otter
@otter@lemmy.ca
I live in Canada on the west-coast. I waddled onto the beach and stole found a computer that I could use.
- Comment on If you lose your memories, are "you" dead? If a close relative/friend lose their memories, are they still "your relative/friend"? What the hell even is memory? How sentimental are you about memories? 2 weeks ago:
This sounds more like a ship of Theseus style question
Is the person with amnesia still the same “person”. I assume the question would also need to enforce the type/extent of the amnesia
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to videos@lemmy.world | 1 comment
- Comment on What happened near Spokane in BeaconDB? 2 weeks ago:
In case the tags don’t work from Piefed, I’ll try as well
- Comment on What happened near Spokane in BeaconDB? 2 weeks ago:
It’s a project that’s compiling a map of wifi/cell tower/bluetooth locations for location services. GPS doesn’t work well in some cases (indoors, remote locations, areas with tall buildings) and so big companies have built similar databases to get accurate location information, but those ones are proprietary / private. This project is intended to be a public / openly licensed version of that, while also
- Comment on Ants Trapped For Years in a Soviet Nuclear Bunker Survived in The Most Horrifying Way 2 weeks ago:
Wow that was a cool read, especially the ending
Although luckily for this colony, they no longer have to turn on their own: In 2016, researchers installed a wooden boardwalk (below) in the bunker, connecting the ventilation pipe to the ground. Within four months, nearly all the trapped ants had deserted the bunker floor.
Now, when any ants are unfortunate enough to fall into the dark chamber, they don’t have to resort to cannibalism. They can just calmly walk the plank, all the way home.
I wonder if the ants have an understanding of what’s down in the hole, since now they can visit without dying there. Some ants “grieve”, and this colony was confirmed to have grave areas down in the former hole colony, but maybe they have no reason to wander down there?
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to [deleted] | 9 comments
- Comment on how come Lemmy show more upvoted posts further down the thread instead of at the top? 3 weeks ago:
join-lemmy.org/docs/…/03-votes-and-ranking.html
Here is an explanation for each sorting type. It sounds like you’re looking for “Top”. I personally prefer Scaled so that I get some content from the small communities I’m subscribed to
- Comment on LinkedIn set to start to train its AI on member profiles 4 weeks ago:
This link should take you to the settings page where you can turn it off: www.linkedin.com/…/data-for-ai-improvement
See also this page for other privacy settings: www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/…/privacy
- Comment on LinkedIn set to start to train its AI on member profiles 4 weeks ago:
The AI tool that I saw on there was to give users advice on “how to make your profile better”. The tips were generic garbage, so maybe after they train the AI on member profiles, the tips can be even more generic garbage.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to videos@lemmy.world | 7 comments
- Comment on [META] Community discussion regarding AI & clickbait 4 weeks ago:
Thanks for posting this discussion, I agree with the general consensus from the edit.
Thumbnails are annoying to deal with, and I had trouble the few times when I tried to address it in my own posts. It’s a lot more work to pull a different thumbnail and replace the autogenerated one, especially if you’re on mobile and just want to share something quickly. Still, if someone is posting low effort spam/clickbait often, I’d agree with a mod telling them to knock it off
- Comment on Between Codeberg, Forgejo, Gitea, etc., which do you prefer and why? 4 weeks ago:
Thanks, I’ve edited the title accordingly
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to [deleted] | 15 comments
- Comment on If you had to buy a new TV, what brand would you get? 4 weeks ago:
This is very detailed and helpful, thank you
Which soundbar or AV system did you end up going with?
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on 'Almost like science fiction': European ant is the first known animal to clone members of another species 4 weeks ago:
Neat!
The workers in Iberian harvester ant (Messor ibericus) colonies are all hybrids, with queens needing to mate with males from a distantly related species, Messor structor, to keep the colony functioning. But researchers found that some Iberian harvester ant populations have no M. structor colonies nearby.
“That was very, very abnormal. I mean, it was kind of a paradox,” study co-author Jonathan Romiguier, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Montpellier, told Live Science. The team initially believed there was a sampling issue, but they went on to find 69 regions where this was the case.
In setting out to resolve this paradox, Romiguier and his team found that queen Iberian harvester ants also lay eggs containing male M. structor ants, with these males ultimately fathering the workers. This discovery, published Sept. 3 in the journal Nature, is the first time any animal has been recorded producing offspring from another species as part of their normal life cycle.
“In the early stages, it was kind of a joke in the team,” Romiguier said. “But the more we got results, the more it became a hypothesis and not a joke anymore.”
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to [deleted] | 74 comments
- Comment on New study shows how Amazon trees use recent rainfall in the dry season and support the production of their own rain 5 weeks ago:
Explanation of the “own rain” bit
The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical forest, home to unmatched biodiversity and one of the planet’s longest rivers. Besides the Amazon River, the Amazon rainforest also features “flying rivers:” invisible streams of vapour that travel through the atmosphere, fuelling rainfall both within the forest and far beyond its boundaries.
The forests play a central role in this system. Much of the moisture that rises into the atmosphere comes from transpiration. Trees pull water from the soil through their roots, transport it to the leaves and release it as vapour. That vapour becomes rainfall — sometimes locally, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away.
- ImaginaryCTF 2025 | September 5-7, 12 PM PDT | a cybersecurity CTF competition with a variety of challenges for all skill levels2025.imaginaryctf.org ↗Submitted 1 month ago to cybersecurity@infosec.pub | 0 comments
- Comment on How long do we have before PCs get locked bootloaders and corporations ban installation of "non-approved" software? (for context: Google is restricting sideloading worldwide on Android ETA 2027) 1 month ago:
It might, but I think it might be a federation bug between our instances. I haven’t seen one like this before, but I’ll keep an eye out to see if it happens again / there’s a pattern.
You could also try setting yourself as a bot, saving, and then reversing it again. That might prompt your instance to send out the information again.
- Comment on How long do we have before PCs get locked bootloaders and corporations ban installation of "non-approved" software? (for context: Google is restricting sideloading worldwide on Android ETA 2027) 1 month ago:
Oh sorry about that, it’s still showing up as a bot for me but it’s fine on your instance. I think the information just hasn’t federated over to lemmy.ca yet
- Comment on Unfortunately, the ICEBlock app is activism theater 1 month ago:
Jen asked:
There’s a lot of secure software, that probably people in this room work on, that is developed in the open, and that is used primarily by at-risk users, including things like Tor, Signal, SecureDrop. That’s great, because it makes it easy for folks to contribute. Maybe you don’t want that, I understand that can be hard. But it also makes it easier for people to audit and gain assurance that the app is doing what you claim without having to have, you know, EFF reverse engineer it. Would you be open to making the app open source?
His answer: “Absolutely not.”
Why? “I don’t want anybody from the government to have their hooks in how I’m doing what I’m doing. Once you go open source, everybody has access to it. So I’m just going to keep the codebase private at this time.”
He also claimed that the government can’t learn everything about how an app works by reverse engineering it, which isn’t true.
I agree with Jen. His answers are very concerning.
- Comment on How long do we have before PCs get locked bootloaders and corporations ban installation of "non-approved" software? (for context: Google is restricting sideloading worldwide on Android ETA 2027) 1 month ago:
Your account is marked as a bot by the way, you can fix that in your user settings
- Comment on What strategy would you use to estimate the number of hazelnuts 1 month ago:
I love it 😄
Did you extract those clips for this post, and do you have a recommended method for doing that? I sometimes find clips on getyarn, but the site barely loads half the time
- Comment on What strategy would you use to estimate the number of hazelnuts 1 month ago:
I saw some at the store, but I need to go back and confirm that they are still there
- Submitted 1 month ago to [deleted] | 61 comments
- Comment on Did Ukraine provoke Russia by building a dam? 1 month ago:
I don’t think the post is in bad faith and it fits the purpose of this community. It sounds like OP is asking where this talking point comes from in order to counter it effectively.
The title could have been better
- Comment on Rss app for android 1 month ago:
It depends on how you want to sync. If you’re selfhosting freshrss for example, my personal preference is Capy RSS
- Comment on Do LLM modelers maintain a list of manual corrections fed by humans? 1 month ago:
That would be the good way of doing this, but I remember right after the
strawberry
issue was fixed it would still mess up similar queries. They might have hard-coded something in for that one, at least initially - Comment on If I stood on a precision scale and farted, would I get lighter or heavier? 2 months ago:
Wouldn’t it also lift you up with a similar amount of force? Similar to putting a fan on a sailboat to blow at the sails, the forces would cancel out somewhat