Pinned
Reblogged italo-disco-calvino
bigandretired-deactivated202501
Reblogged transgenderer
Lee Jaeseok — Linkage (○―○―●―○―○) [acrylic on canvas, 2024]
today we are writing to inform you about our plans for sunsetting openSNP on April 30, 2025.
On this date, we will shut down the openSNP website and delete **all** the data that we have stored - this includes your email address, password and where applicable genetic and phenotypic data.
With this most important bit out of the way, we want to briefly outline our reasoning:
When we launched openSNP back in 2011, the world was a different place. Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) genetic testing was a still quite new and promising technology for research use. With openSNP, our goal was always to give people the choice to open up their own genetic data so that it can be used more widely for research, instead of mostly being used within the siloes of DTC companies and the 3rd parties that can afford paying for access to the data.
In 2025, with 23andMe going bankrupt and struggling to even find any buyers for themselves and the data they control, it seems less clear what the use and potential benefit of these data is. While data hosted through openSNP has been used for a number of research studies, teaching workshops and university courses, and producing individual insight, this use has remained the exception. Instead, by far the most transformative impact of DTC genetic data has been found amongst law enforcement agencies, who have made extensive use of the geneological properties of genetic data, ultimately leading to DTC data platforms like GEDmatch being bought by forensics-related companies.
In 2025, we are also seeing a global rise of authoritarian and far-right governments that are attacking not only free culture but that are also replacing scientific reasoning itself with pseudoscience. All while large corporations that are aligned with those governments are strip-mining our open data & culture infrastructures - such as free & open software repositories, Wikipedia and others - at the same time. To us, all of this means that the risk/benefit calculus of providing free & open access to genetic data today is very different compared to 14 years ago.
We have always promised that openSNP along with the data it hosts is not for sale and want to be true to this to the end. That is why we have decided that sunsetting openSNP by deleting the data is the most responsible act of stewardship for these data.
Reblogged
Found by Orthonormalist:
My experience is that pretty much all the actually-smart people are grimacing, because they see a reciprocal ethnic conflict with no good short-term solution.
They're not gonna celebrate Hamas because Hamas killing Israeli civilians is bad. They're not gonna celebrate Israel because Israel cutting off supplies into Gaza and bombing it to rubble is bad. Support for Hamas in Palestine is (reportedly) too high to just integrate the two territories into one country. The bombing is probably not going to make that support go down.
One can, as fruityyamenrunner does, discourage people from getting sucked into the vortex. Beyond this, one is mostly left to watch in horror.
it is worse than this because many of them ("regimented verbal reasoners") do celebrate israel, to some degree or another, because they have judaism, understood largely as "my ethnic idol of regimented verbal reasoning", which is why i characterise the vortex as one of moral injury.
people are also somewhat deferential to judaism in "rationalism" because, of course, it is a jewish sect, and because more generally it is a post-fedora millennial movement, but it also means that people are going to censor themselves when they see jews do their ethnic reassurance-touching, not least because, knowing it is a very tender site of moral injury, it is likely to cause *considerable* loss of face if you make someone freak out israeli style. orthonormalist himself is jewish, right? what is he asking for?
Reblogged intactics
humanremnants
kind of diagram that makes those people who see themselves as "me" in polemic with "brain" as the aggressor go "yes yes" and feel seen, probably hazardous for this reason
Reblogged
Found by Orthonormalist:
My experience is that pretty much all the actually-smart people are grimacing, because they see a reciprocal ethnic conflict with no good short-term solution.
They're not gonna celebrate Hamas because Hamas killing Israeli civilians is bad. They're not gonna celebrate Israel because Israel cutting off supplies into Gaza and bombing it to rubble is bad. Support for Hamas in Palestine is (reportedly) too high to just integrate the two territories into one country. The bombing is probably not going to make that support go down.
One can, as fruityyamenrunner does, discourage people from getting sucked into the vortex. Beyond this, one is mostly left to watch in horror.
it is worse than this because many of them ("regimented verbal reasoners") do celebrate israel, to some degree or another, because they have judaism, understood largely as "my ethnic idol of regimented verbal reasoning", which is why i characterise the vortex as one of moral injury.
Reblogged supplyside
RAF Phantoms flying over the Fylingdale Radar Station in Yorkshire, England.
Reblogged cromulentenough
This is why I don’t tend to talk about stereotypical Ninja weapons in my videos!
(Or on Patreon, but you will find more pole and archery stuff there!)
Reblogged
Uncredited art that accompanied the "menu" table of contents for the French-language Micro-Mag, May 1989.
Source: archive.org
Reblogged violetfractal
Rare mid-galumph shot
(Credits to Adam Slazok/ComedyWildlife)
WE HAVE LIFTOFF