133arc585 @ 133arc585 @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

Yes you can. Goodreads has export instructions. On BookWyrm you upload the export file. It maintains ratings, shelves, read status/dates, etc.

Just be careful when you import: some of my titles were matched to completely wrong titles. For example, "The Color Purple" was matched to some other random book with the word Purple in the title. Fortunately, as part of the import process:

• it tells you which books it could not reasonably match and lets you manually match them, and
• it lets you edit any matches it made automatically.

Every book I had in Goodreads was available to add to my shelves on BookWyrm, even if they didn't all happen automatically. Overall though, compared to how many books I had on shelves, only a handful were not handled automatically/properly.

Table salt has more chlorine by mass than sucralose. Moreover, in your body, table salt dissociates into a chlorine ion, whereas in sucralose it's covalently bonded into the molecular structure. That's not to say that it is suddenly nonreactive, but being covalently bonded tempers some of it's electron craving, so to speak. By your logic, table salt should be orders of magnitude more dangerous than sucralose (it's not).

Edit to add: Do you know of any mechanism by which sucralose could cross the nuclear membrane? If not, sucralose isn't going to be touching DNA at all. It could touch some form of RNA in the cytoplasm, which isn't necessarily innocent, but it's not going to be touching the DNA. That means it won't cause long-term genetic changes or damage; any damage it caused would be transitory to the working set of RNA and that damage would be gone when that RNA was processed/destroyed.

Almost anything can be carcinogenic with a high enough exposure. You can pump a rat full of water until it dies and declare that water kills people.

It would lead to death, but not to cancer. Not everything is carcinogenic, even with high exposure. Causing death by a method other than cancer doesn't make it carcinogenic.

Do you drink hot coffee or tea or soup? Cause hot beverages are considered more likely to cause cancer than this designation for aspartame. Do you eat meat? Cause that’s two levels higher than this designation for aspartame.

Sure, these things on their own, at the amount they're generally consumed, may not cause issues. But when you are combining these things, the sum total can be worrisome. Maybe red meat alone isn't much; maybe hot coffee alone isn't much; maybe aspartame alone isn't much; maybe alcohol alone isn't much. But when you have hot coffee for breakfast, red meat for 2 meals, aspartame drinks all day, and alcohol at night, you are at a completely different level of risk. Knowing which small things contribute to this sum is important. Or, from another angle: maybe someone really likes alcohol, even acknowledging the potential cancer-causing aspect. So to somewhat offset that known risk, they're wanting to minimize other sources of potential-cancer.

I see what you're saying. I think I said this in another comment, but my goal is just to avoid (overly-)sweet foods. From that standpoint, "unsweetened" is ideal. But "no sugar added" for something that's naturally somewhat sweet (such as tomato paste) is also acceptable. If I were to pick up tomato paste that said "no sugar added" but did have artificial sweeteners, I'd be horrified. So I guess the terminology is more straightforward if you're avoiding sugar, but it's less useful if you're avoiding sweetness.

Lead was used way past discovering it was dangerous, and is still used enough to cause problems in specific populations. Just like cigarettes. If there is a large moneymaking industry and it suddenly comes to light that what it is producing is dangerous, they have a lot of motivation to put money behind keeping that knowledge from getting out or, when it does, keep it from affecting law. They lobby/bribe, they abuse the legal system, whatever they can to avoid going under. As such, it's not safe to assume that something is not dangerous simply because it hasn't been banned.

"Unsweetened" is a subclass of "no sugar added" though, and so if you're really looking for "unsweetened", you still have to read the labels of all of the "no sugar added" products that chose that (more generic) label over the (more specific) "unsweetened" label.

They’re about to declare it as possibly cancerous. Not fully cancerous.

What do you mean by this? Everything that can cause cancer is declared "possibly cancerous"; it depends on dose and exposure. Nothing is "fully cancerous" for whatever that might even mean. You can be exposed to radiation and either get cancer or not; it depends on the dose. Would you call radiation "possibly cancerous", or "fully cancerous"?

Analagously, most bacteria can cause infections but they don't always in everyone. So to label a bacteria as purely benign or purely dangerous is just as silly as trying to make a distinction between "possibly cancerous" and "fully cancerous".

Aspartame is in a lot of things, mainly sodas and gum, but you’d have to consume a lot of the stuff beyond a human limit really.

And if someone wants to minimize their risk of cancer, they should be able to make informed decisions. Knowing that at particular food-additive has higher-than-baseline chances of causing cancer allows someone with a different risk-aversion profile to make decisions wisely. If you don't mind the incidence rate at the dose you consume it at, that's fine as well. But it is useful to have it be public knowledge if something is potentially cancer-causing.

Depends on what you call a scam. I am not sure it's the right word, but duplicitous behavior and definite privacy violations (even if by negligence) are absolutely true.

They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak; also I'd take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn't the most savory:

... Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.

On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance

In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,

In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.

With regards to the CEO, he made a donation to an anti-LGBT cause when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance.

He also spreads COVID misinformation.

My statement above was not meant to come across as xenophobic, but wary considering, historically, how involved China’s government is with local tech companies and entities that would contribute to a project like this.

This right here is where the problem is though. Simply being associated with the Chinese governement is not sufficient to assume malfeasance. Just as any of the large USA tech giants that take various forms of government funding aren't automatically assumed to be malicious simply by being associated with a "malicious" government. Hell, the Linux Foundation (Linus' employer) is almost entirely funded by really creepy USA-based tech companies that themselves receive government money for various projects or products. I don't assume baselessly that Linus would make the distribution insecure simply because he's funded by people who might want that.

Obviously, more data needs to be evaluated, but I think it’s fair to be cautious.

It is only fair to be exactly as cautious as you would be to run any other random Linux distribution: say, some random person's fork of Debian. Again, unless you have actual reason to treat it differently, doing so baselessly is rather lame and doesn't serve anyone. Of course it's fair to be catious of something as critical as an operating system; but viewing it through a biased lens doesn't make you more secure.

SIGs (special interest groups)

I'm not sure the precise definition for what counts as an SIG here, but it could mean something analagous to the Linux Foundation. It isn't necessarily suspicious. I think, from context, it's used in contrast to "enterprises"; that is, I take it to include any volunteer or not-for-profit contributions.

Of course there's not. It's a reflex: China → malicious. It doesn't require evidence and, since it's not normally questioned in daily discourse, the person saying it seemingly never questions whether it makes any sense to make such a baseless claim.

Xenophobic fearmongering serves nobody.

Should we also avoid the Linux kernel, since it's Finnish, and Finland participates in the largest global surveillance apparatus with the USA? There's absolutely no reason to assume the distribution is any less secure or any more likely to be malicious simply due to it being developed in China or by Chinese.

Moreover, it's open-source. Use the same logic you should apply to open-source software before you accuse it of being malicious: look at the code and prove it.

And more importantly, ignoring the validity of the claims. It's not a court, you can't get it thrown out on a technicality; either the claim is valid or it's not and, although the way the claim is conveyed can be worth mentioning, ignoring the claim itself and only assessing the conveyance method is just useless. @mykhaylo@fosstodon.org

It's used as an excuse. If people weren't armed, they'd find another excuse. That's what I mean by not addressing the underlying problem of police brutality and abuse of power. Also, they'll always say they thought someone had a gun even when they know almost for certain the person didn't, because they know you'll buy it.

What an insane take. Plenty of police shootings are on unarmed individuals. Moreover, having an unarmed populace wouldn't prevent police shootings when the core cause of police brutality isn't addressed. They demand control and obedience; you being unarmed doesn't make them any less likely to shoot you if you're not being obedient.

Small correction, those "swastikas" are oriented square, whereas the Nazi swastika is rotated 45 degrees.

I'm just going to repeat myself: it is literally not any better if it's a backup versus the primary system. Read my comment.

Edit to add: When do you use a backup? When things have gone very wrong. That is precisely when reliance on this system is the most dangerous.

That's not reassuring in the least. Even if it's a backup or secondary system, if Starlink and the USA can cut service at will, it's disadvantageous for Japan's military to use it. This isn't just reliance on foreign technology in the form of chips or other hardware, this is reliance on a foreign for-profit company owned by a megalomaniac billionaire who has made threats to cut service before in an active warzone when it suited him. This system subordinates Japanese (military) autonomy to external entities that not only aren't obligated to act in Japan's best interest, but have no way of being held responsible when they act against Japan's interests.

Precisely, is that not very concerning?

No, having ways to sequester carbon will only justify continuing to produce massive amounts of it. Worse case, it excuses increasing atmospheric carbon production because "it can always be sequestered". Also, who pays to sequester? The producer? That's not happened in the past; it tends to be the taxpayer who is responsible for this externality.