my university and my friends is trying to be a surgeon, yet we’re constantly in debates about astro and quantum physics to the point we’ve gotten career physicists to weigh in on our arguments.

No relevance to our majors or our work, but super fucking interesting and full of gaps where there are more theories than facts. Plenty of room for new perspectives.

Normalize doing research for fun!

Edit: changed “engineer” to “engineering student researcher” because a certain person thought I was purposefully misrepresenting the fact I was a student (despite referencing the fact I’m in school in my other comments).

Jsyk in America only “Professional Engineer” is a protected title requiring a certification. You can work as an engineer and have the title of engineer without getting a degree.

I knew several civil engineers in my hometown who were called engineers without having a degree. I think one of them did eventually get his PE certification too after working under a certified PE long enough and taking the tests. (Infrastructure needs a PE sign off before getting built in my state)

In other fields like software engineering you’ll find a lot more people with the title of “engineer” and no certification or degree.

Anyway, point is that I’m sorry if I mislead anyone. I thought it was obvious I’m in school; in the future I’ll try to avoid calling myself an engineer without a qualifier mentioning I’m a student. I think this is the only comment I’ve needed to update for that, hopefully it will stay that way.