naishoya

GenodeOS :: SculptOS might get more attention for just this reason.

Nice click bait-headline you have there.

Try: Ten year-old reproduces Georgetown University professors moth experiment in butterflies under remote instruction and parental supervision. Results demonstrate persistence of trained behaviour across generations, does not explore method of transmission.

Writes a long report and gets invited to entomology conference. The professor gets university support for attending international conference and follow up blog interviews.

Ten year old declines to pretend to want to become an entomologist. States a more financial minded goal of Veterinarian, instead.

21 hour old troll farm account... see comment regarding 'financially motivated' psuedo-scientific content.

I should have kept scrolling, but here goes.

TLDR; Science is Complicated, statistics are confusing, some publications that look like science have been paid for by the petrochemical industry to mislead the gullible, and climate instability has many reasons of which human activity is a significant contributor.

Here goes the long version :

There are many, many... very many regions in scientific understanding where one cannot simply 'run fully controlled laboratory experiments with only a single variable.'

These all require many minds working together to find the most probable cause-and-effect relationships, which may have a large number of co-related and unrelated contributory causes.

Most of applied medicine, materials science, ecosystems biology, sociology, ... the list really does go on to include just about every field that is not either very elementary kinetics or basic chemistry.

For example: The primary reason for most of the efforts in low temperature quantum computing is about removing as many exterior effects (thermodynamic chaos) on the very specific material interactions that are being used.

The application of a prismatic view: "we don't have a single-variable laboratory equivalent" to the realm of attempted scientific comprehension, can make it necessary to stop learning at about a 5th grade basic science level, and then set a worldview accordingly.

It might be inferred from the tone and content of linked interaction, not with a frontier-capability LLM model, but with the 'explain-a-thon two-thousand' which has been shimmed into the google search page, perhaps this is the worldview-building approach in use, and this post is seeking validation of that worldview in this forum.

This interaction does not in-fact demonstrate that an understanding of the scientific process has 'defeated' a weak-tea model's training data, nor does it demonstrate that there should be any significant measure of doubt that anthropogenic effect on climate instability exists.

Take strict note of the "significant measure of doubt" phrase, it is load bearing in all of science. If any reliable dataset introduces significant doubt into the scientific consensus, the scientific community (a.k.a the consensus) does reliably investigate and then shift toward explanations of observations which reduces the "significant measure of doubt."

That is the exact process which has been followed, and continues to be followed, to reach current scientific community's consensus in every field, including global climate instability, which was simplified in the press to read as "Global Warming."

Where reliable data is insufficient or false some corner cases appear in headlines about "reproduce-ability failure" and "ethical misconduct" in scientific publications. This is an outcome of many effects, many of which may be attributed to misalignment within institutional science resulting from 'publish-or-perish' stressors on research.

Another effect on the body of climate science publishing has been and continues to be been directed, unethical publications of disinformation funded by the groups who are financially incentivized to continue the mass consumption of petrochemical assets. These publications and the alleged scientists producing them are generally viewed as unprincipled when the financial mechanisms funding the unreliable research and those publications are exposed to public view.

This is similar to situations when tobacco companies contracted the creation of pseudo-science which presented as true various viewpoint from 'smoking is good for you', to 'smoking treats cancer' and later 'smoking doesn't increase your chances of being diagnosed with cancer.' These were conclusively debunked and some of the offending parties held accountable in various courts of law.

The petrochemical industry is in the nascent stages of this same route to accountability.

So, yes, "Science is Complicated" but there is not any significant doubt in the scientific communities' that increasing frequency and severity of weather instability in general and wildfires in particular are one outcome of conditions which have been impacted in a measurable quantity by human actions.

Anyone who is publishing to the contrary is very likely to be perpetuating a worldview that may be easier to understand, but that worldview is less likely to be accurate than the probability of finding several grand prize LOTTO tickets on the ground.

Well, they do seem to understand the target market - a cringe sob story rationale, and a sales promo video set on what appears to the between the columns of a antebellum plantation estate.

Might as well lean hard into the sub decimal percent market, while developing obvious defense sector flight control software.

A bit of anecdotal story about the differences between US and Japanese companies and customer relations follows:

The scene was Tokyo Disneyland at the time of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Shelter in place was a requirements, and there were school age and younger children who took refuge in a gift shop. As a help to keep the youngest children comforted through a scary time, the staff there took the initiative and let the children hold stuffed anials from the gift shop inventory.

Now, think about this from the US Disney Corp. viewpoint. They did what?? They gave away what amounted to pretty much the entire inventory of stuffed characters?

How fast would the manager taking that action be 'unhired' at L.A. or Florida?

But, this was Japan and things are different.

The managers have a cultural standard of hospitality and responsibility of care, even though this is a Retail Location, these children and parents are still guests in the venue.

The children and their parents also knew that these weren't "gifts" from Disney, but, without getting explicit or formal assent at the time of handing them out, everyone just understood that when the shelter in place period ended, the stuffed characters were to be returned.

Staff didn't even have to ask for them back, and the parents had managed childrens' expectations to prevent meltdowns when that happened.

All the children who needed some extra comforting in a stressful situation had a favorite character, and the Retail Location lost exactly zero product.

I could go on with many other intrinsic differences, but this one is a pretty clear example.

So, the US business realities neither were necessary nor appropriate in that situation.

Upload limits: You can limit your global upload speed to 0 KB/s in your client settings. This effectively stops your client from sharing anything, including in-progress pieces, while the download happens. It's not "playing fair" but there is nothing in the torrent protocol which requires every user to participate in seeding.

Here's are a few links to several resources about the state of safety at the frontier LLM models' companies of origin. The first uses shorter sentences and has further supporting links.

Hopefully those with provide you with an easier to comprehend, "synthetic" (sic) measurement of the risks that are unavoidable in the 'product' under consideration.

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320191/20260711/openai-lo...

TLDR; the safety at every commercial LLM scores at or below a C+. I don't believe anyone serious can honestly believe that the founders of this 'product' are capable of reinforcing security that does not exist in any of the models they may choose to utilize.

https://futureoflife.org/ai-safety-index-summer-2026/

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318351/20260614/chatgpt-f...

Hope this helps.

Also, the "Shame on you" statement was directed exclusively at the founders of this product and people who would intentionally expose children in their stewardship to these dangers.

If that is not you, then my honest apologies if it seemed directed at you. That was not my intent.

If that includes you, and you couldn't grok the concepts in my rant; we have nothing more to talk about.

It's simple for parents - be the human tutor they need. If you're capable of loving them and being responsible for raising them, that task fall to you. Underprivileged by socioeconomic realities? In the US there is Head Start for this problem, and yes, it does work and has been longitudinally proven to do so by independent studies and peer reviewed publication. In a nation without these services, but able to be here on HN reading about the situation? Who is helping your child right now?

The concept of using untested, unregulated, demonstrably harmful models - see news about 'suicide ideation and school shooting facilitation' by public facing enterprise models - is a dangerous condition that no amount of hand-wavy, but "My co-founder, who is a clinical child psychologist" statements mitigate.

First, that isn't a statement by the actual person purporting to be a professional, and second this statement plays into the misconception in American consumers' minds which often conflates psychiatrist with psychologist . The first is a medical degree with the responsibility and risk of losing a medical accreditation for engaging in this kind of unethical, untested approach on children at large. The second has no supervisory board capable of revoking credentials, and may even mean nothing more than an undergraduate degree in basic psychology. Thus, I am highly skeptical about any such business' ability to carry liability insurance from a reputable firm.

Here on HN you can readily find articles about firms offering fraudulent compliance readiness; so I'm not doubtful of being able to procure the verisimilitude of coverage, just the veracity and legality of the coverage available to any organization taking this cavalier approach which relies on these models.

Now, if the model and infrastructure Elo is leaning on is an in-house, on-premises, refined private MoE (Mixture of Experts) framework with a curated harness and training data which is demonstrably free of harmful materials and has been/continues to be fine tuned to provide provably safe content and interactions: that might be testable for compliance and liability coverage.

The cost of such an infrastructure would make it a premium product, with a potential customer base that can and does already have 'affordable' human tutoring. As this human one-on-one to on-on-a-few tutoring is the gold standard benchmark for 'best-case' that this product cannot exceed, there is no viable use-case for it's existence or use, except when the parents might find an AI subscription to be less of cognitive load than managing actual people. Even rich people can be self serving and delusional about the well-being of their own children.

All I can see from here is; attention grabbing, AI hype delusional, high risk, for-profit exploitation of overworked middle class parents, using uncontrollable public facing models which hide behind a 'we take no responsibility for the results' disclaimer organizations that can and will spin the dials on performance and capacity quotas and 'upgrade' to a degraded, de-safety limited model with zero notice, mid workload. Which once the enticingly low costs of providing this 'risk factors as a service' are covered, has the appearance of profitability for the founders in the short term, and when the 'unlimited plan' is actually very limited will be an external 'force majeure' for either subscription price increases or rug pull from under the by-then addicted young minds.

The need for solutions to the gap in educational opportunity between children of the top 1% and the rest of the world is real. This approach is not a solution; but is an entirely different class of risk posing as a solution.

Shame on you both.

xcancel.com/whatever-the-rest-of-the-x.com_link solves this.

One could look deeply into the Sudbury School or other similar approaches, especially for students with an existing internal drive to learn, as your daughter has demonstrated. The socialization aspects, particularly in participation in building group consensus in early developmental periods has far reaching effects.

If you believe that the core learning; reading, writing, and math competencies are being achieved at home, then a 'scheduled, unstructured time with peers and friends' may also be possible at this age through 'Head Start' program if available in your area.

The outcomes of Head Start's programs have been longitudinally validated from pre-kinder to the measurable outcomes through university graduation for a significant number of students across underprivileged and socioeconomically advantaged cohorts, with the process and results of these as a matter of public record by external researchers with independent review. Serious consideration may weight these types of studies more than "our students perform well" statements by other school projects.

That is not to say that other programs don't have merit, and in fact to the extent that the applied practices of any school overlaps with those studies, the results should be analogous.

I only bring this up, as at least for early grades, the 'hub for families' sounded like something that either the Sudbury or Head Start could deliver.

Disclaimers:

I have a family member who participated in every stage at Head Start; from in-classroom teacher, to multiple graduate degrees in developmental psychology and social work in order to design curricula, and as a regional manager for both HeadStart and a private community family social support caseworker. So I have some big picture concepts of what the program is and what it can provide.

I also have a close friends who have a daughter who was homeschooled through 3rd grade. Both parents have degrees in education and have been primary school teachers, one with a focus on linguistics and social studies, the other in math and life sciences. It really was Home+School. She then attended a traditional curriculum charter school, and then in middle school attended a Susbury school. The 'transition period' for her unfortunately was interrupted during COVID's early days. After the return to in-class attendance at the Sudbury School she staew there for a year and felt that she would perform better in a traditional classroom. Her parent's have been very complimentary of Sudbury approach, and they all feel that if she had been in that school from an earlier point in her education it could have worked for her.

It is clear that you are thinking deeply about this, and I wish you all the best of luck.

simple math. Money == Power.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Given enough money and increasingly perverse incentives to gain even more has a very high potential to corrupt.

Did they start out as corrupt, or was it the influence of the power that came with the obscene amount of money?

It's really a chicken and egg level of calculus.

Doesn't matter which came first, either way you get feathers and chickenshit all over the yard.

Do some very rich people still seem very nice in person? Sure. Of course they must, because otherwise no one would willingly work for or with them. As the total amount of money goes up, the incentives to remain 'seemingly nice' go down and either you get to see who they really are, or who they became through the choices to make that much more money. Doesn't matter which is true.

The examples of non-villainous billionare are rare.

Of non-villainous multi-billionaire; lets see there's about eight of them that stand out for giving significant amount of the massive wealth to helping the world around them, who live normal lives like the people in the communities where they reside, and who participate at the companies they own by eating in the company cafeteria among the people who earn the wealth they enjoy.

Thats 8/3400 global billionaires ... about a quarter of a percent.

And of the 'pledges' like Giving Pledge by the billionaire class, the actual amount delivered - not parked in a family or private trusts for tax deductions; but actually delivered to the front lines of any global crisis amounts to 0.18%, less than one fifth of one percent of the $20.1 TRILLION dollars held by that class of owners. thats less than $2.00 on every $1000.

That's not to say that donating to public needs is 1:1 for non-heinous behavior, but it seems like a basic tool for distinction. the 'can make a significant difference in global suffering : chooses not to' ratio as a surrogate for villain may be useful metric and doesn't require cynicism as the underlying rationale for calling someone's behavior as unkind in general or mean in particular.

You seem to misunderstand the logic flow of why the right-wing bigots' infrastructure is repeatedly getting hacked.

They don't get hacked specifically because of who they treat poorly, but because the very people who they treat poorly won't work for them. The subset of the population of whom they are publicly abusive and disrespectful is over-represented in the top performing defensive programmers.

point A > They wont hire from this subset of the population - which excludes a significant portion of infosec top talent. The neurodivergent talent pool that is adjacent to that subgroup, which itself may not be the direct targets of the abusive behavior is also over-represented in the top talent pool is less likely to feel comfortable supporting these clients.

point 2 > The remaining talent pool is thus a less concentrated distribution of top performing infosec professionals. Not that any individuals in this group are less capable in particular, but that the mean distribution of capability is somewhat lower in the remaining group.

point D > Hackers are prolific and adept at finding the least secure aspects of infrastructure, by definition. The concentration of talent in the hacking community probably follows the same distribution curves. This creates a subset of hackers with a motive to target both the less well prepared organizations, and have a negative opinion of those less prepared organizations with a history of abusive behaviour towards groups with which the subset of high performing hackers strongly identify or associate.

Bigots, racists, far-right-wing Republican organizations get hacked. [Perhaps more frequently - unsubstantiated]. Apparently, because the outcomes of self-identification as intolerant asshats makes their specific infrastructure both an easy target for hackers of any orientation, and a preferred easy target for hackers opposed to bigotry, racism, and far-right-wing Republican organizations.

Period

This, ALL DAY LONG.

Having significant roles in the design, funding, and implementation of various public and private school educational projects which integrated some minimal technology I have seen this firsthand as far back as it has existed.

The schools which had the GOOGLE Classroom crap 'sold' to administrators and forced upon the teachers and students were examples of absolutely abysmal failure at every role to which they were supposed to help.

GC is s complete waste of the schools limited budgets, a waste of instructors already over-committed time, and a complete failure to deliver improved educational outcomes for the students. They may have been more 'engaged' in the screens, but they learned less. In the end the GC framework becomes a leash, used by schools to monitor and invade the out-of-school aspects of student lives, and tilts the field more steeply where disparities of home income levels exist.

My particular programs' inclusions of technology were never for 'education' with the exception of elective CS and robotics classes. Otherwise the technology was for records management and course content preparation help for teachers.

One project's tech use case stands out distinct from that limit. A charter school project - instructors and students working to create video and online course materials documenting the conversion of a school program from single grade standard 'science' classes to multi-age, collaborative, hands-on STEM science programs.

But the tech use and coursework were more for documentation and dissemination of the conversion process than for the principle educational objectives.

Actual students did use adapted legacy Samsung android devices to record observations and collaborate among peers during the observations of field studies and workshop classes.

The handhelds checked out to students' on a 'per project' basis each day, so there was no 'individual content' on any of the devices.

The repurposing of these devices wasn't accomplished through 'locking down' an overcapable platform, but by building from the kernel up and only including the specific functionality as required to collect and collaborate - so, no web, no chat, no games, no distractions. The specific workshop content and objectives were available via the handheld, and at specific places in the progression the students were required to input observations and record still or videos. Those images were not shared among students and there was no incentive for shenanigans as all content was directly attached each student's workshop performance and we were clear in the start of the classes that because this was going to be part of the conversion process documentary, no people in any film. we has a big library of already categorized required captures: Plants in various stages, equipment set-ups, insects in situ for ID, test-strip color comparisons, reagent container labels, etc. Some of the kids called them something from a scifi TV show, complete with "Beam me outta here" jokes.

So, technology can be very useful, but not when it comes with external motives and further widens socio-economic disparity. If the objective is MORE engaging content and MORE accurate records of student progress, then sure.

But, that usefulness is usually directly inverse to the cost and functionality of the devices: cheaper, limited capability tech will usually if not always outperform fancier, overcapable tech.

A $very-cheap refurbished Samsung Galaxy stripped down to whitelisted bluetooth and Wifi LAN, with an distributed storage layer and local-only browsing (Apache Cordova based app) can get alot done without adding tools not required for the specific needs of the student [or educator in many cases].

Campus server infrastructure de-minimus was a solved problem with bittorrent sync and each device only subscribing to the specific file-tree required for the specific workshop/class, and student submissions are only accessible to that student, and the course instructor(s) - eliminates the bullying and other misuses of technology.

We also were able to use a direct approach to resolve the personal phones in class problem, at least for the part f the campus participating in the STEM conversion (4th to 7th grades). Students had to turn off phones, lock them in a pouch, and hand that in to receive a handheld.

If a parent needed to reach the student in school, that's why the school front office had phones. Otherwise, student's were 'in class' and not to be disturbed.

But this was over ten years ago, and today's parents and students would probably throw a toddler sized tantrum at these rules.

Too bad the project got rug-pulled for funding in between years 1 and 2 for the documentation and distributable methods layer; but the school did get to keep teaching the hands-on STEM focus to completion of the then enrolled students - we baked in the costs for that into the first year at the insistence of the participating teachers and parents.

TLDR; don't let your school get SCROOGLED.

The long term sustainability in at least one of those leading countries (Japan) has been shown effective for at least the period from the end of WWII to now. The principle difficulty they have is not maintaining high levels of educational success but in having enough children to keep the schools open and the teachers fully employed. But, that is a different concern than successful educational outcomes.

The average level of capability and comprehension in fundamental disciplines for students completing primary is a direct result of some fundamental differences in the way they approach classroom organization: for one middle school and high school students do not change classrooms during a school day.

Teachers rotate rooms while students remain in place and this maintains a less disjointed, less distracted transition between classes. There are still very little to zero technological advances to the teaching methods: blackboards/whiteboards, overhead projectors, hand written paperwork, textbooks.

The reasoning is simple. The fundamentals which students in primary education are in need of learning do not change much. Last years' textbooks are perfectly useful and the cost of replacement is directly carried by each student. If they damage a book, they must replace it.

Salaries for teachers are not unusually high, but they are also not low. The building and administrative costs are kept low, for one, by there not being a significant non-instructor labor expense of janitorial and maintenance workers. Schools share the pool of municipal HVAC and other trades for serious infrastructure, but janitors? Nope. The students are required to actually clean up after themselves, and to actually clean the whole school. It makes a difference, and those avoidable labor costs can be directed to proper compensation for the teaching staff.

Anecdotal observation of the overall efficacy of this approach reaches areas not usually measured as 'educational success' but also includes one noteworthy artifact. The common clerk, shop keeper, cook, or gas tank delivery driver all know that i = sqrt(-1) and that a complex number is a pair of numbers, one of which is the coefficient of (i). Let that sink in. How many people graduate with a B.A. from western schools without that?

There is not a 'silver bullet' but there are a full compliment of approaches which when applied together, consistently, and persistently, yield excellent sustainable outcomes.

Back to the falling population problem. There are pluses and minuses from the choice to provide separate boys and girls middle and high schools; one of which is lower teenage pregnancy and it's inverse, lower adult birthrates. (It's not the only reason for the lower birthrates, but it's not having zero impact.) You cant win 'em all.

modern autonomous warfare :: so, skynet version 0.n :: now hiring

An account 57 minutes old, with zero other information and a company name from the Wile E. Coyote cartoons.

With zero website or email information...

Step one - Find the right CEO and cold spam him with GitHub proof of work or an idea to steal (side project is the LAST THING is would show to a CEO with nothing else to do but 'acqui-hire'). No formal resume: "we're to cool to read those."

For a company that doesn't have a product, any code, or any customers.

Step two - invent the product, build the code, test the code, deliver 80% complete code (forgetting the 90-10-90 rule of code) in return for 5% stake in a company with no other product than what you just invented whole cloth by yourself. Which when 80% done is still 10% away from being half of the required time away from production ready.

Geebus, how dumb and desperate does this account-holder think a full stack developer with 3 to 8 years experience on mature, functioning production is going to be at this point in time?

Oh, and be low ego. So that when the CEO and his buddies claim to have invented the next big thing, you are already OK with that.

Here's a useful page about alternatives to instacrap. https://monnett.social/blog/5-alternatives-to-instagram/

TLDR;

https://pixelfed.org/ <- open-source, decentralized, and ad-free

https://glass.photo/ <- subscription-based photography platform: artists pay, viewer account are free

https://vsco.co/feed <- started as a mobile photo-editing app , became a creative community stripped of social mechanics. No public follower/like counts or comment sections. Basic tools and sharing has a free tier.

If the people who encouraged you to insta are actually interested in your work, find out which one of these suits your needs AND will be used by those individuals.

Next: Find a way out of FB.

'Kilt! Whas happ'n tae'e last wee rocket as call't a skirt'

https://www.amazon.com/Kilt-Happened-Person-Called-Skirt/dp/...

But you're not wrong. I haven't rode and actual Vespa, but have been on a Yamaha Vino YJ50 in my full montie gallus kilt, frae bunnet tae brogues.

What was the comment that got deleted?? I read the transcript, and scrolled through the comments... did you have anything substantive to add to the wandering dialogue about FPGA specifically that would have breached something 'the big G' is invested in protecting? or is this just a 'look-at-me' post for the youtube channel?

It might be closer to you than you think.

How far from the nearest Walmart Superstore do you live?

Ask the cashier/clerk there and at your local gas station if if they can afford to live anywhere but with their parents or a handful of roommates.

Visit a chain food establishment where a lunch for two costs less than $40, and talk to the back-of-house staff; the ones washing dishes and cooking food. Ask them about retirement fund plans and employee provided health insurance options.

If you're fortunate enough to live farther away from these parts of the American economic realities, I would expect that 20 to 40 minutes drive on a freeway can get you pretty close to it.

If you don't go to those places; ask your Door Dash or Uber Eats driver about why they drive instead of working at those stores... and pay them with a C-note for taking the time to help broaden your perspective.

Try looking at the view of current America through the eyes of someone who is non-white, non-male, non-tech or tech-adjacent. It's a stark contrast to the sanitized view from the isles of Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, Erewhon, or PCC and from Sweetgreen, Cava, and the True Food Kitchen.

Im not talking from a small sample set of anecdotal observations over a short period of time, but from a wide consensus of travel, first hand interactions, and living experience. In different states, over a 35 year working history, in a variety of situations, and direct relationships with a much larger than average network of family members. I have over one hundred cousins - not counting spouses, their children and grandchildren, on each of my patriarchal and matriarchal sides.

Not joking, my ancestors have been here, on the ground, since the Clovis era (between 9000 and 13000 years ago in the Rocky Mountains) and the early 1630's - one of my direct forefathers was a Colonel who reported directly to Washington. So I have every reason to wish the country was living up to it's stated intentions and potentials. It simply isn't, not recently, but also not for a VERY long time before now. The conditions I describe are the lived experience of many Americans, and appear to have played an outsized role in the results for the nation today.

Maybe, I'm wasting my keystrokes - username trollbridge might be the clue that this is an argumentative tone question without any real intention of truthful discourse.

In that case, consider this response for the benefit of the broader HN community. We all need get outside our own bubbles, and find ways to uplift the people who do the work we rely on and provide support for the community in ways which are not being delivered by the system. It's not ok to pretend to not need a functioning society to thrive in.

Yes, this it absolutely true.

Thus the past-tense in the quoted section.

They "were" differently motivated and the slide that began much longer ago in the other schools (and was always present for the 'legacy' students at Ivy-Leagues) has now reached the general student body.

Hopefully this trend will become more visible in hiring practices, will lead to an erosion of the preference for named schools, and employers will adopt a more disciplined path from internship-to-mentorship-to-full_team_membership to compensate for the general loss of capability and readiness from graduates everywhere.

I say, hopefully. I don't see any inclination toward that path from any of the major employment sectors.

Maybe the Ivy-Leagues and top ranked schools will collectively reinforce student performance requirements, encourage educational rigour, accept lower admission numbers for only high performing applicants, use their endowment funds to establish bridge institutions which remediate the shortfalls of public school education and offer trade-school training programs for the masses of students not capable of the high standards.

But, as Mal says, "I'd like to be the king of all Londinium and wear a shiny hat."

So, we're both right. The Ivy League did mean better education, AND it may not be better for much longer due to the incoming student body.

A honey farm rehab with the first task on the first day: get a beehive out of the church apse today, because the wedding is scheduled tomorrow - with a sawsall and a shopvac with an inline bee-safe collection box: relocate the hive, dont kill the queen and most of the workers.

Progressing to controlling mite infestation to prevent further population collapses, without using any chemicals beyond superfine cane sugar and crystallized sterile honey powder ~ dusting to induce healthy hygenic actions and relocating the hives into an elevated, bottomless position with oil on water traps to catch mite and other pestfall.

Induce queen cell production (using a #2 pencil as the 'oversized' cell template), expand from 6 struggling hives back to 26 active producing hives with on-site queens and brood comb splits). Build new top-bar hives.

......

Cooperage - white oak wine barrels from scratch by hand, without jigs or templates, from raw lumber to staves and oak 4 plank heads, with mild steel assembly rings and permanent hoops (chimes, quarters, and bilges) made from repurposed marine keel strake strips from salvaged sailboats.

......

Braided kangaroo and bovine rawhide into riata: 6 and 8 strand weaves in 55' to 60' for ushnad bre by working vaquero in Sonora, Chihahua, and elsewhere. [Wow, was that really 40 years ago? Man, time flies!] Sold a few, hand braided nylon halters and other saddle tack about the same time from broken and unraveled nylon-poly rodeo ropes.

......

Tour guiding - Back country (multi-day, horse+mule and hiking in diverse climates and ecosystems), high altitude star-gazing with Celestron telescopes, and lava flow multi-mile hiking to experience active flows.

......

Sub-grade elevation precision assurance for municipal scale drainage and water management construction : convert surveyor placed elevation pins into verifiable slope gradient guidelines and grade check every foot of the excavation using plumb-line and laser-level, 0.2 to 2.0% slopes with tested compaction for pre and post pipeline installation - installation sites included one MLB spring-training campus.

/todays installatment of 'unusual things i have done for a little income'

This, all day long... 9-5 is just the first job of the day if we're lucky.

Then there's the 7 to 2am second job, the 5 to 7 on Saturdays and Every Other Sunday.

Just to not actually have health insurance which is accepted at anything but the worst health care facilities in the region, with a 6 month waitlist for basic check-ups and a 60% fails or cancel for those appointments and reschedule 3 or more months away.

We are all ONE semi-serious illness or injury away from living out of a shopping cart under an overpass.

Money isn't the cure to ALL problems, but if the only problems you have left are the ones that cannot be solved by money, quit whining about being luckier than practically and statistically EVERYONE else. It is unbecoming and makes you look the fool.

Start taking notes.

Quick answer: YES

Longer answer - in the other reply to your doubtfulness.

This is true across the entire US system, some state flagship universities curricula are so deficient that graduate level at better schools wont even consider the bachelor level diplomas from those schools as eligible unless the applicant is top n% of the graduating class, where n is a low single digit.

The admissions committee may never publish or say it directly, but for MANY state flagship universities the B.S. level maths and science courses are simply insufficient fo higher level studies at leading schools.

Thus, companies with hiring and leadership that is aware of these conditions will also simply pass over applicants with degrees from flagship state universities, much the same as they do with online diploma mill "Graduates."

My take on this situation is that as primary education outcomes worsened in the US, state universities modulated the coursework to match the readiness of incoming students in order to keep enrollment 'available' to everyone and extract revenue from the student loans system.

The "Princeton and Harvard(s)" were differently motivated, in that they never had a goal of admitting the majority of High School graduates, and thus were not required to lower levels of educational rigour to meet eroding conditions in primary education.

It truly is a sad "state" of affairs.

and didn't secure the domain as linked... had a client for web design that did this once.

He printed all of his advert. hard copy, product labels, business cards, and the whole shebang without actually securing the domain.

Then came to me and wanted a site built at that URL.

The site was for sale... by someone in the printing pipeline, for 3.2k - which was just about 100 less than all the printing would cost to rerun. That's how we knew it was a print related opportunistic move.

Now he could either rererun the print (find another vendor supply chain), or buy the domain.

Either way he didn't have a plan for how to do one of those things and still pay for the fancy website he wanted... we ended up going with a basic Drupal at the printed domain.

Hope your shift from the world of make believe 1.0 to make shit up 2.0 goes better than it looks like it's starting out.

PS. internet lesson number A. don't use go-daddy if you want HN or anyone else to take you serious.

it's pretty hard to define - unusual in my life.

Farmers' market produce was once a go-to for our basic funding requirements; and pretty much all of those were wild harvested from perma-jungle that we leased or from surrounding state/public roadside, and from trees and edible weeds that i was also payed to trim and maintain - so i knew they were all pesticide, herbicide free.

Also did some sales of goat milk, which as it was unpasteurized and unprocessed, was not for human consumption. A primary customer was the exotic mammals nursery at the local zoo. Turns out goat milk is a pretty good stand-in for the needs of everything from foxbats, to marsupials, to simians; with perhaps a little adjustment by the veterinarian caretakers in each of those cases.

I've been an occasional writer of technical documentation, including for private and government grant proposals ~ that may seem strange to have your lawn-care, goat-wrangling, tour-guide, dive-instructor as the uncredited primary author for a multi-year, multi-institution, multi-million dollar educational research program: but hey, whatever gets the job done, and since I identified the grant(s) and matched them to the service providers, educators, researchers, and institutions they paid me to write them. Several of those ran for a little less than ten years with renewal and reapplication - minimal reworking of the original grants to meet each years' new parameters.

Provided safety training and outdoor activity orientation in a National Park which included both whitewater rafting and back-country mule rides. Is that unusual?

Collected offshore water samples for e. coli detection and genetic analysis to determine near-shore pollution sources. Is that unusual?

Pulled used vehicle tires from landfills for recycling into rubberized asphalt, with selections of those shipped to form a seismic damper layer at an international airport built on a man-made island? Is that usual?

The list really does go on: astronomy equipment digital control interface software, bare-metal unikernel design, commercial dish washer, electric and hydrogen kiln control hardware redesign and implementation, commercial game meat processing, electronic flight-bag software design, commercial video monitoring installations, high risk personnel protection, methane-digester design (with vapor scrubbing for safe appliance use in a mixed methane:propane system including off-grid refrigeration), NiFe alkaline power cell reconditioning, PC repair including refloat of 'dead' GPU hardware solder points (oh, back in the day of the 9800), isolate and safety testing of lambic fermenting polycultures for more than one microbrewery - many of the HN crowd may have actually tasted the semi-sour Weisen from one of those, before the shop got bought out by AB Inbev, ... it's been a while since i really made a list, and just now I realize it does just go on-and-on, ... there's rattlesnake meat sold to a restaurant, gentle breaking of horses, house demolition and historically accurate restoration of a 'listed property', underwater asset reclamation...

The thing I realize is that I may never have made very much revenue from any of them; but each needed done, I was willing and able.

It sure beats saying to myself; "I made widgets to make other people wealthy enough to lose tough with their humanity."

One person's unusual is other peoples' every day.

lol, you have hit both of myreasons for using it: 1. the previously mentioned, as nothing in the quiz bothered me to a greater degree than what i previously stated, thus it's use here is 'cromulent'... and 2. this entire paragraph is tongue-in-cheek as a play at seemingly overreaching 'embiggenment'.

Thanks for playing along. :)

The phrase 'widely viewed' in the articles initial premise; "work which is now widely viewed as the source of the unintentional lab leak that sparked the pandemic" is doing some pretty heavy lifting.

Widely viewed by whom?

I have seen no supporting evidence that the professional scientific community, nor the international virus research community has anything approaching a large minority of consensus about this premise.

Widely viewed has no need to be based on any factual condition; many, many things which are widely viewed by the general population are patently absurd and factually disprovable - such as the idea that you are likely to win the national lottery if you just keep buying tickets, when the statistical probability of winning is nearly zero regardless of how frequently one plays.

A widely held view is, on average, less reliable to a significant factor, than just about anything. The act of the DNI publishing anything, regardless of it's importance or bearing, in terms of "widely viewed" puts the "Intelligence" part of the official agency name into significant doubtability.

Ad-hominem attacks against commentors, labeling them as 'uncurious' is also quite revealing. Is this 'story' a dog whistle that is only meant to reach the attention of the 'curious' but unscientifically reasoning audience?

Is the intent of posting links to spurious publications which do not actually present anything more scientifically than to quote vague, unnamed sources such as 'widely viewed' simply an appeal to the uninformable?

I think 'widely viewed by the loyal' is more accurate for the audience as interpreted by the poster.

stinkbeetle, welcome to my | hide | section, I have no more time for this level of credulity.