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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2025

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  • I’m sure things are different in different parts of the world, but where I’m from, pretty much none of the big crop farms let fields lay truly fallow. Most of them plant various cold season cover crops that include things like clover, brassicas, and legumes like vetch. Those all produce lots of flowers that feed the bees in the off season.

    The issue with wildflower meadows, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that most of those wildflowers bloom at times when the fields would otherwise be needed for crop production. Of course, there are farmers who skip planting at all some years, but in my neck of the woods, nobody does that. They plant every year, at least once, they just rotate different crops in and out. Corn one year. Hay then soy, the next. And so on.






  • I’ve read or heard that most types of snake venom are large, fragile proteins that are quickly broken down or neutralized by stomach acids and/or cooking. And most are only dangerous if they can enter the blood stream or are injected directly into body tissues.

    In practice, there are lots of variables that come into play that might allow ingested venom to get into your bloodstream while still active, such as cuts/abrasions/sores in the mouth or ulcers in the lining of your digestive system.

    So, in summary, it’s terribly risky.


  • Have we as a collective eaten every species of snake in the world to know that absolutely none of them are poisonous? Can we rule out genetically modified snakes that would make them so? Or maybe they are fed a diet of human flesh and a steadily increasing amount of some supplemental toxic substance such that they have become immune to the toxin as it slowly builds up in the snakes’ flesh causing them to also become poisonous? Is it possible most snakes are actually poisonous but only if consumed in sufficient quantity on Thursday November 18th, 2084 at 6:30 p.m.?


  • I haven’t read the article yet, so apologies if this is addressed.

    Bluray has always been a niche product in many/most parts of the world, DVD is ubiquitous.

    It pains me to say this, but people generally just do not care about the difference in picture quality between the two formats. At least not enough to pay the Bluray premium.

    The equipment itself is more expensive, as are the discs. Your subjective “not even much more expensive” is very dismissive of the economic situation for huge numbers of people around the world. It’s often $3 - $4 more per disc in a retail setting, sometimes higher. And DVDs go on deep discount far more often in my experience, furthering the cost divide. And the bluray players aren’t just more expensive, they’re way more troublesome, slower, clunkier, and many/most/all require a stable internet connection (at least periodically) or you’ll be locked out of watching your discs.

    The money aspect isn’t a concern for wealthier households. But, wealthier households tend to have higher adoption rates for stable, reliable, unlimited, high speed internet. They’ve largely switched to streaming only, and have little to no need for discs and players. They’ve also got many other entertainment options. They went from DVD to streaming, skipped Bluray.

    Poorer households are far more likely to have no/less reliable internet, let alone unlimited data. If you don’t have internet, you will be locked out of watching at least some of your blurays. You certainly won’t be streaming, at least not regularly and reliably. That $3 - $4 difference in the price of each disc is money for gas or a loaf of bread. The $50 difference in the player is potentially a big financial blow. If you want to watch something cheap, you can find a huge selection of DVDs at the thrift store or even rent for free from the library, or you can pay a little more for the one bluray they have for sale (it’s an Adam Sandler comedy from 20 years ago where he dresses up as a woman) and does funny voices.


  • And then there are actual good developers who could or would tell you that LLMs can be useful for coding, in the right context and if used intelligently. No harm, for example, in having LLMs build out some of your more mundane code like unit/integration tests, have it help you update your deployment pipeline, generate boilerplate code that’s not already covered by your framework, etc. That it’s not able to completely write 100% of your codebase perfectly from the get-go does not mean it’s entirely useless.