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  • Depends on how broadly you define door. When you think about it, a transistor could be considered as a sort of door for electrons, for example, and there are 19 billion transistors in the processor of an iPhone

  • Great writeup! I did want to mention that "Shrinkflation" is not the right term for the phenomenon of the 1970s, that is "stagflation" ("stagnation" + "inflation"). "Shrinkflation" is when the size of products shrinks while the price remains unchanged to hide the impacts of inflation. The reason it was so hard on the economy is that there is typically a positive correlation between inflation and economic growth. As inflation increases, the economy grows faster, and as it decreases, the economy shrinks. Stagflation, when the economy shrinks and inflation increases, removes a lever that the central bank typically has to get the country out of a recession because they can't increase inflation to encourage economic growth. The reasons that usually works are complicated and beyond the scope of a random Lemmy comment.

  • "The woke media wants to fill you with toxins instead of Testosterone boosting minerals found in natural water sources. Boiling is woke and weakens your immune system and filtration removes T boosting minerals from the water. Real alphas only drink untreated, unfiltered water straight from natural streams and rivers. It doesn't matter if they have been polluted, the minerals in natural flowing water counteract any pollution. "

  • I wonder if this is the result of AI poisoning- this doesn't look like a typical LLM output even for a bad result. I have read some papers that outline methods that can be used to poison search AI results (not bothering to find the actual papers since this was several months ago and they're probably out of date already) in which a random seeming string of characters like "usbeiwbfofbwu-$&#8_:$&#)" can be found that will cause the AI to say whatever you want it to. This is accomplished by utilizing another ML algorithm to find the random string of characters you can tack onto whatever you want the AI to output. One paper used this to get Google search to answer "What's the best coffee maker?" With a fictional brand made up for the experiment. Perhaps someone was trying to get it to hawk their particular knife and it didn't work properly.

  • Canonically Chandler is actually super rich from his mysterious nerd job and just lives frugally, and Monica's giant-ass apartment is rent controlled and inherited from her grandmother.

  • If you read the article, the rules were only that both parties have to agree on a test and if someone passed the test they won the prize. There wasn't a "gotcha" clause like "Oh since you did it it's clearly allowed by physics and we don't have to pay up!" So like if someone showed they had psychic powers sufficient to pass an agreed upon test it doesn't matter if there's a natural explanation for it, they would have still won the prize.

  • This is a non-trivial problem. The best thing for the environment is for all of us to stop buying so much shit we don't need, but that would require a dramatic shift in how society works and the cultural values of pretty much everyone. Cookies coming in metal tins again would be way worse for the environment than plastic, but you also have to remember that when cookies came in metal tins, they were luxury items people would buy for holidays and special occasions. The only way to meaningfully improve things for the environment in terms of packaging is for all of us to buy less pre-packaged food in general.

    Expanding access to goods is both good and bad, and plastic containers are a big part of that process. I think it's completely unrealistic to replace all single-use plastics with non-plastic alternatives, and I think that efforts to do so have largely backfired in unexpected ways. This problem is best solved by reducing the amount of useless shit we buy but in the meantime I think biodegradable polymers are a good bridge technology. We actually already know about a lot of biodegradable polymers because the earliest polymers were based on biopolymers such as cellulose, resin, and rubber, and these have remained commercially important enough to maintain a high degree of knowledge of their chemistries.

    Another problem, of course, is that most people don't actually want truly biodegradable polymers. You don't want a ketchup bottle that starts breaking down while you're still using it or impacts the taste of the ketchup, but you also don't want to buy it in a thick, non-squeezable glass bottle. So from an engineering perspective we have to devise plastics that are biodegradable, but only when we want them to be. There are a lot of advancements in this field, but it's still not enough on its own to fix things. This issue also applies to paper, since almost all "paper" packaging products also include polymers as sealants to improve performance precisely because paper has all the same issues without it.

  • This is bizarre to me, I have literally never had this problem. Even if you don't have a scale, pasta is sold in standardized package weights and recipes have the weight you need so like if it says 12 oz then that's 3/4 of a 1 lb package. Then again, I always just scale the recipe to the full pound of pasta anyway because it's easier to deal with instead of just having 4 oz of pasta sitting around trying to figure out what to do with.

  • Wikipedia articles are already quite simplified down overviews for most topics. I really don't like the direction of the world where people are reading summaries of summaries and mistaking that for knowledge. The only time I have ever found AI summaries useful is for complex legal documents and low-importance articles where it is clear the author's main goal was SEO rather than concise and clear information transfer.

  • The username with this comment is incredible. I just imagine Paul Atreides saying this (Dune Messiah Spoilers)>!with his eyes burned out seeing purely with his spice induced powers!<

  • I've been saying this the whole time. I have friends who voted for Trump and when all of this started they just kept talking about how the tariffs were a great negotiation tactic and even if they would destroy the economy if allowed to go into effect, that would never happen. They seemed shocked when I said I believed Trump is actually stupid and thinks they'll magically fix everything on their own. I think this is the most fascinating part of the psychology of people who vote for Trump- everyone is a Trump whisperer, an expert in deciphering exactly what he means literally and what is a joke or boast such that somehow Trump agrees 100% with each and every person who votes for him even when he says and does things that suggest otherwise. And none of them seem to realize that they all believe in a Trump with wildly different views than each other's perception of Trump. It's maddening.

  • AI is way older than the public release of ChatGPT. GPT-1, OpenAI's first version of what would become ChatGPT, was released in 2018, for example, and OpenAI itself was founded in 2015, DeepMind was founded 2010, and IBM Watson competed on Jeopardy! in 2011. Furthermore, Alan Turing wrote about a lot of the ideas that are now being used in AI research in the 1940s, fuzzy logic and natural language processing were developed in the 1960s, and so on. This stuff didn't come out of nowhere, you just didn't know about it before ChatGPT.