vanesa

29 y/o

[iravaid]

Visit Original Link

On conservation and survival

[segamascott]

[bi-astolfo]

Yes, investigation claimed at least 1,200 detainees 'dropped off the grid' from 'Alligator Alcatraz'

The claim is not new — the Miami Herald published its findings in summer 2025.

[standwithdaanes]

source for the congresswoman thing as well, because i hadn't heard about that:

Rep. LaMonica McIver Faces 17 Years in Prison Over ICE Jail Inspection

The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to restrict or thwart congressmembers’ access to ICE jails.

[withdreamsofhereafter]

Hexagonal growth in a black olive tree

[peppermintsolarpunk]

Let's play: Is it AI or Real?

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

Stay critical, and –more importantly– curious, y'all! The world is a beautiful place, we don't need fictional plants passed off as real ones for that to be true.

[accordion-druid]

Don't Lie To Me About Web 2.0

If you're like me and you're trying to keep an open mind that there may someday be a non-scam application of blockchains, you've probably read some articles about "Web3", which promises to re-decentralize the web by something something Blockchain.

I realize this is far from the most important criticism but i think it's really interesting that the standard explanation you find replicated nearly word-for-word at the beginning of most "Web3" articles has a big ol' chunk of historical revisionism in it. It goes like this:

"First there was web 1.0, which was, like, geocities pages and stuff, and it was decentralized. Then there was web 2.0, which was the centralized silos of social media - facebook, twitter, etc. Now Web3 is gonna re-decentralize everything by letting you own your own data on the blockchain…"

No! Stop there! Web 2.0 was not social media! You're rewriting history that's less than 20 years old!

Web 2.0 was:

blogs with comment sections

wikis (wikipedia was far from the first wiki!)

forums (that is, discussion that was previously on Usenet migrating to like phpBB web forums)

bookmark sharing sites like Del.icio.us

user-defined tagging systems as in del.icio.us (and computer nerds who spent a lot of time defining taxonomies being blown away when it turned out you could let users define their own tags and a useful system could organically emerge)

on a technical, behind-the-scenes level, static HTML files, server-side includes, and Perl CGI scripts were getting replaced with structured, database-backed web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Drupal, etc.)

AJAX as a way of loading content dynamically into a page without the user navigating to a new page

Javascript in general allowing more full-featured applications - as did Flash

RSS feed as a user-defined way of aggregating content

when someone tried to buzzwordify all these disparate trends they noticed that what a lot of them had in common was "Website owner allows website visitors to enter words that will be seen by other website visitors" and summed that up as "User-generated content" and branded it "Web 2.0" around 2004-2005.

I was there. I worked on backends for a lot of this stuff!

The key shift was where things were hosted. In Web 2.0 you might use off-the-shelf software like WordPress or phpBB or whatever but you were still hosting all that stuff on your own server. Your server, your rules; you'd set your own moderation policy and wield your own "banhammer". The free speech compromise was "don't like my moderation policy? Make your own website."

It was a huge paradigm shift in 2005-6 when YouTube started and said "we'll host your videos for you". (What? trust a third-party website to host my videos? Sounds sketchy) That was the beginning of the end, because once people gave up running their own server in favor of letting a big company host their stuff on a centralized server, we gave up all the power.

Social media wasn't web 2.0, it's what killed Web 2.0!

You might think I'm arguing over mere nomenclature but the important fact is that this era existed, and the Web3 pitch pretends it didn't. We already had decentralized internet with social features. This fact contradicts the story the Web3/blockchain advocates want to tell you, so their story skips this entire era.

Web 2.0 lost to siloed social media because:

running your own server is a pain

running your own server costs money, especially if you want to host video

signing up for facebook/twitter/etc is much easier for non-computer-literate users, who outnumber us 1,000 to 1

once there's a critical mass of users there, anybody who wants an audience has to be there (network effects)

non-technical users didn't understand about paying with their privacy, and in most cases had no experience with the freedom they were giving up

the price was not apparent until everybody was locked in

Apple made a fateful decision that mobile-phone internet should be app-centric, not browser/website centric. Then Android copied their mistake.

To make the web3 argument you have to explain why "a distributed ledger where each update contains a cryptographically signed pointer to the previous update, replicated across many computers via a decentralized protocol, that rewards people for hosting nodes by paying them pretend money when they brute-force solve a cryptographic hash" is relevant to any of these problems. I suspect it is not relevant, because:

the blockchain is incredibly slow, inefficient, and energy-intensive, and it can only hold miniscule amounts of data. (The ape pictures are not on the chain, only links to them are on the chain). So everything still has to be hosted elsewhere.

for most web3 stuff "the" blockchain means the Ethereum blockchain, where it sometimes costs thousands of dollars to make a single transaction process.

people who don't want to run their own webserver sure as heck aren't gonna run their own blockchain node

in practice, people don't interact with the blockchain directly, but through intermediarires (coinbase.com etc), who inevitably become centralized.

in practice, control over blockchain itself, for any popular blockchain, is highly centralized to a tiny number of the largest mining consortiums

if you want to make the dream of "buy your Minecraft skin as an NFT and bring it with you to wear in Fortnight!" work (why is this the example every article uses?) you would need to get all the games involved to decide to implement equivalent items, or some kind of framework of item portability, and if you could do that then you wouldn't need the blockchain!

What might help solve any of the problems that killed Web 2.0:

cheap and easy (EASY!) web hosting

portable data standards

antitrust enforcement with teeth

privacy laws around data collection that make the centralized social media business model unprofitable

a critical mass of dissatisfaction with corporate social media

I want a decentralized internet to come back more than anybody, but blockchain is completely irrelevant to that.

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Skull, watercolor and ink by BowingMoth

[vanesa]

Life update: Achieved my one goal this year (get an internship) before the end of January. :)

[vanesa]

I'm genuinely trying to open my mind and see how I can use LLMs in my daily life to be more productive or outsource tasks I spend way too much time on, but:

I can Google and find (mis)information just as quickly

I can write

I can write emails (kneel before my power, average AI user)

I can skim

I can plan

I can code

I can draw

I add custom instructions like "encourage me to think critically instead of just agreeing with me" and "provide sources" to ensure I don't blindly trust it. I've tried over and over to use it, but I keep falling back to plain old web search.

I tried making it help me with planning, but Google Gemini can't access 'secondary' calendars (and it kept lying to me about ways to make it work). I tried to set up something simple, like giving me a weather report notification each morning since I distract myself with checking the weather on my phone to check other apps, but I needed to pay for that feature. Also, it turns out weather apps provide weather notification options anyway. And the Weather Network gives me storm and snow warnings. I tried to get it to help me with task prioritization, but after it gave me advice, I was able to prioritize my tasks on my own as I was making the task list to give to it.

A genuine use I got out of it was asking for coping mechanisms related to mental health... which I'm extremely reluctant do. If I want health advice and therapy techniques, I can already get it from Dr. Google, thanks.

Another genuine use was debugging code, but only after I'm at my wit's end, and I don't share my entire code. I'm still learning. 99% of the time, step-by-step debugging and Googling solves my problem. I use it as a last resort.

Lastly, I've been liking Google NotebookLM for generating quizzes and example problems from course material to help me study.

That's about it. I lived my life without AI pretty well and I can continue to do so. Even trying to force it, I don't use AI. I'll continue to keep looking, but as it stands, there's very little room for AI in my life that isn't already covered by something else.

[helenasurvives]

calling all authors!!

i have just stumbled upon the most beautiful public document i have ever laid eyes on. this also goes for anyone whose pastimes include any sort of character creation. may i present, the HOLY GRAIL:

https://www.fbiic.gov/public/2008/nov/Naming_practice_guide_UK_2006.pdf

this wonderful 88-page piece has step by step breakdowns of how names work in different cultures! i needed to know how to name a Muslim character it has already helped me SO MUCH and i’ve known about it for all of 15 minutes!! i am thoroughly amazed and i just needed to share with you guys 

[healingaspie]

Medisafe is now on a paid subscription model.

Medisafe has been my medication app for over a decade. Now that they've switched to a paid model, I need an alternative to track my medication.

I wanted something that reminded me to take my meds and tracked it. I wanted to see the history of when I took it. I need this becaise even with an alarm and a pill organizer, I sometimes think I did take my meds when I didn't and only turned off the alarm.

The best alternative I've found is this open source app called MedTimer:

It has an interface similar to Medisafe and it's open source, free, and private. There's no unnecessary news section, either, which is a bonus.

The only thing it lacks compared to Medisafe is the Medfriend feature, where loved ones can sign up to keep you accountable for taking your meds. I've never used it, however.

You can download it on F-Droid or Google Play Store.

[vanesa]

Yes, “AI” will compromise your information security posture. No, not through some mythical self-aware galaxy-brain entity magically cracking

LLM-based systems are insanely complex, both on the conceptual level, and on the implementation level. Complexity has real cost and introduces very real risk. These costs and these risks are enormous, poorly understood – and usually just hand-waved away. As Suha Hussain puts it in a video I’ll discuss a bit later: "Machine learning is not a quick add-on, but something that will fundamentally change your system security posture." The amount of risk companies and organizations take on by using, integrating, or implementing LLM-based – or more broadly, machine learning-based – systems is massive. And they have to eat all of that risk themselves: suppliers of these systems simply refuse to take any real responsibility for the tools they provide and problems they cause. After all, taking responsibility is bad for the hype. And the hype is what makes the line go up.

...

Why does this happen? Because LLMs (and tools based on them) have no way of distinguishing data from instructions. Creators of these systems use all sorts of tricks to try and separate the prompts that define the “guardrails” from other input data, but fundamentally it’s all text, and there is only a single context window. Defending from prompt injections is like defending from SQL injection, but there is no such thing as prepared statements, and instead of trying to escape specific characters you have to semantically filter natural language.

[jadagul]

The post on that reading comprehension study is good (and reminded me of some of my complaints about GPT a couple years ago, although the LLMs have gotten much better since then).

But the thing that really stood out to me is that I feel much this same way about math instruction:

i have seen this repeatedly, too - actually i was particularly taken with how similar this is to the behavior of struggling readers at much younger ages - and would summarize the hypothesis i have forged over time as: struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense. my hypothesis for why this is the case is that their reading deficits were not attended to or remediated adequately early enough, and so, in their formative years - the early to mid elementary grades - they spent a lot of time "reading" things that did not make sense to them - in fact they spent much more time doing this than they ever did reading things that did make sense to them - and so they did not internalize a meaningful subjective sense of what it feels like to actually read things.

One of the big problems I have primarily in Calculus 1 (which is the lowest-level course I've taught) is that students just don't expect math to make sense. There's a bunch of rules to follow, which you have to memorize, and then you look at an expression and use some rule that seems like you could use it.

But that's not how competent mathematicians (and I use that word in the broadest possible sense) interact with mathematics. Mathematical formulas mean things. They have syntax, and semantics, and you can break apart a computation and talk about what individual terms mean and are doing, and what manipulation you're doing and what that corresponds to.

(Sometimes, of course, that's easier than others. Calc 2, in particular, involves a lot of "tricks" where it's hard to explain the logic in the middle of using them. But that's why I'm focusing on Calc 1 here, which is mostly not like that but does have a lot of application-y problems where this semantic understanding is important.)

But if you've never worked through a math problem and felt like everything was meaningful, you don't expect meaning in what you're doing, and you don't expect your own work to make sense. And then, well, it won't, and you'll struggle and get lost in the middle of every problem.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Free or Cheap Japanese Language Learning Resources For Your Karate Class

I will update this list as I learn of any more useful ones. If you want general language learning resources check out this other post. This list is Japanese specific. Find lists for other specific languages here.

For the purposes of this list "free" means something that is either totally free or has a useful free tier. "Cheap" is a subscription under $10USD a month, a software license or lifetime membership purchase under $100USD, or a book under $30USD. If you want to suggest a resource for this list please suggest ones in that price range that are of decent quality and not AI generated.

WEBSITES

JLPT Matome - This website is organized by the levels of the JLPT Japanese proficiency test. It has lists of Vocab, Kanji, and grammar points as well as pages with more detail on each point for free. The paid tier has test simulations and flashcard drills but if you ask me, all of that is unnecessary.

Renshuu - This website/app has games, daily challenges, a dictionary, and a lot of other resources. There are some paid features like quizzes but the vast majority of the website's features are completely free.

Tofugu - This is a free website with articles and podcast episodes in English about learning Japanese with tips and culture points. The creators of this website also created WaniKani, a website aimed at helping people memorize Kanji.

Comprehensible Japanese - This is a website/Youtube channel with comprehensible input videos for learners from absolute beginner to intermediate. They have a number of free videos but most are behind a paywall. Their pricing is $8 a month, $80 a year, or $300 for a lifetime membership.

Tae Kim's Guide - This website and blog archive is mainly based around grammar explanations. You can also buy the website owner's book, but there's also a lot of free content on the website.

Tenyomi - This free website is based around reading practice and grammar lessons for beginners. It has a selection of short stories as well as a sentence of the day with a short lesson attached. It has a fairly large archive of these daily lessons to read through. All Japanese sentences also have audio and English translations along with their grammar explanations.

Pitch Accent Perception Test - This free tool works as a test to see how well you can hear pitch accent. I've seen some people use it as a training tool as well.

Condensed Audio Catalog - This is an archive of condensed audio anime. That's anime with the silent moments edited out so you can listen to just the audio over and over again. Some people say they like using this for study so I've included it.

Jisho - This is a free online Japanese to English dictionary that also has kanji explanations and example sentences.

Yomitan for Firefox and Chrome - This is a browser extension that works as a popup dictionary and also allows you to connect it to your anki account to create flashcards with it.

Kashi 1.5K Anki Deck - This is a free premade Anki deck that has 1,500 common Japanese words with pictures, audio, and example sentences.

Kakijun - This website is in Japanese and is a resource for learning proper stroke order for Kanji.

YOUTUBE CHANNELS

Cure Dolly - This channel no longer uploads but it has a massive archive of videos on Japanese grammar as well as a dedicated playlist for absolute beginners.

Akane Japanese Class - This is a channel by a Japanese teacher that makes vlogs in Japanese for intermediate learners. She often films herself traveling, ordering food, checking into hotels, describing things in shops, and other daily life situations. She has subtitles available in various languages and is actually sometimes interesting to watch even if you're not learning Japanese tbh.

Learn Japanese With Tanaka San - This channel has an intermediate podcast, listening practice for beginners, and videos about kanji with cute little illustrations with various characters that works as a visual aid. The creator of this channel also has various free PDF guides linked under a lot of their videos.

Kaname Naito - This is a channel by a Japanese teacher who mostly teaches in English and makes videos explaining some of the more confusing grammar points.

Japanese Super Immersion - This is a channel by two native speakers who post videos of Japanese conversation and conversation practice videos for beginner to intermediate learners. They also have some more advanced dialogues for channel members.

Jiro, Just Japanese - This channel has videos in Japanese for learners. He has a podcast, travel vlogs, and a series of minecraft lets plays.

Nihongo-Learning - This channel makes listening practice videos on a variety of topics for beginner to intermediate learners. They also have videos about Japanese culture and news.

Speak Japanese Naturally - This channel is in a mix of Japanese and English and has explanations of grammar and vocabulary and tips on how to improve pronunciation. The creator of this channel also has a podcast aimed at intermediate to advanced learners.

iroironanihongo - This is a comprehensible input channel channel for beginner to intermediate learners by a Japanese teacher who teaches using manga, anime, and discussions of Japanese culture.

Daily Japanese With Naoko - This is a channel by a Japanese woman who makes daily life vlogs in simple Japanese for Japanese learners.

READING PRACTICE

Tadoku.org - This website produces a number of Japanese graded readers for various levels and a selection of them are free to read on their website.

Satori Reader - This website/app is meant for intermediate learners to practice reading. They have a lot of short stories and series, integrated flash cards, and grammar lessons. The free tier has a good number of free articles. The pro version is $9 a month or $89 a year.

Jareads - This app is on ios and android and has a number of news articles in Japanese with the option to save words to an in-app flashcard deck and check definitions as you're reading. There's also the option to sort articles by JLPT level. The app is free to use but requires watching ads to access some features.

Lingual Ninja - This website has a number of free little folktale stories, articles, and bits of JLPT reading practice with translations, audio, and some also have video.

I'm gonna list off a number of more affordable physical paperback graded readers now.

Japanese Short Stories for beginners by lingo mastery - $19 with significantly cheaper used copies available

Japanese Stories for Language Learners: Bilingual Stories in Japanese and English by Anne McNulty and Eriko Sato - $18 with used copies available

A Japanese Reader: Graded Lessons for Mastering the Written Language (Tuttle Language Library) by Roy Andrew Miller - $19 with cheaper used copies available.

Short Stories in Japanese for Intermediate Learners by Olly Richards - $15 with cheaper used copies available

PODCASTS

This spreadsheet has over 100 podcasts listed on it. Some specifically for learners, and others for native speakers.

Japan Radio - This app allows you to listen to various Japanese radio stations for free

SELF-STUDY TEXTBOOKS AND DICTIONARIES

The Learner's Japanese Kanji Dictionary - This dictionary is focused around Kanji and has English explanations. Its official price is $25 but it's often on sale and used copies are available.

Lonely Planet Japanese Dictionary and Phrasebook - This book is especially useful for people looking to learn Japanese for tourism. It focuses on survival everyday language. It's around $12.

Miriam Webster's Japanese to English Dictionary - This is generally the cheapest bilingual dictionary on the market at $8.

Learn Japanese With Manga - This is a series of self study textbooks that uses comics as its teaching medium. Each book in the series is around $20 for a physical copy and $10 for a digital one.

Japanese for Dummies - This is one of the cheaper textbooks out there but reviews say it covers a bit less than stuff like genki or Japanese from Zero. Those more popular books are more expensive though. It's $28 for a physical copy and $17 for a digital copy and used copies are available.

Japanese for Busy People - This textbook series is aimed at professionals moving to Japan and teaches very formal Japanese. A new book is $30 but that doesn't include the workbook. Though from what I've seen it's often on sale and used copies are pretty easy to find.

Shin Nihongo 500 Mon - This book is better if you can already read some Japanese. There are a few books in the series for different JLPT levels. The basic premise of this series is that it has 500 questions to help you practice for the JLPT exam. I usually see them listed for around $20.

Vocabulary for the JLPT - This series has lists of vocabulary words for different levels of the JLPT with both English and Vietnamese translations if you speak Vietnamese I guess. Each book is about $22 new.

That's what I have for you! Please do suggest additional resources if you have any!

[vanesa]

Chemistry is stuck in the dark ages: 'Chemputation' can bring it into the digital world

Chemistry deals with that most fundamental subject: matter. New drugs, materials and batteries all depend on our ability to make new molecul

The premise is simple. Chemistry can be treated as a form of computation carried out in the physical world. Instead of publishing chemistry as prose, it is published in executable code, as described in our new preprinted article. Reagents are data. Operations like mixing, heating, separating and purifying are instructions. A range of machines, such as those shown in the image below, play the role of processors.

[vanesa]

I've been trying to articulate this for ages in various blog posts, but Mariana articulates it so well here.

I think this is one of the most important organization tips out there. You need three different things:

Your Time Manager

Your Task Manager

Your Knowledge Manager

It's similar to Tiago Forte's "Second Brain" concept.

[vanesa]

The instinct to write clever code is almost universal among engineers. It feels like proof of competence. But software engineering is what happens when you add time and other programmers. In that environment, clarity isn’t a style preference - it’s operational risk reduction. Your code is a strategy memo to strangers who will maintain it at 2am during an outage. Optimize for their comprehension, not your elegance. The senior engineers I respect most have learned to trade cleverness for clarity, every time.

(Addy Osmani, 21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google)

[vanesa]

Our hangnails are incredibly real to us; whereas to most of us, the English village of Nether Wallop and the high Himalayan country of Bhutan, not to mention the slowly swirling spiral galaxy in Andromeda, are considerably less real, even though our intellectual selves might wish to insist that since the latter are much bigger and longer-lasting than our hangnails, they ought therefore to be far realer to us than our hangnails are. We can say this to ourselves till we’re blue in the face, but few of us act as if we really believed it. A slight slippage of subterranean stone that obliterates 20,000 people in some far-off land, the ceaseless plundering of virgin jungles in the Amazon basin, a swarm of helpless stars being swallowed up one after another by a ravenous black hole, even an ongoing collision between two huge galaxies each of which contains a hundred billion stars — such colossal events are so abstract to someone like me that they can’t even touch the sense of urgency and importance, and thus the reality, of some measly little hangnail on my left hand’s pinky. We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself. The realest things of all are my knee, my nose, my anger, my hunger, my toothache, my sideache, my sadness, my joy, my love for math, my abstraction ceiling, and so forth. What all these things have in common, what binds them together, is the concept of "my", which comes out of the concept of "I" or "me", and therefore, although it is less concrete than a nose or even a toothache, this "I" thing is what ultimately seems to each of us to constitute the most solid rock of undeniability of all. Could it possibly be an illusion? Or if not a total illusion, could it possibly be less real and less solid than we think it is? Could an "I" be more like an elusive, receding, shimmering rainbow than like a tangible, heftable, transportable pot of gold?

(Douglas Hofstadter, 2007)

#myhangnail

[vanesa]

What if the idea of the autism spectrum is completely wrong?

For years, we've thought of autism as lying on a spectrum, but emerging evidence suggests that it comes in several distinct types. The impli

Autism’s incredible diversity is something to celebrate. However, it has long presented an immense challenge to researchers trying to understand this seeming jumble of traits. Strides are now being made, as several recent studies have identified apparent groups within the catch-all term of autism that are also underpinned by patterns of genes and brain activity. Researchers are exploring if and how these subtypes can be leveraged to help autistic people get better, more personalised support, and gain a great understanding of themselves. “There is now a more concrete basis for understanding where their experiences are coming from,” says neuroscientist Conor Liston at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. Yet this isn’t the first time that researchers have tried to separate autism into different guises and some advocates are wary of how these subtypes will play out in society. “You might feel like [subtyping] is value-neutral, but for someone else, it really isn’t,” says Amy Pearson, a psychologist at Durham University, UK.