Lucent

On September 22, hundreds found their Threads account suspended, taking down every linked account and bricking any Meta hardware they owned with no consistent reasons provided or recourse available.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ThreadsApp/comments/1wnkje9/my_inst...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ThreadsApp/comments/1wng8u5/threads...

Here is the creator of Kobo caught up in the same ban wave, who escaped only by knowing a Meta employee. https://www.threads.com/@mtamblyn/post/DdqEWIGAF1g

The best adventure games are 2D because random walks there always return (Pólya). Not true in 3D, so puzzle games there end up either too easy or too difficult.

I just got swept up in this mass Threads suspension yesterday, despite not using it. I am locked out of Facebook and Messenger, and my Portal, Oculus, and Glasses are now bricked. I pay them $12 for Instagram a month, mostly to deter username thieves, and that was oddly not suspended, despite being linked, so the "safety" claims ring hollow. Be very careful about giving your money to Meta. They are quick to unperson with no recourse.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ThreadsApp/comments/1wnkje9/my_inst...

Good addition! I just added it.

You're in luck. I just moved a lot more motion to the compositor. Cladogram got a big upgrade too in speed. Most annoying bug is that Chromium will not allow any SVG on the compositor if your devicePixelRatio isn't 1, which is practcally nobody on a modern laptop.

This is vernacular picked up from Wikimedia commons for Homo rhodesiensis and its WikiData. It could be vandalism. I'll post to the Talk: and if it reverts, I'll reingest that source. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Homo_rhodesiensi... https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q131464

Edit: Regardless, I pulled it from production immediately out of an abundance of caution.

I reproduced this bug and will have a fix out in an hour.

This is the highest compliment, and I see why no other projects have tried to join all the different trees of life together or attach and reconcile traits. This was the majority of the project.

However, the unique "roll-up" visualization of traits brought in an interesting method of self-correction. For example, if any other phyla than the obvious 4 showed up with a single egg-laying species, I went back to the drawing board to find out where that incorrect join introduced the error.

OneZoom is a great museum piece. Very engaging visualization that invites large touchscreen interaction. Impressive code behind it too for pruning offscreen vectors so the zoom stays smooth. On desktop however, perhaps due to my age, it gives me a bit of gorilla arm.

Thanks to open data, I offer the same node hierarchy of OTT, among 10 other backbones, but present it with 3 different (perhaps less dazzling) viewing mechanics switchable at the top: Icicle, which packs hierarchy into a fixed vertical height while allowing depth to stay horizontally reachable. Chronogram is the opposite, showing structure even 10 levels deep in a compact horizontal region, but at the expense of large vertical expansion. And Tree, the default, which is a compromise that can also show multiple winding paths simultaneously by folding them against the gutter.

I also focus less on the tree itself and more on trait overlay and rolling up thousands or even millions of species into compact segments so you can get a feel for how many chordates lay eggs or how many spiders are carnivorous at a glance. https://ptree.org/#OTT

The gutter fold is entirely custom and took a month to get right. Try a link like this to see how the lines fold around each other in the gutter so hierarchy is preserved. https://ptree.org/#GBIF/Nutrition/42&view=tree&tab=wiki&open...

The project only exists thanks to thousands of scientists carefully cataloguing all this data and releasing it CC-BY. I am only the interface.

The problem with rolling up 2.2 million species into 7 kingdoms is it surfaces data quality issues loudly. Ranking photos by popularity means one node mismatch in millions due to a homonym will send that up from 10 levels deep. As I find these, I'm trying to squash them.

That raccoon you see is actually suffering from Morbillivirus Canine Distemper Virus and that photo is correctly attached to that virus, and that bird is indeed eating a lungfish. I actually do penalize outlier favorite counts for photos because they're often meme-ish. I may blacklist this so the 2nd most favorited lungfish can surface. There are a lot of detailed rules that score which photo you get based on aspect ratio, whether the subject is in captivity, alive, etc.

Ptree consolidates of 11 taxonomic trees, both categorical like we used in school (plant, animalia) and phylogenetic (evolutionary descent), with instant crosswalk between them.

Across those trees it overlays 41 visual properties (categorical and numerical) assembled from hundreds of biological traits and sources. Color the tree by habitat, nutrition, size, longevity, even see vertical range of birds and depth of fish visually.

The backend is 800 GB of raw data distilled through a 9-step build process that reconciles and links all 11 trees along with hundreds of traits so every node in every tree gets all the properties. Every color and number presented retains and shows its provenance: original wording, citation, and license.

The frontend uses a custom Miller column implementation with fold-away gutter, all composited animation (no frameworks, pure DOM mutation). Use +'s to try to confuse it by expanding many branches and it will fold them away and route edges around them.

Made by the creator of ptable.com, a popular interactive periodic table website around since 1997.

For some reason the floor price is $5 a month when given the complexity of the app and the benefit to my life, the price should be between a few cents and a dollar at the high end.

This is why land use and nuisance laws exist in municipalities. People clamor for deregulation when it prevents them from shooting off fireworks or guns or burning trash and move to unincorporated areas.

Then, a datacenter comes along, effectively a bigger, louder, richer neighbor playing by the same lack of rules and outdoes them at their own game. It's only oppression when a bigger dog shows up?

Costco's gimmick is relieving you of choice and price shopping. They find the best stuff and don't mark it up. If Consumer is your identity yet you fear executing its labors, let Costco step in and become your denomination of consumerism, complete with tithe, proscribed usury, and communion hot dog.

Mom brain is also a thing. Large scale, consistent, structural changes in the postpartum brain that is uncorrelated with PPD. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab463

I suspect the "alpine divorce" phenomenon is the same desire to test influence dangerously attempted in a higher stakes environment. "No, let's go to this restaurant" becomes "Let's take this path" or "Let's take a break" and refusal to entertain tests of influence to alter the plan are recast as attempted murder.

https://twitter.com/JamesLNuzzo/status/2037859859585179746

I am shocked it resonated with readers here so universally. It was well-presented visually, but genuinely miserable to read with all the worst tells of AI writing. It contained two or three actual sentences of content with intense repetition, obnoxious signposting, and disjoint "what the fatcats don't want you to know" framing throughout. "Nobody in a position of power is saying this. The reason is simple: They sold you the condition. Now they sell you the treatment." The single worst thing I've read on Hacker News this year.

Two Kickstarters, one with the "Projects We Love" badge from the platform itself, have raised $1M+ by promising a clamshell PC with mechanical keyboard while demo videos show a known AliExpress headless keyboard/touchscreen (no internals) running benchmarks while never showing the rear I/O suggesting hidden cabling.

When it flags something as high confidence, 3.1 is very reliable. Human-authored text I saw scoring ~70 with 3.0 now scores ~15. With scores above 90, the false positive rate looks to be about zero. https://www.pangram.com/blog/pangram-3-0-technical

Turns out my blog is actually a newsletter? Seems like a distinction without a difference.