I actually like their implementation.
I'm curious if it will be enough for governments, but it is nice that they are trying to persue a path without id checks
This proposed solution does however allow quite liberal access to discord without confirming the age. If the implementation is as worded; then i would not see a reason to confirm my age at all.
The issue comes down to if governments accept such a (urgh) comparatively lax implementation. It's pretty clear to me that the primary purpose of these laws are entirely to... force all citizens to identify themselves across the internet for the purpose of profile building, and nothing to do with child safety.
So as implementations go; this one is pretty decent. We should stop governments from passing these darn laws though.
I can imagine a few more. Here's one that is 100% effective:
* Wait until your account was created > 18 years ago.
That may not be enough for you, and that's fine, this is not a governmental service or site, with a mandate to serve everyone. You can chose not to use discord, and discord can choose not to have you as a customer. YMMV.
I think it's interesting they limit the types of content they use to determine your age. I'd guess they don't impose those same limitations when it comes to other uses (including targeted ads)
I guess it falls in the same category of burglars that enter from the unlocked main door.
It is still illegal even if there were no security measures to overcome by the attacker.
That being said using an API does require a minimum of computer knowledge
>None of the dietary studies that I have seen has provided any conclusive evidence that meat per se is the harmful ingredient
This is innacurate if not simply false; according to the WHO red meat is a class 2 carcinogenic and sausages are class 1 carcinogenic. This leaves only white meat as non cancerogenic
If you look at the data vegan (and vegetarian to a lesser extent) diets over various studies consitently perform better in cardiovascular health and cancer rate (colon in particular) compared to the omnivorous conterpart
Those mentioned by you are very specific kinds of meat, and there were doubts about how healthy they are long before the last century.
There is absolutely no evidence that any data about red meat or sausages also applies to other kinds of meat, e.g. those that have negligible content of myoglobin and saturated fat, like poultry breast or white fish.
I agree with what you said, that almost any study about vegan or vegetarian diets shows positive effects, but it is never clear which are the differences from the comparison diets that really mattered, because the compositional differences between diets were too many and too variable.
The OP is actually talking about the studies that the WHO was using to classify meat as a class 2 carginogen. For meat preserves the evidence is clear and known mechanistically, but for meat in general it's inconclusive at best and badly-designed at worst.
Correct, but the link for "super jupiter" also goes to something that astronomers are fairly sure is 1.38x the diameter of Jupiter. Much less massive of course. Meaning Jupiter's diameter is not an absolute hard limit nothing can be larger than.
I guess it is more of a derivative of the question: "in which bucket should we put the brown dwarf? Is it a star or a planet?".
The answer is neither of course; but since it is more closely related to stars than to planets, I'm more inclined to call this satellite an exoplanet (instead of exomoon).
That being said it is still a nice finding, way more difficult to discover than "normal" exopanets.
'Planet' comes from the Greek word for 'wanderer' which was very useful for labeling the handful of bright stars that moved through the heavens in a pattern. Then we got to the Space Age and kept calling them (and similar new additions) 'planets' even as we learned far more about them. And immediately there's a problem. Setting aside Pluto (and the Sun), you've still got Mercury on one end (5% of Earth's mass, and smaller than several moons) and Jupiter on the other end (320% of Earth's mass - more than everything else in the solar system put together, and over 1000 times Earth's volume). "Planet" stops being a word you can use with any sort of detail. (Thus the IAU definition battle and Pluto's "demotion".) Astronomers have pretty good terminology for stars, but once you go sub-stellar, the labeling rapidly gets difficult, and for good reason.
> Astronomers have pretty good terminology for stars,
...do they though?
The "proper" terminology says all main sequence stars are dwarves, but nobody calls them all that in practice.
Some astronomers insist on saying "yellow dwarf", but some don't really bother.
In general having the only two kinds of star be "giant" or "dwarf" is contentious, but it's also contentious that there isn't a name for whatever is in the "middle". "Main-sequence star" is a broader category and doesn't apply. They're all "stars", obviously, so that isn't specific enough.
The only decent terminology is for the spectral classes, but those only work as long as you look at spectra. The moment you try to figure out what the theory says those stars would look like as proper 3D objects, things get very messy. You also immediately get the issue that star size and brightness goes O>B>A>F>G>K>M. So... it's alphabetic except it isn't. And C is something completely different and doesn't fit the brightness classification at all.
As far as I'm concerned, CD-35 2722 B can self identify however they want.
If they want to identify as a planet, however, they can claim the almost unique distinction of having a gas giant as their moon. I wonder if the gas giant itself has their own small rocky and potentially habitable moons.
The token saving is oversold, from what I can tell so far. These days output tokens are just the tip of the iceberg.
If anything the real value is it saves my brain from going into power saving mode by lunchtime because I haven’t spent the day reading pages of output when a sentence or two would do.
It is truly fascinating, I wonder how it evolved like that.
Before becoming a spring as it is today how was it hunting in the past? What constraints made it need such a mechanism instead of a typical web?
Injured Himenoptera are known to send pheromones that trigger a vicious defensive response from other members of the colony. On a typical web the companion ants would do what the ants do. Go to war and flood the place surrounding the danger until eventually killing it. The spider does not have neither the stamina, nor the venom amount to deal with that. This web is designed to extract just one ant, while cutting the path that the ant rescuers could follow.
This is the first spider web known designed to catch only one species of prey. That alone would make the finding extraordinary. The trap can lure only green ants and serve the food exactly were the spider wants it; granting access to a common source of food that is everywhere, but also that is very dangerous to hunt (as much big as the spider, with powerful jaws, and much stronger).
The video shows one most interesting thing: Notice that the spider is carefully moving out of the way, just a second before the ant is launched. The spider knows in advance that its current location is about to be hit by a bungee jumping ant, and acts accordingly just in time to avoid the "bullet". We can easily imagine the spider thinking 5,4,3... This means that spider brains can predict the future outcome of a complex movement of objects in the physical system of its trap, and also calculate how much time the fibers will resist the jaw of the ant.
The smart spider is portia, a jumping spider. A quick search uncovers zounds of videos, articles, and scientific publications on them.
They specialize is hunting spiders, changing hunting tactics based on type and number of prey. Yes, they count. They strategize. They make multi-step plans that take them out of sight of prey. And some people keep them as pets.
I can personally vouch for them being great pets. They're active during the day, hunt prey, don't need much food or water, and tend to "hide" in silk cases they build along the top of their terrariums so you can always see them. They like to get water from inside flowers, and probably can differentiate between many colors, so adding bright flowers not only makes things prettier, it provides a watering hole and possible hunting advantage over color-blind insects trying to hide.
Of course, if you don't want to set up a terrarium and personally sentence crickets to death, just look at the screens in your windows. Odds are, a jumping spider is already living there and will stay as long as you let it. They're territorial.
> Notice that the spider is carefully moving out of the way, just a second before the ant is launched.
It's not moving before the ant is launched. It's moving as soon as the tension in the web is gone, ie. there's movement in their web. Most spiders react to movement in their web.
I once watched a spider spinning a very crude "parachute" and catching wind to leap between two parked cars about 6 feet apart. Spiders definitely have great spatial reckoning and a level ingenuity in silk use that is pretty shocking for such small creatures.
Amazing specialization. I was wondering the same thing. Cave glow worms cast a "fishing line," and this is similar-ish. I wonder if N million years ago, a couple of fishing-line-like spiders started anchoring their lines, and the ones with a more conic shape anchor may led to more success over time. And the anchor may have only worked on territorial prey. Fun stuff to imagine.
Me too! I was visiting my parents’ farm and walking around in pitch black while looking at the stars when I saw a bright green glow out of the corner of my eye. Ended up tracking it down to a California pink glow worm that had perched itself on a rock.
There are many such mysterious mysteries in evolution. Some wasps paralyse a caterpillar of a particular species by stinging it very precisely in its nervous centres, then carries the caterpillar into the nest it previously dug out, lay its egg on the caterpillar then close the hole to never come back.
This is a completely automatic, unintelligent behaviour; if you remove the paralysed caterpillar at any point in the process the wasp simply goes on with its business (it will close its nest without any caterpillar inside, where the larva will die out from lack of food).
In the late 19th century, Jean-Henri Fabre studied these wasps (and many other strange insects) and had a copious correspondence with Charles Darwin on this very matter. His books are absolutely fascinating (ditto the letters Darwin and him exchanged).
The weirdest insects I've seen in real life are these ones called Burying Beetles - they have chemoreceptors that allow them to detect the odor of a dead mouse from as far away as two miles. Then a male and female fly to it, dig a big hole, strip all the fur off of it to line the hole, then drag it down in there and raise their young together. They are also unusual in that outside of bees and ants, very few insects raise their young together from infancy to adulthood.
2° it paralyses a caterpillar (some other species use different worms, or beetles, as their victims; but each species of wasp targets one precise species of caterpillar or bug and cannot use any other food source for its larvae than the one it's genetically programmed to catch).
3° it carries the caterpillar into the hole
4° it lays its egg on the caterpillar, far from the head
5° it closes the hole with dirt
6° the egg hatches in the dark, and the larva feasts on the paralysed caterpillar, eating it alive.
If you pull out the caterpillar while the wasp turns around to lay its egg, it doesn't interrupt itself. IIRC even if you take the caterpillar while it's flying to the hole, it still proceeds to the end, without the caterpillar (which makes no sense at all, showing it's a purely reflex activity, without any intelligence).
This sort of thing makes me think that if I were engineering a biome, this sort of specialized spider would be exactly how I would solve the problem of a species that I accidentally made too prolific. The spider is a targeted fix: only preys on the ants, and if the ant problem ever resolves itself, the spider goes away.
I think this is a case where the theory of evolution feels pretty handy-wavy and doesn't answer the mechanism of how this happens. The article even talks about "bioengineered" silk! There are certainly lots of cases of evolution, so it is clear that things do evolve, but the problems of a theory are revealed in the edge cases, and I think this spider suggests that the theory really needs a lot of work to be a robust theory. I don't think a simple gradient descent (evolving toward more fitness) has explanatory power in this case. A theory that hand-waved around edge cases like this would never fly in Physics; at best it would be considered a holding theory until a better one could be found, like dark matter.
(Plus, I think it's fun to think about bioengineering in a sci-fi, or even Babylon 5 way)
First, ecosystems don't work on this concept of "balance" or "problems to fix". There are ecological niches that are exploited by a species or not. We have both generalists and specialists, predators that will eat anything and predators that have specialized in a particular prey or hunting approach. The world is full of organisms with remarkably complex behaviors, the field of evolutionary biology would collapse if this sort of behavior disproved it.
Second, there's really nothing hand-wavy about how specialized behaviors evolve, and in fact there is a mountain of research in the fields of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology that have significant explanatory power here. I would argue that you're the one being hand-wavy saying "I don't think a simple gradient descent...". Evolution is not a simple gradient descent, and no evolutionary biologist would ever argue that it is.
It might be more helpful to think of it as small changes in “genome-vector” taking place across generations of the species with the filter of it being not bad enough to cause extinction of the bespoke variation, as opposed to evolving towards more fitness as an optimisation objective. When thought of like this, one can imagine how high-dimensional the “feature”-space becomes, which leads to such intricate engineering we see in nature.
There's also typically a ton of standing genetic variation that is relatively fitness-neutral, but can then lead to more rapid or directional evolution if conditions change. For example, standing variation in silk elasticity may have been more fitness neutral when capturing other prey, but after encountering this ant species, spiders with more elastic silk were more successful and had a fitness advantage.
An interesting illustration of this might be variety seen in dogs, which are still one species that can reproduce together.
Presumably there was some ur-mutt, where almost all the variations we see today were already there, latent, until humans nudged the balances and blends.
Attempts to systematically domesticate foxes [0] suggest that certain packages of physical traits come along with selecting for calm or friendly behavior.
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