For sure, I just get antsy when peer review doesn’t come from from external sources

1 patient, T2 since mid-30s and now 59, had kidney transplant 2017 after end-stage diabetic nephropathy and fucked glucose control since 2019. The successful cells were endoderm stem cells from him cultivated by mice they injected with his PBMCs that they then made diabetic. So not from cadavers (except mouse cadaver i guess), which is the actual new part here. Intrahepatic implant, and cells from unrelated donor failed that were embedded at the same time. His personalised mouse-donor cells worked well enough to take him off insulin 3 months later.

Wu, J., Li, T., Guo, M. et al. Treating a type 2 diabetic patient with impaired pancreatic islet function by personalized endoderm stem cell-derived islet tissue. Cell Discov 10, 45 (2024).

It’s good news, but you’re entirely correct that the article missed the point entirely. Thanks for the crash course in islet cell therapy!

Hm, 5 year old journal, with the editor board, funding and half of the authors all from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but significant hospital contribution. I remain skeptical of the headline but hopeful of the science.

Looming? Sudan is past the looming stage. When do known verified atrocities reach “current reality” status?

I once looked at a job listing for something with very specialist technical knowledge in specific programming areas, for a Japanese company based in Tokyo (pre-covid so remote wasn’t really a thing yet). Pretty niche stuff and needed at least basic Japanese language skills too, so I assumed it would pay ok - even if it wasn’t good or great in comparison with jobs where i was.

After conversion it worked out to be around USD$40k a year, which is probably just over 1/3 of what it would pay at minimum elsewhere. More like 1/4 or less for Silicon Valley type locations, but the rent for a tiny Tokyo shoebox is about the same price even if food is a cheaper. There was no way I was applying for that.

It isn’t just about a weak yen, it’s much more about hugely underpaying people.

I’m going to hope this is some ChatGPT template response bullshit, because the other option is that someone chose to write this.

Even if they were an adult who might recognise an illuminated spy camera, it’s not like you have enough choice in bathrooms at 30000 ft to infer something resembling consent.

Which kind? We’ve got bunches. The sulphur crested are the most famous, and they are great but can be vandals

Oh no, i got to see them. This was a decade ago, and I was told even then that there used to be many more. I was happy to see any at all though, I had only ever seen them in movies and they almost seemed mythical. They are pretty magical, it’s very sad to hear they’re almost gone.

Seeing a chipmunk was the same for me. And goddamn are they cute, I had no idea they were so small and precious. Alvin and the chipmunks are monstrosities by comparison.

The bin chickens are my kin, I’m in the small minority here who appreciate them.

And yeah, the flying foxes are a surprise for most foreigners. They’re also pretty big and often fly low at dusk, so they can be slightly startling too, even though they’re just adorable fuzzy harmless nectar drinkers. It’s a pity they screech too, it might be easier to reassure non-locals that they’re not dangerous.

People are also often surprised to see all the other Sydney city wildlife and how much of it there is, especially rainbow lorrikeets. Everyone loves the lorrikeets, but people from the northern hemisphere are especially awestruck when they see them. It’s understandably almost a little surreal to have such brightly colored parrots hanging out in the middle of a city, if you’re someone who comes from a city that is just pigeons and sparrows.

If you want to see a croc, just go walking near the shallow water of the top half of the country’s coast. You won’t see the croc for long, and it will be the last thing you ever see, but it will be up close and very personal.

Seriously though, you don’t go to see salt water crocodiles in the wild or even go near any body of water on the northern coast. If you can see one with the naked eye in the wild, you’re already too close. They’re extremely fast, extremely aggressive, and the males get up to 6m / 20ft long and 1000kg / 2200lb. They are very much a zoo only thing.

I was excited to see squirrels, lightning bugs and a racoon in the US.

When people come to Australia they obviously want to see kangaroos, koalas and platypus and quokka. Koalas are very rare to see in the wild, and a visit to a zoo will score you a sleeping ball on a branch. Kangaroos are frequently roadkill if you go outside the city. Quokka require a long trip to a really remote location. You’ll also almost never see a platypus, even the ones at the zoo you might catch a water ripple at best.

But if you’re headed to Sydney city, guaranteed you’ll spot the almighty and much maligned “bin chicken”, our Australian white ibis. Often not quite white from the bins. At night they serenade you with their collective honking from their tree, which can be easily spotted by the masses of white poop underneath. And you’ll see fruit bats in the evening. Hopefully not the daytime corpses hanging from electrical cables while they slowly rot, but that’s not altogether unlikely either, unfortunately.

If you want your funeral to properly represent you, write your own eulogy.

Die antwoord also adopted, abused and abandoned an albino (Edit: my mistake, he has hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia) child, Tokkie, who spoke out a few years ago. They’re truly awful and Tokkie’s documentary is worth watching.

Also Marilyn Manson has been evicted from my music library for sexual abuse. I have no interest in supporting known exploiters, and I can’t listen to their music without thinking about how awful they are as people. No regrets, there’s plenty more musicians out there worth my time.

so they could be edited out of the episode and then the user could also download said episode where ads are cut out of the final audio file.

This is the part that might be problematic and I can see being part of a civil suit (I am not a lawyer). Depending on how you collect and store the episodes (which you may not actually have to do to achieve your goal, but is the easiest solution) you would likely run afoul of “distribution” precedents in the US that may result in a judgement against you.

But even if you didn’t actually break the law, the media lobbies globally are well known for filing huge numbers of lawsuits over anything that even looks a little like it might be costing them money. Defending yourself at all is hard time-consuming and often expensive. It’s not something I would recommend going into casually.

https://torrentfreak.com/category/lawsuits/ is a great site for learning about the current lawsuits from a tech perspective, and has helped me out many times over the last decade. It’s one of the gems of the internet, in my opinion.

I channel the despair, anger and misery into working on solutions to help marginalized peoples. I don’t have all the answers to the world’s problems, and I can’t solve it all, but I can show the people who might have the answers that there is someone in their corner who supports them in their efforts. Even if those people haven’t been born yet, demonstrating the power of empathy and collaboration sets them up to choose constructive paths. If I give up on them, then it becomes much easier and more likely that they will choose the same anti-social self-interested motives that are destroying us all. But, if they are going to be able to make that choice at all, they need to be in a position where they aren’t in survival mode all the time.

We’re all just organisms who exist for a brief flash of time on a galactic scale, ultimately this is all meaningless. But as someone who identifies as a bit of an existentialist, I make my meaning. You can too.

It also enables me to leave the weed for wind-down time, mostly. Depends on how badly my health is doing, and it’s pretty variable.

No documented leadership hierarchy or organisation structure when there’s more than maybe 10 people working there. If you have to waste your time fighting out who everyone is and you can’t do it in a single meeting where everyone can introduce themselves, then the place is too big to not document roles and responsibilities officially. It leads to closed circles of people who hold the necessary historical knowledge to get anything done.

Go with the standard politician non-answer: “to spend more time with family”. I have no idea if German politicians give the same stock response though!

Oh it’s less a fixation and more an interest in scale of impact. There’s a lot of people out there who talk a big game but when you look at the results, they’re clearly underwhelming. Edit: or worse, they’re self-serving publicity not designed at all to do good. The blood donor in this thread is a great example of oversized impact, but that’s difficult to replicate. It does give good food for thought in terms of things to look for that could use more support.

The multidimensionality is why I didn’t provide any opening suggestions; I didn’t want to guide the answers. This was so that I might find some dimensions I had not previously considered, and I was curious about what metrics others use to measure “good” in the first place. Unfortunately Elon Musk as always proved to be a topic that generates more opinions.

Thanks for the support though. Honestly, there are a huge number of good choices already, more than I could ever dedicate enough to. I’m hopeful there are some gems out there that have potential to really offset some the vast quantity of suffering the world has to offer, this was just a small experiment in looking outside my own bubble of experience for them.

It wasn’t actually to help me feel better, I was hoping to offset some of the doom that is very widely covered by providing some much-needed attention for the people who are putting in real effort. I also hoped to learn about new people who I could support, because they don’t receive coverage from their public relations spokespeople putting out media releases that are pasted into articles by journalists.

Criticism of your suggestion is not an attack on you. I’m sorry that you felt it necessary to try to insult me for expressing a difference of opinion, and I hope your day improves.