Tag Archives: Personal

I don’t think Twitter is dying

You can stop tweeting #RIPTwitter

Over this past week, Twitter has gotten weird. Reports flying that Musk fired literally everybody, that there’s no engineers managing the servers, that he demanded everyone work 80 hours or quit and most of them quit. Forgive me for not posting sources but most of this is ultimately unsourced info from social media anyway. Regardless, people on Twitter are tweeting up a storm about how this is The End of Twitter and how they’ll all move to Facebook or Instagram or Mastodon when Twitter inevitably goes down for good. I don’t think that’s going to happen, at least not for another year or more.

Twitter may lose some of userbase as its billionaire owner continues to go crazy, but I highly doubt it will be replaced all at once, or even in the next year, or so and for a few reasons:

  • 1.) Lack of alternatives

When MySpace lost the battle to Facebook, it was a true battle between two platforms that did mostly the same thing. Both were neck and neck in terms of usercount and both focused on very similar styles of content and posting. Twitter doesn’t have that problem, Facebook and Instagram are nothing like Twitter in terms of its microblogging content or its ability to spread content to every corner of the userbase by latching onto its trending topics. And Mastodon has a tiny fraction of the total usersbase, if it continues to grow every year and Twitter loses half its userbase every year, then in around 5 years they’ll be neck and neck like Myspace and Facebook were in 2008. Until I see a sustained long-term trend of that nature, I’m not ready to proclaim that This Is The Death Of Twitter.

  • 2.) Institutional Buy-In

Twitter gives institutions something that they really really want, the ability to spread their message easily to all its users at almost no cost. There’s a good reason that Justin Trudeau, his holiness The Pope, and the People’s Daily (most read newspaper in China) all have official active accounts on twitter. Most would never be caught dead on Reddit in an official capacity, and Facebook/Instagram/other sites don’t allow them to reach every user in the way that Twitter does. Even if everyone with a net worth under 1 million dollars left Twitter TODAY, the site would likely continue on the inertia from Institutions for quite some time, as they would find tweeting something and having it get picked up by other institutions (especially newspapers) would still be a great way to get their viewpoint out into the wider world. Institutions don’t change rapidly, and even if Twitter does die it could take years for many institutions to migrate off of it. And the key is that as long as those institutions remain on Twitter, Twitter will still have value to many different users. Users who like to troll politicians’ comments, or bloggers/journalists looking to keep up with what the institutions are putting out, these people will stay on Twitter as long as the institutions stay on Twitter. So even if you start posting your dog pictures solely to Instagram, I doubt the Washington Post newsroom will abandon Twitter any time soon.

  • 3.) The Court of Lord Musk

People like to see billionaires as unaccountable god-kings creating or destroying everything in their path. This is partly because that is the image most billionaires cultivate and partly because they are certainly held less accountable than those of us who work for a living. But Musk isn’t the sole proprietor of Twitter, or even the sole proprietor of Musk Enterprises. There are a legion of accountants, lawyers, and investors who check and double check his every move. It seems strange that a man flaunts both the SEC and slander laws is being checked and double checked, but the very fact that he has never been punished for what he’s done is a testament to the work of his lawyers, accountants, and investors. These intermediaries act as a moderating influence on Musk the auteur CEO and so will likely ensure that no matter what he does the bills will keep getting paid and the lights will stay on at Twitter Enterprises.

  • 4.) Ease of use

Twitter has already been integrated into just about everything imaginable. I only have a Twitter handle (@streamsofconsc) to tweet out my daily blog posts. But WordPress (and basically every other posting software) has made it super easy to link your Twitter handle to your blog and auto-post everything you do with no added work necessary. Mastodon isn’t integrated into this ecosystem and probably won’t be any time soon.

  • 5.) I’ve seen this game before with Musk

This is a bit personal, but I’ve predicted the downfall of Musk before myself. I was part of the Musk hate-culture in r/enoughmuskspam for a fair bit, and fell easily into the echo chamber which pushed a narrative where Musk was constantly on the edge of destruction. I eventually got out, but it made me realize how easily hatred and castigation get amplified in such an echo chamber. Twitter is currently a strong echo chamber declaring the death of the platform and the End of Musk, and since there’s no social benefit to going against the grain, the most hyperbolic and outrageous claims of destruction are shared and amplified. This reminds me all too much of the patterns I saw with the hate-culture surrounding previous Musk ventures, and it makes me skeptical about people’s claims for this one.

I don’t think Twitter will go down because Musk fired too many of the people doing server maintenance. I don’t think Twitter will be replaced by Mastodon within the next few years. I don’t think Musk will be charged with market manipulation or treason for how he’s purchases a major avenue of public speech and trashed it. And I don’t think the people who are declaring the death of Twitter today will ever look back and admit they were wrong (if they are indeed proven wrong) any more than the people who declared the death of Tesla back in 2018 or the peak-oilers of the early 2000s. I think most people will either forget entirely or will claim that they were “early, but not wrong,” eternally pushing back their predicted death-date as they get more and more wrong by the year.

I may be wrong on this, and I’ll try to revisit this post in a year or so to either give my mea culpa or to declare how much smarter I am than everyone, but at this point I’d happily take the gamble that Twitter won’t be dying any time soon.

I’m amazed how little some of my friends can cook

Let me be clear, I barely cook. I can cook eggs, quesadillas, frittatas, burgers and some recipes out of a cookbook. I’m not some maestro of the kitchen and I rarely cook because I usually have faster options. But if necessary I can cook things that are edible and tasty enough to satisfy.

That’s why it’s in some ways baffling that I have so many friends who have cook even less than I do. I texted a picture of a baked-from-the-box brownie to one of my friends who replied “wow! you can cook really well!” You add water and bake, does it really count as cooking?

Eh, I guess this is how it is sometimes. Not everyone owns an oven, not everyone even has a full set of cookware in their apartments, especially people around my age. But still, brownies, they’re easy and delicious so you might as well learn to “cook” them.

How do bonds work

Seriously. I don’t get it. People are telling me “buy bonds, the market will explode” but when I went onto my brokerage I couldn’t understand a damn thing about what I was looking at. If anyone understands bonds, feel free to tell me what I should be doing.

Note: this post was made almost entirely in jest, I understand how bonds work but was miffed at how poor the front-end for buying them was at my brokerage. I’ll have a better post on bonds up later.

Halloween feels bigger than Thanksgiving now

Yard decorations, parties, whole store aisles dedicated to it, I don’t think we’ll have quite so much of that for Thanksgiving this year as we’ve had for Halloween. Halloween has always been a bit of an American tradition, but it feels like it’s exploded in popularity during my adulthood to the point that Halloween parties have now been added to the list of corporate/academic events that serious employees will attend to have a bit of drink and fun and goof off with their bosses and coworkers. What used to be a party mostly for children and collegiates has come into its adulthood and is now a part of the American rolladex of holidays.

I’m not at all sure where this began or when, but I’m wondering if it’s somewhat inevitable for all holidays to expand if the culture allows them. People like goofing off, and having more excuses to do so by turning Halloween into a “season” instead of just a single night of kids asking for candy is something that people will enjoy. I only wonder if Thanksgiving will follow this trend and we’ll have an entire party season from September through January in some distant future.

You shouldn’t go too far down a scientific rabbit hole

Sometimes when you get scientific data that doesn’t make sense, the best use of your time is to say “well that’s weird,” and just redo the experiment. I’ve been in many labs where strange data, be it unknown proteins in a mass spectrometry sample or unknown shapes under an electron microscope, have gotten people’s minds aflutter as they try to figure out what it all means. Is it contamination, is it scientifically interesting, is it something that should be expected but we just don’t know about it? Humans are innately curious, scientists most of all, so when presented with a mystery it’s natural to want to solve it. And a scientific mystery should be easier to solve than most because not only are the experiments set up with numerous controls that can be checked against, but there is a wealth of data in the literature that might point to an answer. When you see something you don’t recognize, it’s easy to dive deep into the literature searching for some paper or clue which might tell you what you’re looking at.

But this isn’t always the best use of your time. Sometimes stuff is just weird for dumb reasons and if you spend weeks trying to figure out why then that’s weeks you’re not spending working on your actual projects. Chasing false leads can also blind you to the more important (if less mysterious) true leads that you should be following. All this to say, my lab is currently in the midst of a mystery that I don’t think is very important and I wish we could all just agree it’s mysterious and get back to more mundane but solvable problems.

Teaching isn’t easy

I’m going to come right out and say that I don’t know if I’m a good teacher.  I’m a passionate teacher, I like to see students learning and growing, but I don’t know if I’m a good one.  And honestly, in my position I don’t know if I can be a good one.

I’m a researcher at a major research institution.  One of the first rungs of the “science-as-a-career” ladder is usually for students to join a lab as unpaid volunteers, either for course credit or just for fun.  They will get trained and learn to help out with some of the duties performed by the lab, they may even do some actual science.  Eventually they may move into a semi-paid position in which their work in the lab pays for some of their tuition, before finally moving to a paid position around their graduation.  From there, the scientific world is their oyster.  But this first rung, with untrained students, is to me the hardest.  Nobody really knows what work in a lab is like until they do it, I know when I was a kid I had a picture in my mind that scientists spent all their time sitting and thinking.  But it’s actually a job that requires moving, doing, skillful techniques, and a lot of hand-eye coordination.  These are all skills that a student needs to learn to progress as a researcher, and I don’t know if I’m doing good as a teacher.

When I work with these students, the biggest issue is imparting on them the necessary knowledge.  This starts with “what is the work we are doing and why,” student may have just learned about DNA replication for instance, but that doesn’t necessary give them the background necessary to understand why DNA-intercalating-molecules are known carcinogens.  And it definitely doesn’t give them the knowledge of all the previous research that has been done in this field that brought us to that conclusion.  So you need to get them up to speed on some of the facts of the field, “here’s what these molecules are, this is why they’re important, this is how we are studying them.”  

Furthermore, a lab is nothing like a classroom, there is no textbook filled with the One Holy Truth that they can study, textbooks only get written about the settled science that is decades old.  Instead there are papers and literature of all kinds that they need to read, scattered throughout many areas and each focusing on a different area.  These scattered papers don’t even make a coherent story unless you know how to read and understand them and draw your own conclusions.  So additionally we must teach them the skills necessary for them to gain knowledge on their own.

Finally, there’s teaching them the things we actually do in lab.  The techniques, the protocols, and even the proper methods for safety and cleaning, teaching them all there is to know about working and being in a lab is probably the most important part of keeping them safe, but it’s also difficult to teach this in any way but by rote.  You just tell them what to do and tell them to keep trying until they do it right, I don’t really have the skills necessary to teach physical activities in any way but that.

So with all that said, there’s a lot of teaching that needs to go on between senior lab members and junior lab members, and personally I don’t know if I’m up to the task.  I try to help them learn on their own, but I seem to always just give them the answer when they can’t figure it out.  I try to help them do things in lab, but only by doing it myself and letting them watch how I do it.  I just don’t know if what I’m doing is the best or most helpful way to teach them, but teaching is just such a small part of my job that I don’t have the headspace to “get good” at it either.  I hope I’m teaching them and I hope they can leave this lab with good memories of their time here, but I just don’t know.

What to do when you don’t know what to do

I’m reaching a point in my current project where I’m not entirely sure where to go next. I don’t want to get too specific or anything but I’m trying to extract and image a protein and so far it hasn’t been working. It’s led me to ask the question: what do I do when I don’t know what to do? So far I don’t have an answer for this one, the obvious answer is to “try something else” but that’s vague and isn’t an action plan, try what else. There are a near infinite number of “elses” that I could try to do and no reason to believe any of them would fix my problem. I’ve considered trying to approach the problem from a different angle: why do I think the protein is there to begin with and can I prove that? But nothing is without cost, I could do a big experiment to prove what I already suspected to be the case (the protein is there) without solving my underlying problem (I’m not able to extract and image it). Doing an experiment where the upside is a major setback and the downside is to remain stuck in a rut isn’t appealing.

So I’m still very busy with this project and that’s my excuse for not having a good post today 🙂

我在想用中文写一个报

我觉得报的意思是“report”所以因为我不知到怎么说”post”用中文所以我说报。

我现在必须写一个工作的报告，可是我告诉我的自己我会每一个天在我的blog写一个报。所这是我的报。我想在工作找得到新朋友，可是这是特别难的。每一个工人我们都工作以后回家，不做好玩的东西。所以我跟同工不花时间，所以我跟同工不当朋友。

我也不知道什么我想用中文说。不知道怎么关于科学用中文写。我的工作用蛋白质，我可以说那。我们学病毒，我可以说那。可是怎么说别的东西？

这个包是不太条可是我没昨天晚上写，我今天在写。所以我应该做工作，所以不太条不太错。

The log in your own eye?

There’s someone I love who really needs help but doesn’t want it. There’s an old saying about removing the log in your own eye before criticizing the speck in someone else’s eye. But at the same time, if someone just doesn’t see their problem, isn’t if your duty to try to help them? I can’t fix everything about myself, especially not all at once, but I can at least try to help someone fix themselves while also trying to fix myself. I don’t know what to do though, it’s hard to see someone not get the help they need especially if you love them, but it can destroy a relationship to try to help someone who doesn’t want it. I really hope I can help

I’ve got to stop staying up so late

So no real post today as instead of writing for my blog I stayed up super late goofing off. This isn’t some deep meditation on the modern world but it really is too easy to get trapped in a spiral these days, there’s more words on the internet than any one man could read in a lifetime. So even while I find myself pointlessly scrolling through social media, I mostly end up just rereading the same things I already know, written by a different person. And when it’s not that it’s reading things I don’t really care about and will forget in a week. The breaking news cycle is the hardest to break out of, recently there’s been a lot of news about Ukraine liberating more and more of their territory, I find myself scrolling through news like an addict looking for any new information even though I know nothing happens in minutes or hours.

So yeah I need to stop.