Long ago, for a few years I would occasionally buy ebooks from Amazon when it was trivial to strip the DRM with basically my credit card number and a script.
Once they started trying to lock things down further, I completely stopped buying, moving to piracy mostly, and occasional scanning of physical books.
Being more technically capable than typical, I’m hardly a normal customer to try to target, but the way I see it all this does is piss off the minority who care and are capable of getting around restrictions. Those who don’t care or aren’t capable will just continue getting cluelessly fucked over as always. These measures less about effectiveness, and more like a money themed emotional support affirmation for someone in a suit. It helps them feel like they are accomplishing something, but that’s it.
I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that “AI” tools that easily and accurately rip and format data from a picture feed of a screen will become the way to go for bypassing whatever clever encryption schemes come along. This also has the benefit of ignoring the steganographic tracking data hidden in paid files, making piracy ultimately easier for the uninformed. This sort of thing was always possible, but was a bit janky and laborious.
Same here - I'll only buy books I can read on any device of my choosing. Kindle+dedrm was an option. https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/p/drm-free is another option I have used a lot. But if it's not available, I will go to the modern day library of alexandria. I will not pay for crap that will just stop working in a few years - a book can sit on my shelf for 15 years before I get around to reading it.
In the agriculture world, application of harpin proteins (https://www3.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/reg_actions/regi...) can be used to help treat diseases by inducing a defense response. Mind you, it’s not a standalone treatment, but helps make applications of fungicides and the like far more effective.
Pathogen defenses can roughly be thought of having a metabolic cost at the very least. Meaning if there’s no selection pressure (such as death) otherwise, then it often ends up being more optimal to not have a defense active until it’s needed.
Problem is we have a global distribution system that is forcing organisms that have previously evolved into an equilibrium with the disease complex in their area, to encounter multiple novel threats in rapid succession. Like how aggressive species of downy and powdery mildews are now everywhere in the US. Giving plants a boost by inducing defenses early on helps them resist the onset of infection and helps treatment succeed.
I wish there was some kind of desktop application that I could sit down and locally organize my data into, allowing me to keep a full quality source while syncing a copy to naturalist for others to benefit from.
As it stands, I don’t really have a system in place, and I don’t want to put a lot of effort into a lossy (assets get compressed and stripped of metadata) online project.
iNaturalist would agree with you; they explicitly say[1] it's not meant to be the primary source for your photos. Users generally fall into a couple broad camps:
1. Mostly use the mobile app, and take photos and upload observations directly from there. Local photo collection either isn't a priority or is backed up by their phone's cloud sync.
2. Mostly use inaturalist.org via a desktop browser, with either a standalone digital camera or mobile photos synced to desktop. Local filesystem (hopefully plus backups) is the source of truth.
I have been working on a desktop application[2] with a long-term goal of full bidirectional sync, and a secondary goal of offline usage. The current feature set is fairly modest and read-only, though, focusing on organizing local photos using data from iNat.
I did agronomy work out in Kansas for a while, which is basically a big grid of very similar crop circles.
Thinking on it, there were lots of places I passed by often on the roads, but would never remember, but wherever I stopped and entered a field on foot and discovered all the little differences in terrain that made each quarter unique, I was much more able to have a better mental map of where I was, even if I was only there a few times in a year.
Could it be that you learned the chaotic city better because you were more likely to go around on foot and experience little things, rather than just driving to a box store?
I think this is more about the map. It is easier to remember that you have been at the crossing where that triangle street hits the half-circle road than to remember your position in an isomorphic grid, just like it is easier to know you stood next to that tree in a park (a point of interest) than to remember your exsct position in a lawn where every spot looks more or less the same as the other.
And to add to that 4th point, there is a very real chance that many the “AI” companies that are buying all this hardware could go bankrupt at anytime and in rapid succession, leaving drive/memory manufactures with a bunch of unpaid orders and a second hand market now saturated with liquidated equipment.
Much like the GPU/crypto boom/bust some years ago, but on an even larger scale.
Yes, though you need to know what sort of nesting sites they like, and what sources of food they need. Many native bees need certain plants to get the nutritional profile they are adapted for, and don’t do so well on nothing but dandelions and typical ornamental flowers. They also need food sources throughout their active time.
For mason and leaf cutter bees, a box sheltered from rain and filled with Japanese knotweed tubes (don’t grow it yourself, it’s highly invasive) works well for “I like seeing solitary bees around, but want minimum efforts”. There are tons of videos you can find on the subject.
Drilling various sized holes in wood blocks also often works. The nice thing about “solitary” bees (which are often quite communal), is they don’t have much of a drive to defend a nest, and would much rather fly away than bite/poke you. I’ve walked alfalfa fields full of them, and while the loud buzzing was a bit disconcerting, they couldn’t care less about me. Leafcutter bees are used for alfalfa because they don’t mind how alfalfa flowers work mechanically. European Honeybees will just chew through the base of the flower to get the nectar, avoiding pollination.
For other bees, there is highly likely to be a native bee enthusiast group in your local area that can give guidance on native flower mixes and possible setups for habitat.
They like the semi-compacted neutral to slightly alkaline sandy soil that’s clear of weeds, hence a long term orchard is perfect, especially as we’ve moved to softer insecticide chemistries that generally preserve beneficial insects. Offhand I think I start seeing them filling the ground with little holes in may when I start monitoring for Filbertworm moths.
And don’t forget bumblebees. While it’s a hated introduced weed for growers, it turns out that Sharppoint Fluvellen in the fescue grass fields is loved by bumblebees because it happily continues to flower in the late summer/fall when everything else has dried up or run it’s course.
> Japanese knotweed tubes (don’t grow it yourself, it’s highly invasive)
Last year I was lamenting to a neighbor that bamboo doesn't survive the harsh winters where we live. He disputed that.
"There's some growing down the road, next to the ditch," he said. "It comes back every year. It's everywhere."
I was wondering what the heck he was talking about and then I realized it was Japanese knotweed. The segmented branches do look like thin bamboo, and he claimed that at one time it was sold at the local garden center as "bamboo."
Seeing long presses implemented for those intermittent and irreversible actions in games is something I‘ve always appreciated. I often end up making errant inputs, especially on keyboards.
A guard I often make for myself is removing/disabling the delete key on my keyboard, and setting FN+Backspace to Delete with whatever control software is involved. I often then repurpose the delete key location to F2, which is typically used to “Edit” a spreadsheet cell or file name.
Being more technically capable than typical, I’m hardly a normal customer to try to target, but the way I see it all this does is piss off the minority who care and are capable of getting around restrictions. Those who don’t care or aren’t capable will just continue getting cluelessly fucked over as always. These measures less about effectiveness, and more like a money themed emotional support affirmation for someone in a suit. It helps them feel like they are accomplishing something, but that’s it.
I haven’t checked lately, but I expect that “AI” tools that easily and accurately rip and format data from a picture feed of a screen will become the way to go for bypassing whatever clever encryption schemes come along. This also has the benefit of ignoring the steganographic tracking data hidden in paid files, making piracy ultimately easier for the uninformed. This sort of thing was always possible, but was a bit janky and laborious.
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