I belong to several chicken groups on other social platforms, and the number of people who view this as part of a giant conspiracy is wild. Nope, this cannot possibly be the consequences of the known spreading mechanisms of well documented disease in a factory farm setting. It is clearly an attempt to control the populace through a narrative of limited food supply. Or it is a justification to release the next phase of the scamdemic. Or it is an initial cull to drive up prices and make more money by - checks notes - refusing to sell eggs.

I agree the corporations are out to take us over the coals and that large scale government has aspects that should not be trusted but still, people go from zero to pedophiles in pizza basements really fast.

Sincerely, I wish her the best. I know it is common to jump in with hate-the-rich feelings here, but I don’t know of anything she has done that makes her deserve cancer. Cancer sucks. The flight is awful, and once it is done you don’t get to know if you are actually better for a long time. For the rest of your life you get to carry physical and emotional scars from the fight.

I did this fight. I would wish it away from anyone except the most evil. I hope her treatment and recovery are as smooth as possible.

This is where AI could legit change the world for the better in the future. Use fewer pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides as the problems can be fixed mechanically on a highly localized level.

This could even help fix problems with invasive species - imagine a drone fleet that could kill kudzu just as it erupts from the soil.

Those would be X-tremeists. It’s an easy mistake to make.

Oh, this is great. There may have been more results since I was working on a field project studying them, but to my knowledge we have absolutely no idea! They are not particularly well adapted to the cold, but their range keeps extending northward. This well predates the rapid climate change caused by humans, so we cannot use that as a reason. They are a bit of a mystery.

My guess would be that they are occupying a niche where limited brain and limb development (problems all marsupials face) are not limiting factors on success. Maybe their lack of a close genetic relation when surrounded by placental mammals gives them some pathogen resistance when scavenging? Those are just mildly educated guesses. When I was working with them we had no idea, and our field results were not at all enlightening.

I do not mean to be pedantic, but this is topic I love.

Marsupials do not fill a niche by virtue of their lack of placement. Instead, they have survived so long by virtue of their isolation.

It turns out that the adaptions required for marsupials to birth and raise young without a placenta make them inferior to placental mammals in almost every scenario. They get out competed and die off in almost every instance. South America had marsupials, not placentals, until it formed a land bridge with North America. What happened then? All the marsupials died off with the weird exception of the American possum. The placentals straight up out competed them across the board.

Australia has kept marsupials only because of its extreme isolation. When any type of placental mammal has been introduced to Australia, it has ruined the ecosystem and taken over the niche it fills.

Independent of humans, marsupials are a dying design. We just happen to live at a time when we can see that extinction in process. Yes, humans have sped it up by more rapidly introducing placental species, but we can see how it happened without human intervention as well.

She rolled her eyes and said, "Well, I’m glad that our contract is only for [a limited period of time].”

It was not a vote against the whole shift, but instead a comment on the volatility of this space. The tech and the associated market is changing so fast that there are no real experts, proven business models, or established long term use cases. Everyone is experimenting, and nothing is set in stone. This change means the dust is not yet settling.

“We keep thinking like OpenAI is a company that has a clue what it is doing because they have this amazing product that is getting used everywhere in business. In reality, they are a startup, and startups are going to have startup problems. We cannot treat them or their product like they are established and stable.”

-my wife, who leads work at another company with OpenAI tech

I know the above quote is from someone “unimportant” in the industry, but to me it encapsulates exactly what we have seen from OpenAI in the past couple weeks. She became simultaneously reassured and more worried when Satya Nadella, the highly respected CEO of Microsoft, became directly involved. I wonder what she will think of this development when she wakes up.

Thank you! I was going to make this exact point. Autocatalytic reactions are assumed with good reason to be a necessary step on the way from non-life chemicals to life, but they are only one step. Carbon is the only element that can form the basis of the huge variety of chemicals needed for the simplest of life to evolve.

When I was an undergrad, I had professors who made completing arguments that live on other planets would not only be carbon-based, but that it likely would closely resemble life on Earth on molecular, microscopic, and macroscopic levels. Survival of the fit certainly depends upon the environment, but it also must comply with chemistry and physics. I am no expert in theoretical xenobiology, but it provides a strong and fact-based counter to the idea that alien life would by default be wildly different from life on Earth.

I am still going strong on Tears of the Kingdom. I love exploring a world I already new with changes and additions. I love having an open world game where I am still mandated to be a good person. I love getting creative with weird things. I love that my oldest kid plays as well and my youngest likes to help me solve puzzles. It has just been a blast for my family.