Publishing in a more prestigious journal usually means that your work will be read by a greater number of people. The journal that a paper is published on carries weight on the CV, and it is a relevant parameter for committees reviewing a grant applicant or when evaluating an academic job applicant.

Someone who is able to fund their own research can get away with publishing to a forum, or to some of the Arxivs without submitting to a journal. But an academic that relies on grants and benefits from collaborations is much more likely to succeed in academia if they publish in academic journals. It is not necessarily that academics want to rely on publishers, but it is often a case of either you accept and adapt to the system or you don't thrive in it.

It would be great to find an alternative that cuts the middle man altogether. It is not a simple matter to get researchers to contribute their high-quality work to a zero-prestige experimental system, nor is it be easy to establish a robust community-driven peer-review system that provides a filtering capacity similar to that of prestigious journals. I do hope some alternative system manages to get traction in the coming years.

My plan is to remove the petals from the freshest male flower available and rub that directly.

I store the previous set of male flowers in a cup with a bit of water in the fridge :

If I don't pick a male flower, the next day it looks like this:

I did this in case that the male flowers would stop coming out when the females came. But I think my worry was not warranted... because the plant is swarming with male flowers. That's why I have begun cooking them.

I am still not sure of whether I will pollinate a single flower to try to grow a large pumpkin, or if I will go for multiple pumpkins.

Am I missing anything that makes this a horrible or unacceptably risky idea?

Yes, I am not 100℅ sure, but I think debt collectors. My little understanding is that the bank may not want to go through the hassle of sorting this out themselves if the debt is small and the applicable laws complex, in which case they can sell the debt to a debt collector. Whatever person or agency is motivated enough to buy that debt might have some good experience in getting paid back. They can annoy your family for a while, and they might know of some laws that they can use to put pressure.

I am also quite interested in this. It is not something that keeps me awake at night, and I am not particularly paranoid about it. But I find that working towards answering this question is a fun frame from which to learn about electronics, radio communications, and networking.

Since this appears to be something that is causing you some anxiety, I think it is better if I start by giving you some reassurance in that I have not yet managed to prove that any electronic device is spying on me via a hidden chip. I don't think it is worth being paranoid about this.

I can explain some things that could be done to test whether a Linux computer spying. I am not suggesting that you try any of this. I am explaining this to you so that you can get some reassurance in the fact that, if devices were spying on us in this manner, it is likely that someone would have noticed by now.

The "spy" chip needs some way to communicate. One way a chip might communicate is via radio waves. So, the first step would be to remove the WiFi and Bluetooth dongles and any other pieces of hardware that may emit radio waves during normal operation. There is a tool called a "Spectrum Analyzer" that can be used to capture the presence of specific radio frequencies. These devices are now relatively affordable, like the tinySA, which can measure the presence of radio frequencies of up to 6 GHz.

One can make a Faraday cage, for example, by wrapping the PC with a copper-nickel coated polyester fabric to isolate the PC from the radio waves that are coming from the environment. The spectrum analyzer antennas can be placed right next to the PC and the device is left to measure continuously over several days. A script can monitor the output and keep a record of any RF signals.

Since phones are small, it is even easier to wrap them in the copper-nickel polyester fabric alongside with the spectrum analyzer antenna to check whether they emit any RF when they are off or in airplane mode with the WiFi and Bluetooth turned off.

What this experiment may allow you to conclude is that the spy chip is not communicating frequently with the external world via radio frequencies, at least not with frequencies <= 6 GHz.

Using frequencies higher 6 GHz for a low-power chip is not going be an effective method of transmitting a signal very far away. The chip could remain hidden and only emit the signal under certain rare conditions, or in response to a trigger. We can't rule that out with this experiment, but it is unlikely.

A next step would be to test a wired connection. It could be that the spy chip can transmit the data over the internet. One can place a VPN Gateway in between their PC and the router, and use that gateway to route all the traffic to their own server using WireGuard. All network packets that leave through the PC's ethernet connection can be captured and examined this way using Wireshark or tcpdump.

If one can show that the device is not secretly communicating via RF nor via the internet, I think it is unlikely that the device is spying on them.

And there’s the program to give certain power users the option of buying stock before it debuts on the public market.

I am curious about seeing how this plays out. Let's say multiple users, who are inexperienced in investing, decide to buy-in... And then the stock price plummets shortly after IPO. I know very little about law and so I am only speculating here. I suspect that the users might have a legal case against Reddit on the basis that they were sold a risky asset under conditions generally reserved to experienced investors. The inexperienced users could not have been expected to fully understand the risk. Even if the users are given the S-1 form and asked to sign a legal document stating that they understand the risks, I don't think that this would be enough for Reddit to not be liable.

Thank you!!! Very happy about the moderation tools!

There is a problem opening community pages. I checked and the bug was introduced with this version.

🐧

A botnet could have many unique accounts, and some could even appear like users. So I can't rule it out. I also haven't done a deeper dive into the accounts.

But when a post gets popular I would expect it to get at least a few downvotes, regardless of what it is.

Hmmm, I vote for Matricaria chamomilla!

EDIT: I passed the other photos through PlantNet, and PlantNet agrees with me. I thought that the frame I chose for the post would be the best for identifying because it shows the leaves better. But now I have one suspicion: Most of the photos of Matricaria chamomilla that you can find by searching for images online feature the flowers, while photos of Chamaemelum fuscatum are taken with a similar framing to my input photo to showcase its dark stem. So maybe this bias in the framing of the photos present in the training set contributed to this miss-id. Just a thought.

My girlfriend kept complaining about losing her hearts on Duolingo and I was very confused as I never had any "hearts" during regular lessons. Eventually I found out that since I had created a classroom while exploring the site, I was given access to a teacher version of Duolingo - which is basically a free premium version 😅

Cool initiative! Thank you for setting this up!

I have pinned an announcement to my instance so that it's easy for users to find it.

Upgraded! No issues.

Again, thank you for your amazing work!! :D