otter
@otter@lemmy.ca
- Submitted 3 hours ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on 'Almost like science fiction': European ant is the first known animal to clone members of another species 3 hours 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 16 hours ago to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world | 62 comments
- Comment on My proplifted succulent collection 1 day ago:
I’d love an update post once you complete the next part of this!
- Comment on New study shows how Amazon trees use recent rainfall in the dry season and support the production of their own rain 5 days 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.
- Comment on what replacement to nova launcher would you recommend? 5 days ago:
Lawnchair is what I’m currently using, and it has some support for changing icons. You can pick other icons from the icon packs you have downloaded, but not random files and you can’t set icons for folders.
- Comment on Campfire (the self-hosted group chat) just became free and open source! 1 week ago:
There are some other projects in this space already, with varying levels of open source / selfhostability / features
Zulip and Revolt looked the most promising for Slack and Discord replacements respectively
- Submitted 1 week ago to technology@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Google gets to keep Chrome, judge rules in search antitrust case 2 weeks ago:
omgubuntu.co.uk/…/google-antitrust-ruling-firefox…
United States District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google can continue to pay other companies, including browser makers like Mozilla, to be their default search engine.
I see, I’ll edit my other comment. So what even changes then, were they even making exclusive deals in the past? The discussion I remember was about how being the default made it difficult for others to compete since most people don’t change the defaults.
- Comment on Google gets to keep Chrome, judge rules in search antitrust case 2 weeks ago:
I think they’re referring to Firefox’s funding, a lot of which was through search deals
An article from 5 years ago: pcmag.com/…/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google…
- 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) 2 weeks 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) 2 weeks 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 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) 2 weeks ago:
Your account is marked as a bot by the way, you can fix that in your user settings
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on What strategy would you use to estimate the number of hazelnuts 2 weeks 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 Social Web Foundation is Betting Big on Client-to-Server API 2 weeks ago:
I blame all the similar sounding terms and organizations in the fediverse space. It’s actually pretty cool
What SWF is:
In a gesture that’s been a long time coming, Evan Prodromou, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol, has launched The Social Web Foundation. The organization aims to tackle the various headaches and challenges the ActivityPub ecosystem has faced over the last decade of its development. Their mission? A bigger, better Fediverse.
From this article:
the SWF has been working on several interesting projects outside of these stated scopes, and it’s something Evan Prodromou has been bullish about: leveraging the ActivityPub Client-to-Server API. Historically, this piece of the ActivityPub protocol is rarely ever implemented, due to complexity as well as the fact that Mastodon’s own client API has seen widespread adoption.
- Comment on What strategy would you use to estimate the number of hazelnuts 2 weeks ago:
I saw some at the store, but I need to go back and confirm that they are still there
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world | 61 comments
- Comment on Any FLOSS alternative's to Ground News? 2 weeks ago:
They do make it possible to adjust the ratings on your own account for the ones you disagree on
- Comment on ChatGPT offered bomb recipes and hacking tips during safety tests 2 weeks ago:
specifically trained chatgpt not
Often this just means appending “do not say X” to the start of every message, which then breaks down when the user says something unexpected right afterwards
I think moving forward
- companies selling generative AU need to be more honest about the capabilities of the tool
- people need to understand that it’s a very good text prediction engine being used for other tasks
- Comment on Did Ukraine provoke Russia by building a dam? 3 weeks 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 Do LLM modelers maintain a list of manual corrections fed by humans? 3 weeks ago:
That would be the good way of doing this, but I remember right after the
strawberryissue was fixed it would still mess up similar queries. They might have hard-coded something in for that one, at least initially - Comment on Solar panels in space could cut Europe's renewable energy needs by 80% 3 weeks ago:
The article is actually discussing a feasibility study for the far future (25 years from now as per the article):
For the first time, researchers from King’s College London have assessed the possible impact that generating solar energy in space could have for Europe. They found it could cut energy battery storage needs by more than two-thirds.
The study, published in Joule, analysed the potential of a design by NASA for solar generation, which is planned to be in use by 2050. The findings show the design could also save money by reducing the cost of the whole power system in Europe by up to 15%, including energy generation, storage and network infrastructure costs – an estimated saving of 35.9 billion euros per year.
Space-based solar power generation involves in-space continuous collection of solar energy. This involves placing large solar panels on satellites in orbit, where they are exposed to much more sunlight and can continuously collect energy without being affected by clouds or the day-night cycle. This energy would then be transmitted to one or more stations on Earth. It is then converted to electricity and delivered to the energy grid or batteries for storage.
It’s a cool idea and I’d imagine we’d need an array spanning the globe rather than just over one continent
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to fediverse@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on CrowdBucks is a new payment system for the Fediverse 4 weeks ago:
On our donation page, we put a breakdown of how much each platform takes from the donation and I think that is why a lot of users chose to donate through the methods that have lower / no fees: fedecan.ca/en/donate
I imagine as Crowdbucks develops, they will introduce more methods and improve user / platform choice. Dealing with payment platforms is annoying, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with over time
- Comment on Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data 4 weeks ago:
Your account seems to be marked as a bot, you can fix that in your user settings
- Comment on If I stood on a precision scale and farted, would I get lighter or heavier? 4 weeks 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
- Comment on If I stood on a precision scale and farted, would I get lighter or heavier? 4 weeks ago:
I’m not sure it would, unless the person’s volume also changes considerably
- Comment on Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery 5 weeks ago:
Yup
The auto naming feature is neat in some cases, like the AI chats themselves
- It’s convenient for searching through 10s or 100s of chats later on
- I spawn new chats often and it’s tedious to name them
- I don’t have a strong preference for what the title is as long as it’s clear what the chat was about
Tab groups don’t hit those points at all
- I’ll have a handful of tab groups
- I don’t make them often
- I have a strong preference for what it’s called, and the AI will have trouble figuring out exactly what I’m using those sites for
- Comment on Something we can all agree on 5 weeks ago:
also ‘barber’
