Mostly this is just an issue with the nature of science. There’s fundamentally just a lot we don’t know about what these creatures looked like. Thankfully, in the last 20-30 years, we’ve learned a lot more. We’ve become a lot better at finding evidence of feathers and other surface details. We may have gotten better at estimating the musculature? I’m not really sure what the current state of knowledge is here.

But the key thing to consider is that science, as a project, is incredibly conservative. Science is all about precisely defining your claims and clearly justifying them, ideally via quantitative analysis. The reason old renderings of dinosaurs look like this is that these represent the threshold of the known. They are scientific renders, containing only the details that we can be reasonably certain actually existed on these animals. You can of course go further and fill in missing details with imagination and reasonable speculation, but this will always be more an exercise in art than science, a speculative exercise. Yes, dinosaurs likely didn’t have this “shrink wrapped” appearance. But what their real appearance was is a guessing game. Yes, it’s plausible spinosaurus had big back muscles rather than a fan, but there are likely also other speculative models people could propose. Maybe the spine isn’t a fan, but the base of some giant peacock-type tail? Maybe it wasn’t a fan, but a series of spikes. Maybe it wasn’t one vertical fan, but two horizontal sheets? Who knows?

Science is an inherently conservative exercise. We tend to forget this. Political conservatives hate science because they hate when reality disagrees with their dogma. But while political conservatives call science woke or liberal, the truth is, institutionally, science is conservative. Ideas move slowly. Major paradigm shifts only occur when overwhelming evidence forces them to. Ideas often take decades to slowly percolate through academia, sometimes only changing because the old generation retires or dies of old age.

Scientists as such are, generally, biased against making unfounded claims and speculation. A lot of scientific training focuses on precisely defining your claims, including the precise limits of those claims. And this bleeds over into scientific renderings. From a scientific perspective, it is often better to make a rendering that you know is almost certainly incorrect, rather than make a likely more correct rendering that you cannot support with evidence.

Only a Nazi conflates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Those on the right, being Nazis, use the Hitlerian definition of anti-Semitism. In this Hitlerian definition, Jews can never actually be full citizens of any other nation besides Israel. Regardless of their personal loyalty or belief, any Jew in the US or Europe is suspect, only a partial citizen, a foreigner at their very core. This is Hitlerian, as it is the very way the historical Nazis viewed Jewish identity.

For modern Nazis, being a Jew and being Israeli are interchangeable. A criticism of the Israeli government is an attack on Jewish people in general. Nazis like the modern Republican Party believe that Jews can never be real Americans, and that they will always have some connection and loyalty to the Israeli state. This is the very logic that justified the Japanese internment camps. If you think every Jewish person must be loyal to Israel, you are literally a Nazi.

To me, the hardest part seems to be - how do you keep your small web from being infected by AI slop? Currently the slop spammers aren’t focusing on these small web rings and web 1.0 communities. But if they did start to become popular, the AI slop would inevitably follow.

Perhaps such sites need to run on a 100% no-advertising model. Individual hobby sites or those supported by subscriptions and donations only. That would cut out most of the vast, vast majority of the slop. AI slop currently can’t produce content that people are actually willing to pay to subscribe to. If sloppers can’t bring in revenue via ad impressions, they won’t have any incentive to create slop AI 1.0 sites.

You’re under-thinking this. Cops don’t help people during medical emergencies. They’re trained to stand there and let people bleed out and die in front of them rather than lifting a finger to help. Also, I’m pretty sure if the mystery gang does get any reward money, Shaggy just smokes it all away.

I’m sure there’s a VR headset mod out that allows just this…In both solo and partner modes!

There was a legend I heard of in an engineering office. There was an engineer at this company I worked at, long before I was there. On the first day of work, he created his first file, file 000001. He pulled out a notebook, and wrote the file number and the document title. Later that day, he moved on to file 000002. And so he continued. For many years, one document after another, all in sequential order. No one ever bothered to inquire about his numbering system. He simply sent files off when needed, renaming as necessary. No one ever needed to poke through his work computer. Then, one day, he got laid off in a company downsizing… He simply took the notebook with him, took it home, and burned it.

Crawl up into your attic or wherever the air circulator is installed and find the exact model number of your unit. See if instructions can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160603194940/https://vanee.edenenergy.com/res-air-exchangers-literature.php

If not, I would contact vanEE directly. I had to use the Wayback Machine as the documentation section on their current site is blank.

A few years ago I attended PAX Unplugged in Phily. PAX Unplugged is a tabletop gaming convention. Think your classic DND and eurogamer crowd. But there was also a marathon going on at the same time, and the marathon had their own convention in the same convention center. So you had both the tabletop gamer crowd and the marathon athletes sharing the same space and streets for several days. It was glorious.

Sure…“friend.” I think upon meeting one, you would find how friendly the worm finds the songbird.

You could use a 3D printer to make an old-school Gutenberg printing press. Only useful if you want to print a large number of something, but it could be done. Instead of movable type, I would just 3D print out entire pages as raised letters on a flat plate. Then run ink over the press, put some paper down, and turn the screw.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:991447

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6769671

Future IoT devices won’t even ask. They’ll just have GPS chips prebuilt into them. And you won’t even be able to solve the problem by cutting the device off at the network level. Your TV and printer will just phone home via the cell network.

I do love the idea of making old timey printing plates using a 3D printer. If you printed in TPU would that make the equivalent of a rubber stamp?

Probably.

I mean, there’s no reason why a 3D printer couldn’t be rigged up to use a stylus instead of an extruder. (Plotters exist after all.) Probably not very performant compared to your solution though.

Yeah, plotters exist, but they’re slow. The reason I mention subversive literature is that activist groups are some of those that would most benefit from an open source printer option. Regular commercial printers all have government-mandated fingerprinting software built into them. A home made printing press gives you the throughput of an inkjet printer but without the opsec issues.

If you’re worried about opsec and want to like, print subversive pamphlets, one way to do it would be to use a 3D printer. Literally 3D a small printing press. Use 3d printed movable type. Or perhaps better, just print the sheet of a pamphlet as a single print and swap out the pages as you go.

If you wanted a secure way to print something, you could use an open source 3D printer to do it. You’re just using it to make plates for a literal old-fashioned screw-type printing press.

When talking about where you live, you don’t “stay at”, you live at a place.

Perhaps a social critique of our post-capitalist hellscape? We no longer “live” anywhere. We just stay places.

It’s a knight light. It keeps the monsters away.

Want to really make a power move in life? Go through your grocery store clockwise, like a psychopath. Just to show you won’t let the system control you!

Simple. They should only be legal to own if they’re fixed.

I want the most anti-British option. I know! We’re going to do away with clocks entirely. We wake up when we wake up. We work when we work. We forget counting the days. Forget the calendar entirely. Live forever in an eternal now.

No. Let’s go for the craziest option. Continuous time zones! Your clock changes a bit every mile east or west you go.

You are vastly underestimating the social awkwardness that comes with telling someone they smell. Maybe you have a very different relationship than most do with their friends, but it would take quite a lot before I would bring that kind of thing up. In a professional setting, I would want to get HR involved before pointing that out to someone. I would let them figure out a polite way of asking the coworker to fix their B.O.