@alyaza - eviltoast

alyaza [they/she]

internet gryphon. admin of Beehaw, mostly publicly interacting with people. nonbinary. they/she

  • 830 Posts
  • 422 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • The Yurok Tribe has released 18 condors into the wild so far, over four rounds of releases. They’re doing great, says Williams. “It’s been really exciting to watch the flock expand and change in their dynamics.” The first couple of cohorts stayed close to home, only exploring within a 30-mile (48km) radius. Now the birds wander as far as 95 miles (152km) away, she adds.

    “It’s awesome to see these young birds who’ve literally never flown in their life because they were reared in facilities with limited flight space, starting to learn the ropes and how to use the landscape to their advantage,” says Williams.


    The tribe has a release and management facility to monitor the birds for the foreseeable future – many challenges remain before they become a fully self-sustaining population. The birds are brought back into the facility twice a year for check-ups to ensure they are doing well, and to check the transmitters they’re fitted with.


    West believes the key to a true, sustainable condor recovery is education. “The only way to combat a lack of information is to reach out to these communities and empower them with that information,” he says. “If [the public] all make the transition to non-lead ammunition, our intensive management efforts could virtually stop overnight.”

    Remedying this single issue should allow condors to “again have a meaningful place in modern ecosystems”, says West.
















  • How would they even enforce this if the site is hosted in a different state or even country?

    you’re asking a question they don’t care about, which is the first problem here. the purpose is not to have a legally bulletproof regulation, but to cast doubt on the ability of websites like this to operate in Texas without incurring liability and thereby force them to block users from the state or another such action. this is also how most abortion restrictions work in practice: they muddy the water on what is legal, so risk-averse entities or entities without the revenue to fight back simply avoid doing/facilitating the practice in a given jurisdiction or completely move out of state.

    is this dubiously legal? yeah, obviously. but it doesn’t matter if you don’t have the money to pay a lawyer. and the vast majority of these sorts of websites obviously don’t–they’d likely need someone to represent them pro bono, which is not likely.





  • i mean if Roblox is any indication, Valve will probably bend the knee sooner or later. government scrutiny is obliging them to make changes and actually do even basic moderation over there:

    The fast-growing children’s gaming platform Roblox is to hand parents greater oversight of their children’s activity and restrict the youngest users from the more violent, crude and scary content after warnings about child grooming, exploitation and sharing of indecent images.

    The moves comes after a short-seller last month alleged it had found child sexual abuse content, sex games, violent content and abusive speech on the site. In the UK, Peter Kyle, the secretary of state for science and technology, told parliament: “I expect that company to do better in protecting service users, particularly children.”







  • With no voices in support in the original post and currently the only two voices in support here being the mods themselves.

    bluntly: this is not a democracy, we don’t pretend it is, and we’ve never run it that way so this is not a particularly relevant consideration for us. democracy at the scale of communities is an incredibly fraught issue that requires a lot of time and energy to administer we don’t have. in any case none of our referendums in the community (which we’ve done before) have been majority votes, they’ve solicited feedback that informs our judgement. our judgement here is this is a good idea regardless of how the community feels about it, and that even if we didn’t implement the moratorium we’d be cracking down on posts, handing out bans, and doing sweeping removals because we’ve been more permissive than our usual moderation on the subject and let behavior we’d normally step in on go.

    in short: even if the moratorium were removed, that’d just mean heavier-handed enforcement from this point forward. if people really want no moratorium then they should be prepared to start catching 30-day bans (or permanent bans if they’re off instance) for any unkind behavior.



  • If one takes that attitude, you’re right, you won’t change the world.

    i think you’re conflating “having value” with “changing the world” when these are two essentially independent qualities. at no point have we ever sought to “change the world” with this (because we’re five people running this in our spare time, that’s not in our capabilities as people), and from the beginning we’ve said we’d be content with only a handful of people using this place as long as they get something out of doing it (because that’s what we consider valuable, not whether or not this can have sweeping social impact or importance).


  • because you can play meaningless “what if?” games like this forever. at the end of the day you don’t have to be a pessimist to realize the odds of something here changing the world are so minute that it’s fine to put a moratorium on certain kinds of posts. you’re not going to convince me otherwise. and even in the optimistic scenario: virtually all of what’s discussed here, while interesting, is designed to be fleeting and buried. conversations on link aggregators tend to have a shelf-life of no more than a week, and that’s not really where you’re going to find ideas that make change. here the conversations usually die down after an even shorter period (about two days).

    frankly: if the next Lenin or whatever is actually on Lemmy, i’d tell them to get a blog instead of hashing it out in link aggregator comment sections. it’s a better use of their time, it’s a better place to test and hone their ideas, and they have actual editorial control over everything.


  • A lot of people are understandably upset right now, and yes, all the facts of the election are not in yet. But do you really want to have a moratorium on election posts for a whole month?

    yes, the mod team is in more-or-less unanimous agreement on the subject. and if we were moderating to the exact same standard we usually do we’d likely be removing, locking, or severely pruning nearly every thread posted in the politics section on the subject in the past few days. maybe we’ll shorten if it need be but moratorium itself is not controversial and i do not anticipate us reversing course on it. please remember that this cannot be a day job for any of us.







  • POLL CLOSED, the results are as follows:

    1. Kamala Harris (Democratic) (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
    2. Claudia De la Cruz (Socialism and Liberation) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 30–10
    3. Vermin Supreme (Independent/Pirate) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–6, loses to Claudia De la Cruz (Socialism and Liberation) by 15–11
    4. Cornel West (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 31–10, loses to Vermin Supreme (Independent/Pirate) by 15–12
    5. Bill Stodden (Socialist) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–7, loses to Cornel West (Independent) by 11–9
    6. Rachele Fruit (Socialist Workers) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–6, loses to Bill Stodden (Socialist) by 9–7
    7. Jill Stein (Green) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 34–6, loses to Bill Stodden (Socialist) by 15–8
    8. Blake Huber (Approval Voting) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 33–8, loses to Jill Stein (Green) by 13–9
    9. Laura Ebke (Liberal) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Blake Huber (Approval Voting) by 10–7
    10. Joseph Kishore (Socialist Equality) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 35–5, loses to Laura Ebke (Liberal) by 9–8
    11. Peter Sonski (American Solidarity) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Joseph Kishore (Socialist Equality) by 12–5
    12. Lucifer “Justin Case” Everylove (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–3, loses to Peter Sonski (American Solidarity) by 10–8
    13. Jay Bowman (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Peter Sonski (American Solidarity) by 9–7
    14. Robby Wells (Party) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Jay Bowman (Independent) by 8–6
    15. Chris Garrity (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Robby Wells (Party) by 8–6
    16. Richard Duncan (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Chris Garrity (Independent) by 8–4
    17. Shiva Ayyadurai (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Richard Duncan (Independent) by 7–6
    18. Chase Oliver (Libertarian) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Shiva Ayyadurai (Independent) by 11–8
    19. Joel Skousen (Constitution dissident) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Chase Oliver (Libertarian) by 10–8
    20. Michael Wood (Prohibition) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Joel Skousen (Constitution dissident) by 10–6
    21. Randall Terry (Constitution) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Michael Wood (Prohibition) by 8–7
    22. Mattie Preston (Godliness, Truth, Justice) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 37–2, loses to Randall Terry (Constitution) by 10–5
    23. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Independent) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 38–1, loses to Mattie Preston (Godliness, Truth, Justice) by 14–6
    24. Donald Trump (Republican) loses to Kamala Harris (Democratic) by 39–1, loses to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Independent) by 22–2