iteratethis

It's complicated. If you're a tourist and just stumbled upon a species not yet described, that's only the start.

Next is a whole lot of work to actually describe it which a tourist would typically not be doing, so the idea that you should get naming credit is not a given. There's no hard rule for it.

You can definitely give input for the name, and there's rules to naming. You can't name it after a company, for example.

The most generous example I've seen is a research organization where you can "buy" a species name. Within taxonomy rules, you can decide on a name for a fee, even if you didn't discover the species at all. It's a way to fund research.

In my experience though, getting an actual discovery described is the real issue. I've discovered both plants and insects new to science myself, did the work of collecting specimens and sending them to the correct authorities, but years later there's zero movement. Taxonomists are severely underfunded.

A species' discovery is never about first "seen", it's first described. There's no way to know whom first saw it.

Your assumption regarding splitting known species is wrong as it comes to numbers. It often happens for birds but this doesn't move the needle as there's only 10K birds.

Almost every species on this planet is an arthropod and most are not described. It's trivially easy to "discover" new ones. Go to a bio-diverse area (say a jungle) and fill a wheelbarrow with soil. Filter the dirt and describe anything you find. It will take you forever but there will be dozens if not hundreds of "new" species. The main bottleneck is not finding them, it's describing them, which is very time consuming.

Put some specialized lights up in the same area at night. One remote site I attended in Colombia discovered on average 20 new species of moth every single day. There's expected to be 150K moth species, which still may be an underestimation.

And this doesn't even describe the truly tiny organisms living in soil and rivers and oceans.

As it comes to species, the public has a bias for mammals and birds. Combined they're about 17-18K species only. Not even a drop in the ocean. You can split each of them into 10 separate species and this still doesn't do anything to inflate the total amount of species.

Looks like these "reviews" never happened.

But even reviews that you might see on YouTube are usually not reviews. They are demos. Unboxing a product and demonstrating that a product indeed does what the box says is not a true review.

The same is true for developers.

Creating engaging high quality spatial content/experiences is insanely difficult and expensive. It's something Disney can do, but not 99% of current iOS developers.

The mozilla.social downsizing is telling.

Mozilla will always be Mozilla. They get about $0.5B each year for free, just by keeping Google the default search engine. Next, they piss it all away on the most fruitless projects and activist blogs, not to forget overpaid leadership.

With mozilla.social they were all-in to ride the new wave of alternative social media. And then discovered that Mastodon is just a bunch of hard-left misfits constantly canceling each other.

Mastodon is a miserable place and rapidly shrinking. Today it dropped below 1M MAU. Which is half of MAU just a few months ago.

The article emphasizes socioeconomic conditions as a root cause for the declining birth rate. Whilst those factors do not help, it's not why the birth rate is declining.

It's a universal trend. The exact same issue is happening in countries that are far more family-friendly.

The world used to REQUIRE you to have children. As your personal pension plan. By cultural or religious force. Or because of the lack of education or contraceptives.

Now in most parts of the world, you're not required. It becomes a question of WANT instead of MUST. And when you ask people how many children they want, the answer is typically 0, 1 or 2. Most people still want children, and quite a few prefer 2. But that averages out to 1.5-1.8 in the aggregate. Which is far below replacement level.

People still want children, just not many per household. Why the cut-off at 2? Because 3, 4, 5 does not fundamentally improve upon the joy of having children whilst it adds a lot of challenges. Bigger home, bigger car, many more trips to take them everywhere, cooking is more complex, it's a mess.

Anyway, the point being is that the article is largely wrong. People that do not want any children because of their focus on career will still not want children when policies are more family-friendly. There's plenty of evidence of this not working. It doesn't move the needle.

You should still go for better policies, just don't expect it to fix this problem.

That's not how it works at all. Admins pressure other admins in apply the same blocks, or risk getting defederated. The entire thing is ran by power hungry bullies.

In which case the point is useless. It's a pie in the sky statement.

Fediverse instances being too trigger-happy in blocking other instances means the network as whole is less open in comparison to a centralized social network. So, why bother? You have little to no control over whom you can connect to.

Also, "switching" is an alien concept to normal social media users. You never have to "switch" and you never lose your content or followers, exceptions aside when you get yourself into serious trouble.

My hot take:

VR enthusiasts, which I guess now includes Apple, assume there's some natural, obvious mass market demand for such a solution if only the tech is good enough.

I'm telling you that this mass appeal doesn't exist. Nobody cares about AR/VR. We've had AR on iOS for a decade and other than navigation and Pokemon, there's no killer apps, no ecosystem.

I took my colleagues to a VR center, where they could experiment with lots of setups, try out games and experiences. They had a great time but nobody spoke about it ever again and nobody bought any device. And these people work in tech.

The tech isn't the problem. The entire interaction simply isn't a fit.

This product, and every similar headset to follow will never appeal to a mass market for daily hours-long usage.

It's uncomfortable, isolating, constraining, expensive, anti-social and its use cases are at best temporarily impressive but quickly grow old.

The entire product category simply sucks. I'm sure the incidental 3D movie experience is great, but most people don't watch movies every single day for hours on end whilst sitting alone on the couch.

It's slow to operate, can't easily be shared with others and having gigantic screens surrounding you is a useless novelty without utility. Watch people with big monitor setups. They watch the middle one whilst the other 2 are stale and only get the occasional peek. This super-multitasking idea is a myth and not how people work.

Consider how when people own both an iPhone and an iPad, they almost always use the iPhone, even for use cases in which the iPad is superior. It's quicker, more flexible, hassle-free, always ready.

Another issue is that the type of content/experience that would truly shine on such a headset, is impossibly hard/expensive to make. So that leaves out 99% of app developers.

We have to be accurate about the statistic. It said that 45% had never approached a girl/woman. Not that 45% is permanently and actively avoiding having a relationship by choice.

For sure they should become more active, but there may be societal trends contributing to the statistic: increased isolation, limited shared spaces, dating largely moving to apps, poor or no role models, fear of rejection, etc.

I don't have an alternative, I was just sharing an observation. It was implied that this group of men is "forced" to better themselves or else be locked out of dating and family formation.

A growing amount of men go for the "or else" part. So it doesn't look like a powerful motivator for change.

I think "really great TV" isn't good enough for mass appeal. I think even for a group of wealthy early adapters, the novelty may soon wear off. It's heavy and you're constrained, can't do much else whilst watching TV.

And let's face it, the way people consume "TV" is quite different from what the ad suggests. Most video is consumed in short format, rapidly, whilst messaging someone. I'm sure watching some epic movie using this device is incredible, but that doesn't mean this device has a use case for lengthy daily usage.

Consuming media on a larger screen is also not really a game changer. I upgraded my TV by 20" in size, and you get used to it in a single day. At home I have giant monitors but I don't mind working with the smaller screens at work. I have the time/money to watch lots of movies in a cinema but can't be bothered as my home screen is good enough.

Note also how most people that have an iPhone, also have an iPad, but the iPad is only marginally used as the tiny iPhone screen is just so much more practical and flexible.

Bigger screen doesn't cut it. You need top notch VR content that is spatial. Problem with that is 99.99% of app developers cannot deliver it. It is extremely difficult and costly to produce.

In general, I don't believe anything that is heavy and worn and still largely isolates you from your surroundings will work. And I'll admit that I hope it fails. We need less screen time and less isolation, not more.

Men drifted to the right due to a vacuum. I'm reasoning from a European perspective but the pattern is fairly universal.

In the 80s-90s, almost all men were progressive. The progressive movement was a labor movement fighting for the plight of the lower class which largely consisted of blue collar men. There was ample room to improve the conditions of these men, thus the politics and the demographics align.

Let's pause for a moment here to consider the implication: men are not innately right-wing or conservative.

As of the 90s, the progressive movement dramatically shifted away from working class men to target other groups. Women joined the workforce which rightfully needed attention. Minorities/immigrants. Teachers and other government workers. Pretty much everybody but (white)(blue-collar) men.

Then globalization happened, as well as extensive labor immigration. Both trends have dramatically affected the economic status of these men. Where before non-college educated men had ample access to a tough but honorable job in blue-collar that would earn enough to start a family, now they're in the lower ranks. The underclass.

So not only where these men politically de-emphasized (or even totally abandoned), also economically. And to finish it off, there's the cultural abandonment. A cynical and hostile view of men.

A lot of people fail to acknowledge the above degradation of men's status or even believe it's a good thing. What they fail to realize is that the "patriarchy" concerns the top ranks. Most men are not in the top or in any position of influence at all. Men in the working class, specifically in rural areas, and other sub groups have most definitely taken a huge beating, politically, economically and culturally.

That type of abandonment by progressive politics is what created the vacuum. They feel alienated and not represented, hated even. They may vote conservative out of spite, without even supporting the beliefs. A recent poll of young conservatives showed that the vast majority in fact do not support dialing back abortion rights.

The progressive movement should start caring about men. You can do two things at a time, it's not zero-sum. In fact, it's a no-brainer. Men failing is very bad for women, bettering the plight of men directly benefits women.

You'll be disappointed by that power.

Apparently, millions of young men have simply checked out. They're not in school and missing from the work force. Another statistic I came across: 45% of young men (18-24) have never approached a girl in their life.

They're isolating themselves. They're not bettering themselves, or competing. They're out.

Depends on their age.

False. Even when smaller phones are on offer, people still don't buy them and prefer the larger ones.

That's the Big Tech playbook: go towards technology so expensive to run that competition is impossible. Tech that cannot be replicated. And of course the main fuel is our work, our content.

I don't understand why this complaint survives, it seems a myth at this point.

Open a fresh install of Brave. No crypto things are happening. There's one button inviting you to enable it, which you can dismiss with 2 clicks. It will never ask again.

An additional problem is companies simply going out of business. Happens a lot in the middle-segment of electronics.

It's an unstoppable rat-race of cheap crappy products. The issue is that (too) cheap is the problem but also widely loved.

I would love to pay more for long-lasting products that are repairable and well-recyclable but most people don't.

Couldn't agree more.

And it's not just Google. Amazon is a mess. Social media is a mess. It all used to kind-of work but it's rapidly falling apart.

Same here, but in my notes app. Been doing it for years.

And if I may expand a little, not just for crappy Google, I also create alternative local knowledge bases at work.

I can't find anything at work. Everything is spread out across chat, Wikis, SharePoint, email. All having different owners, content may at any time disappear or move, there's constant authorization headaches.

Whenever I come across something useful that I expect to be of some future use, I make a local copy. File, web page, wiki, anything. Because our information systems are a massive failure.

Thanks, I might as well keep going then :)

Google has commercialized a huge amount of search terms. I'll use biology as an example. You search for particular species and search results prioritize products that kill the species. You search for a particular plant and you'll have a hard time learning about the species as it only shows cultivated versions and products related to how to care for them.

Pure information/knowledge for the sake of learning and curiosity is de-prioritized.

Back to image search, it's unable to figure out original sources or doesn't care. Pinterest is the well known manifestation of that.

Google shopping results: completely broken. Click through on the products and half the time the price, availability, discounts and stock do not match.

Everything is so goddamn broken, and nobody at Google seems to care. I can't explain it, but it's been going on for a good 6-7 years or so.

I don't understand Google anymore.

Surely people can relate to the situation where you end up on an article based on some technical query you have. The article repeats your question 7 times, has endless casually-related filler text that still does not answer the question and then ends with: try to unplug it.

It is so freaking obvious that it's a malicious content farm, but Google with all of its technical might seem unable or unwilling to detect it. If tech can't do it, organize some type of curation or feedback?

Same for image search. You search for "red flower Thailand" and flowers of various other colors from various locations appear. The idea that Google is spectacularly good at subject detection from imagery does not seem to actually work out in practice.

Most people's search queries consist of just 2-3 words. Nowadays Google consistently just drops the last word as if it knows better than I do what I need.

High value elaborate articles on various topics do not rank. Instead, dated articles do. You have to manually bookmark high quality content as you see it, because you'll never find it back via search.

Is everybody asleep at Google? This is not a small thing, this is your bread and butter. Teens are using Tiktok for search, you're in real trouble and better start cleaning up your act.

"We're doing cost cuts and layoffs and here's why this is great for you".

English is not my first language so this is going to be hard to get across.

Apparently low temperatures do not fully resolve the modern soap (which is thick and heavily perfumed), leaving behind a lot of residue. An occasional hot wash clears them.

I don't remember the name of the better soap, but basically what he says is that for clothes that are just a bit smelly but not really dirty/stained, modern soap is massive overkill. It also doesn't need all this perfume. Your clothes are fine smelling neutral, they don't have to smell like a day in the Alps.

Would really advise to talk to a local maintenance guy, they can probably explain it much better.

If you know enough about Musk, doing thoughtless, stupid, risky stuff that backfires is his play. Or not even a play, a default state of mind. He enjoys all this drama.

We all believe we're punishing him by massively dunking on him, but we effectively reward him. The media too loves Musk, in the same way that they love Trump.

I saw footage from a drone's body heat cam approaching a Russian trench. One of these blurry red shapes put a gun to his head and beat the drone to what was inevitable. They hear it coming and know it's over.

Another piece of footage was even worse. A kamikaze drone isolated a soldier and was intentionally taunting the soldier by flying at it, pulling back, flying at it again. Like a wasp. The ending is predictable.

All of this supplemented by a cheerful "blooper" tune. And the replies show gamer-like excitement.

Not my personal experience but it helps to talk to repair guys.

I learned that a lot of machines break down because of the combination of low temperature washing and the types of soap/detergent people use. It clogs up the machines and without regular maintenance, the occasional hot wash or better soap, it destroys components.

Corporations love the tale of resilience.

You'll have evil corp pushing their employees to the max. Then HR sends an email "we care about your mental health", which includes a link to an e-course on meditation.

They do not care about your mental health because they don't spent a second addressing the root cause of the overload of stress.

All of society now has this fatalism built in. The believe that we can fix problems and improve life for all is largely gone. Instead, the energy is that we accept that the future is bleak, make no effort to change it, expect things to perpetually get even worse, and somehow at an individual level try to find some marginal happiness within this reality we see as a given.

I'm personally not as pessimistic as the above suggests, just saying this is the culture.