pies @pies@qoto.org

In the event of nuclear war, here’s my plan: Get vaporized immediately

In 1995, 14 wolves were released in Yellowstone National Park.

No one expected the miracle that the wolves would bring.

It started with the wolves hunting the deer, this led to a rapid decrease in the deer population. The wolves' presence also made the deer avoid parts in the park where they were and easy prey.

Thanks to the deer's absence, those parts started to regenerate. Forests of aspen and willow trees started to flourish.

That's when things really started to happen. With trees and bushes came more berries and bugs. As soon as that happened, various bird species started moving in.

With the increasing tree population, also another species was attracted. The beaver, previously extinct in the region, moved back. And the dams they built provided habitats for otters, muskrats and reptiles.

The wolves also killed coyotes, which meant more hawks, red foxes, badgers and weasels in the park. Even the population of bald eagles and ravens rose.

But here's where it gets really interesting. The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers. With more balance between predator and prey came the possibility for other species to thrive. There was less erosion because of increased vegetation. And the river banks were stabilized, the channels narrowed, more pools formed, and the rivers stayed more fixed in their courses.

So the wolves did not only transform the great ecosystem of Yellowstone, they also changed the park's physical geography.

#nature #ecology #wolves #yellowstone #parks

A brief history of counting stuff: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-counting-stuff

Even if CO₂ emissions decreased annually as much as during the pandemic lockdown, we wouldn't achieve our climate targets.

While individuals made huge sacrifices, the system remained. This shows that individual action will not solve climate change. We need the system to change.

The first wedding anniversary is the "paper" anniversary and traditionally you should give your spouse a book. Tradition doesn't say what kind of book, but from experience I can tell you it's not Spider-Man erotica

could you imagine explaining this to anyone

Anyhow the Google quasi-monopoly on web browser technology is bad.

Firefox is in low single digits.

Only competitor is Apple, but Safari isn't available on all platforms.

Google needs to be force-split up in multiple companies like 10 years ago.

Stop anthropomorphising billionaires.

I’m no financial expert, but it looks to me like they’re organizing a hedge fund.

The piece that the the New York Times made about the latter from #OpenAI and friends about the existential risks posed by AI has so much bull in it that it might have been written by a chatbot as well.

Seriously stuff like: "They say the technology has shown signs of advanced abilities and understanding [...]"

Sure, take the points made by an executive at face value, it's not like he's trying to hype the thing into the stratosphere and pump up his shares.

On Monday morning we (Mozilla) detected a very large crash spike affecting #Firefox users on Linux, specifically on an older version of a Debian-based distribution.

It turned out to be an interesting bug involving the #Linux kernel and #Google JavaScript code so let me tell you about it.

A thread 🧵

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1839669 1/6