https://www.audubon.org/magazine/apparently-magpies-and-crows-are-using-anti-bird-spikes-make-their-nests

I am fairly sure this is a mix of plotlines from several different movies.

I am sure there are a ton of factors involved. I am also sure that there is a lot of financial incentives to publish positive studies.

There is a huge caveat to posting a study to counter your stats above since you technically aren’t wrong. “Typically” can mean many different things, but here, it can also fit within published data.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1125407/

Most articles I found usually point to roughly the same numbers as that study, but there is a lot of variation in how those numbers are presented. (Even that study initially presents stats in a way that is confusing: A percentage of a percentage of a percentage, over time.)

My point is that it’s one of those stats that is super easy view as “really good” or simultaneously “exceptionally bad”. IMHO, I still think it’s crazy that we can even do transplants at all.

Edit: I believe everyone should at least get a chance to live a bit longer, but it sucks that it comes at extreme cost. The procedures are extremely expensive and a person could potentially be put on expensive anti-rejection drugs for the remainder of their life. Add in all the follow-up appointments and occasional hiccups in recovery (adding even more cost) a person is likely going to die broke and be put through even more stress that is a very real danger to health anyway.

Those drones are still very inaccurate compared to other weapons that we use today and are basically just terror weapons. It is an automated killing machine, sure. It doesn’t target anything other than a coordinate.

It’s the decision by a machine to target something specific that is the moral conundrum. If you give a machine the ability to “decide” to kill one person over another, there isn’t anyone to blame for the death. There is a ton of randomness introduced into neutral networks (AI) and any decisions are non-deterministic in nature. You can jam in as many guardrails as you want, but if the ultimate decision is to kill or not to kill, the guardrails do not matter. This spawns a ton of questions about giving machines the intelligence to kill. Even though there is randomness in any conflict, we can get away with calling it “collateral damage”.

If a machine decides that a book looks like a gun and hoses a classroom of 5 year olds, there isn’t really any accountability if the machine was approved by law. Again, there isn’t anyone to blame, which is a huge part of how humanity works, unfortunately. (Side thought: This would get even more complicated if said machine was supposed to fill the role of a protector or guardian.)

Even with the most complex weapons today, they are just following specific directions to hit a coordinate at a specific time. There isn’t any real thought behind it even if it is extremely accurate. Once the trigger is pulled, weapon go to destination and the trigger person is responsible.

Edit: I made a fuck ton of edits to add clarification. Sorry if you were an unfortunate recipient of a draft.

Used to watch him on the Today show on a black and white TV when I was a kid. We aren’t that old, TBH.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke

I certainly wouldn’t say it was incompetent and there is a good set of data points. Given the nature of what the study is attempting to correlate, not explaining what limitations were taken into account is a a significant limitation, IMHO. It is called out that there are limitations, but that it is essentially just a short footnote. (The full paper does a better job of calling out other studies and some contradictions.)

This referenced study found the opposite and had a no (or weaker correlation) to cancer associated with SSBs: Khairan P, et al. Sugary drink consumption and the subsequent risk of gastric cancer: Khairan P, et al. Sugary drink consumption and the subsequent risk of gastric cancer: The Japan Public Health Center-based Prospective Study. Eur J Clin Nutr 2023;77:218-25.

Without doing a comparative analysis of the studies, which would be interesting, I have open questions about what the key differences were. My first guess (without calling either study “wrong”) is that maybe risk factors were calculated differently?

On the darker side, there is motivation for keying-in on a specific correlation and that cannot be ignored either. (Past grants, groups requesting the study, etc.) The original paper also sets itself up to be a marketing call-out for artificially sweetened beverages, unfortunately. (I am not saying that is the intent, but the wording aligns exactly with what vitamin water-type company would want to see. It made for a good Lemmy post title, at a minimum.)

At the end of the day, they stated what they were looking for and presented what seems to be a clean analysis of that data. The limitations that were presented have the potential to be significant, however.

So my chance of developing gastric cancer doubles to 1.8% chance over my lifetime if I drink sugar-beverages every day… (This math wasn’t sponsored by a cancer testing company.)

After you actually get the the study, there wasn’t any mention of other associated lifestyle behaviors that may contribute to the risk of gastric cancers. What sticks out to me is that people drinking one or more sugar-packed beverages per day likely have additional diet or lifestyle concerns.

It’s not that I think the number crunching for the study was wrong or that the sample sizes were too small, it’s just that it was extremely focused on making a correlation for the sake of making a correlation.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter.

It’s mostly function for cameras like that. The lense stacks for cameras these days is some really cool stuff crammed into a really tiny package. I don’t know the exact function of each camera, but they are collecting a lot of light to focus on a small camera sensor and are able to achieve some amazing results for various focal depths.

More lense with bigger holes equal more light, usually.

The biggest ones are going to be your generic filters which need big enough to keep the rings from interfering with the field of view.

There is some super cool engineering packed into those thing, but mainly because of their size.

I would try and light it outside, but with a long stick (like a wooden skewer). There is a high chance that those are O2 bubbles, if you were trying to make some Sodium Percarbonate which is a common additive to laundry detergent anyway… It’s supposed to be equal parts mix, but I suspect the excess of hydrogen peroxide is intentional as to have the best chance to convert all the sodium bicarb and still have plenty of liquid to soak something in. (Just a guess. Chemistry can be a weird science sometimes and I think there were a few reactions that could of happened here.)

Consumer grade hydrogen peroxide is dirt cheap, and so is the baking soda. I dunno if you saved money and a made a more effective solution for what you are trying to accomplish. A spoonful or two of regular laundry detergent may have masked smells a little better. Dunno. I like science but I also like efficiency, so whatevers! (Experiments are fun.)

Flags have always been poorly standardized outside of system apps and tools. Generally, -u should equal --update (and depending on how the app was written, may warn for --up: “Did you mean --update?”) Single tick flags are generally combinable: -ua or -ls. I have seen long single tick flags somewhere, but can’t remember where. (Your -update example.) Various python libraries than handle flags have helped a ton with getting people to use the same patterns, so that is nice.

You just summed up my first experience with systemd many years ago.

systemctl != sysctl. Both somehow got wedged into the same index in my brain and took years for me to correct. On top of that, <service> <action> was reversed to <action> <service>. (Or was it the other way around?)

I was convinced from my first experience with systemd that the person who wrote it was the purest form of evil. (It’s leveled out a bit over the years, so it’s tolerable to use these days. Still not a fan though.)

Billionaire Island, Issue #1

Shocked expressions, big red arrows pointing to nothing, titles based on shock, surprise or open-ended questions are videos I tend to avoid. I don’t particularly care to watch a video where the first emotion had is sympathy for desperation. (It makes you almost question the emotional state of most of the users that “the algorithm” tuned itself for, TBH. I say that only as an observation of scale when looking at the sheer numbers of viewers that YouTube has.)

Sticking with the subtle stuff is just fine. A picture of the host smiling with an informative title and thumbnail is OK, and not very gag evoking.

Blaming “the algorithm” for having to do that shit is likely a very real thing. However, I will religiously watch channels that produce good content first.

Either way, I have conflicting views: A person has to earn a living, but when emotional exploitation is used in this way, I don’t know what to think. Is it really harmless? Not sure about that yet.

Not true. If they piss off richer, more prominent pedophiles they may accidentally fall out of windows or simply hang themselves in jail.

Fingers?

I did. All the important things have time to gracefully shutdown now. (Except my for my rack of 4 DL360’s, which need something a little more robust than a Walmart UPS. They aren’t critical and only exist to handle weird one-off projects anyway.)

This happens, too. A burst of local brownouts killed an OPNsense firewall of mine once. (The hardware was fine. The data got wrecked.) The firewall would boot, or almost finish booting, and then another brownout would hit. After the third or fourth cycle, the poor thing was toast.

I should thank the power company for free resilience testing.

There absolutely is a darker side to Lemmy, but for the most part, many of those “legacy” instances have already been pruned from the federation that we are in now. (I suspect there are smaller, highly niche, “Lemmy” bubbles that even I wouldn’t want to go looking for that have never federated with the larger group. There are also various branches you can explore via instances that keep their doors mostly open.)

On the surface, and depending on what you consider toxic, the misinformation campaigns that are run on Lemmy seem fairly normal, but can get fairly dark if you understand the sources and start to do broader geolocation estimation of some of the participants.

There are still the occasional DDoS’s and the occasional CSAM posters, both of those are only a degree or two away from the really nasty shit.

The biggest issue now, and probably will always be, is how easy it is to avoid bans. Some seriously troubled users have generated hundreds of accounts across multiple instances just to troll and appear to generate traffic to specific communities. (“you_emm” being one of the worst, but its posts are fairly easy to sniff out still. It will actively search for untagged mentions as well, hence, my obfuscation.)

But for the most part, the bullshit is easy to filter out. When you stumble across a specific niche, they tend to niche themselves super hard, so beware. All-in-all, Lemmy is chill and fairly quiet which is why I still use it.