For the curious:

Speaking to MailOnline, Willot confirmed this 'was indeed a tricky procedure. They are very reactive and won't stop struggling once caught, preventing any shaving attempt if not anaesthetised.'

This was done by exposing the ants for a few seconds to carbon dioxide, then strapping them down firmly.

Hairs were removed using a high-power binocular telescope and a very sharp blade.

'It's the same as shaving your own chin: the scalpel blade has to move in the opposite direction of the hair's growth. It has to be a delicate and gentle motion,' said Willot.

After practising on large soldier ants, he found that a smaller worker ant could be entirely shaved in an hour of delicate work.

He estimates around 40 ants were shaved altogether to produce seven good examples for the experiments.

Link

I'm primarily a lurker. I've been trying to be better about participating lately because I'd like to help the fediverse grow and be a meaningful online meeting place.

Why are they collecting financial information??

And it's not like we learn this stuff in school. It's not written out anywhere. We have to rely on word of mouth, people with experience, or people like the commenter above you who are familiar with the ins and outs.

The bottom line is that it is complicated on purpose and designed to wear you out so you don't get coverage for your most basic human needs - like peeing without your urethra being on fire.

It concerns me that we're seeing this more and more in industry. Middle fingers to regulations because when you have enough money, it doesn't matter.

This article does a pretty good job of explaining why it's not a good thing.

On mobile, the link kicked me to a different post. https://www.reddit.com/r/BotDefense/comments/14riw76/botdefense_is_wrapping_up_operations/

From the post: TL;DR With the API changes now in place, we no longer believe we can effectively perform our mission so we are sunsetting BotDefense. We recommend keeping BotDefense on as a moderator through October 3rd so any unbans can be processed.

57M * 8:31 = 485.4M minutes 53M * 7:17 = 386.0M minutes 386.0 / 485.4 = 79.5%

If those numbers are right, reddit's engagement time dropped 20% by the end of the blackout.

I doubt it's that low now, but it is having an impact on their bottom line.

No, it just feels like that because you can't keep it up anymore.

The youngest of the patients at Alcor is two-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong, a Thai girl with brain cancer, who was cryopreserved in 2015, reports Reuters.

“Both her parents were doctors, and she had multiple brain surgeries,” More tells the publication. “Nothing worked, unfortunately. So, they contacted us.”

This is a bit chilling. How do you begin to move on with your lifeif you're holding out hope that your loved one will be revived one day? What happens to this girl's body once her parents die? What happens if they beat the odds and master cryo and the girl gets revived in 100 years? That sounds incredibly traumatic.

To what end, I wonder?

I feel like it has to be financially motivated and the only thing I can think of is they want users paying for premium directly rather than having it gifted from a different accounting bucket. But that doesn't seem like strong enough motivation on the surface.

Not new, but my biggest one is physically placing things I need to remember in the path of my daily routine. Like if I need to remember to bring my laptop to work, I might put my computer mouse in my shoe.

Another one is moving things in stages. If I'm cleaning my living room and something needs to go upstairs, I'll just leave it on the stairs for the next time I go up. Otherwise I'm likely to get distracted when I get up there and forget to continue cleaning downstairs.

I also try to have multiples of things that I use in multiple rooms or places. Like a small trashcan in all my rooms so I don't have to go somewhere else to throw it away. It minimizes distractions and helps me stay focused on the current task.

I’m not going to insult people for being ignorant about something, because that’s literally the default state of being a person.

Well stated. I try to keep this in mind, or assume this until proven otherwise.

I kind of want all the users to wipe their comments and burn it down like the library of Alexandria. Then spez can't mine it for AI.

I hate losing the window into humanity, but it would be insanely satisfying to watch the fire burn.

As a side note, there were babies on that plane in those temperatures for that long!?

That was my thought too, that's deadly for babies and children. I'm astounded.

I thought I heard recently there was talk about making the fediverse API more friendly towards existing 3p reddit apps so that it wouldn't be as much work. Though I can't recall a source atm. I'd be curious to see if that did happen if the 3p devs would make the change.

Is there proof that they're not profitable? I ask because the only place I've heard that is when spez has parroted it on interviews. But I question the reality of that because how else would they be in operation for 15 years if they weren't able to make any profit or were operating at a loss? It just doesn't make sense.

Granted - I'm not saying they shouldn't charge for the API access, but I'm curious what their real numbers are.

Yup. Like, I know I knew this at one point and can't remember the details to save my life. I remember doing the deep dive. I remember enjoying it and feeling energized by it. And now I'm standing here word vomiting bs and repeating "I know I looked it up once"

What does he do if you stay where you're at and ask what he wants you for?

Is AI capable of this? My gut is that there is still too much nuance for AI to be successful, that it won't be able to adapt to changing circumstances as a subreddit community evolves for example. Are we at that point with AI technology?