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xipho

> were predatory ... ?

Were they? Sawflies are herbivores, and are at minimum share a common ancestor with those that were not herbivores.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...

Re:ASCII by Jason Scott on Friday May 15, 2026 @12:00PM (#48150257)
He's streaming live "right now". https://www.twitch.tv/textfiles
Re:Any Open Source projects in need of documentation writer? on Thursday April 09, 2026 @07:38PM (#47711718)
Come spend some time with the TaxonWorks community, docs can always use love. https://taxonworks.org.
Inspirational stuff, with lots of great references to the OGs at the bottom, and source available. Now can it be merged with the look/feel of https://heredragonsabound.blogspot.com/. ;)
Re:Ghostmd: Ghostty but for Markdown Notes on Saturday March 07, 2026 @08:44PM (#47293461)
I've tried a lot of note management but always come back to [potwiki](https://github.com/vim-scripts/potwiki.vim) + "Vim". Only one necessary functional bit in the whole thing, write CamelCase and your word is linked, hit enter on it and you're there.
One could argue all science is still funded that way. My team is funded by a philanthrophist. NSF "royalty" re-distributes the peasant's taxes to do science. Etc.
When AI is done consuming (and it basically has, except for redundant human-human social network interactions), then will there be a renaissance of re-exploring the natural world? Without understanding its complexities I would posit we're doomed to short and ugly end. Perhaps AI is just what we need to start to re-appreciate it "at scale".
Re:Kimi Claw on Sunday February 15, 2026 @10:19AM (#47024381)
Anyone chime in on how they typically engage something like this? No way am I dropping my primary contact info into something so outwardly cryptic. Phone number? Hah! Do you scaffold a new identity/email (semi-automagically)?
Re:uBlock filter list to hide all YouTube Shorts on Saturday February 14, 2026 @10:02PM (#47020660)
This is the way. I get plenty of feeds, recommendations etc. from others, enough to keep me busy. Follow who I want, and drop in when I see they have something new.
Re:I Built a 1 Petabyte Server from Scratch [video] on Friday January 16, 2026 @09:49AM (#46646884)
That too! There seem to be a lot of YT videos that are memes on this theme as well though. He alludes to the fact that people make build videos that are essentially adding a couple of pre-existing more or less built components together. This is another level.
Re:I Built a 1 Petabyte Server from Scratch [video] on Friday January 16, 2026 @12:17AM (#46643225)
That's no meme- it's a fully operational crazy custom build. A remarkable video that doesn't end in "like and mash subscribe".
Ok, I'll bite. What if solar panels turn into breeding grounds with perfect environmental temperatures to create viruses that kill us all? Who is to say the sun won't blow up tomorrow? Why not enumerate all the things that might happen to distract? There is a nice quote going around re a weather scientists who gets asked annually what's it going to be like this year? He's tired, and notes "this year, and every year for the rest of your life is going to be the hottest ever." That's in large part to oil, full stop.
Re:Solarpunk is already happening in Africa on Wednesday November 05, 2025 @04:13PM (#45828103)
"But here’s the thing: this massively understates the opportunity.

The solar system is the Trojan horse. The real business is the financial relationship with 40 million customers."

Soooo... they have a good thing going, there is an opportunity to fsk them over? Like more centralized fees?

Re:Space Elevator on Monday October 20, 2025 @11:16AM (#45644909)
Notes on mushroom clouds are sobering.
Re:Data Viz Color Palette Generator (For Charts and Dashboards) on Thursday September 25, 2025 @10:33AM (#45373073)
Related, the OG, with research behind it- https://colorbrewer2.org/.
Re:Ton Roosendaal to step down as Blender chairman and CEO on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @05:42PM (#45281735)
I've pitched Blender to NSF Review panels and the higher ups that come by those to visit as the way science should do software. Would love to know of others as successful as this, particularly as it crosses boundries to industry.
Re:Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo on Thursday September 04, 2025 @05:18PM (#45132319)
If the only two examples that are presented are "SpaceX" and "Latin America" can we not dismiss any further importance on the conflict-of-interest aspect alone? A completely failed experiment, and a company that can create millions simply by tweeting- who buys this?
Child comment is probably right, "asymmetrical" was likely going through my mind, or some chimera of both. I mean to say that whatever humans do, their actions ("requests"), don't get a response from "nature" immediately, the "response" is unpredictable, particularly as to when it will come back. If we get a break down SS, we get no response. Request(s) -> nature impacted -> some time passes -> response comes back, but not all nice and linear, nor always what we expected. "Promises" only coming with deep understanding.
Big pharma will intervene when they realize that life is one big chemistry experiment, and it's running longer than any lab has. AI to predict, nature to produce, then you need to figure out how nature produced. Understanding the pathways in nature -> quicker time to product.
Very hard to escape biology unless you invest in understanding it. Ticks, mosquito-born diseases, agricultural pests, they don't care about AI, politics, or space-races or geo political boundaries. We, on the other hand, require life to go on, it's asynchronous.

This is why natural history collections, and taxonomists are going to be more critical than ever, at some point we'll need to re-invest in knowing what's out there, and, more importantly how and why it's different than what we knew before. Biodiversity is vast, this isn't easy.

Companies that anticipate this (we know we're going to get a billion requests for "what's this fly", how can we monitize this?), and also actully understand that species are literally invaluable lab experiments running millions of years, are bound to benefit. In a not so distance Scifi future will we see big pharma, defense, etc. protecting areas and their environments because they finally grok this?

Re:Show HN: New Ensō – first public beta on Monday June 30, 2025 @09:00AM (#44422764)
But yet I lurked longer than many of other product pages I land on to think about what might be going on thanks to the nature of graphics and the non-standard non-bootstrap template approach.

Sometimes providing TLDR means you are providing a way for people to instantly ignore you without further thought. Maybe there is a desire to engage people who think.

Re:Google DeepMind Releases AlphaGenome on Thursday June 26, 2025 @11:20PM (#44393422)
"To ensure consistent data interpretation and enable robust aggregation across experiments, metadata were standardized using established ontologies."

Can't emphasize enough about how DNA requires human data curation to make things work, even from day one alignments models were driven based on biological observations. Glad to see UBERON, which represents a massive amount of human insight and data curation of what is for all intents and purposes a semantic-web product (OWL based RDF at the heart) playing a significant role.

Re:Reinvent the Wheel on Saturday May 24, 2025 @04:46PM (#44083718)
Re:Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @02:39PM (#43836398)
The discovery part is anything but. I was trained to recognize scams in grocery stores (the on sale smaller is never cheaper then the bulk item... until rarely it is) early on by my parents. Few people recognize just how bad this is. Educating folks with somethign that does it for them first is a first step.

But yah, completely with you on the "sales is hell" part, that bit was for the startup bros.

Re:Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @09:52AM (#43832635)
On a "price awareness vein" - I've thought that a killer app would be a phone app that runs in a grocery store, it detects costs, brands, and sizes, and overlays two things 1) the option that is cheaper per mass and 2) whether there are cheaper options in other stores. Bonus for "this no-name is the same as that brand-name".

Imagine waving your phone, or having on your VR glasses and getting this feedback "instantly".

Plus, you can sell what you learned to sellers so they can out-compete one-another (and drive prices down for consumers).

In a sci-fi world this would turn grocery stores into Faraday cages quickly.

Maybe not useful for the Doordash generation, but the majority of human life can't afford such.

Right, they are not underwater. Hemimetaboulous insects like Holobates look like baby adults when they are born, and undergo multiple "partial" metamorphosis. In this case their wings are almost non-existent. They will go through multiple molts, gradually looking more like the adult. Holometabolous insects (e.g. beetles, wasps, butterflies, flies) are the ones with radically different body plans, often exploiting different niches, the larva could be aquatic, the pupa and adult terrestrial. Some more "basal" insects (dragonflies, mayflies) also have different body-plans at different stages, though instead of "larva" we say "imago", and things like that, for those lineages.
I know of Halobates, they live on top the ocean, not in the ocean. I.e. they have no adaptations to breathe in salt water. There are many other species like this that are restricted to tidal (flies, parasitic wasps, etc.) or costal areas and nowhere else, but again, not under water.
I suspect arthropods are way too diverse to fall under a single umbrella of "is_allergic". Millions of years of evolution can produce very radically different things for our bodies to worry about. Just the fact that there are no marine insects (completing their lifecycle within an ocean) tells us something about how different their biologies, and therefor allergenic "surface" are. Poison pathways from venom can target completely different systems in a humans.
Re:Obituary for Cyc on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @08:24PM (#43627774)
I find this very amusing. In philosophy of science some 20+ years ago I had a wonderful prof who went through 3(?) periods of thought. He laid out this argument, followed by the arguments seen below in this thread in various ways, in a systematic way where he convinced you that one way of thinking was correct, you took the midterm, then the next day he would lead with "everything you know is wrong, here's why.". It was beautiful.

He noted that this evolution of thought continued on until people generally argued that concepts/definitions that let you do meaningful things (your definition of meaningful, doesn't really matter what it is), are the way to go. The punchline at the very end, which happened to be the last thing I regurgitated on my last undergraduate exam, was him saying something along the lines of "Science, it beats hanging out in malls."

All this to say that if we read a little philosophy of science, that was done a long time ago (way before the class I took), things would make more sense.

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