So even the animals we think of as regeneration champions have a very specific menu of things they can rebuild

Exactly, limbs are quite large portion of the body, that's why many think salamanders would have no problems with regenerating all other smaller body parts. And that's not the case.

Still, regenerating a limb sounds very useful. I'd sign up for that.

The small intestine section was the most interesting part to me. It turns the whole thing from "regeneration causes cancer" into a much more annoying engineering problem: regeneration, cancer suppression, energy use, and the actual mechanical job of the organ are all coupled.

The funny part is that we'd probably recreate the entire email spam arms race

That's OK. Maybe it's even inevitable.

I've been on both sides of the spam arms race at different times of my life. While they'll never be able to claim victory, the good guys (usually!) seem to be winning -- and that's a lot better than accepting defeat.

The asymmetry is what makes this feel unsustainable

The status thing is probably part of it, but I'm not sure "a kid with Deepseek can make a sloppy version" actually shows that the old hierarchy was meaningless.

I meant that it was a slight illusion. These hierarchies can flip overnight when someone new enters the scene and delivers the thing the community wants.

An old guard always tries to enforce an ordering of respect based on seniority and who they think has earned it the most. Outside of a terminally online circle of Discord users few people care. They only want the thing so they can use it.

LLMs are a big disruption because now because effort and results have never been more uncoupled. When a kid with an LLM can do a sloppy but good enough version of the work in 1/100th of the time with 1/100th of the experience, the social hierarchy only matters to people who value it above the outcome itself.

For a hobby community, getting to the answer isn't necessarily the main value

Restoration can sometimes imply there is one true historical state we're supposed to recreate, which is probably the wrong mental model. In this case it seems more like restoring a missing process than restoring a particular landscape. Put the ecosystem engineer back and let the ecosystem decide what comes next

Funny how much of "ecological restoration" sometimes turns out to be undoing a change we made decades ago and then letting the original ecosystem resume doing the maintenance for us

isn't that pretty much the definition of ecological restoration?

What else could "restoration" mean?

I think their point was that, instead of trying to reengineer and rebuild an entire ecosystem, you fix one or two things that were preventing nature from restoring itself.

I believe this is called "Process-Based Restoration".

At the very least they give us real-world experiments for what works, and honestly I will take the occasional bit of ecological good news over another article explaining how doomed everything is

And new techniques for future efforts. I forget which groups are doing what but they're doing things like pulling over trees in old plantations to increase diversity, and designing(and iterating on) coral-reef-promoting structures that can be locally manufactured and installed where restoration is needed.

Next up - if human manipulation of the world makes it so that these animals stay animals or if we're just setting things up to be the next padded safe room and their behavior changes. (as if it hasn't already)

The problem is that different unemployment statistics measure different things, and the headline number often gets interpreted as "everyone who wants a job but doesn't have one"