I didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing.

Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy

I like area-of-effect damage as a framing device.

It’s a bit more complex.

The bacteria causing this (Streptococcus pyogenes) causes hundreds of millions of illnesses each year, ranging from the mild “strep throat” to the extremely severe scarlet fever. Whilst there have been a few outbreaks of antibiotic resistant strains of this bacterium, that doesn’t appear to be what’s going on in this outbreak, so thankfully the underlying streptococcus infection should be treatable with standard antibiotics.

Unfortunately, the condition that’s actually killing people (Streptococcal Toxic Shock Syndrome (STSS)) is caused by exotoxins released by the bacteria, and killing the bacteria only stops further exotoxins from being produced — antibiotics can’t do anything about the exotoxins that have already been secreted by the bacteria. If you’ve ever wondered why we can’t cook spoiled food to make it safe to eat, this is a large part of why — exotoxins are often better at sticking around than the bacteria that produce them. It doesn’t help that exotoxins are often super potent toxins (Botulism is a particularly potent and well known example).

It’s not clear what causes some cases of Streptococcus pyogenes to escalate and non-eventful cases of strep are common enough that treating every case with antibiotics is implausible. It’s tricky because if symptoms are severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of STSS, then things will have already progressed enough that the exotoxins present s risk to health even if antibiotics are administered. This outbreak of many cases of the severe STSS is concerning because it might indicate that the strep bacteria has evolved to be more deadly, but we really don’t know why there’s such a cluster of severe illness in one place.

I couldn’t believe it when the portrait was revealed. The first time I saw it was actually in a meme made by Elden Ring fans, which put the portrait in the context of scarlet rot afflicted Caelid. It was hilarious how not-out-of-place it looked

I’ve been meaning to check out matrix, so thanks for making this post, maybe it’ll push me to do it finally.

Also, I love your dress, it’s got such a cute pattern and fit (and speaking of fit, masterful camera work/posing — I can never figure out how to do a flattering shot when taking full body pictures, but this is great)

Oh, one Discord feature I really like is how it doesn’t have the ability to mass mute servers so that you’re not pinged awake at 3am by someone tagging @everyone. You can either turn off notifications for everything, or go through servers one by one.

/s

Non Credible Defence is a community on Lemmy (I forget which instance) that seems to be about the Ukraine-Russian war, favouring the Ukrainian side (I think). I’m uncertain of this because the most distinctive aspect of NCD is the “shitposty” approach to what is sometimes really dark war stuff, which makes discerning their “stance” difficult. I’ve seen some people denounce NCD and argue that it’s inappropriate to make light of the realities of the war with memes, but I can also see the argument that NCD is at least partly satirical, and that people have been coping with the horrors of war by making light of it for millennia. I haven’t spent much time in that community myself, so take my explanation with a pinch of salt.

It’s easier to answer your first question about Raytheon. They’re an American (I think) military manufacturer who are profiting absurdly from Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestine. Arms manufacturers and other corporations putting rainbows on stuff during June is always a bit cringe, but it’s more offensive than ever. N.b. I don’t know if Raytheon has actually done any pride branding or if that logo in the image is created for meme purposes.

I think the “Moved from Jekyll to Hugo” dot has an implicit catchment area around it, which includes people who don’t technically fit that description, but they’re close. I’ve used neither Jekyll nor Hugo, but the fact I understood that archetype meant I felt pulled in by the gravity of that point.

Damn, kids these days. Like, I knew that I shouldn’t disregard slang as meaningless just because I don’t understand it, but I’m realising how despite knowing this, I’ve probably been subconsciously dismissive. TIL, thank you.

It’s an outfit from a particular episode where she sings a song that’s one of the first overt gay hints

Edit: https://youtu.be/h28xpNvW9Yw it’s a bop

The trick is that you don’t actually need to be willing to burn down your house, you just have to make other people believe that you would.

The thing is that that was how Google became so big in the first place. PageRank was a cool way of trying to filter out the garbage and it worked real well. Even my non techy friends have been getting frustrated with search not working like it used to (even before all this Gemini stuff was added)

That was very cool, thanks for sharing.

I would argue seeing the barn makes it even sillier, but in a good way.

Also, fun fact, public lice and head lice are separate species. Head lice can’t survive on pubic hair and vice versa.

I think there’s even more questions that spring forth from this also. Like, it’s not just head hair Vs pubes, but also the soft downy hair on arms or women’s faces. Moles that have hair coming out of them, they’re weird too. And I’d love to know why my toe knuckles have been getting hairier with age.

Oh my gosh, that’s hilarious. It’s a baby shredder. What gets me is imagining a bunch of people in an office figuring out what scale to print out the UN charter so it would fit in the tiny shredder.

It reminds me of an article I read recently about Ukrainian porn actress Josephine Jackson, who used her notoriety to raise money and awareness for disabled veterans

https://www.politico.eu/article/josephine-jackson-ukraine-porn-star-yulia-senyuk-raise-fund-war-amputees/

I think it’s more about what we mean by “failure”. That probably sounds silly so I’ll lean into the coffee shop example. Imagine if a coffee shop was successful, but then something beyond the control of the owner happened to make it no longer profitable. In this world, the business may have failed, but it may not be accurate to say the business owner has failed. Or maybe the business becoming less profitable is directly because of the owner, who may be taking less time being active in managing things, perhaps because of other things in their life taking their attention. Again, there’s a sense in which they’re a failure here, but in practice, it may just be that their life circumstances and priorities have changed. It might be failure with respect to the coffee shop, but I don’t think that’s failure with respect to their life. Even if the reason the coffee shop shut was because they didn’t anticipate how stressful it would be and they regret ever attempting this endeavour, I think that considering this a failure risks not acknowledging the growth and learning involved.

I liked the marriage example because I used to be engaged to someone who I spent the first chunk of my adult life with. We broke up because we had grown into people who were no longer compatible, and it was a moderately messy breakup because we didn’t want to acknowledge that fact. I think that in this, and many other relationships I’ve seen, people’s aversion to “failure” causes them to stick it out for far too long in bad relationships, which ironically leads to messier breakups and a situation which is much more clearly a failure.

I think the big problem that OP attempts to highlight is an overly binary view of success. Like with the coffee shop thing, I posed personal and commercial as two different axes of success, and I think there could be more. It encourages us to attempt to gauge the “objective” value of things that are incompatible with that kind of quantification — the bit of your comment about longer lasting friendships is something I actively disagree with you on. Some of my most cherished friendships are ones that belong to the past and it wasn’t because of lack of importance why they stopped because active: most of the time, it was just that we had become different people, in different circumstances, such that our lives were no longer compatible. There is still great love and care that exists between us, but as active friends, things have changed. In a way, these friendships feel like they were actively successful, because of how instrumental they were in helping me grow to the person I am now. I don’t think failure is a useful lens to view outgrowing something

Edit: I worry I have come across as overly argumentative, so I want to clarify pre-emptively that whilst there are aspects of your comment that I disagree with, I appreciate the time you spent writing it because the ways in which I disagreed was thought provoking. The primary reason I wrote my response was more an exercise in articulating myself than an attempt to sway you — this subject area is subjective and nuanced enough that agreeing to disagree is more than fine.

I think people like your father make bank because even though new programmers could learn COBOL, that wouldn’t be enough for them to be able to fulfill the same niche your father and other established COBOL programmers occupy; any programming language has a disparity between “the proper way to do things”, and the kind of kludges you see in the field, but few have the kind of baggage that COBOL does, in terms of how long it’s been around and having things built on top of it.