No one is accidentally buying ‘sparkling protein’

Obviously, true Hamburgers can only be made from humans born and raised within the Hamburg city limits.

If you see “plant burger” and you are misled to think that it must be made of beef, that says a lot more about you than the manufacturer.

They literally did that with Facebook. Yeah, plenty of people left, but it worked.

Yeah, this is definitely a more normal use of the word.

Not like a synonym for “mildly disagreed with”.

I really need to just put a filter on all of my feeds for the word “slam”. Unless there is any actual slamming going on, of course.

Octopodes have a different nervous system than vertebrates. We have a brain that does almost all of the “thinking” while the rest of the nervous system is either sending or receiving signals (with some “thinking” done below the brain like in the spine).

Octopuses have a brain, but much of the “thinking” is done by nerve clusters in each tenticle.

While grasping on object for humans requires signals going from hand to brain and back, for octopi, a lot of the signals can literally just stay in the tentacle.

It makes sense in that context that they would learn tasks in specific tentacles.

That’s really a feature to them, not a bug.

I would argue that it is currently a big part of the current economy if you know where to look. Lots of labor works via the principles of a gift economy.

E.g., you help your friend move to a new house, they help you redo your deck, you babysit your brother’s kid, they cook you dinner, etc.

The problem with bartering is that it doesn’t handle 3+ way trades (i.e., person A needs something from person B who needs something from person C, who needs something from person A), and it doesn’t usually handle asynchronous trades.

In gift-based systems, people can literally retire based off the goodwill that they’ve cultivated. There are many old people who serve their families/communities for years who then get taken care of when they need it.

Bartering wasn’t made immediately illegal when currency came in. Currency was made to make bartering easier and more fairly divisible.

I pointed this out above, but I think it’s worth repeating: bartering did not exist before currency, or at least there’s no anthropological evidence suggesting it did. People barter when they are used to currency, but don’t have access to any.

Bartering is a replacement for currency. There is no anthropological evidence of bartering existing before the introduction of currency. You would think somewhere there would be, but there’s not.

I think the main thing that’s happening is analogous to what’s happened with a lot of electronics over the past couple of decades. It seems like every electronic device runs off of a way more powerful computer than is necessary because it’s easier/cheaper to buy a million little computers and do a little programming than it is to have someone design a bespoke circuit, even if the bespoke circuits would be more resource efficient, robust, and repairable. Our dishwashers don’t need wifi, but if you are running them off a single board computer with wifi built in, why wouldn’t you figure out a way to advertise it?

Similarly, you have all sorts of tasks that can be done with way more computational efficiency (and trust and tweakability) if you have the know-how to set something bespoke up, but it’s easier to throw everything at an overpowered black box and call it a day.

The difference is that manufacturing costs for tiny computers can come down to be cheaper in price relative to a bespoke circuit, but anything that decreases the cost of computing will apply equally to an LLM and a less complex model. I just hope industry/government pushing isn’t enough to overcome what the “free market” should do. After all, car centric design (suburbia, etc) is way less efficient than train centric, but we still went there.

My work would be improved by the dumbest of dumb retrieval augmented models: a monkey with a thesaurus, ctrl+f, and a pile of my documents. Unfortunately, the best they can offer is a service where I send my personal documents into the ether and a new wetland is dried in my honor (or insert your ecological disaster metaphor of choice).

Ah, yeah, forgot that was another one I’ve done. It seems like I’ve taken apart most of my household appliances at this point.

Until you do like step one of taking an appliance apart, and realize that the real manual is marked “for technician use only”, and it’s hidden inside of the appliance.

My washer and dryer both have good manuals complete with circuit diagrams under the top once i take a few screws out. My chest freezer has one taped up under the hatch where the compresser sits. My refrigerator has one hidden in the door hinge.

If there is a demand for a forensic capability, there’s someone willing to sell it to a police department (and a jury).

You’re getting downvoted for saying something sorta close to true, but not exactly. I agree strongly with everything you said here, though.

Generally, with any complex human-machine interface, you want to cast as wide of a net for accommodation as possible because there are so many variables that come into play.

Like if you are putting together a basketball team, you probably want a bunch of tall dudes, but you never know how many Muggsy Bogues’s are out there unless you let everyone play.

For a fighter pilot, would you rather have a female with greater ability to distinguish color, or a male that can pull higher g’s? It’s impossible to say what specific traits would lead to the best outcome in all possible engagements.

Even things like colorblindness can be a positive in situations because camouflage can stick out to colorblind people. Some types of deafness comes with immunity to motion sickness.

That’s not true. With no controls, there is no significant difference in tolerance by sex. When controlled for height, females have lower tolerance than males. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3753357/

It’s because they want people to mentally subtract “military-age males” from the figures.

Yeah, the focus the landscaping part is weird. It seems more relevant to me that 5 years ago, he was in high school, rather than that he did landscaping.

Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.

It’s such an easy thing to predict happening, too. If you did it perfectly, it would, at best, maintain an unstable equilibrium and just keep the same output quality.