alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • As many as one million black-footed ferrets lived on the continent in the late 1800s, but by the late 1950s, the species was presumed extinct. Scientists discovered a wild population in 1964, but even that group died out, and a captive breeding effort failed. Since a second rediscovery of a wild population in 1981, conservationists have worked hard to conserve the species using traditional breeding programs as well as more innovative technologies, including freezing semen and cloning.

    One of the challenges conservationists face when tasked with bringing back a species from the brink of extinction is limited genetic diversity, which leads to inbreeding and can make offspring more vulnerable to issues, including hereditary abnormalities, poor reproductive efficiency and increased mortality rates.


    The current population of black-footed ferrets—thousands of which have been reintroduced across the western U.S. since the 1990s—is all descend from just seven individuals, except for a few clones and Antonia’s new offspring. That’s a recipe for genetic bottlenecks that threaten the longevity of the species.

    Cue cloning. In 1988, scientists had the foresight to collect tissue samples from a black-footed ferret named Willa after she died and preserve the material in the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Willa never reproduced, so her genetic material was not included in the modern ferret population. Her preserved genes contain three times more genetic diversity than living black-footed ferrets do.









  • Because these are literal sky scrapers. Fire on a wood structure is a recipe for catastrophic failure. A fire in a large structure could have similar effects to those large high rise condos that collapsed in Florida from poor maintenance.

    i think you’re operating under 1) an extremely 1800s understanding of how fire-resistant a wood skyscraper would be and 2) a misguided understanding of where fire safety problems tend to come from in most contemporary buildings

    wood is not uniquely flammable,[1] and the vast majority of the problem in a fire is not going to be with the actual wood itself (as is true of steel, concrete, etc.) but moreso with the fact that we make nearly everything that isn’t the building itself out of extremely combustible materials and we probably should not do that? as i recall that was the entire problem at Grenfell, where the cladding used was a flammable plastic that rendered any airgapping measures between flats useless and allowed the fire to spread uncontrollably. the fire at Grenfell also reportedly began from a refrigerator that was plastic-backed.


    1. it can rather trivially be treated to be fire-resistant–and as the person you’re replying to notes has already been tested extensively and implemented in existing buildings to that end, and in multiple locales, just from a brief search on the subject ↩︎












  • Gaming culture and sex has a vexed history when it comes to gender, given the industry’s long history of bad assumptions that ‘real’ gamers are straight men, and that building an adult game audience means sexually appealing to straight men. Female characters in adult games are often expected to have sexualised designs, with entitled male gamers complaining about characters like Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy or The Last of Us II’s Ellie not being sexy enough; meanwhile, the BBC has reported about female games workers also being affected by a blasé culture around women’s sexualisation, such as graphic, distressing sexual content being thrust upon female games actors without warning. The few semi-famous titillating console games, like the Leisure Suit Larry series or Playboy: The Mansion, don’t exactly seem like they’re interested in feminism.

    But understanding sex in video games means understanding it as more than just cheap eye candy for straight guys. Sex is central to how many video games work, including games that don’t technically have any explicit content. Nintendo games present themselves as bastions of childlike, lightly heterosexual wholesomeness – Mario gets his kiss on the cheek from Princess Peach! – but I’ve written about the gay and trans innuendos common throughout the Zelda games, for instance, and how they’re used to both build Link’s androgynous character and to make use of covertly gay and covertly homophobic comedy. Levels of awareness of sex, from basic focuses on satisfying touch to creating sexual tension, are intrinsic to games in various ways, and the games that play with this awareness often find new and interesting ways to tell their stories, and to reflect on why we play games in the first place.


  • Dystopika (Steam, Windows) is a city builder in maybe the strictest definition of that two-word descriptor, because it steadfastly refuses to distract you with non-building details. The game is described by its single developer, Matt Marshall, as having “no goals, no management, just creativity and dark cozy vibes.” Dystopika does very little to explain how you should play it, because there’s no optimal path for doing so. Your only job is to enjoy yourself, poking and prodding at a dark cyberpunk cityscape, making things that look interesting, pretty, grim, or however you like. It might seem restrictive, but it feels very freeing.



  • As of 2019 the company published 100 articles each day produced by 3,000 outside contributors who were paid little or nothing.[52] This business model, in place since 2010,[53] “changed their reputation from being a respectable business publication to a content farm”, according to Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.[52] Similarly, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab deemed Forbes “a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism” as of 2022.[49]

    they realized that they could just become an SEO farm/content mill and churn out absurd numbers of articles while paying people table scraps or nothing at all, and they’ve never changed



  • It’s been just a week since US telecom regulators announced a formal inquiry into broadband data caps, and the docket is filling up with comments from users who say they shouldn’t have to pay overage charges for using their Internet service. The docket has about 190 comments so far, nearly all from individual broadband customers.

    Federal Communications Commission dockets are usually populated with filings from telecom companies, advocacy groups, and other organizations, but some attract comments from individual users of telecom services. The data cap docket probably won’t break any records given that the FCC has fielded many millions of comments on net neutrality, but it currently tops the agency’s list of most active proceedings based on the number of filings in the past 30 days.


    The FCC will surely hear from many groups with different views on data caps, but Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel seems particularly keen on factoring consumer sentiment into the data-cap proceeding. When it announced the inquiry last week, Rosenworcel’s office published 600 consumer complaints about data caps that Internet users recently filed.

    “During the last year, nearly 3,000 people have gotten so aggravated by data caps on their Internet service that they have reached out to the Federal Communications Commission to register their frustration,” Rosenworcel said last week. “We are listening. Today, we start an inquiry into the state of data caps. We want to shine a light on what they mean for Internet service for consumers across the country.”







  • It kind of reminds me of ASD symptoms, not reading social cues properly, etc.

    i know you mean well but, respectfully: having autism or another disorder (if Stallman even does) is probably not the reason why Richard Stallman has historically defended what amounts to pedophilia; why he continues to defend bestiality and necrophilia; and why he has extremely malformed opinions on what constitutes sexual harassment and sexual assault. and even if it is, that’s an explanation and nothing more. it does not excuse or make acceptable his behavior or the consistency with which it has skeeved other people out. he deserves to be strongly rebuked, as anyone else would, for his refusal to take accountability in this situation.