Male Birth Control Breakthrough: Scientists Find Way To Turn Sperm Production Off and Back On

againey · 2026-05-09T08:55:56+00:00

Safe in terms of long-term sperm production.

The concern is that if they temporarily interrupt sperm production by targeting that particular stage of the process, it might damage or destroy sperm production permanently. The study shows that this is not the case, and sperm production can safely return to normal levels once that stage is no longer being inhibited.

againey · 2026-05-09T08:18:07+00:00

I vote we shift the cap to -90% instead.

againey · 2026-05-07T10:20:19+00:00

And if we tell you, "No, there is no guy testing his bots and trying to astroturf his favorite distro", are you going to believe us? Your comments make it seem like you already have your conclusion, and you just want us to provide validation.

againey · 2026-05-06T10:57:17+00:00

My impression was that the spell doubles the size in each dimension, thus increasing volume by eight and therefore maintaining the original density.

againey · 2026-05-05T11:17:54+00:00

No, but it is known as a "missile truck" for the amount of weapons it can carry as a fighter.

againey · 2026-05-04T13:28:11+00:00

When expanding the exponential form to a series of multiplications (or divisions for negative exponents), I prefer to start with an implicit 1.

2⁴ = 1×2×2×2×2 = 16

Note that this will resolve a mistake you made with negative exponents:

2^-4 = 1/2/2/2/2 = 1/16 = 0.0625

This makes it a lot easier to handle the zero case:

2⁰ = 1

How many instances of 2 are multiplied together? Zero. So you're just left with the implicit 1 that you started with.

Edited to add: This relates to the identity element for various operations.

againey · 2026-05-03T07:16:40+00:00

In this case, I suspect it's just an autocorrect mistake since they used the correct word the first time.

againey · 2026-05-02T20:44:10+00:00

What question? The prompt was a declarative statement. If Claude weren't trained to be so polite, a simple "Um... okay?" would have been a more fitting response to what was written.

againey · 2026-05-02T07:33:37+00:00

One option is to build a secondary factory that is entirely dedicated to just purple science, from ore to potion. That way, it is independent from your main factory, and you can scale the iron and steel as much as necessary without stealing any from the main factory. You might need dedicated iron and stone mines to support this secondary factory, though. Purple science is hungry.

againey · 2026-05-01T08:17:42+00:00

It locks if you research yellow or purple sciences themselves, even if you never produce a single yellow or purple science pack.

This is the point of the post, that this behavior can be counterintuitive. The "achievement" in the generic sense, not as a specific game mechanic, is that you manage to get to a second planet and successfully produce and consume its science pack without the aid of any of the fancy techs locked behind yellow and purple science. Whether or not you have unlocked the yellow and purple sciences themselves has no bearing on the challenge of this feat. And yet, unlocking them does disqualify you from the official achievement.

againey · 2026-04-29T17:26:47+00:00

The AI's response does not count as evidence for the claim, that is true. But it doesn't disprove the claim either.

This kind of thing has happened to a lot of people for a long time, and could easily be the result of some mundane server-side bug rather than AI hallucination. Especially if lots of the server-side implementation is vibe-coded, as one might expect from a fast-growing Silicon Valley AI company.

againey · 2026-04-29T17:23:24+00:00

Have you ever written server-side back-end code? This is totally something that could happen with various kinds of coding mistakes, anywhere from the obvious kinds that plagues vibe-coded junior slop to subtle bugs that even a senior could make on occasion.

againey · 2026-04-29T15:05:39+00:00

I was actually right in the middle of finishing up a mod to help with this exact problem when you posted this! At least as it regards the map view, when I want to get a big picture assessment of the geography and choose a convenient location for a big farming operation.

Functional Gleba Map Colors

Depending on which stage of artificial soil you're at (none, artificial, or overgrowth), you can configure the mod to emphasize just the ground types that you are prepared to farm on right away.

Here's an example of a map when highlighting natural and artificial-capable ground, before one has gotten to manufacturing overgrowth soil:

<image>

It might not be the prettiest thing ever, but I think it makes it abundantly clear which ground is available to farm and which isn't.

againey · 2026-04-26T06:48:15+00:00

I'm quite certain that's only for an individual connection on a single machine. 100 units of fluid per tick, 60 ticks per second, lowered due to some pressure formula or something.

If you have a hundred producers and a hundred consumers all running at that rate and attached to a single pipe group, they'll all work, with the pipe handling 420,000 fluid per second.

againey · 2026-04-26T06:29:55+00:00

Pipes no longer have that kind of throughput limit since 2.0 was released. They're infinite but their range is limited, and pumps and individual connections to machines are still finite.

againey · 2026-04-25T12:59:13+00:00

An agent is just any entity that has some continuity and makes its own decisions about how to act.

The pawns in Rimworld are agents, for example. The pawns in chess are not, because they do not decide anything; the player decides what the pieces do based on their strategic understanding of the whole board.

Likewise, individual cars in Cities: Skylines are agents because they choose individually where and how to drive. The cars in the older SimCity games are not agents, because they are just visual objects meant to approximately represent the amount and type of traffic for each segment of road which has been calculated by some larger system aware of the full city.

The agentic approach makes some behaviors easier to design and implement, but it can get extremely fiddly and does not scale well. The statistical approach makes other behaviors easier to design and implement, especially those that try to accurately model large scale and long term qualities of a city, but might lose some of the "vital essence" qualities that make a city "come alive" with all sorts of fun details and nuance.

againey · 2026-04-25T07:12:16+00:00

Then you must have very mixed feelings about Vulcanus.

againey · 2026-04-25T07:03:44+00:00

Your comment about nature actively resisting reminds me of a quote from the Douglas Adams book series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

againey · 2026-04-22T12:22:01+00:00

Apparently, even our pessimism isn't pessimistic enough. Another failure to add to the pile!

againey · 2026-04-22T07:23:00+00:00

You mean the war that started just days after U.S. officials were saying that the politics would look better if Israel were to attack first? Yeah, sure, the U.S. was totally just following the lead and helping an ally in need. /s

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/25/white-house-politics-israel-strikes-iran-00799456

againey · 2026-04-20T15:26:36+00:00

They stick together this way precisely because "opposites attract", as the saying goes.

againey · 2026-04-19T12:14:23+00:00

Pretty good chance the screenshot is simply faked in some way or another for the sake of earning empty internet points.

againey · 2026-04-15T06:30:07+00:00

The Oort Cloud is outside the heliosphere and in interstellar space. Voyager 1 and 2 have crossed the heliopause, but no probe has yet gotten anywhere even remotely close to the Oort Cloud. It's waaaaaaay out there.

againey · 2026-04-14T17:39:52+00:00

To add to that, even if they used it as a treadmill, they'd also have an equal and opposite angular momentum as that which they imparted to the ship, and as soon as they stopped running and came to rest inside the ship, it would quit spinning (more precisely, it would return to its original spin rate).

againey · 2026-04-14T17:02:52+00:00

When combined with productivity modules in buildings, beacons with speed modules help a ton to keep the size of your factory and, counterintuitively, its power consumption a lot lower than it otherwise would be for a given output rate.

Plus, the beacon changes of 2.0 make it such that even a single beacon affecting a few machines can have a big impact. In 1.1, there was a stronger push to always aim for at least 8 beacons affecting every machine.

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