The topic is very poorly framed here. There are 3500 known mosquito species. Just 12 are known to cause human disease. Eliminating these 12 that have become evolutionarily co-adapted with pathogens to propagate human (and other mammalian) disease seems unlikely to cause any sort of ecological catastrophe, but certainly this must be thoroughly examined before we try to do it. It will also be essential that we know our methods only target the specific mosquito species.

Reading the paper's abstract (can't get the full article yet), not just the press release, I see that this is NOT the first time that an ergot producing fungus had been recovered from morning glory seeds, despite what the misleading headline would have us believe. This was the third such recovery from a morning glory species, and as we expect from co-evolution each is a different fungal species. Now we need to get the A. nervosa fungus isolated!

After the isolation and identification of the ergot alkaloids from the ergot fungi in the early 20th century the discovery of these same complex and delicate chemical structures in the Convolvulaceae (morning glories) was quite a surprise as they appeared to have evolved no where else in any of the plant kingdom (or elsewhere in the fungal kingdom for that matter).

So the theory was proposed that this was the result of a fungus that had long ago become an obligate parasite or endosymbiont in that plant family, and then had descended and co-evolved as the parent infection radiated out phylogenetically. The highest concentrations for example for found in Argyreia nervosa (the Hawaiian Baby Woodrose, actually from India). Later genomics succeeded in recovering evidence of a fungal genome in the morning glories that had traces of ergot alkaloids.

A surprising thing here is that, from the linked article:

This fungus was found just growing on a seed coat. Mycologists and botanists have been trying to identify the fungus that infects these genuses and species for more than half a century without success and they have failed to be isolated through many, many investigations. No one has seen the fungus emerge and grown on the surface of a seed before. How this happened needs explication.

Albert Hoffman was an extremely skilled synthetic chemist and he not only invented the techniqes used to produce lysergic acid derivatives, he synthesized a large number of them himself.

While working with the 25th dialkyl derivative of lysergic acid that he had prepared, LSD-25 (it was the diethyl derivative), he became the first person to be intoxicated by it, but how he managed to ingest it (probably about 25 micrograms) has never been determined. The procedures he used should have protected him from exposure but somehow that day did not.

Indeed. It is a "customer management" UI, designed to promote up-sell.

On many 6-speed manual transmissions, 5th and 6th are both overdrive gears.

(Okay, I take that back: there's one version in which I'd be okay with them lionizing Sam, but it'd have to involve actual lions)

I just hope they're not going to lionize Sam. That's the last thing we need. He pulled a classic sociopath-style manipulation to retain his position in the face of legitimate concerns about his abuse of power in the company.

Said a wealthy, supremely well-connected, upper class male Roman citizen.

Life is WAY better after the industrial revolution than it was before it.

People have this fantasy image of what life used to be like, thinking of picturesque farms, craftsmen tinkering in workshops, clean air, etc. The middle ages were filth, you worked backbreaking labour long hours of the day, commonly in highly risky environments, even the simplest necessities cost a large portion of your salary, you lived in a hovel, and you died of preventable diseases at an average age of ~35 (a number admittedly dragged down by the fact that 1/4th of children didn't even survive a single year).

If it takes people of similar social status as you weeks of labour to produce the fibre for a set of clothes, spin it into yarn, dye it, weave it, and sew it, then guess what? It requires that plus taxes and profit weeks of your labour to be able to afford that set of clothes (and you better believe the upper classes were squeezing every ounce of profit from the lower class they could back then). Decreasing the amount of human labour needed to produce things is an immensely good thing. Furthermore, where did that freed up labour go? Into science, into medicine, into the arts, etc etc. Further improving people's quality of life.

And if your response is "But greater production is more polluting!" - I'm sorry, do you have any understanding of how *miserably* polluted cities in the middle ages were? Where coal smoke poured out with no pollution controls, sewage ran straight into rivers that people collected water from and bathed in, where people extensively used things like arsenic and mercury and lead and asbestos, etc etc? The freed-up labour brought about by the industrial revolution allowed us to *learn* and to *fix problems*.

Meh, you do you. I'm rooting for the Torment Nexus.

Which of those things hit 800 million users in 17 months?
Which of those things hit such high annual recurring revenue rates so fast?
Which of those saw the cost of using the tech decline by 99% over two years?

Heck, most of them aren't even new technologies, just new products, often just the latest version of older, already-commonly-used products.

And re. that last one: it must be stressed that for the "cost of using the tech" to decline 99% over two years per million tokens, you're also talking about a similar order of reduction of power consumption per million tokens, since your two main costs are hardware and electricity.

You're looking at three months of very noisy data and drawing some pretty dramatic conclusions from said minimal data.

Winter demand is heavily dependent on weather. You're mainly seeing the impacts of weather on demand.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F2024%25E2%2580%259325_North_American_winter

"The 2024–25 North American winter was considerably colder then the previous winter season, and much more wintry across the North American continent, signified by several rounds of bitterly cold temperatures occurring."

One may wonder why the vending machine simulation is talking about quantum mechanics, contacting the FBI, and threatening nuclear annihilation. Why is this part of the vending machine simulation? Also why it cannot understand such basic things as orders have to be delivered before it will actually have them.

And the fundamental reasons are:

• The are language models, they are only playing with the statistical frequencies of words in all the texts they have had scraped from the Internet. They know all the words in the world, and the language contexts is which they get used, but do not understand anything at all. They words have no meaning to them. So of course a vending machine company has access to anything that has ever been described as existing in the world -- they all just words. It has no concepts, knows literally nothing about the world, just the words that have been used to talk about it.
• As a giant statistic word-game player it does not know about such things as the properties of numbers or time or causality. That things must be delivered before you have them, and I am mildly surprised that it did not think it could restock all the machines indefinitely with just one delivery, not knowing that things get "used up".

Internet Time