A raven doesn't sound too bad. Can fly, smart, doesn't really have a predator so I can explore the world at ease

I dunno I'll try to befriend some nice sailors, most ppl are reasonably nice to ravens... Into the ocean is out of the question unfortunately

Since I'm literally from the namesake city, Peking duck? Basically it's duck meat wrap with some veggies, almost like a Chinese taco wrap so to say. It's not something you can easily make at home and is typically quite pricy for how much meat you'd get, but it is quite good

Fun fact, the ducks used for Peking ducks (including in Beijing) are no longer bred in China for a long time

The real one that should have been famous is the Douzhi. Trust me it tastes even worse than it reads, Beijingnese ppl are weird

Whatever I could find in the nearby grocery/supermarket 🥲 Bad at cooking & generally don't have enough free time...

Arcade rhythm games (DDR, Pump It Up, maimai, etc) are subsidized by the Japanese government to get Otakus/NEETs to go out, touch grass, and exercise

Have you ever wondered why you can have 10-15 minutes of game time for the same amount of money as one (sometimes half) a pull on a claw machine?? /puts on tinfoil hat

Everything about fecal transplant. Or maybe just the fact that it is even a legitimate medical procedure

The elites don't want you to know but "[y]ou may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home)"

Following their guide gives a local Invidious client, don't forget to 1) copy their production compose file instead of using the one on git and 2) change "hmac_key"... from my experience setting up cron (crontab -e) to restart the docker container once per day keeps the Invidious docker healthy

Edit: here are some alternatives for popular Google services. Not in anyway related to the above (smirk

• Google itself: SearXNG (try searx.be first), one of the easiest services to self-host
• Gmail/calendar: a lot of people seem to swear by one of Proton Mail, Tutanota or Mailbox.org. Self-hosting is possible but challenging
• Google Drive: You mean Nextcloud?
• Google maps: Organic Maps is actually getting pretty good now
• Google Chrome: at the very least there is Chromium... obviously there is Firefox and Firefox forks (such as Librewolf), as well as other smaller browsers
• Google Play: F-Droid hosts a lot of FOSS stuff, and there are alternative ways to access Play (such as Aurora Store)
• Android: a bit more difficult... but there is LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and similar stuff

I have a pet rat that seems to be sick. My local vet has a long waitlist: do you have any suggestions on home remedies that can help them feel better in the meantime?

::: spoiler spoiler If it isn't obvious, the original comment is about animal euthanasia in research laboratories :::

I believe no one else mentioned this but... China is a case study of why this is a terrible idea

The entire PRC uses the same time zone, even though in any other parts of the world, China should have been split to at least 3 different timezones

It is very disorienting to try and go for breakfast in Tibet at 9 am to find that nothing is open and the sun is just out... So yeah. Imagine if this is extended to 12-hr differences

Wikipedia has a nice summary of this

This again??

This time once archive.org is back online again... is it possible to get torrents of some of their popular data storage? For example I wouldn't imagine their catalog of books with expired copyright to be very big. Would love a community way to keep the data alive if something even worse happens in the future (and their track record isn't looking good now)

Something that hasn't been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay...

Case in point, unmodded Skyrim's legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation'd...)

Unfortunately... Isn't there a saying like "the amount of effort to refute bullshit is much large than the amount needed to produce it" or something? So sadly the HCQ thing is just going to stay there for now; the journal taking 4.5 years to retract it didn't help either

I’m talking about PRC btw

Oh... OH

Their advice is good in this very specific context as the PRC is a bit... special, see other comments. They don't limit their reach to just Chinese citizens either, my interpretation of what has happened in Canada with the secret police stations is that they might consider all ethnically Chinese people fair game

For most instances though, methinks valid constructive criticisms toward the government is a good way to keep democracy going, and unfortunately this process sometimes involve protesting. I can't make decisions for others when a social cause is more important than their own safety, but to each their own at that point so...

The worshipping of the self-made man and entrepreneurship in popular American culture

I think I was just too young and fashionable, maybe I was one of those guys that saw themselves as a "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"... then got old enough to see through the nonsense

This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered... The person is not officially "fired" since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.

This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue's Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study... close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.

And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn't find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low... oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.

This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc... one poor girl's nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I've heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits...

Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is... Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from... San Diego State University? Doesn't seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.

If you are interested in the full detail... here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue's student-run newspaper

• Undark's report on Camp DASH
• Exponent, 2017-07-24, Camp DASH was shut down
• Exponent, 2017-11-28, president's statement
• Exponent, 2019-09-20, drama between Dr. Weaver and the school on data retention
• Exponent, 2024-02-11, outcome of a lawsuit

Yes, I already did, even before this particular news broke out...

I tried to individually tell every one I know IRL (which is not too many ppl sadly), basically told every single one of them to consider back-up career options... There are a couple of 1-year exchange students from Europe in my floor and I have not-subtly hinted at them to make contingency plans for PhD training back home. I've been following the news very carefully recently so I can share relevant items as soon as possible... The people need to know. I've even considered making know-your-rights printouts before they claimed they're doing an ICE raid in Chicago, but realized how little resources I have for that... I absolutely will do something. Not sure what it is but I can't see society go this way.

I just feel bad that as a non-US citizen there is only so little I can do... I don't even know if I could join a protest without being considered for deportation at this rate. Am planning my leave as well so there's that.

Funny incident, I blurted out to my family 2-months ago that Trump will probably build a concentration camp and was told to shut the F up... Murphy's law I suppose

I... don't quite feel comfortable sharing the full details, but F-1; I have submitted a green card application too but no way it's gonna pass now. I might find an opportunity to write about it a bit more in the future

Yeah no joke. The biomedical community is probably in collective ourage now, since NIH straight up cancelled most grant reviews and all types of outreach... which is unprecedented

The official NIH website banning specific words is just... cherry on the cake, I suppose. Hence only mildly infuriating

::: spoiler spoiler I swear goodness this gives me way too much of the great China firewall vibe... :::

clear because apparently I am too scatterbrained to comprehend more than one full page of text in the terminal

A bit off topic... But from my understanding, the US currently doesn't have a single federal agency that is responsible for AI regulation... However, there is an agency for child abuse protection: the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect within Department of HHS

If AI girlfriends generating CSAM is how we get AI regulation in the US, I'd be equally surprised and appalled