Salamander

  • 19 Posts
  • 176 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • Thanks! <3 Cost is not the issue. The reason why I selected this option was because it seemed a good choice at the time. Moving the image database around is a bit of a hassle so I chose to just keep it as it was even after learning of other options. Last time it took several days of downtime to move the images over because the transfer speed into/out of the object storage is very low.

    If I would have known that this would happen now, I might have taken this opportunity to move all the images over. But I was not expecting this amount of downtime. Now I worry that trying to move images from one place to another when the object storage is acting up is risky, and also I am busy.

    I sent another message to support this morning and received:

    We are sorry for the inconvenience caused. Please note that our technicians are working diligently on this matter, there is no ETA.

    Sorry 😓




  • Only that I am frustrated at the object storage provider (Contabo), and now I see why their reputation is not great. Their reply was that they sent a warning about the “12 hour downtime during March 10th”… but obviously these effects have extended both to before and after this “12 hour downtime”. At least I got confirmation that this problem is due to their migration.








  • How did I miss that?!

    My timeline is incorrect then. Since the post from sassymetischick.bsky predates the wiki edit, it is more likely that the wiki edit was made in response to this meme, and not the other way around. This pretty invalidates what I said above…

    I still can’t find any evidence of this being an actual trend, but I no longer have a good guess about the origin.


  • I have banned multiple of those accounts for DM spam. Banned a new one just now.

    I’m not sure this is a bot. I suspect it might be a real person who doesn’t realize how they’re coming across. Initially, I thought it might be a strategy to get attention, but if that were the case, I’d be surprised by their persistence with a strategy that isn’t very effective.

    I suppose it is kind of effective if we are making posts about them… Hmm…

    I prefer not making too many assumptions other than to assume no malice. But of course the DM spam will not be tolerated.


  • They have gone from:

    Unlike other companies, we don’t sell access to your data. … Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.

    To (paraphrasing) “Ahh, well, we don’t have ownership, we just have a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content. We can also process your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Policy… Ah, and, of course, we may change the policy in any way we want and you automatically agree with it by continuing using the service”.

    In the past, they used language that included very specific limits on how the data could be used. Now, they make no promises and obfuscate the possibilities by providing ‘examples’ of ways that the data might be used.

    If they were serious about privacy, the minimum would be to be transparent and specific about the data use. The lack of specificity makes it abundantly clear that they intend to use the data in ways that users would disapprove.




  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoScience Memes@mander.xyzChat, is this true?
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    17 days ago

    EDIT: As indepndnt mentioned in a comment below, the OP was posted on February 14, which pre-dates the wikipedia edits. So, my conclusions below about the timeline are not valid.

    Hah, sure, let’s investigate 🕵️‍♂️

    The term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was added as a potential Aztec name to the English wikipedia page on February 15, 2025, by user ‘Mxn’.

    The description of the edit is the following:

    Frum says the Aztecs had no specific name for the gulf, which is plausible in a practical sense, but Fernández gives a specific religious name and is more of a reliable source on this topic

    If we investigate a bit further, we can see that the term Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl is described to be a name for the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in the spanish Wikipedia: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

    This page was updated to include the description of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl as the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in September 16, 2018. I don’t have access to the citation so I don’t know if the citation specifies if this term is still known/used.

    If you check the history you will find that the same ‘Mxn’ fixed a typo in this page on February 15, 2025.

    So, from this sequence of events it is highly likely that the term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was included into the Gulf of Mexico wiki page as a result of the user Mxn performing an active search for Aztec names for the Gulf of Mexico, and finding this connection between the term an the gulf by searching on Wikipedia. This information did not come from recent news about the term being used by natives.

    I can find no evidence of native people referring to the gulf of Mexico as ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ more frequently or at all. I can find no mention of this becoming viral in Mexico.

    I find it highly unlikely that:

    • User Mxn added an obscure Aztec term to the Wiki page two weeks ago

    AND

    • This same obscure Aztec term coincidentally began being used by Mexican natives, and this trend became popular enough to be noticed by foreign media but not by Mexican media

    More likely…

    • Mxn actively looked for a term and updated the English wiki
    • Someone read the English wiki, thought this would be a nice story, made the meme

    And this concludes my little investigation 🧐


  • Always exciting to learn about new perspectives on consciousness!

    I have searched for the “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)” theory and I do not personally find it very compelling. I appreciate that the hard problem of consciousness is very difficult to address using the scientific method, but I suspect that consciousness arises from a form of processing that requires computations of the kind performed by animal brains. I don’t think that the kind of biophysics that allows cells to sense and respond to the environment are enough to create a conscious experience.

    About the: “third state”. Cells are alive, independently of the multi-cellular organism that they come from. I don’t agree that changing the way that the cells are organized constitutes some “third state”.

    Despite my disagreements, it is still nice to read and think about. Thanks for sharing.



  • Ooh, cool! 😁 That detector seems to be working only in “Geiger mode”, which means that it can count the number of X-rays/Gamma particles but it does not estimate their energy. So, the dedicated devices are still better in that they allow you to identify the source of the radiation by measuring the counts and the energy distribution simultaneously.

    It probably would not be too difficult to build the open gamma detector into something like a pinephone. I don’t think that has been done yet.