hellinkilla

joined 2 months ago
 

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/189796

Footage captured in 2024 of a small rabbit hopping about in front of a camera trap had scientists baffled. The juvenile, with gray-brown fur and a black tail, didn’t resemble any known species in the Sierra Madre del Sur, in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. Biologist Fernando Ruiz-Gutiérrez anxiously searched his records and consulted with colleagues to confirm his hypothesis. A few kilometers away, ecologist José Alberto Almazán-Catalán had the answer: having captured an adult specimen years earlier and conducted a series of studies, he now had irrefutable proof that the Omiltemi cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus insonus), believed to be extinct for the past 120 years, was still alive. The last time scientists knowingly encountered the Omiltemi cottontail was in 1904, when U.S. naturalist Edward William Nelson described it for the first time. Habitat loss, poaching and subsistence hunting have been the biggest threats to the species throughout its existence, which is why it took more than a century to rediscover the elusive rabbit, hidden in the forest. “It was very exciting to pin down an animal that we not only believed to be extinct but that also has an almost mythical quality, because the furs we have in Mexico are not as precise as we would like since they were not taken by a mammalogist but donated by campesinos [small-scale farmers],” says Almazán-Catalán, president of the Institute for the Management and Conservation of Biodiversity (INMACOB), a Mexican NGO. “We really weren’t sure this rabbit existed. It could’ve been an…This article was originally published on Mongabay


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[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

I think it has t do with neuroplasticity.

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 14 points 5 days ago

Aspirationally the parachute one but realisticly the one in the VCR.

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 33 points 6 days ago (1 children)

One of the triggers for the current debate is this post, which followed the removal of a comment comparing National Socialism with the current situation in Israel, which can be considered a trivialization of National Socialism. Such statements can, among other things, lead to imprisonment.

Comparing hamas to national socialism, comparing Oct 7 to the holocaust is rank trivialization and denialism.

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I was subbed to this show yeeeeears ago. I found it weird that a daily show was able to be released even though nobody I knew from various black, left, and black left perspectives seemed to have ever heard of it. So I didn't trust it. What's their deal?

8
unity (www.youtube.com)
 

I especially like the first piece. It looks so.. intolerant of error. I could never be involved in anything like that.

Māori stick and poi

These are some songs from the DVD "Heritage of Māori Songs"

I saw these and really felt like they need to be promoted. The haka seems to take dominance in pākēha understanding of māori culture and waiāta. I think that the world is more interested in the uniqueness of poi and rākau.

The first song is Titirorea performed by Ohinemutu Cultural group. The second song is Tiramarama by St. Joseph's Māori Girl's College.

[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 27 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

that's the pettiest shit I have read in 2025

 

I suggest watching the video.

full text only -- just text no images or video

“It was heaven to start with but ended up hell” says John, a former resident of the Plean Street high-rise flats in Yoker, as he summarised his 20 years living there. He was one of the first residents to move into the flats in the mid-1960s, when he and his mother had been decanted from Cowcaddens slum clearances by Glasgow Corporation.

Coming from a room and kitchen, with no hot water, no central heating and no indoor toilet, John was one of the tens of thousands of Glaswegians who were uprooted from the worst slum conditions in Europe to a ‘completely new life’. “There is an old saying in Glasgow that went: ‘We never knew how poor we were until someone told us.’ It was only then, when we entered our new home on the 14th floor, that we realised the real slum-like conditions we had been living in.”

In the 1970s John remembered the Plean Street flats as a place defined by aspiration and community spirit, a place where you could leave your doors open and families looked out for one another. As with other high-rise flats across the city in the late 1960s, people fought hard to be allocated a flat. References were required, sometimes even one from the police, before a person was even considered to be a tenant. John describes the day he and his mother moved in as ‘complete elation’.

By the late 1990s it was a different story. The Plean Street flats were now labelled the ‘Towers Of Terror’ by locals and the press. Heroin dealers and thieves were running riot and a man was stabbed to death in the entrance lobby. For former resident Leslie, who lived in the flats for ten years, it became an embarrassment to say you lived there. “Everyone in the flats knew who the dealers were, and so did the authorities, but nothing was done to sort it. In the end we gave up complaining. We were all demonised. You were embarrassed to say you came from Plean Street – we were all classed as junkies.”

A ‘minority of antisocial tenants and crime’ in a high-rise environment had led the rest of the flats into a downward spiral. Asking who was to blame for the flats’ demise, John blames “a gradual decline in moral standards in our society today. But ultimately, within a high-rise flat, that’s down to poor housing management and these people should have been dealt with.”

Former resident David recalls a happy childhood in the flats in the early 1980s – but by his own admission he was too young to notice what was really going on around him. By the mid-80s he and his family began to witness running riots in the foyer with people covered in blood in the stairways. “Everything changed when they changed the points system that allowed people to move in – they effectively downgraded the flats. We had all sorts of vulnerable people moving in, undesirables you might call them.” He and his family moved out of the flats by 1986, adding that, “I can only imagine as the years passed the situation got even worse”.

In June 2007, after a petition from the residents, Glasgow Housing Association decided to demolish the flats and its last residents started to be moved out. In 2010 both blocks were brought down piece by piece by the UK’s tallest ‘state of the art’ demolition machine. Midway through demolition, John returned to Plean Street to say his final goodbyes. From the ground level he counted up 14 floors of the partially demolished flat to see his former living room exposed to the world. “It’s strange and sad to see your former home this way. What makes high-rise living so condemned in this city? It’s sad to see it end like this. It could have been avoided.”


[–] hellinkilla@hexbear.net 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Why do you prefer accrescent to f-droid? I didn't know about it before now. From poking around on their github repo it seems that it is not a very mature project so its surprising that graphene packages it by default. I see accrescent hosts open and closed source packages with no distinction between them. At least as of a few months ago. More like arch linux; libertarian. But unlike arch, targeted at non-technical users who would be scared or put off by any mention of open source.

Everything you are getting from obtainium is available on the main f-droid repo. I feel like I trust those nerds more and try to get everything I can through there. I guess ultimately these accrescent people are doing a different thing which is trying to offer an alternative app store for some other reason. Do you think they are planning to monetize?

2
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by hellinkilla@hexbear.net to c/technology@hexbear.net
 

I didn't realize bluesky was even described as decentralized til recently.

Well I agree with this:

There is one other thing which Bluesky gets right, and which the present-day fediverse does not. This is that Bluesky uses content-addressed content, so that content can survive if a node goes down. In this way (well, also allegedly with identity, but I will critique that part because it has several problems), Bluesky achieves its "credible exit" (Bluesky's own term, by the way) in that the main node or individual hosts could go down, posts can continue to be referenced. This is possible to also do on the fediverse, but is not done presently; today, a fediverse user has to worry a lot about a node going down. indeed I intentionally fought for and left open the possibility within ActivityPub of adding content-addressed posts, and several years ago I wrote a demo of how to combine content addressing with ActivityPub. But nonetheless, even though such a thing is spec-compatible with ActivityPub, content-addressing is not done today on ActivityPub, and is done on Bluesky.

Later on she describes how it costs thousands if not 10s of thousands USD to run a server that doesn't even do everything

Now, you may see people say, running an ATProto node is fairly cheap! And this is because comparatively speaking, running a Personal Data Store is fairly cheap, because running a Personal Data Store is more akin to running a blog. But social networks are much more interactive than blogs, and in this way the rest of Bluesky's architecture is a lot more involved than a search engine: users expect real-time notifications and interactivity with other users. This is where the real architecture of Bluesky/ATProto comes in: Relays and AppViews.

So how challenging is it to run those? In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage. That is a nearly 5x increase in just four months, and my guess is that by next month, we'll see that doubled to at least ten terabytes due to the massive switchover to Bluesky which has happened post-election. As Bluesky grows in popularity, so does the rate of growth of the expected resources to host a meaningfully participating node.

Bluesky is actually like usenet:

Bluesky does not utilize message passing, and instead operates in what I call a shared heap architecture. In a shared heap architecture, instead of delivering mail to someone's house (or, in a client-to-server architecture as most non p2p mailing lists are, at least their apartment's mail room), letters which may be interesting all are dumped at a post office (called a "relay") directly.

I don't understand the credible exit idea.

Even though the majority of Bluesky services are currently operated by a single company, we nevertheless consider the system to be decentralized because it provides credible exit: if Bluesky Social PBC goes out of business or loses users’ trust, other providers can step in to provide an equivalent service using the same dataset and the same protocols. -- Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

It is not a bad choice for Bluesky to be focused on providing an alternative to X-Twitter for those who miss Twitter-of-yore and are immediately looking for an offboarding from an abusive environment. I understand and support this effort! Bluesky does use several decentralization tricks which may lend themselves more towards its self-stated goal of "credible exit". But these do not make Bluesky decentralized, which it is not within any reasonable metric of the power dynamics we have of decentralized protocols which exist today, and it does not use federation in any way that resembles the way that technical term has been used within decentralized social networking efforts. (I have heard the term "federation-washing" used to describe the goalpost-moving involved here, and I'm sympathetic to that phrase personally.)

In my opinion, this should actually be the way Bluesky brands itself, which I believe would be more honest: an open architecture (that's fair to say!) with the possibility of credible exit. This would be more accurate and reflect better what is provided to users.

This article is about 10k words and I'm 2/3 through it.