I wasn’t intending my comment as a correction - microbe is a more general term than bacteria, and most fungi are indeed microbes - but just saw an opportunity to add on what I think is a cool fact. Thanks for bringing up the carboniferous period!

That it took 400 million years for one fungus to evolve wood eating is wild to me. And no other microbe has ever evolved that ability: my understanding is all wood decay fungal species today evolved from one shared ancester.

This really veers out of the espionage lane and towards the act of war lane. Acknowledged as a war action when done successfully against Ukraine. Possibly “only” a message if the failure in Poland was deliberate on the hacker’s part, but still awful.

In any system, some people with very expensive treatment options, especially if the treatment would extend life only a few months and/or with poor quality of life, are going to be denied that treatment. As a society, it doesn’t make sense to spend twelve million dollars to keep one bedridden patient still bedridden for another six months, when that money could instead be used to improve quality of life for many people for many years.

I believe the meme is about denying highly cost effective care like insulin or basic doctor visits, which is cruel without any redeeming aspects. Just wanting the conversation to include that, while the US has drawn the line in a ridiculous place, there does need to be a line drawn sonewhere.

The website revamp was part of a larger overhaul of BoM’s IT systems dating back a decade that has cost taxpayers $866m after a 2015 “serious cyber intrusion” exposed vulnerabilities in its systems.

You threw out four years as an estimate of the time period involved, but if I am reading the article correctly this was more like ten years.

If the government procurement person doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, they are likely to choose the bidder who also doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, and is the low bidder because they don’t realize what they are getting themselves into.

By the time everyone realizes how much more is really required, they are already halfway through the project. The government could have saved money by choosing a more realistic higher bidder to start with. But once they have half a program from the low bidder, throwing that away and starting over doesn’t save any money. Better to just finish with the team that’s invested with the project.

I work at a large company that is critically dependent on VAX software written in the 1980s for almost every aspect of functioning. This was recognized as a problem. A replacement coding and testing team was established. It included a full-time team of contractors - a handful US based and I believe dozens located in India - along with a few full-time dedicated employees and maybe a dozen each of people brought part time out of retirement (the people with the 1980s knowledge!) and people with other main jobs who had to start dedicating significant time to support.

It ran for two years, then two more years, then another year. Very much a case of “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” in that the more functions were programmed and tested, the more edge cases and sub-function requirements were uncovered. This program has been upgraded in pieces by so many people for so many decades that no one realized how hugely complex it had become, and what an enormous undertaking it would be to replace it. But after five years - more than double the original two-year projection - it was coming together, more things being really finalized than new needs being uncovered.

And then the software that the replacement program was being written with lost support. It was too old. Documents were written to try to give some future team a better chance of success, and everything was disbanded and shut down.

Being peripherally involved in that really made me more sympathetic to fiasco large tech projects.

I mean, enough that manufacturing of homogenizers is a thing. https://improbable.com/2021/05/13/shakespeare-and-the-whole-mouse-homogenizer/?amp=1

The ad features the comforting headline: “Only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds”

For me, it happens especially with activities I do over and over again. Washing my hair, while rinsing I will forget if it’s shampoo or conditioner I am rinsing out, have to try to deduce it. Morning stretches I have to do in the same order, because I can remember the order to recognize where I am and do the next thing, but I have no memory of what I just did.

Keeping track of one-time sequences is also a problem, but at least in that circumstance I am more likely to have written material I am referring to anyway.

Do you think he might like the warmth? Parrot feet don’t have the feather insulation owl feet have, and I believe their circulation actually restricts to barely keep feet above freezing and save most warmth for their torso. Sounds uncomfortable.

I think I saw a clip of an Australian doing that with a chicken.

I don’t think this is an ADHD thing. Brains delude us into false senses of control in all kinds of ways. For example, withdrawal reflexes like jerking a hand back from a too-hot surface are carried out by neurons in the spinal cord before the too-hot signal has even traveled to the brain - but we feel as if that jerk was a conscious decision. Recognizing that fake sense of control is an illusion is helpful in figuring out what few levers we do have and learning to use them.

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

The brain will receive the input while the reflex is being carried out and the analysis of the signal takes place after the reflex action.

The navigation update-to-car limitations are a big reason Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are a thing. Externally provided services you have to connect to your phone for. Car features work on the car. This seems ok.

We did not reach out to Flock for comment on this article, as their communications director previously told us the company will not answer our inquiries until we “correct the record and admit to your audience that you purposefully spread misinformation which you know to be untrue” about this case.

Consider the record corrected: It turns out the truth is even more damning than initially reported.

Burn.

Amazing work by these reporters. Removing the plausible deniabilty around the stalking being done is valuable for public discussion, and hopefully informs vulnerable figures on the importance of taking precautions like leaving the phone at home in the fridge when having an informant or organizing meeting.

I work in a manufacturing plant. I am not a programmer, but I work with several supporting my projects on the manufacturing equipment. I find it wild that they stay in the front office building all the time, and are generally resistant to coming out on the plant floor and seeing the physical stuff being made because of their programs. That’s the best part IMO!

I work at a multi-bilion dollar company that would crash to a halt if our Cobol + assembly language Unisys system written in the 80s went offline. It’s hard to predict what will become difficult to replace, but some code has extraordinary staying power.

Lumafield scanned 1,054 batteries – around 100 from each brand – and found 33 of them had a serious manufacturing defect known as negative anode overhang. The defect “significantly increases the risk of internal short-circuiting and battery fires” and can reduce the overall life of the battery,” according to Lumafield. All 33 of the batteries with the defects came from the 424 sold by low-cost brands or brands selling counterfeits…

For two of the counterfeit brands that were reporting impossible specs, the percentage of tested batteries from those brands that were found to have the defect were even higher – upwards of 12 and 15 percent. None of the name brand OEM batteries were found to have any problems…

Defects like negative anode overhang and bad edge alignment don’t mean an affected battery is guaranteed to explode or catch fire, but they can increase the risk of those incidents occurring, particularly when combined with other factors such as being left in a hot car or an accidental drop causing additional damage.

I have read some analysis that right-wing propaganda gets the most engagement when there are liberals in the community to provide the “liberal tears”. Yes, there is a core group happy to be in an echo chamber with only imagined liberal tears, but the majority find substitutes unsatisfying. Potentially the diminishing of non-right content volume will also diminishing the right content by making the comments less interesting.

Somewhat encouraging at least some public community is being built elsewhere, instead of the only widespread options being X and group chats. Hopefully the momentum keeps going and more types of users also make the switch.