The shitpost is correct. Bony fish, or the superclass Osteichtyes, absolutely is a scientific classification, and by the way modern cladistics work, every single thing descended from them, which includes all terrestrial mammals, reptiles etc. are also bony fish.

In other words, if the common ancestor of tuna and squirrels and whales is a bony fish, they are all bony fish. The squirrel and whale cannot be demoted from their bony fish status.

Umm, this is the first thing we were taught on the first day of kindergarten.

I legitimately switched back to local teletext as my main news source. No SEO bullshit, no ads, the articles are succinct and written by humans (for now).

Personal story time. A few years back, I texted (through Whatsapp) a colleague for a few minutes about a friend taking up welding as a supplementary source of income, and immediately (within the day) received a targeted ad in the Duolingo app for… welding torches. Important facts, I don’t weld, I’ve never done any welding and I don’t know anything about welding. How this bit of info got from whatsapp to whomever was providing interstitial ads in the duolingo app, I have no idea. My best guess is still that google’s keyboard app is logging every single keystroke I type and aggregating it in a database somewhere. I can’t fathom how that shit isn’t extremely illegal.

At the risk of sounding like a door-to-door fediverse evangelist: the good thing about mastodon is you can always move to a small and quirky instance, or even start your own small and quirky instance and defederate from any parts that you don’t like.