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> highly invasive and spreads easily

If that were the case you would expect to see large growths of it in the wild, right? Whilst I do see it in the wild, I've never seen any situation where it looks to be taking over. I just see individual plants occasionally.


My reference for "highly invasive and spreads easily" is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impatiens_glandulifera#Invasiv..., which has by now completely taken over most clear and shady areas in and near forests where I live. Summer lilac is definitely far from being that bad.

(I live in the South of Germany, but the UK, where it was originally introduced in the 19th century, seems to also have a huge problem with it: https://www.cabi.org/invasivespecies/species/himalayan-balsa...)



> I've never seen any situation where it looks to be taking over. I just see individual plants occasionally.

Each one of those individual plants can produce 40.000 seeds each year, so give them a decade alone and you will see. Is very invasive on river beds and disturbed soils.


fwiw the railway verges in london seem to be predominantly this - which also incidentally - i've never heard anyone call Summer Lilac before


Very poor article. It doesn't link to the study, and it doesn't give details about what type of workers the study examined.


It looks like it tries and fails to link to the study. I did a quick google and found this, which is what I think it's trying to link to:

https://www.upwork.com/research/ai-enhanced-work-models


This is not a study. This is an executive summary of a study.

This sort of stuff rankles me. Without the numbers, questions, and methodology there’s no way to ascertain what errors the folks who created the study committed, if any.


This part resonated for me

> To add insult to injury, nearly half (47%) of employees using AI say they don’t know how to achieve the expected productivity gains their employers expect, and 40% feel their company is asking too much of them when it comes to AI.

I routinely talk to clients and partners where the business decision makers are just utterly delusional about what AI will produce for them. They genuinely seem to think the age of employing people is ending which I guess isn't a shock since that's what Sam Altman and the media have been telling them.

Meanwhile internally we're just puttering along using Copilot and it's definitely a force that can be used for great good or great ill. I can say it has... Further reduced my appetite for hiring people to do programming tasks that should be automated out of existence anyway? That seems like a fair assessment. It's somewhere between a tool and a toy for helping complete the real work.

Edit: oh yeah, and sooooo many tech products out there right now burning dev time on AI features that aren't really useful.


> They genuinely seem to think the age of employing people is ending which I guess isn't a shock since that's what Sam Altman and the media have been telling them.

I wonder if they have good answers as to who will buy their products after all the jobs are gone. Reminds me of https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars/ . An anecdote 70 years old at this point but seemingly evergreen in its applicability.


>I routinely talk to clients and partners where the business decision makers are just utterly delusional

You can just stop there; the problem is not necessarily with AI but the type of people that have power.


on the plus side, the sort of investors who entrust their companies to management that bets them on ai without understanding how to use it will not have power much longer :)


Yes I think it must mean multicellular organism. I understand there are lots of unicellular organisms that don't use oxygen.


Even with that proviso it's still wrong. These animals were found in 2010 to be living in a completely anoxic environment with 2.9 mM of sulfide(!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loricifera


Searching for YouTube videos of those anoxic, salt, toxic "brine lakes" is highly recommended. An alien sea within our oceans.

Eg. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwuVpNYrKPY


Lines up with this Nature 2010 article "Animals thrive without oxygen at sea bottom (Creatures found where only microbes and viruses were thought to survive.)"[0] which I don't have access to.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/464825b


Not to mention plants (oxygen is a waste product for them), some fungi, etc. They're multicellular, but not animals.


Plants still perform respiration using oxygen. Photosynthesis lets them create their own sugars, but their process for using those sugars in the mitochondria is similar to how we do it. Plants release more oxygen than they consume because they grow: in order to grow they must pull CO2 from the air, use the C as building material (instead of respiration fuel), and dump the O2.

https://www.pthorticulture.com/en-us/training-center/basics-...


A plant’s metabolism still needs to function even when the sun isn’t shining.

So they consume oxygen at night, in their roots, etc. This is most apparent for the occasional parasitic plant without chlorophyll. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albino_redwood


Yes, evolution makes play fun, but it's really learning, in the same that that evolution has made sweet and fatty things extra tasty, because they are full of energy.


This is “common sense” but knowing all we know about food and calories, we still eat the donut…


> It's their job to do GDPR, of course they consider it a positive.

No, actually it is annoying to do. But it is extremely positive. The two things do not conflict.

It's annoying for restaurants to maintain the high level of hygiene that the laws enforce. But I expect most people in the restaurant business see it as a positive (and I'm not going to the restaurants that don't...)


They are a very minor part of GDPR. It's kind of a shame that it is most people's only experience of it, because the other changes are all very positive for EU citizens.


> They are a very minor part of GDPR.

Cookie banners are not a part of GDPR. Especially not the common dark-pattern-riddled "we sell your info to thousands of companies" ones


The only part of GDPR most people know about are the website pop-ups, which probably was a bad idea. They don't know about all the other stuff that is really positive.


The pop-up is not part of the law. The law says user should be aware and able to do informed changes, not that they should be annoyed. That part is entirely on companies


If I go to the EU website ( https://european-union.europa.eu ) and see a pop up, surely there's a better way of implementing that it if it wasn't the best way to do so.

If there is a pop up there, for just accessing the home page of the European Union, is that site collecting too much data?

There's even a bit at the bottom of https://gdpr.eu

> We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.


GDPR.eu is operated by Proton AG, a Swiss technology company offering privacy-focused online services.

It’s not an EU site.


Nonetheless, is it possible for the site to fulfill its obligations under the GDPR without needing a cookie or other tracking information that would warrant needing to say "you are being tracked"?

    GDPR.EU is a website operated by Proton Technologies AG, which is co-funded by Project REP-791727-1 of the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union. This is not an official EU Commission or Government resource. The europa.eu webpage concerning GDPR can be found here. Nothing found in this portal constitutes legal advice.

The "here" link goes to https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...

Would you be surprised if there was a big banner at the bottom of the page that read

    This site uses cookies. Visit our cookies policy page or click the link in any footer for more information and to change your preferences


As far as I can tell, yes. If cookies (or other means of storing data on the users computer) are strictly technically necessary, and no data collection takes place as a legitimate interest, and you do not process data requiring consent, neither the ePrivacy directive nor the GDPR requires you to create a cookie banner. Needless to say, I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

On a technical level this would likely mean turning off access logs and other tracking mechanisms. (IP addresses are considered personal data last I checked.)


I'm being a bit snarky, but maybe the better way involves not tracking people to death.


Under the GDPR, an IP address is PII and recording the IP address of a visitor can be problematic.

https://gdpr.eu/eu-gdpr-personal-data/

    Looking back at the GDPR’s definition, we have a list of different types of identifiers: “a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier.” A special mention should be made for biometric data as well, such as fingerprints, which can also work as identifiers. While most of these are straightforward, online identifiers are a bit trickier. Fortunately, the GDPR provides several examples in Recital 30 that include:

    Internet protocol (IP) addresses;
    cookie identifiers; and
    other identifiers such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.

    These identifiers refer to information that is related to an individual’s tools, applications, or devices, like their computer or smartphone. The above is by no means an exhaustive list. Any information that could identify a specific device, like its digital fingerprint, are identifiers.


The trick is to read through and understand what falls under "Legitimate Interest" (important note: it never involves giving other services access to it!).

A very common example is recording the IP address for technical (debugging, ensuring site functionality) and legal (security, audit logs) does fall under Legitimate Interest.

Worst case you have to mention it in privacy policy.

The thing you can't do is let your marketing team or others grab at it in any way, or sell it to other vendors, and arguably you should not move outside of safe countries.


That popup is not the half-height YOUR PRIVACY IS IMPORTANT TO US blocker, it's a banner at the bottom. Totally different (but still worth a block from my side if possible)


Yes popups are not part of the law. they are an implementation choosen by the websites.

Also I put a bit of responsibility on us, the consumers. It does not seem to me that popups are such a real issue since no website reported: we are removing popups because users are so annoyed that they stopped visiting our website.


That, the whole pop-up idea was just copy&pasted. It's possible to make commercial websites without it when turning off tracking without logging or having to explicitly opt-in, possibly for added value. There's a lot of confusion while the law is mainly about differentiating which data is needed to operate and which is purely nice to have. That said, there are plenty of GDPR-compliant services that keep data for 10 years mostly in finance or auditing related use cases and nobody bats an eye


> The law says user should be aware and able to do informed changes, not that they should be annoyed.

Then tell us how companies should implement this law both

- without annoying the user

- not being in a risk of getting sued

If the law does not make this relatively easy, one has a right to be furious about the EU.


They could just not track users? I seem to remember coding a lot of websites that totally failed to track users.


Your websites have no logging at all? Remember, even an IP address is PII under GDPR.


You don't have to log IPs. And if you need them for rate limits / abuse prevention, that falls under the "necessary / legitimate interest" rule.


Security, debugging and audit logs all fall under "legitimate interest".

Just keep them out of hands of parties that might want to use them for other reasons.


You don't need to ask if the information you collect is necessary for your site to work.


> You don't need to ask if the information you collect is necessary for your site to work.

Shysters/pettifoggers are very "flexible" (in a negative way) in the interpretation what is "necessary for your site to work". :-(


It's written in plain English: you can read it yourself. Articles 5, 12, 24 and 25.

The main problem, and the reason certain parties are working so hard not to comply, is that GDPR makes several business models illegal. (Not that I see that as much of a problem.)


> It's written in plain English: you can read it yourself. Articles 5, 12, 24 and 25.

This is what the law says, but not how shysters/pettifoggers interpret it. :-(


> It's written in plain English: you can read it yourself.

That isn't how the law works for things like this though; what is plain to a lawyer is different to an untrained person. People make that mistake with tax law all the time; they read something and come up with a plain interpretation that shows they don't have to pay their taxes and that delusion persists until someone explains the actual, less plain, reading.

It isn't the worst starting point but winging the law with untrained readings is not really acceptable for running a business.


People also come up with "plain interpretations" of the laws of physics that allow them to construct perpetual motion machines. Arrogance and wishful thinking are a bad combination, no matter the field.


> People also come up with "plain interpretations" of the laws of physics that allow them to construct perpetual motion machines.

But you don't (typically) get into trouble with the law enforcement agencies if you don't/didn't understand the laws of physics correctly.


The GDPR is not the ePrivacy Directive (the "cookie law"), the ePrivacy Directive predates the GDPR by many years.


Link to Michael Michalko website is broken.


Googling his name turns up this site, which appears to have some potentially useful resources. https://thinkjarcollective.com/members/michael-michalko


Author here: Fixed, thanks a lot!


Does it affect you negatively in your life? The point of a clinical diagnosis is so that you can get further help to address issues. If it doesn't affect you negatively, then you won't get a clinical diagnosis. Autistic is just a label for a very diverse condition. You are probably atypical neurologically in some respect, just accept it as part of you.


Whether or not they have an autistic neurotype is something they deserve to know whether they want help with it or not.


Ok, so they use an airship to get to the edge of the atmosphere - but isn't the gravitational pull there still strong? According to Wolfram, the edge of the atmosphere is about 100km above the surface of the Earth, and the gravitational pull there is about 0.97G, compared to 1G at the surface. So how much less fuel is required to get into orbit from that point? Is it significantly less?


Most of it is lost countering atmospheric drag. Gravity only starts to become an issue when you want to go beyond low earth orbit.


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