llewelly

I tried to write an introduction and it was so empty it collapsed inward on itself

Public Key

npub1w6hdkemeheu83td6ylaw4l42rl3j59pch2zccvv909n78zy6245q6fzeq2

NIP-05 Address

llewelly@sauropods-win.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8dtkmvaumu7rc4kaz07h2l64plce2zsut4pvvxxzhjelr3zd926qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ekk7um5wgh8qatzajauvl

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub1w6hdkemeheu83td6ylaw4l42rl3j59pch2zccvv909n78zy6245q6fzeq2

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Last Notes

2026-10-27 11:58:09 UTC

... are they trying to provoke RFK jr?
#nevent1q…fdev

2026-10-27 09:41:18 UTC

the creators of ChatGPT are trying to:
(a) lure 404 media into participation in yet another marketing stunt
(b) bombard 404 media with spam
(c) actually it's just an unintended side effect
#nevent1q…pn9q

2026-10-26 16:30:53 UTC

come on, everyone has to start somewhere.
#nevent1q…auce

2026-10-26 14:05:27 UTC

1/2
sometimes I ponder the fact that work of dead people is a considerable part of what is used to train most every modern LLM. This is mainly because there is so much writing from dead people easily available online, and some of them are famous, but also because both popular and academic notions of what makes good writing are heavily weighted towards old dead white guys.

2026-10-22 11:53:36 UTC

this sort of "well actually [common name] can refer to any of five different species in 3 different families and 2 different orders" thing is unfortunately the norm when it comes to common names for foods.
#nevent1q…nuyf

2026-10-18 22:53:48 UTC

on the one hand, I'm kind of sad that guy died, but on the other hand, he hosted that show like the Overton window wasn't being driven around like a remote control car whose controller was in the hands of meth-smoking billionaires.

2026-10-18 22:42:53 UTC

I want chamomile tea, but last time I was at the grocery store I didn't buy any because, and for reasons totally unrelated to the flavor of the tea, I hated every brand on offer in the tea aisle.
Now I'm disconsolately drinking hot water and I'm not sure what to do.

2026-10-18 22:38:58 UTC

you might have thought Empty Orchestra was band name meant to be a clever play on Phantom of the Opera, but actually it's just karaoke

2026-10-12 21:12:05 UTC

we all know someone who would volunteer for the crewed Pluto flyby.
#nevent1q…qyu0

2026-10-10 00:15:17 UTC

remember when technology had knobs?
#nevent1q…phe4

2026-10-08 22:06:47 UTC

I guess some people just don't know that in the USA Ace Rimmer is known as Sur Ace, and that's who microsoft named their laptop after. Some geek references are just too obscure.
#nevent1q…kmag

2026-10-07 20:46:07 UTC

today I learned that nobody in the Fediverse has built a machine to inscribe a chosen wikipedia page onto a clay tablet. I find this discovery both disappointing and unsettling.

2026-10-05 15:36:21 UTC

1/2
as we all know, metrics have ruined the internet, and much of the rest of society along with it. Thus, time travellers have been sent back to the founding days of the internet, to convince everyone of that era that metrics are horrible, and thereby prevent a great evil from arising.

2026-10-03 10:20:48 UTC

remember: an icon is a religious or cultic symbol, which usually requires important contextual knowledge to understand. This knowledge seems "obvious" to members of the relevant cult(s), but is typically obscure to non-members. Once you internalize this essential fact, many previously incomprehensible aspects of computing will be easy to understand.

2026-09-30 23:57:51 UTC

... what about android?
#nevent1q…jvwp

2026-09-29 12:01:21 UTC

"Language models manipulate form, but without reference to meaning. " -- Professor of Linguistics Emily Bender
An excellent example of Emily Bender's quote, from the world of pottery:
#nevent1q…wy3v

2026-09-27 15:26:50 UTC

but how many other snails remained glued to cards in diapause for untold years (decades? centuries? aeons?) , but their diapause unrecognized?
#nevent1q…rp9t

2026-09-24 16:15:37 UTC

product coming soon from a cloud storage company near you: "Notice: You have not upgraded your account in the last 30 days. As a result, we have eaten all your old photos. If you want them back for any reason, we will use our shiny new image-generating AI to reconstruct your old photos at the low low cost of $1 per megabyte. "

2026-09-24 16:10:33 UTC

1/2
satellite experts: uh, if you put computers in space they'll suffer rad damage ...
investors: rad damage! That sounds so cool! Let's go for it!

2026-09-22 21:32:03 UTC

WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH
#nevent1q…4r7n

2026-09-11 00:29:40 UTC

Of course not! They're not firing at Will, they're firing at YOU! Will is just collateral damage.

2026-09-08 19:32:52 UTC

"russian" roulette has been upgraded to american roulette: You enter a robotaxi. Will it take you to the destination of your choice? Or to the workcamps? Or to DHS offices to be deported to a mysterious "third country"?
#nevent1q…za7j

2026-08-29 02:08:19 UTC

1/2
I learned to play scrabble at a small public library that had placed the table for board games next to the The Big Dictionaries Table. In those days, even small libraries would have a table or to which existed solely for huge dictionaries with half a million words, which were never allowed to leave the table. Naturally we allowed any words that could be found in the The Big Dictionaries.

2026-08-28 11:47:57 UTC

there are endless millions of songs about heartbreak, but somehow, none are about how it feels when you fall in love with a field of study, and in that field, in all its terrible glory, there is that horror which breaks your heart.

2026-08-25 02:05:31 UTC

how weird, I downloaded a Leonard Nimoy reading of Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains a little over two weeks ago, and I'm finally listening to it today, and it gets to the part where the automated house says the date out loud, it says "Today is August 4th 2026" ... huh. Maybe I should have listened to it right away. : )
#SF

2026-08-24 18:31:58 UTC

Quicksand is just the earth elemental parallel of the Ent Quickbeam.
(If you're still afraid of quicksand, remember this)

2026-08-24 11:16:50 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj Thank you. I didn't realize the discussion was confined to sports opportunities.

2026-08-24 11:11:12 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj
"Were it not a caldron of suffering, it's also a narrow band of opportunity and glory for men with few other options."
did I miss a post somewhere? This sentence doesn't make any sense to me. Why "... few other options."?

2026-08-23 23:10:28 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj
historically, the core flaw of surveillance regimes is the need for people to watch the opressed. The more people a fascist cop has to watch, the less attention they have for each victim, and the more things they miss. And on top of that, the watchers themselves need watching.
the dream of modern fascists is "AI will do the watching", and the stochastic errors the surveillance "AI" makes will function as stochastic terrorism.

2026-08-23 14:44:13 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj if you're in a handbag, you may not know where you're going, because you can't see out. But if you're in a handbasket, you know you're going to hell.

2026-08-21 23:03:34 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj yeah - everyone makes a big deal about the stock market, because it can wreck the economy, but then they admit it's actually just a rounding error. Think about that - the global economy, so fragile a rounding error can wreck it.

2026-08-21 19:38:53 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj this is why I quit using facebook.

2026-08-21 17:18:11 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj
I mean if your definition of horse is broad enough:
"Eohippus stood at about 12 in (30 cm), or three hands tall, at the shoulder.[4]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eohippus
: )
(of course there are modern tiny breeds of horses, but I'll skip those bc fossils)

2026-08-21 17:09:22 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj also: " Dendrocalamus sinicus having individual stalks (culms) reaching a length of 46 meters (151 ft), up to 36 centimeters (14 in) in diameter and a weight of up to 450 kilograms (1,000 lb)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo
that's practically horse-sized.

2026-08-21 17:08:09 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj palm "trees" are a rough equivalent of horse-sized bamboo, even if not as closely related as I once thought.

2026-08-21 00:39:59 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj well I finally added a link to the podbean url of the episode, so you can look at the show notes and decide if you want to listen. It does have some neat info about where the two species of fire ants at issue come from, and where they first got into the USA.

2026-08-21 00:33:39 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj well, you need to pay close attention to the kinds of places people dispose of furniture they don't want to move. But he might be right.

2026-08-20 20:52:44 UTC

oh good, arthro-pod is finally doing an episode on fire ants!
#ants
#invasive
on second listen, I've decided to tag
@nprofile…pfuj , even though its main focus is on two ants as invasive species.

2026-08-20 17:16:27 UTC

I saw an adorable skunk at a safe distance on my walk early this morning, and I have no idea who to share this with.
#mammals
#beforeDawn

2026-08-20 14:07:59 UTC

people think I can't rhyme elon with brown, but they don't know elon is secretly the same word as clown, so it already rhymes.

2026-08-20 00:25:24 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj after Cinderella's chariot turned into a pumpkin, the giant forest ants came ...

2026-08-19 21:12:04 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj yeah. Imagine having to generate infinite non-repeating digits every time someone inputs a prime number (other than 1, if anyone still thinks 1 is prime), or any other number without integer roots. Exhausting.

2026-08-18 19:58:17 UTC

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@nprofile…tkx6 wonder if @nprofile…qupq has any contacts among bivalve paleontologists.

2026-08-18 08:43:41 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj based on what I saw in Jasper, a moose doesn't need to climb on a roof to eat from it. They can just reach up there, because they're absurdly tall. Unless, you know, you live on the seventh floor, or something.

2026-08-17 20:21:56 UTC

"His rage passes description - the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted."
-- Tolkien, describing the rage of Smaug after Bilbo steals a dwarven goblet (and returns it to the dwarves who rightfully owned it).
#dragons

2026-08-17 18:27:51 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj I suggest the fungus symbiote of Lasius fuliginosus made her do it.

2026-08-17 15:16:40 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj the lesson of Hurricane* Sandy: The combination of sea level rise and more intense storms is already a serious threat to the viability of the NYC subway system. Both are fossil fueled problems, so if the NYC subway system is to last, it must first eliminate fossil fuel industries. The USA, as currently constructed, is a petroligarchy. Therefor, the NYC subway system must either eliminate the USA, or radically restructure it.
*(debatably post tropical, by 6 hours)

2026-08-17 15:01:24 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj uh, 10 years from now, if they need to reserve colossal amounts of RAM production, like they are right now, the cost of upgrades is going to be ridiculous. And right now, nearly all the money to pay for that RAM comes from a hideous downward spiral of circular accounting. I guess we'll see if that kind of accounting can last for 10 years, if we survive that long, but I don't expect it to.

2026-08-16 00:14:50 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj 1/2
when I did wheel thrown pottery, the studio I worked at adopted a stray cat
as it happens, wheel thrown pottery requires a (4 litre, 1 gallon) bucket of water, sitting in easy reach of the wheel, to lubricate the potter's hands, sponges, and other tools. Before every step, first, you use a small sponge to get a little water out of the bucket and put it on the clay,

2026-08-13 00:39:14 UTC

and, perhaps unsurpisingly, yet another study beloved by anti-vaxxers is retracted:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/major-covid-study-that-fueled-vaccine-skepticism-retracted-over-misinformation/

2026-08-13 00:31:50 UTC

the flat-headed cat
#nevent1q…zmvc

2026-08-12 23:24:05 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj well I've seen the sunrise 3 times this week, does that count? Because that's all I've got.

2026-08-12 18:42:44 UTC

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@nprofile…galm owl, my teeth

2026-08-12 13:30:40 UTC

when noodle-cooking halts before the noodles soften, it's called "owl dente". But owls don't have teeth, and they rarely eat noodles.

2026-08-09 13:18:10 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj
what the heck?
how is missing ten toes a symbol of being committed?

2026-08-09 01:55:50 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj
the uncanty valley

2026-08-08 17:28:36 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj
the hard part is getting the bottoms of the feet co-planar and equally distributed around the center. And on that topic, it seems a geometry teacher like you would have an unfair advantage.

2026-08-08 17:24:31 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj junk in the alate trunk?

2026-08-08 03:03:57 UTC

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@nprofile…galm I'm not worried. No one will ever need more than 640k

2026-08-07 20:49:37 UTC

soon, it will all be 0k
#nevent1q…d08s

2026-08-03 13:42:43 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj the url implies it's an all plagiarism slop site. (I do not intend to imply they won't try to build an "uber for nurses" business ; I'm just commenting on how they generated the business plan. )

2026-08-02 22:46:46 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj have you tried phylocode?

2026-08-02 22:46:18 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj he's building an entire mountain range of other people's bodies.

2026-08-02 18:04:51 UTC

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@nprofile…tkx6 can't help but notice you co-authored descriptions of two of those taxa. : )

2026-08-02 17:59:30 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj honestly it surprises they don't go whole-hog with a "built by steampunk goblins" theme for coffee maker kit.

2026-08-02 17:49:05 UTC

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@nprofile…tkx6 @nprofile…z0rm finally I have enough money to afford a donation, but now my card gets declined, probably because I couldn't answer the confirmation call fast enough. Will try again some other time.

2026-07-31 23:23:39 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj to me it seems natural that someone who bankrupted multiple casinos thinks everyone should be required to gamble.

2026-07-31 21:51:00 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj some of Forel's ant texts, on internet archive ... arg, they're all in French! How do.
https://archive.org/search?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Forel%2C+Auguste%22+OR+subject%3A%22Auguste+Forel%22+OR+creator%3A%22Forel%2C+Auguste%22+OR+creator%3A%22Auguste+Forel%22+OR+creator%3A%22Forel%2C+A.%22+OR+title%3A%22Auguste+Forel%22+OR+description%3A%22Forel%2C+Auguste%22+OR+description%3A%22Auguste+Forel%22%29+OR+%28%221848-1931%22+AND+Forel%29%29+AND+%28-mediatype%3Asoftware%29&page=2&and%5B%5D=collection%3A%22ant_texts%22

2026-07-31 20:50:17 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj Myrmostenus Emery, 1920
Myrmoplatys Forel, 1916
Myrmopsamma Forel, 1914
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_ant#Subgenera
so just find Forel and Emery ... whoever they are ...
Forel is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Forel#Myrmecology
Emery is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Emery

2026-07-31 20:44:53 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj I wonder if any were originally genus names in their own right?

2026-07-31 01:33:18 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj with the 1980s began a thousand years of capitalist hell ...

2026-07-28 22:38:17 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj I'm waiting for the social parasite creature that carries a leaf to blend in with the leaf cutter ants.

2026-07-28 22:31:20 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj in paleontological names, "pro" as a prefix often means that at the time of naming, the animal was hypothesized to be a near-ancestor of the animal prefixed; Procompsognathus was hypothesized to be a near-ancestor of Compsognathus (err ... that didn't work out so well), and Proceratosaurus was hypothesized to be a near-ancestor of Ceratosaurus (nope ... the first is a tyrannosaurid, the second is not).

2026-07-26 22:46:42 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj as a tangential footnote, red jungle fowl is widespread in southeast asia, and feral chickens often do well in many different habitats, so I'm not so sure chickens will all go extinct after humans do. (Presumably the current chicken population of 28 billion will prove unsustainable, and a large population decline will occur, but there will probably be survivors.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_junglefowl

2026-07-26 03:42:32 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj honestly if Anoplolepis having only 9 species means it "was on the way out", what to make of the genus Homo, with only one living species and a rash of recent extinctions?

2026-07-23 19:32:47 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj it's a xenomorph name.

2026-07-23 18:56:00 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj sure, there are plenty more animals in a city than pigeons and rats. But coyotes are sneaky and hard to spot. And some of them know how to pretend to act like an ordinary dog, at least at a distance. But most of all, they are mainly active an hour or so before sunrise, when humans are the least likely to be even awake, and probably groggy and unaware of their surroundings. I don't find it all surprising that most people never see coyotes.

2026-07-23 17:06:00 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj Hoplitomyrex was the original five-point buck. All others are inferior imitations.

2026-07-23 08:17:29 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj for an indoor cat like Pica, maybe that's true, but for any cat that goes outside at night, it's not; they must face raccoons regularly. Both animals strongly prefer the same types of cover, and the same types of human-distributed garbage, food, and shelter.

2026-07-22 19:17:29 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj @nprofile…s0kv
when life gives you blocks
make blockade

2026-07-22 00:24:37 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj ahhh, they must belong to the obscure ant genus Hamponotus.

2026-07-15 17:41:17 UTC

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@nprofile…tkx6
as a small, newspaper reading child in 1980s USA, it seemed most newspaper comics did their level best to be "normal". The Far Side was the opposite. Often enjoyable solely for that reason; a lone weirdo in a sea of conformists.
In the mid 1990s, I got mostly regular internet access, a fount of endless novelty, so much of the Far Side gradually lost appeal. The Far Side can't outweird me anymore; I get stranger things free with my breakfast browsing.

2026-07-13 00:57:16 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj mabye it's a giant defensive obstacle course only they can navigate in safety

2026-07-13 00:54:50 UTC

when will bookzilla, with its arms of thousands of shelves books, rise the infinite deeps of the basements of the libraries of the world, reaching for the sky ...
#libraries

2026-07-12 19:21:58 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj every time I mention ladybird beetles a neighbor of mine will say "those thiings bite and it hurts". She used to say "the asian lady beetles bite and it hurts" until she got tired of me informing her that the american ones also bite.

2026-07-11 14:45:28 UTC

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@nprofile…xtr4 allowing two entendres might tempt people into dancing.

2026-07-11 01:09:54 UTC

americans need to eat more real food because integer food doesn't contain enough irrationality.

2026-07-11 01:04:34 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj but they have furnace ants because they live in an actual furnace. Really it's terribly hot. Don't go there.

2026-07-10 17:40:55 UTC

how often do you read an article like this and then ask yourself: "Where are the biggest gaps in the seed-dispersal networks of Pleistocene America, and how can we stuff ground sloths and mastodons into them?"
#pleistocene
#mastodon
#groundSloth
#nevent1q…02lx

2026-07-10 14:35:38 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj is it called "decipiens" for having ten piens (whatever that means) or for having a decietful pen name?

2026-07-10 02:01:55 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj ants, lemurs, and demopterans ...

2026-07-10 01:44:34 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj is this about USA politics?

2026-07-10 00:17:52 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj @nprofile…vvgx it's questions like this that make life worth living.

2026-07-09 23:00:12 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj @nprofile…vvgx but then, why make drugs for the ants? Do the ants provide some sort of (incidental?) protection for the wasp larvae?

2026-07-09 22:09:52 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj maybe the ants mob the wasp because it broods in ant queens.

2026-07-09 18:22:46 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj this seems answered in this link: https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/116885366454908070

2026-07-09 11:07:25 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj they are to the AI shills of our time what Arthur Conan Doyle was to the mediums and table-tippers of his time.

2026-07-08 13:40:31 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj chatbots of dead people are the digital equivalent of hiring an Elvis impersonator to wear a suit made from the skin of the dead person (who wasn't Elvis) and impersonate them based on second-hand descriptions.

2026-07-07 13:04:52 UTC

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@nprofile…pfuj what I'm hearing is all 3 species were a mistake and should be sunk

2026-07-06 17:46:03 UTC

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@nprofile…gydw but the road seems to have much less water on it than the irrigation ditch? or whatever you are biking in?