That is my favorite way I have ever heard anyone express that wish.

Some lint for you (accuracy may vary):

Bee family trees, if you follow a queen down through drones and workers and other queens, follow the fibonacci sequence. The fibonacci sequence is also reflected in the structure of spiral seashells. Source: Some book I read about the fibonacci sequence many years ago.

Flamingoes are motherfucking TANKS. Seriously. Their ability to survive in absurdly harsh environments that would kill other animals is wild.

Only female reindeer lose their antlers in wintertime (disclaimer: this may depend on species of reindeer?)

Some guy (Russian I think?), when a computer informed him that nuclear missiles had been fired at his country and he was told to return fire, correctly believed the computer to be bugged and refused to fire the missiles. So uh. Thanks, guy. He went and lived out his life normally and never got appropriate thanks for saving a shitload of people, I think. Source: memory of wikipedia article, may be wrong on some details so really I should be double checking those before repeating them but here you go I'm too tired for that.

Some other guy survived BOTH the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and lived to old age afterwards. Somehow both the literal worst luck, and the best.

There is a parasite that latches on to ants' feet that does not harm the ant - in fact, it fully replaces the function of the ant's foot, including forming a claw to help the ant grab stuff like it would with its actual foot. There is also a similar parasite that replaces a fish's tongue (yeah I hate it too).

Octpuses only live for like 3 years max, and the females die after laying their eggs. Meanwhile, they are really, really, really smart, like dolphins and parrots and crows. Imagine being that aware and smart, but only living 3 years. It disturbs me.

Uranium glass, which is exactly what it says on the tin - glass made with a teensy bit of uranium in it - glows in the dark in (typically) bright, cartoon acid green.

Whales can and do communicate across vast distances because their calls carry much more easily in water than sound carries in air.

Hammerhead sharks' heads detect electrical fields, and they use these fields to locate their prey. Run.

The whole alpha/beta/omega wolf pack thing is complete bullshit, retracted even by the person who first popularized it, and he has spent years upon years trying to scrub out that idea he unleashed into pop culture but has been unable to.

Elephants' feet are very sensitive, able to feel minute vibrations from miles away, and they can communicate with them. Also they do NOT make the thumping sound that is foley'd into nature documentaries - they walk silently. Also, the bottom of their feet looks like swiss cheese and you should not google that if you have tryptophobia.

We need one of those mod appliable (or vote-appliable?) "Misleading title" or "headline altered" tags maybe

I hope one of the archive projects (archiveTeam or others) has backed up r/askhistorians past posts and comments, just in case.

Dang, after reading that, somehow I'm even more glad I overwrote all my past comments and posts with a protest message. You do not get to monetize my speech down to keyword targetting, reddit!

The way that's written is so blatantly and shamelessly "all these people volunteer and provide an amazing service for free! :D look how much money we can make off this free labor without giving any of those volunteers a single cent, and while sabotaging the service!"

If you want to auto-overwrite your comments and posts, or just delete them, check out Power Delete Suite or Redact by June 30th, before the API change breaks these tools.

The supposed tendency of lemmings to run blindly off cliffs is greatly exaggerated, too, and based on a 'documentary' where they were pushed off one by a human. A tiny group of documentarians abused some lemmings and ruined their reputation forever.

tldr I'm proud to be a lemming :) Let's rejuvenate the reputation of lemmings the animal.

That said, I did enjoy the old "Lemmings" video game, featuring rather human-shaped lemmings that you had to prevent from falling to their deaths.

I agree. On reddit, there are a bazillion different "gaming" subreddits that are only named different because that's the only way to have different communities around the same topic: r/gaming, r/games, r/truegaming, r/patientgamers, r/girlgamers, r/transgamers, r/gaymers, and so on.

Each of those communities has a different feel and different moderation and different priorities, and no way no how would I want r/gaming posts mixed in if I'm trying to browse r/transgamers, for example.

Similarly, I'm mostly sticking to Lemmy instances that disable the downvote button, because it makes for friendly places I think, and lowers the barrier to posting for socially anxious users.

I like the idea of there being a way for users, or for similar groups of instances that agree to it (like if beehaw and an instance with similar rules/community feel wanted to collaborate a bit), to set up a multi-lemmy 'all' community thing that shows posts across similar communities, but it should still be optional.

That is fantastic news.

I've already deleted my reddit account, but I use RedReader primarily as a "look, don't touch" way to view reddit anyways. RedReader allows you to customize so much that you can turn off all the voting buttons and the reply buttons, so you just get a nice minimalist reading experience, don't have the constant tiny mental overhead of voting, and don't risk getting tempted into impulsively wasting your time (and supporting reddit) writing comments/posts.

Edit: being able to use RedReader for Lemmy would be wonderful, but it looks like that might be a thing in the distant future, perhaps, but not the near future.

I have some similar concerns, although reddit does hang on to deleted comments and posts for themselves/their monetization and tracking purposes. That's why those reddit account deletion scripts edit all comments before deletion, and people are (were?) advised to let the edited comments sit for 24 hours before finally deleting them. I don't know if that actually works anymore to delete the comment from reddit's servers, though; somebody said they started keeping the pre-edited versions of comments to get around it.

At least with Lemmy you also have the option of hosting your own instance, which I would think could get around some of these concerns? I haven't looked into it much.

If you post on multiple communities, too, I think your info is spread around multiple servers. And there's no monetary incentive for people to be trying to track us, except perhaps on instances hosted by companies.

But the only company I know of that currently has an instance (I think) is Mozilla, and since I use Firefox, they'd have a heck of a lot of other options if they wanted to invade my privacy.

Edit: I dislike that when I delete a comment, it just deletes the text and leaves my username there above the deleted comment marker. I can kind of see why it might be desired for accountability purposes, but also, ehhh.

This Lemmy migration does feel like waaaaay more positive of a result than I ever expected from reddit getting worse.

I've always appreciated the idea of the fediverse, but mastodon and the twitter-style of social media has never appealed to me, and Lemmy used to be so tiny and niche, so I didn't invest much time in it until now. But this sure is nice, comparatively. I'm probably on here too much though!

Long press on the empty space to the right of the username.

How were you supposed to know this? Magic, clearly. 🙃

Ditto. Brave also promotes their own crypto-coin ponzi nonsense. And at one point I believe they made a far-right website a default link on their homepage, before outcry compelled them to remove it.

Duckduckgo search engine works as well as google's, though. Except that I haven't yet figured out what the equivalent formatting for "site:reddit.com" is for it, if site specific search is even a supported function (surely?)

Edit: I won't scold anyone for using a free browser though. It's not like you give them $$$. But they do get your data, and while they claim to be about privacy I don't exactly trust them as far as I can throw them.

I dunno about "tomorrow". Eventually, maybe. But today's AI are just language models. If there are no humans answering questions and creating new reporting for new events/tech/etc, then the AI can't be trained on their output and won't be able to say a single thing about those new topics. It'll pretend to and make shit up, but that's it.

Being just language models - really great ones, but still, without any understanding of the content of what they say whatsoever - they're currently in a state of making shit up all the time. All they care about is the likelihood that one word or phrase or paragraph might typically follow another, for truthy sounding language, but that's often very far from actual truth.

The only way to get around that is to create AI that isn't just a pile of language algorithms, and that's an entirely different beast than what we're dealing with now, who knows how far off, if it's even possible. You can't just iteratively improve a language algorithm into not being just a language algorithm anymore.