Zaatar is both the name of a herb (Hyssopus officinalis) and a spice mix, containing the herb along with sumac, salt, etc. Mostly references to zaatar are about the mix as that’s what normal people actually use.

The herb is quite strong, is like a slightly bitter mint, and is also used in Chartreuse and absinthe.

We will implement a new Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider (FASP) that will allow sharing storage and media processing between servers.

This is pretty big too, as the cost and legal risks of hosting this user content is high. They’ve clearly thought about the media moderation problems too:

We will build a reference implementation of a Automated Content Detection service, again as a new Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider with an open protocol.

This will allow server owners to opt-in to use external tools to scan content for spam, illegal materials, etc in order to help them fight bad actors; they could self-host these tools if they choose to do so, or share the infrastructure with other servers for better efficiency.

Tell me more about these bunkers, let’s Streisand this.

I had to look it up too. You might want to stop reading after the Kangaroo paragraph.

Kangaroos are born after less than a month, and then climb into the pouch, attach to a teat and stay there for half a year before being ready to face the outside world.

Spotted Hyenas gestate for about 110 days and then have to make it though the mother’s pseudo penis, which can tear with first-time mothers (fatal to her) and can suffocate the cub (fatal to them) with cubs of first-time mums only having a 40% chance of surviving birth.

https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/116335209525412306

This gives me hope that, while we’re going to suffer as a species planet, there’s enough sanity and selflessness remaining amongst humanity that we’re not going to snuff ourselves out. I like that they’re learning from COP, and making changes like just needing a majority, not being unanimous.

I couldn’t find which the 85 countries are, anyone have that info?

I would like to see more finely-grained feedback than just “no”. Particularly as it forces the voter to justify why they’re downvoting.

Some posts/contents are bad because they’re spam, abusive, or against the rules, or in the wrong place - downvoting these is useful crowd-sourced moderation, particularly for things that don’t warrant a mod report.

Some are just indisputably wrong and it’s a useful signal that the poster is talking rubbish. Then there’s the grey area.

Sometimes it’s just that the poster’s opinion is unpopular, and people are downvoting to suppress views they disagree with - I think that’s not a good thing for a discussion and encourages echo chambers. I like the idea of one of the downvote options being “I disagree” and that basically not doing anything.

I believe Piefed let’s you restrict downvotes to people that are subscribers. I think that’s a good solution to idiots downvoting from all just because they’re not interested in or understanding the post and/or the community it’s in. I also wonder if people even understand that they’re not training an algorithm, just dragging people’s posts down.

It did occur to me that perhaps the site itself had localised it. That would be odd for a science site given that science is usually done in metric, but as the New Scientist is pop sci they might have thought it would help grow US readership.

Was it really difficult?

Assuming this is referring to my comment about making life difficult, you had to either do the maths or use a conversion tool. You made it (now fixed, thanks) so that half (I expected a higher %age tbh) of the people reading it had to do that.

That’s 9.1°C, according to the title on the site.

@[email protected] Did you change the title to have it in Fahrenheit instead? You could have just added the conversion so it had both, instead of making life difficult for the majority of the world that works in Celsius.

It’s also for learning English, which is something a large language model is probably the most suitable for. It’s not going to be much use teaching music or drama.

A transparent divide and conquer ploy

Funny that Flatpack is one of the most popular distros.

My email uses greylisting which is where the first email received from a server gets a “busy” response - the idea being that spammers just fire and forget whereas real mailers will retry.

Unfortunately, some senders take so long to resend that it’s timed out. The second time will work though. Unless they have multiple servers. Some have so many servers that you have to do this a multitude of times until you lose the will to login or forget what you were going to do anyway.

There are plenty of companies still selling actual chocolate, and since it’s chocolate and not chocolate-flavoured sweets I think it’ll just become smaller and/or more expensive. Which is fine.

Peak alliteration

Rhyming is generally the opposite of alliteration, because alliteration’s repetition of initial sounds, and rhyming’s repeated sounds at the end (like flatus atlas).

edit: I intended to implement alliteration in this interaction, but was ineffectual

FFS, can’t we have anything!?

If we’re replacing cilia as well, the fact that respiratory cilia exists means she’s probably got severe to fatal breathing problems too.

I’m still deciding how much I agree or disagree with this. It’s true that they do cite books which you often can’t read online, but adding information backed up by a paywalled proof feels a bit “trust me bro”. E.g. I could find/create a site with an impossibly large paywall and no-one would realistically able to check my sources.

You’re absolutely right, I’ll edit my comment. Thanks for the catch.