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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • At the time of the K-T extinction, we looked like this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purgatorius

    The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event,[a] also known as the K–T extinction,[b] was the mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth[2][3] approximately 66 million years ago. The event caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs. Most other tetrapods weighing more than 25 kg (55 lb) also became extinct, with the exception of some ectothermic species such as sea turtles and crocodilians.[4]

    Omnivores, insectivores, and carrion-eaters survived the extinction event, perhaps because of the increased availability of their food sources. Neither strictly herbivorous nor strictly carnivorous mammals seem to have survived. Rather, the surviving mammals and birds fed on insects, worms, and snails, which in turn fed on detritus (dead plant and animal matter)

    Luckily, great-grandaddy squirrel-critter was a survivor and had a taste for insects:

    It is thought to have been rat-sized (6 in (15 cm) long and 1.3 ounces (about 37 grams)) and a diurnal insectivore, which burrowed through small holes in the ground.



  • If that email is actually from Logitech, it probably has some way to unsubscribe. Might have added you for some nonsense reason like a warranty registration, but I’ve never hit problems with a reputable company not providing a way to unsubscribe.

    The random scam stuff…yeah, probably can’t do much about that.

    One possibility I’ve wondered about is whether, someday, email shifts to a whitelist-based system. I mean, historically we’ve always let people be contacted as long as they know someone’s physical address or phone number or email address, and so databases of those have value – they become keys to reach people. But we could simply have some sort of easy way to authorize people and block everyone else. In a highly-connected world, that might be a more reasonable way to do things.



  • your foreign minister was Madonna

    This is like that.

    kagis

    Not that much like it, apparently.

    https://www.nme.com/news/music/madonna-shares-support-for-ukraine-with-release-of-sorry-remix-video-3170167

    In the early hours of this morning (February 26), Madonna took to social media to share a fanmade video set to a remix of her 2005 song ‘Sorry’.

    “Russia’s Pointless and Greed Driven Invasion Of the Ukraine MUST be stopped!!” the queen of pop captioned the post. “Please Send in Humanitarian Aid to help millions of citizens of the Ukraine who’s lives are being affected by this CRISIS at this very moment !!

    “Putin has Violated Every Human Rights Accord in Existence. Putin has no right to try to erase the existence of the Ukraine. We support you President Zelensky!! We are praying for you and your country! 🙏🏼.”

    She concluded: “God Bless You All! Lets not feel helpless when confronted by Geo-political Actions of this magnitude. There are things we can do.”



  • Well, it depends on what you want it for.

    I wanted specifically to find a search engine that has a subscription-based model and does not generate its income from data-mining and ads. It doesn’t retain search logs. For me, it’s what I had wanted for some time – a service where I was the customer rather than the product – so I am pretty happy with it.

    It has some other features, but I generally don’t care much about them other than its “Fediverse Forums” search lens, which lets one search the Threadiverse (Lemmy/mbin/piefed).

    looks

    It looks like they also have a Usenet archives search engine that I haven’t looked at. I might look into that, as I used to use Usenet archives search engines.

    I’m happy with it. Depends on what you’re looking for, though.







  • “I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident,” she says.

    The sheriff disagreed.

    “She kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or ‘anything’ could have happened,” recalls Patterson.

    Even if his mother was walking there too, it’s not likely going to do much to stop a car from running him over. She’d just be some extra mass to fling.

    Kidnappings – and a number of other serious crimes – are usually done by people who are known, not random strangers.

    kagis

    https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/zmldiz/til_there_are_only_between_150300_kidnappings_of/

    There are only between 150-300 kidnappings of children by strangers each year in the US. The other 200,000 kidnappings each year are by relatives.

    Even more lopsided than I’d expected.

    And as for “anything” happening, I’d imagine that “anything” could have happened at home, too.



  • The downside of building the phone/tablet into the car, though, is that phones change more quickly than cars.

    A 20 year old car can be perfectly functional. A 20 year old smarphone is insanely outdated. If the phone is built into the car, you’re stuck with it.

    Relative to a built-in system, I’d kind of rather just have a standard mounting point with security attachments and have the car computer be upgraded. 3DIN maybe.

    I get the “phone is small” argument, but the phone is upgradeable.

    And I’d definitely rather have physical controls for a lot of things.



  • Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

    You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.