The db0 folks did spin up the anarchist.nexus piefed instance if you want to give it a try!

This is all configurable by site admins and not baked into the code.

Relevant issue: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/252

I have never used yunohost before, but ldap was just recently integrated into piefed (that’s what chat.piefed.social uses for instance). So the main blocker from that issue seems resolved.

Ugh…this one still frustrates me a lot. If I could wave a magic wand and have a different contributor do two things for the project, animated gifs would be one and a more consistent compact layout would be the other.

Edit: Just want to add that when I was working on the gif problem, I got it working for posts…but you have to click through into the lightbox or to the complete image url…the thumbnail isn’t animated. So, I got partway there, but ran into technical limitations of the specific python library being used. Relevant issue.

As somebody that has done a lot of recent work on the UI for piefed, I have tried to make sure that it works even at quite small screen sizes. I actually just submitted a couple commits in the past couple hours to make the navbar across the top of communities/feeds/topics flow smoother across different screen sizes. The PWA is so far my preferred way to use piefed.

This isn’t happening in YouTube Music, the paid music platform. Instead, it is users putting together playlists of normal YouTube videos and presenting them as an album playlist while maliciously inserting a monetized, spammy video into it. As far as I know, YouTube Music wouldn’t really be vulnerable to the same kind of abuse.

Like winamp skins for lemmy?

I am a big fan of content-specific instances. Some instances off the top of my head that fit this description:

• bookwormstory.social - Instance about the Ascendance of a Bookworm series
• ani.social - Instance about anime/manga/Japanese media
• slrpnk.net - Instance focused on the climate crisis and related issues
• programming.dev - Instance focused on software development
• startrek.website - Instance about Star Trek
• literature.cafe - Instance about books and writing

…and I am sure there are many others. I just think that having a focus like that provides a more interesting local instance environment than a large, generalist instance, though both have a place.

It’s all based on the median household income. I feel like that isn’t the best representation if the median household is losing purchasing power over time due to wage stagnation, but it’s the definition they went with. From the article:

The report, which crunched the numbers for all 50 states, is based on Pew Research’s definition of middle class: two-thirds to double the median household income.

Just for some background information on how most countries tend to rely on larger, more rigorous regulatory bodies…

I am in the pharma industry (not in vaccines though). Typically the two main regulators that most other countries look to as a reference are either the FDA or the EMA (the EU organization). This usually means that if you can satisfy the requirements of one of these bodies, then it is satisfactory for the other country as well. However, it isn’t universal as each other country will usually have some modifications here and there for whatever reason. The most annoyingly particular ones I have dealt with in the past are China and Japan.

subtitle playback

This is still a little weird. I found that the web client (in a browser) handles this really well with default settings. However, if I try to use the desktop app or a mobile client, I have to force it to burn in the subtitles for them to show up reliably. Fortunately, there are per-client settings for this now:

It’s been a while since I last used LaTeX since I am in industry now, but there is definitely a learning curve. If you are talking about undergrads, then it might be too steep a challenge for most to want to take on unless they plan on pursuing academia long-term. Like others have mentioned, LaTeX is a kind of standard that you see used a lot in academic circles. Some journals also like or support things that are created through tex and will have their own templates to use.

Basically, LaTeX consists of writing in a markup language, like your screenshot, and then running that through a processor that interprets your .tex file and creates the formatted output (usually a pdf). Back in my day, TexnicCenter was the program of choice to write the actual .tex file, but some quick searching and it looks like VSCode with an appropriate extension is probably one of the best/easiest ways to do it now.

The most annoying part of tex is references. I remember being utterly confused by BibTeX when I was trying to get it to work. I am way out of date on what best practices for today might be, but I hope they have improved that process somewhat.

Seconding LaTeX as the gold standard for formatting math/science in written form. Some of my peers in grad school (physics) wrote up their assignments in it (I opted instead for massive reams of handwritten work). However, I did write up my thesis in LaTeX. My university had a LaTeX template for a thesis that took care of the boilerplate formatting, I just had to focus on the content.

I own a Prius (not a PHEV though, just a hybrid) and can corroborate that my mileage goes down significantly in the winter months. It is a combination of a couple factors in my experience.

• Needing to run the engine more to heat things up for defrosting and heating the cabin.
• Related to the above, I tend to idle a lot more in the winter while cleaning ice/snow off the car, letting it warm up, or clearing the driveway.
• Switching to winter tires (Blizzaks) negatively impacts rolling resistance compared to the LRR tires (Ecopias) I use the rest of the year.

I tend to average ~45 mpg in the summer and ~37 mpg in the winter over the past two years.

It also depends on the community a lot. The anime community on lemmy (!anime@ani.social, shameless plug) has been super chill overall. I think it’s in large part due to the lemmy userbase skewing older than your average social media user.

I work in pharma, regularly writing and filing things with the FDA (and other agencies), and this has been a topic of conversation at work. The good news for people is that the EMA is still a thing in the EU. So, at least the large pharma companies (like the one I work for), are likely to not really change much about their quality control/processes/etc. because we will still need to conform to the EMA guidelines which are typically in line with the current FDA (sometimes more strict, sometimes less so). The real quality concern would be smaller companies that only file for products in the US. They would only need to meet whatever new FDA guidelines come into effect (if they even do, changing stuff like GMP guidance is extremely complicated and time consuming) since the US is their only market.

Don’t overthink it. I bend the rules in my communities quite often. The case that happens most often is somebody posting a duplicate of a news story. However, it is usually one or more days later and the new post usually picks up some comments from new people that didn’t comment on the previous post. I often let those slide. As long as people are trying to constructively engage in the community, then I give people the benefit of the doubt.

That style does work well for presentations

I honestly prefer presentations to writing for the reasons you pointed out. I have never been too nervous when it comes to public speaking, and I feel much more able to convey my point through a more conversational style. However, my presentation style (specifically slide design) has had to change a lot over the course of my career.

When I was in grad school, my preferred method of presentation was to have a slide with a single graph/image/diagram on it and then verbally talk through all the things I wanted to convey for that slide. It allowed me tons of flexibility, kept the slides from becoming cluttered and distracting, and created a more conversational atmosphere as people felt more empowered to ask questions as I was going (this also helps keep the audience engaged).

However, as I moved into a professional setting, I had a mentor sit me down and tell me how great my presentations were, but they were not really effective in a corporate setting like this one (global company, split across timezones, etc). The simple reason being that the slides I was making were being shared to others who couldn’t make it to my presentation and a good chunk of the actual audience of the presentation only ever got to see the slides, without the benefit of my talking to help them understand. So, this has led me to move more towards including text on my slides. I basically have to ask myself if there is enough information on this slide to understand things without my explaining it, but without anything extra to make it confusing.

Since the pandemic, I have also had to change things up a bit to make presentations more amenable to presenting via Teams/Zoom. This means things like removing videos, complex animation, or any audio. It just doesn’t work reliably enough through screen sharing and if you can find a way around it, then it makes everybody’s life easier.

Speaking of tangents, this has been a long one, but I care a lot about effective communication and specifically presentations. So many people are so bad at giving a good presentation, and I find it frustrating personally, when I have to sit through so many.

I actually agree with you about math education and math texts. It is really bad at conveying understanding and my math-heavy courses were the toughest for me (E&M in grad school was awful). Too often math textbooks simply present things and leave the proof as an exercise for the reader, or they will lean too far the other way and present formal proofs for everything. Either way is not helpful for developing an intuitive understanding of what is going on.

The things that helped me develop communication skills the most were simply doing it a lot followed by having some good mentors that I found to be good communicators. My grad school advisor was great at communicating physics and one of my early bosses in industry was an excellent presenter. So, I would often bounce either writing or slides off of them for feedback.

I am guilty of writing walls of text as comments, but I try to stick to my lane. You can see my most recent wall of text about freeze dryers as an example. There are a few things that I think need to come together to create a good, high-effort post:

• Passion - If you don’t care, you aren’t going to spend the time to write about something
• Knowledge - For some topics this may be less required, but I tend to create walls of text about technical issues. I have a PhD in physics, so that gives me a pretty good foundation of knowledge to work from in this regard
• Writing Ability - You need to be able to write effectively to make a wall of text worthwhile. This is a skill that gets better the more you do it.

The other thing I tend to do when writing a high-effort post is I actually proofread it before making it. I try to cut out unneeded tangents, reword things that might be confusing, or supplement things that aren’t motivated enough.

For me personally, this doesn’t take me too long to do since I have been writing and presenting about extremely technical topics for about two decades at this point. Like I mentioned above, informative writing is a skill that gets better with practice. So, doing it regularly as a significant part of my job as well as providing feedback to others on their writing/presentations, has provided me with tons of practice to improve these things.

If you want some formal guidance on scientific writing/presentations specifically, two books I have found informative (mostly on presentations) have been:

• The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley
• slide:ology - The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte