what the heck, i responded to this post:

https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/31/0621235/smelling-this-one-specific-scent-can-boost-the-brains-gray-matter

If you look past the superficial summary and read the study (or at least skimmed it), some of the useful conclusions were that rose essential oil (the scent used) it's possible people liked or disliked it and that caused the grey matter increase.

the other thing to note was that only rose essential oil was tested, no other scents. so it's possible that other scents can do the same to stimulate the brain.  with the understanding of the study, it's possible a hot new york restaurant dumpster in mid july might have the same effect at increasing grey matter as rose essential oil. we're not gaining much from this study, so to speak, the purpose of the conclusions for this research is that this is an area that's not well studied and is worth further exploration.

I'm going go out on a limb here and simply argue here that scents are greatly linked between the brain and memory, and possibly some of the best ways we can exercise our brain and mind is to travel from place to place and smell all the fancy things to smell. the things you smell in one state will be different somewhere else and at different times of the year and among different continents.

link to study:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361923024000297?via%3Dihub

.. if you deny something is a problem, eventually it goes away.

Literally reading this article from my RSS Reader.

https://theoldreader.com/

Cybersecurity news is often available via RSS. I can't imagine any good reason not to use RSS Feeds when you can focus on only the headlines.

Why would I want to waste time navigating to an actual site to read individual articles?  I don't need to read comments to form an opinion.

Underhanded tactics developed because they want access to data they can sell and make profit off of.

While it would be helpful to send severity, I think in a situation like natural disaster, it's easier to just send the notification "An Earthquake event has been detected in your area, take precautions to protect yourself" should be a good enough warning.

You come into liability issues with too much specificity.

People are going to read things differently and gauge whether or not a specific alert or warning carries great weight toward their situation anyway.  Just having an alert that an earthquake, or tsunami, or anything else might happen, we, being humans that possess free will, are able to react and make a decision towards our own futures.

$10m out of the original 450 m purchase price isn't bad, about 2%.

If we compare to a luxurious passenger SUV like a Lexus LX600h, that's like 120k, it's about 1,000 for annual maintenance.

This is oil changes, oil filters, engine air filter, cabin air filters, wipers, inspection, differential, transfercase. (transmission ATF changes are once every 30k).  And that's for a car that sees 10,000-12,000 miles annually in driving.  A car getting like 30-50k miles a year would see a lot more wear items. Tires, Brakes, more fluid changes, ATF, water pumps, bearings, seats, radiator, condenser, etc.

A380s are turned around and do about 2 trips a day for every day unless it's in maintenance, the route is discontinued, some international incident occurs, the plane is sold and transitioned to a new owner, or the airline goes bankrupt.

sooo.

.. or were there?

congress keeps pushing for Credit Card Competition Bill to kill all credit card rewards programs. f those assholes.

The issues with Duolingoare getting long in the tooth, we all know pronunciations are bad but acceptable, it's frustrating to userbase if you're gamifying language learning but then can't probably judge participants correctly and give them poor scores because they're able to properly pronounce.

Another longstanding issue is taking away the user supported forum because they didn't want pay people to manage it.

Guess what, you can offer free DuoLingo memberships to people that help moderate forums.  You can use AI to check posts before people post them.  However, keeping user interaction is kind of the point of language learning.  Why would we want to learn language if we're not communicating with another person?

The CEO is completely tonedeaf to what people are having issues with.  AI isn't the biggest issue, but it's the straw that broke the camel's back.

They're trying to justify headcount by implementing features people don't want.

People want hashtags and people want their Square Ratio Feed back.

Hashtags were taken away because it was free advertising vs using Facebook's Business Center's ad console.  Encroaching upon Facebook's ad revenue was the last straw, and hashtags were taken away.  Not for any other purported reason.

For the Squares, they did it only to seem interesting, but TikTok has kept relatively the same layout and same features but have continued to crush it in terms of use and revenue w/ their integration w/ TikTok Shop mall.

If Instagram wanted to get better they'd look towards TikTok for inspiration and return to their older algorithm that would help users keep track of their friends.

was mostly a licensing issue. the same "kill switch" thing exists for things like medical devices, cars, nintendos, etc. us energy officials are "catching" on to this like fcc "caught on" to this the last time trump was in, but practically any type of "operational technology" that's internet-connected can be bricked in very similar manners. is it fud? perhaps is it a possibility? yeah has this happened before? absolutely (spotify, sonos, etc) while it's something we should be concerned about, i'm really not concerned about "cellular radios" that Chinese vendors install in their equipment. When manufacturing at scale, it's usually cheaper to manufacture everything to the same spec than to remove a specific part because the guy that setup the system originally doesn't work there anymore or is contracted to do something else. But also because a lot of these vendors that resell to utilities are just middlemen that buy rebranded equipment from a large manufacturer at a trade show, and that large manufacturer already built to spec (sunk design cost) the inverters for a national utility, and that solar inverter they sell to the national utility already has already been heavily mark up (since gov't utility paying, and subsidized by utility customers). That large manufacturer is not incentivized to change the configuration of the unit, but heavily incentivized to sell as many models as possible with as few configuration changes as possible. This is where the middlemen reseller comes in to resell to US (or global) customers (at a lower margin to themselves). In this situation, the original design wasn't for export (configured for 220v50Hz w/ cellular radios for firmware updates) but could be configured to 120v/60hz without changing the other features of the solar inverter like the cellular radio. Those radios are usually setup for the wrong frequency band to be used in the USA based on FCC Band plan. But changing out the rectifier is easy since it's a whole plug and play unit whereas the cellular radio is likely an integrated surface mount component on the board installed at the factory and requires skilled workers and equipment to remove surface mount components. so all in all, this doesn't affect me, i'm totally cool with random cell radios in my solar inverter in my offgrid config where i'll never even have cellphone service.

..arguably the best way to build "genuine" engagement, but it was done as a way to force users to buy into the blue checkmark verified status system to further monetize "business" accounts on top of the ad income they make by large marketing firms on behalf of the brands the represent. If they stopped showing random paid and sponsored posts on the feed and allowed people to go back to how things were a decade ago, people would be far happier. Mosseri brought this on himself.

..of choice. it never made any sense to include one half of the equation. it's been a marketing choice always to pump up values instead of state actual specs for decades. When it actually matters you'll see capacities stated in watt hours for like V-Mount Batteries, camera batteries, electric vehicles. This standard should trickle down to all electrical storage mediums.