Reminder that there used to be a $1,000,000 prize available for anyone who could display any sort of supernatural powers that remained unclaimed for 20 years. The challenge rules required that both parties agree upon the test setup, and several people actually tried to claim it and all failed. It astounds me that anyone still believes in this nonsense and that it seems to be becoming even more popular to believe in literal magic and other supernatural idiocy.
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.
Everyone does that all the time though. I can't remember the last time I bought something online that wasn't supposedly either the last one in stock or one of like 5 left. It's obviously bullshit and everyone is doing 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.
I work in the chemical industry and the answer is black platics and coatings can be made way cheaper than light ones because they don't have to be as pure and can be made from lower quality feedstocks and such. Light or clear plastics must be of a higher purity because impurities will usually show up as colored specks that look ugly. For an application like this, impurities aren't a big deal and won't really be hazardous, so it's a win win since it's cheaper for everyone. It would be a waste to make dark coatings from the same base as light coatings in an application like this because you'd need to remove colored impurities only to just add in a dark pigment anyway. If you don't offer the lighter colored coatings or white coatings, you can manufacture your dark coatings cheaper by not having production lines with the extra purification and cleaning steps that would be required to offer those. That's why they only sell dark materials.
My dude has evidently never used a dishwasher because if you put dish soap in there instead of detergent (which is either solid or an opaque liquid/paste) you're gonna have a bad time.
Idk. I've been reading about Bitcoin since the very beginning and while I don't think it's necessarily a "scam" the whole project was based on a flawed hyper-libertarian economic theory that inflationary currency is inherently evil and that the ideal currency has a fixed quantity, requires effort to produce, and becomes rarer over time. From that standpoint, I feel like Bitcoin has failed in its original mission. You simply cannot use it as a day to day currency and everyone is just using it to gamble essentially. I do agree that if crypto had been an outright scam from the beginning, Satoshi would have rugpulled already, though.
"Researchers" did a thing I did the first day I was actually able to ChatGPT and came to a conclusion that is in the disclaimers on the ChatGPT website. Can I get paid to do this kind of "research?" If you've even read a cursory article about how LLMs work you'd know that asking them what their reasoning is for anything doesn't work because the answer would just always be an explanation of how LLMs work generally.
Reminder that there used to be a $1,000,000 prize available for anyone who could display any sort of supernatural powers that remained unclaimed for 20 years. The challenge rules required that both parties agree upon the test setup, and several people actually tried to claim it and all failed. It astounds me that anyone still believes in this nonsense and that it seems to be becoming even more popular to believe in literal magic and other supernatural idiocy.