Are you thinking of bed bugs? They don’t dump their eggs, but have lower lifetime egg output because they are mitigating the attack. Seed beetles? Female gets injured, but the male’s spines are linked to other traits that make her offspring do better. The net effect on her reproduction is actually positive despite the harm.

With ducks, the coercer quality hypothesis is an important hypothesis. But the evidence has caused the hypothesis terrain to shift to the indirect genetic benefit or reinforcement of existing preference hypothesis. Here’s some situations that complicate the coercer quality hypothesis.

1. Coercers aren’t reliably the “leftover” or inferior males as expect in the coercer quality hypothesis. It’s mostly already-paired males doing the forcing, or, put another way, already screened and selected males which is arguably an indicator for genetic fitness.

2. If the tract exists to filter for good genes via female choice, you’d expect some positive relationship between choice-related investment and tract complexity. Instead, egg size (a proxy for female investment) is negatively correlated with both penis length and vaginal spiral count according to a 2020 study. This is the reverse of the prediction. Some in the research community argue female reproductive investment is doing more of the explanatory work. And not mate quality screening.

So the current leading hypothesis isn’t “the tract detects and blocks bad genes,” it’s closer to “the tract protects a choice she already made through courtship, before force ever entered the picture.” Coercion gets filtered because he isn’t the one she picked. But this isn’t settled yet and there are ongoing debate and more research to be done.

So your first paragraph is a bit irksome.

Probably because otherwise the females don’t mate, or are killed during the mating or birthing process. Or it’s possible that there are non-genetic factors to how they develop.

Because it’s speculation to preserve the three explanations for all evolved traits that you know about.
(1) easier to survive -> killed during the mating or birthing process
(2) easier/more survivable reproduction -> otherwise the females don’t mate (3) makes the mate more appealing so others want to mate with you.

Now hold the duck tract up against each one: Not (1). A corkscrew oviduct isn’t a survival trait, it’s purely reproductive plumbing. Not (3). It’s not making anyone more appealing. It’s not a peacock tail. Nobody’s choosing a mate because of a more convoluted tract. Ipf anything it’s invisible to mate choice entirely, it only matters after copulation. Not (2), and actually the opposite. The duck tract makes reproduction harder. It’s a filter to block fertilization from certain partners.

And finally, we have enough evidence to show that this is a heritible trait. So what’s going on?

This is called antagonistic coevolution. This is an evolved trait that makes it harder for all partners. The tract can relax for preferred partners making reproduction easier. But not as easy as a straight tract.

So we have convoluted tracts for the females… What do the males do? They create corkscrew penises. This goes back and forth, male adaptions force female adaptions. There is no directional selection of a fixed trait. There’s coevolution based on frequency dependent selection. It’s the Red Queen dynamics (that’s the “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place” line from Alice in Wonderland). It’s where male and female traits keep escalating against each other rather than converging on one fixed “best” trait. Rather you get a lot of opportunity for variability across the popultion and through generations. This is causal without being teleological.

Finally, there seems to be evidence that this can end in mutualism, but not guaranteed. I’m a little surprised you weren’t more curious about this little factoid when I presented it and chose to close on your best understanding.

Anyway. I believe in unintelligent design.

I generally think this is true. And then I remember duck oviducts. Why does it need to be a corkscrew shape with little culs-de-sac for duck semen to die? For some reason it means that the female has more reproductive control when being forced or coerced during sex. But how that even works is beyond me. From a site with pictures and diagrams:

"As male ducks evolved longer, more elaborate phalluses, females countered with reproductive tracts that twist in the opposite direction, creating spiral pathways and blind pockets that make it difficult for unwanted sperm to reach the egg.

This anatomical design gives females a degree of reproductive control, allowing them to favor sperm from chosen partners while still protecting against fertilization from forced matings. Scientists studying this phenomenon have found that the more coercive the mating system in a duck species, the more complex the female’s reproductive tract tends to be."

I self host on windows. It just happened to be what I had on the box. Then I got started with docker. So that was great. When I have the time, I hope to switch to unraid, but need the time to be open enough to deal with the problem that will arise in getting the system set up just right.

The skills learned in the tutorial aren’t the ones that are forgotten when you take two weeks off late in the game. Redoing a tutorial wouldn’t be the solution.

I don’t see how the tutorial as a main menu option fixes the problem of someone who played for a while, then had to walk away for two weeks only to come back and have to deal with the ninth boss with degraded skills.

Make the fucking tutorial OPTIONAL and something you pick as an option in the fucking main menu. This isn’t rocket science.

The article isn’t saying you lose players in the tutorial, you lose the much farther in when the level 9 boss too hard to beat for someone who stepped away from the game for 2 weeks.

A lot of people would probably like an optional tutorial, but it’s not the point they are trying to make.

The argument is they are played by younger people because they are designed for younger people. Older people, the ones coming into retirement age, grew up playing video games. They enjoy and value video games, but have slower reflexes and less time. Retirement solves the latter issue. From the article (emphasis mine):

“Developers have been ignoring older gamers for the same reason it took them decades to discover women,” he says. "The industry has spent 40 years chasing the same narrowly defined audience because it was the safest bet, until everyone was chasing it. Imagine if Hollywood only made movies for 18-year-old men. That’s roughly the bet games have been making.

"The opportunity is substantial. The 40+ segment in the US is on track to grow from $19 billion in 2022 to $43 billion by 2030, a 132% expansion at a moment when the rest of the industry is shrinking. These are players with the most disposable income, the longest gaming literacy, and the highest brand loyalty. They are also the least visible in the industry’s dashboards because the metrics were built around younger players who compete frequently. Older lifelong gamers don’t, but they keep playing, and they keep spending.

“What needs to change is the industry’s mindset. An entire generation has now grown up playing video games and is ageing into a life stage where they have time, money, and the desire to keep playing. The first publishers to actually see this player will capture a structural advantage. The rest will arrive 10 years late, exactly like they did with women.”

I looked into to using a laptop as a router a while back and decided against it. From what I read, the chip is designed for bursts of processing and isn’t designed to be under constant load like a router would be. That means the fan will always be running an you risk overheating, fan failure, and high power draw.

That’s my non professional recollection so take it with a grain of salt.

They’re a bunch of Luddites.

Here’s a link to the paper. It has this amazing sentence in the conclusion: “As these generations age, the CRC burden in these cohorts will continue to swell like a tsunami moving through time”.

This dude fucks

From the linked research article:

‘Over-diagnosis’ is observed when the prevalence of diagnoses made in clinical services, referred to as administrative prevalence (based on healthcare databases or insurance claims) exceeds prevalence estimates based on accurate assessments in representative population-based samples. Over-diagnosis may occur when diagnostic criteria are not applied with sufficient rigour, leading to false-positive cases. Over-diagnosis may also happen when people inappropriately self-diagnose. Notably, for individuals with milder or subclinical symptoms, a diagnosis can sometimes do more harm than good, creating stigma or leading to low-benefit treatments with significant side-effects.

So is Admin Prevalence > Prevalence Estimates where the estimates are made based on representative population-based samples?

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