Bee extinction means drastically fewer crops and less pollination, but not no crops. It would be devastating, but there would still be agriculture. Lots of staple crops are wind pollinated and don’t rely on insects at all. But for the rest of our food, that would all become very expensive and widely unavailable.

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.

These waves usually turn out better quality users than the lulls when we’re otherwise mostly getting the people who’ve been permabanned from Reddit. So, hopefully we get some good ones!

Sucks to be in tech right now. I’m sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.

Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.

Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is “good with computer” to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.

And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It’s particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.

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.

Anecdotally speaking, this has been my experience as well. I would even go so far as to say the kids I know who smoked the most (or had that reputation) are the ones with the most/worst psychiatric issues as adults.

I have nothing against cannabis use and I do not judge people who use it, but I think parents who are too accepting / forgiving of their teenagers’ use are doing them a disservice. Additionally, when I was a teen, kids were smoking actual, real weed. These days, kids are vaping and using what are essentially poorly tested/understood pharmaceuticals. I won’t claim to be an expert in the topic, but I certainly think there’s ample reason to be concerned about the effects of these things.

On the one hand, I loathe feeling that way sometimes. On the other hand, for the better part of the past decade+ any criticism I had about Amazon was met with victim blaming white knight replies and basically no support. At best I’m probably more on the ambivalent side of things than the no sympathy side, not that there’s effectively much difference.

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.

You probably know this, but for others who might not: MS is now allowing some/many/all (???) people to extend the security updates for Win10 for another year free of charge. You have to go into the Windows update area and click a button to accept. At least in the USA, this seems to be a somewhat newly available option, as it was there the last time someone asked me to look at their laptop to see if I could upgrade it to Win11.

Quite some time ago, the messaging I was getting from Microsoft was that Windows 10 security updates were going to end this year. I didn’t really keep up with the news on that front, but I did notice that there was some kind of law suit in the EU that from what I recall basically came down to the fact that MS would have to continue to provide security updates to Win 10 free of charge for EU users.

Literally within the last week, a buddy of mine asked me to look at his computer and see if I could upgrade it to Win 10. I could not, as it doesn’t have a supported processor. But what I noticed is that MS now offers the option to extend security updates until 2026 with the click of a button.

So, thanks EU folks! Already knew ya’ll were awesome, but I assume this change of heart from Microsoft was a result of that suit. I appreciate it.

Mmmmm, butterfingers are my fave.

While it sounds great in practice, I find it suspicious that they never mention the the final bill.

This is why I go out of my way quite a bit to poison the AI with my pointless boomer anecdotes, largely made up or confiscated. Plus, I rarely proof read my comments anymore, so apologies for the grammatical issues and the hard to believe and rarely either one way or the other but twice the times there’s another type of type that you can also quite not, right?

My experience has been starkly different from Sterile_Techniques and I’m also living in what might be termed as “the middle of Ya’ll Quaeda” USA. So, it’s interesting to hear that there’s such a big difference in opinion / understanding on this topic.

For sure, 20 - 25 years ago it seemed like almost nobody had heard of it, and whenever someone said they were allergic to meat because of a tick bite, there was a lot of skepticism and denial.

However, these days, pretty much everybody knows someone who has this allergy, and that’s no exaggeration. Even the most backwoods, anti-science, do my own thing, fuck your feelings kind of people are telling others to check themselves for ticks and/or taking steps to keep ticks off them because they’re aware of all the risks from tick bites. Now, they might be claiming that it’s government bio-warfare, related to 5G and/or covid, or some other unnecessarily contrarian bullshit, but they do take it seriously from what I’ve experienced.

Also, the good news is (or bad news I guess depending on your perspective) is that a lot of people seem to experience improvement of symptoms in time, so it’s not necessarily a permanent thing for everybody. I don’t know if it’s just that some people continue to test the limits and end up inadvertently putting themselves through exposure therapy or if the immune response itself just naturally wanes over time, but several people I know who’ve had this for 5 - 10+ years say they can usually get away with a small amount of mammal meat, like maybe a hotdog now and then at a minimum, even though a small bite would have caused them a lot of trouble when they first developed the allergy.

… and nobody is there to poop on it, does it even bear repeating at all?

Gray squirrels in my area will raid bird nests to feed on the eggs and young chicks. They also hunt and eat cicadas. They sometimes scavenge from animal carcasses and are known to gnaw on mammal bones (like from a dead deer) or even turtle shells for the calcium.

Chipmunks will catch and eat crickets, worms, and beetles as well as small reptiles or even frogs. Although I’ve not witnessed it, I bet they’d at least gnaw on animal bones for calcium.

However, I think hunting voles is kind of a bit more advanced / unique.

I’m sure it’s performative. I would not be surprised if the plan is to add some other reprehensible stuff to the final bill so that Democrats have to approve the terrible stuff simply to get the cuts canceled or they have to vote against it and be labeled as anti-Medicaid. Because it seems so often, that is the way it goes whenever Republicans appear to maybe be doing something good for the common folk.