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.

Starting a new community is an uphill slog. Some tips and observations:

• Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.
• If you haven’t yet, make sure to announce the community in !newcommunities@lemmy.world and/or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
• If you can think of some kind of recurring post series, it is a good structure to provide a steady drip of content. For latin, maybe something like a weekly post about the etymology of a modern word with a latin root?
• In general, posts with a lead image generate much more interaction than non-image, discussion posts. So, the meme-type posts can serve a role to help people discover the community.

Fantastic, thanks! I haven’t made announcements yet about the new community, but hoping to do that some time this week when I get a chance.

I haven’t been able to post as much this past week compared to normal, but things have been going ok:

• !anime@ani.social is actually kind of booming right now with the start of a new season of shows. I have seen lots of first-time commenters chiming in on episode threads. It actually hit ~300 users/day at one point over the weekend.
• !manga@ani.social has been calm but active. There are a handful of other fairly reliable posters that have been able to keep things going while I have been away.

The not as active ones:

• !nokotan@ani.social - I inherited this community when the previous moderator had to step away for an extended period of time. The nokotan community in general is very meme-heavy, and I just don’t really know how to engage with that very well. There is only so much non-meme content about the series. So, I am going to try to binge-read the manga and start posting chapter discussion threads when new chapters are released. I just need to find the time to do that.
• !gundam@ani.social - This is another kind of special case. The current, most active Gundam community is !gundam@possumpat.io. However, that instance announced that they are shutting down later this month. The current users over there were interested in setting up a new community but there wasn’t anybody that wanted to moderate. So, I offered my help in that respect. It just started this past week, so there isn’t much there yet, but I am going to try to keep posting any Gundam-related content I find over there.

You must have taken Nokotan’s loss pretty hard. /s

Good luck finding new mods and I am hoping that you are able to come back before Dan Da Dan season 2 this summer.

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.

Recently, in !anime@ani.social, I configured the episode discussion bot to create posts using the poster art of the show rather than just an empty discussion post as a bit of an experiment about the effect of images. I don’t have hard analytics to dig into, but I have noticed that the episode discussion threads have garnered significantly more votes when they have images, and a small increase in comments. Though, the additional comments are usually just wandering folks instead of people that stick around and engage.

I still don’t let fanart in either the main anime nor manga community because it would too quickly spiral out of control. There is simply too much fanart in existence for these things. Instead, I limit it to official art only, which usually means teasers/posters/trailers. In the manga community, there is a bit of a special case in that I do allow fanart of a series if it was done by a different published author (not just some random pixiv user). This happens sometimes when a series ends and you get other authors drawing commemorative art for it.

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.

We celebrated a one year birthday for both !anime@ani.social and !manga@ani.social. Over the past year we have grown from nothing to being (in my biased opinion), the best place on the fediverse to discuss anime and manga. It has been a lot of work, but they are both active enough now that I can do something like go on vacation for a couple days and they will keep going in my absence (including other mods that will manage things).

I made a series of birthday-themed anime clips to celebrate. If you are interested, here they are:

• Will You Come to My Birthday Party? - Gundam Wing (post on ani.social)
• Celebrating a Birthday with Yunyun - Konosuba (post on ani.social)
• Exchanging Birthday Presents - Azumanga Daioh (post on ani.social)
• Surprise! Happy Birthday! Let’s Have Some Cake - Nichijou (post on ani.social)
• Bonus - Backup Cake - Nichijou

As somebody that mods other communities on ani.social, lemmy has a sizeable portion of its userbase that browses by All rather than by Subscribed. Lemmy also has a sizeable portion of users that are extremely hostile to anything anime or anime-adjacent (just see the lemmy.ml defederation drama from last year for example). So, random downvotes on active posts happen a lot since each new comment pushes that post to the top of the feed when sorted by Active. The important part is the engagement from your community members. One person commenting is worth >100 random up/down votes for keeping a community going.

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

The products I work on are mostly monoclonal antibodies (and the occasional gene therapy product mixed in). So, the types of diseases they are used to treat vary. To be honest, I work on the process/formulation side of the development pipleline and the actual clinical treatment part is pretty much inconsequential to what I do. Some of the past programs I have worked on include treatments for asthma, eczema, multiple myeloma, breast cancer, MS, hemophilia, and tons of others that I don’t remember. Often, when dealing with antibodies, the same medicine can be effective for multiple indications.

The finished vials, post-lyophilization, sealing, labeling, and packaging, are sent to infusion clinics. There, clinicians will add water to the vials to reconstitute the drugs and then administer them to patients via IV (usually).

Watching TC do a video about something I do professionally has been a bit of a trip. For context, I work with freeze dryers (we call them lyophilizers) in pharmaceuticals rather than foods. I help design the lyophilization cycles for biologics and gene therapy products that get preserved through freeze drying. Until this video, I had no idea that people used these instruments for at-home food preservation (which is kind of insane imo).

The instruments that I work with are typically a much larger version of the bench-scale machine that he is using (usually one of the LyoStar line). However, I have used smaller, bench-scale units as well for some quick and dirty work. I included some pictures at the end behind a spoiler tag. Happy to answer any questions people have.

Some differences in how I use lyophilizers in a scientific setting as opposed to a home-use food setting:

• Typically, we only lyo products that are already filled in vials as opposed to a full tray like he’s done.
• We don’t pre-freeze our products before they go into the lyophilizer. Instead we refrigerate the shelf that the vials are sitting on to freeze the contents before we proceed to the drying steps.
• Speaking of the shelves, in our instrument, the shelves can move up and down. This is used to compress the vials after the cycle is completely done, fully seating the vial stoppers and sealing them before we open up the main door.
• Also speaking about stoppering the vials, we typically allow some nitrogen into the chamber before sealing up the vials, at a pressure moderately less than atmospheric pressure. This helps keep the vial sealed until it is properly crimped with a seal.
• When it comes to drying, we do it in two stages. The primary drying step is when our product is kept cold, but put under vacuum. This removes most of the water, but not enough for our purposes. The secondary drying step is when the product is heated while the vacuum is maintained. This removes the rest of the water. We typically shoot for a residual moisture of <1% for a good cycle.
• He talks about how long the process takes. I have worked on processes that take from 1-5 days. Typically, the lyophilizer is limited with how much liquid can be removed per unit time. This limit is determined by the geometry of the vent that connects the main chamber with your vials, and the chamber containing the condenser. Also, if you try to dry too quickly, it can damage the product you are trying to preserve.
• He has some discussion at the end about the end of the cycle and the progress bar. What the instrument is doing is comparing the vapor pressure in the chamber using two different sensors. One of those is sensitive to the vapor pressure of water vapor, and the other is not. So, when things are fully dried out, those two are going to read the same pressure. While drying is still occurring, the sensor that detects water vapor will read a higher pressure. So, the instrument will continue to extend drying until those two pressures are the same.

This is mine too. I use the hell out of it and YouTube music that comes with it. If we look at $/hr, then this is a no-brainer for me.

I consume quite a bit of anime and manga (just look at the communities I moderate), and I see a number of regular complaints about translation in that space. I personally think most of them are overblown and that translators are doing their best. Translation is far from a science and almost every sentence/paragraph has judgement calls that need to be made by the translator. What some people find annoying about a translation might make the work more approachable to somebody else.

One thing that does bother me for Japanese is the exclusion of honorifics. Most subtitles these days include them, which is a definite improvement over official subs of the past. In subtitle form, honorifics are usually the only indication that a speaker is using something like formal language (keigo) unless you have some knowledge of the spoken language.

As a bit of an aside, if you are interested in professional translation and some of the challenges they face (especially with MTL on the horizon), then Anime Herald did an interview with several of them. Check it out!

I have hosted a wordpress site on my unraid box before, but ended up moving it to a VPS instead. I ended up moving it primarily because a VPS is just going to have more uptime since I end up tinkering around with my homelab too often. So, any service that I expect other people to use, I often end up moving it to a VPS (mostly wikis for different things). The one exception to that is anything related to media delivery (plex, jellyfin, *arr stack), because I don’t want to make that as publicly accessible and it needs close integration with the storage array in unraid.

I love all the news articles that get posted to this community, but sometimes its just a lot of fun to vent and complain about mundane stuff. I hope we get more posts like this.

That being said, I don’t find myself on 93 too often these days as I live in Metrowest, so I am on 90 and 95 much more. I run into similar issues though on a couple ramps. One that drives me crazy in particular is the route 9 exit for Framingham off of 90 West (so, the reverse situation you are describing). People slow down for that exit like 2 miles in advance when it is completely unnecessary. Slow down on the ramp, not on the highway people. It’s not hard!

I have lived in the area now for (checks notes) 14 years and there are sometimes just certain spots that are always annoying.