Ros Jackson @rosjackson@wandering.shop

@Nezchan Fair point.

Who will the Tories pick to run the country next? Based on past performance, it could be Judge Death, Beaker from the Muppets, or an attractive lampshade.

An interesting study on what to eat to prevent Covid, and reduce its impact. What you'd expect in terms of diet, but it's good to see the numbers behind it.

https://health-study.joinzoe.com/blog/covid-19-how-can-nutrition-keep-me-healthy

Openwho.org has free short courses on all sorts of diseases and health issues, in lots of different languages. They're really interesting. I've just done one on Monkeypox, and I'm learning about rabies next.

I've been down the rabbit hole of looking at the text of the Online Safety Bill. It's nuts. Under the premise of protecting children, there's a big grab for age-verification requirements that will be expensive for sites to use. And will cover a lot of sites. They affect "user-to-user" and "search engines". I couldn't figure out whether the definition of search engine included a site search that links to its own non-user-provided content.

We call this cutie Gus. He's quite comfortable in the feeder and comes most days.

@ByTylerHayes Thanks for the warning. I'm not on Discord.

From the archives, The Grass King's Concubine by Kari Sperring came out 10 years ago. An absolutely stonking fairytale:
http://www.warpcoresf.co.uk/the-grass-kings-concubine.php

@Sylvhem Awful news. I hope you can salvage more than you expect.

@shaunduke That's the first time I've seen it too. It looks good!

DALL-E isn't job-destroying because it's any good, yet. It isn't very good, except for carefully curated selected phrases. It's depressing because it will inevitably improve, and because it's clearly generated using scraped photos that people have carefully described. This means that pro illustrators and photographers now have much less incentive to create new public work, and to put it on the internet with long descriptive text.

I don't believe that science will save us from climate change, certainly not on its own. But, you know what, advances in "cultured meat" are interesting. Especially when it comes to preventing dangerous antibiotic overuse.

@Her_Doing In that sense, all of them are probably good prompts for stories about why they seem like a good idea, but aren't. The teleport one could get you into trouble easily. Even the pink one - there's a reason we sleep and dream, it's to lay down memories, and a reason we rest. And so on.

@Her_Doing The grey and white ones are definitely curses!

@Her_Doing The pink one is a definite. The others will depend more on my mood at the time.

There is a petition for Amazon to change the return policy on finished ebooks. Pretty galling for authors to find finished books getting returned, or whole series of books read and serially returned.

https://www.change.org/p/change-amazon-return-policies-for-completed-e-books-protect-authors-from-theft?signed=true

@Vik Thank you.