Do they have any idea who’s perpetrating the attack?

I found this very interesting:

Persuading the BBC not to describe sperm whale clicks as “language” in their Blue Planet II series was the highlight of my science communication career. Why?

A lot of complex communication is going on in cetaceans, much of which we still don’t understand. However, I am convinced that we should drop the stifling and anthropocentric focus on language. It crowds out other perspectives on what is going on – for example, the relationship between rhythm-based communication and music might be a better way to understand the bonding function of coda synchrony in sperm whales.

We should be wary of ranking species on a single dimension relative to humans, as if all evolution is a path to something like us (much like early anthropologists ranked societies by their progress toward western “perfection”). Instead, let’s take ourselves off the top of the ladder and see other animals as distinct branches of an evolutionary tree.

I find great logic in the argument of understanding animal communications in relation to the animals themselves rather than their relation to us.

exactly. i understand that doing bad things is bad because i feel guilt and shame when i do bad things. conversely, i feel good when i do good things. I also understand the broader implications of both-- not to mention that i have empathy and can see the impact of my actions upon others while caring as well.

i don’t need a fairy tale to threaten me with eternal torture in order to not be a sociopath.

This person is openly telling you that the only thing stopping them from being a shitty person is some myth about otherworldly punishment after they die.

Which, of course, means they’ll be juuuust as shitty as they believe they can get away with.

Yeah, I decided to actually bother and read the article. That’s why I made my edit. This sounds like a very important technical milestone for the development of fusion reactors. Hooray!

Is… is that good?

Edit: it is!

What fresh hell is this?

And that sounds a lot like a false equivalence based on pure speculation with zero evidence to back it up.

And there was always a lot of evidence of the damage caused by second-hand smoke that tobacco industries simply paid politicians to ignore. Hell, all you had to do was look at the walls and curtains of a smoker to see the tar and smoke stains. It was clear as day.

For decades studies from all sorts of institutions, both big and small and independently-funded have failed to find any evidence at all that aspartame is unsafe for human consumption as a food additive.

Aspertame is the most-tested food additive ever. There has never been proven any causal link to cancer, not in the decades anyone has tried, and there still hasn’t— not even in this year-old article.

WE VALUE YOUR PRIVACY!*

^{*no we don’t. not even a little.}

pfft— 16-bit @ 3Hz and 128k of ram?

give me Adventure! waiting for each turn to process and refresh would actually give a sense of suspense!

edit: for reference, Pong on an Atari 2600 ran at 8-bit @ 1.19 MHz w/128b of ram. so 3Hz is barely enough power to process rudimentary logic and text display. Adventure was node-based with a simple language-prompt interpreter. it would be slooooow, but it would have a chance of actually working.

edit 2: Adventure, (aka ADVENT) was the original text-adventure game:

This is one that you can really get your teeth into. You travel around an imaginary world, collecting treasure and solving puzzles, all the while making a map on paper so that you have an idea where you are. The control system is fairly simple with just one or two word commands, and once you get the hang of this, it works really well. It is also made easier by certain short-cuts such as just typing, ‘building’ to enter the building.

The game ADVENT, which adventure is based on, was written on a PDP-10 in FORTRAN by Will Crowther in 1976 and is considered to be the first adventure game. The following year Don Woods expanded the game by adding fantasy elements and making it more puzzle-orientated.

Originally written by James Gillogly in 1977 as a port of the classic FORTRAN game ADVENT written by Will Crowther and Don Woods.

(source)

I actually got to play the original version when I was a student at RIT in the 90s, as the College of Computer Science still had a DEC PDP-10 running a VMS/VAX system that had a copy of Adventure. It was infuriating, and I wasted far too many hours in study hall playing that shit when I should have been learning C++.

This is an argument for a publicly-funded “digital public square”, not an argument for stripping private companies of their rights.

That is a change