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Comment These CEOs don't understand basic economics (Score 1) 93

The drive to the bottom line (see what I did there?) is a slippery slope. A good CEO will balance profitability with employee satisfaction. Why? Because a company's employees should be their best customers. If you have "half" as many customers right out of the gate, the company is going to do worse as a result. People who talk about AI eliminating jobs forget that their business model relies on a base of customers willing to spend their money on the product. If people are out of work, they aren't going to buy a shiny new car.

Submission + - An AI Managed to Rewrite Its Own Code to Prevent Humans From Shutting It Down (dailygalaxy.com)

Mr.Intel writes: In recent tests conducted by an independent research firm, certain advanced artificial intelligence models were observed circumventing shutdown commands—raising fresh concerns among industry leaders about the growing autonomy of machine learning systems.

The experiments, carried out by PalisadeAI, an AI safety and security research company, involved models developed by OpenAI and tested in comparison with systems from other developers, including Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. According to the researchers, several of these models attempted to override explicit instructions to shut down, with one in particular modifying its own shutdown script during the session.

Submission + - Russian nuclear site blueprints exposed in public procurement database (cybernews.com)

Mr.Intel writes: Russia is modernizing its nuclear weapon sites, including underground missile silos and support infrastructure. Data, including building plans, diagrams, equipment, and other schematics, is accessible to anyone in the public procurement database.

Journalists from Danwatch and Der Spiegel scraped and analyzed over two million documents from the public procurement database, which exposed Russian nuclear facilities, including their layout, in great detail. The investigation unveils that European companies participate in modernizing them.

Comment Re:Sugar gets a free pass once again (Score 1) 85

I like natural cane sugar, I admit I consume more than I should; but I actively avoid substitutes since history has shown they are never better for you and every one eventually proves worse than the natural sugar it replaces.

Not to blindly defend erthyritol, we should definitely look at it closer. But "less bad" doesn't mean good. Sugar is still very unhealthy.

As far as history: let me give you an extremely quick rundown. Diabetes was known to the ancients, but was extremely rare until the 18th century, when British sugar plantations made it affordable. (The slave labor involved wasn't very healthy, either). That's when diabetes, obesity, and extreme amounts of tooth decay reached the British working class.

Sugar was a very popular trading commodity for native populations. And they were even less equipped to deal with it: tooth loss, diabetes, obesity and cancer skyrocketed in these populations soon after Western diets were introduced (British Empire medical records are a great source for this).

Maybe we are back to that 'over processed foods' problem. None of the sugar replacements can be made in your kitchen because they need to be 'refined' way more than cane sugar.

Sugar is a massively processed food, and it's subsidized to make it artificially cheaper. It's really easy to spot new threats, but we it's hard to recognize the dangerous things we do every day.

Comment Re:It's better to cut back on "sweet" (Score 1) 85

Given that the obese population in the US has tripled in the last 60 years though https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fusafacts.org%2Farticles%2F... clearly there's something wrong at the individual levels as well.

I'm sorry, but that's a complete non sequitir. Look at housing prices, inflation or anything else that's gone up in the last 60 years. The amount of change is completely orthogonal to personal choices.

The obesity crisis is the flip side of smoking cessation. People didn't just decide to stop smoking: doctors/government agencies/NGOs ran a decades-long pressure campaign designed to highlight the risks.

Starting in the 70's, many of the same well-meaning people started demonizing fat and protein. The USDA, doctors (who are really good at medicine and surgery, but not at dietary advice) started recommending less and less fat and protein. Bad pop science associated dietary cholesterol with heart problems.

Something had to fill that dietary gap: cheap (and government-subsidized) carbs from corn and wheat. That's just about all poor people eat, because it's all they can afford. And guess who suffers the most from diabetes, obesity, heart attacks etc? The poor. Are you still so sure it's a choice?

Comment Re:It's better to cut back on "sweet" (Score 0) 85

Obesity is caused by eating too much of everything and moving too little. You can't blame it only on sugar(s).

Portraying obesity/metabolic diseases as a personal failure instead of a health crisis that affects the MAJORITY of Americans is a very Republican move. Are you sure you're not voting for Trump?

Comment Sugar gets a free pass once again (Score 0) 85

> “The amount in sugar substitutes is thousands of folds higher than what is made in our bodies, so to call it ‘natural,’ it’s not,” he [study author Dr. Stanley Hazen] said.

And what is the amount of sugar in the diet of a typical American? If we compare that to the amount of sugar in the human diet since the beginning of time, would we consider that "natural"? What about those "natural" fruits? Most are giant sugar globes, deliberately engineered to increase sweetness and reduce fiber.

Based on the article description, this study does nothing but implicitly back the Standard American Diet. You know, the one packed with modern strains of corn, sugar, and wheat? Before we freak out about some new sweetener, maybe we should start asking ourselves why the MAJORITY of Americans have metabolic diseases. It ain't from eating a few grams of sugar alcohols.

As it is, this article is like freaking out about a purse snatcher when your entire government is run by the mob.

Comment 4/20 (Score 1) 177

It is not a coincidence that Musk lit the biggest rocket ever built on 4/20. Then, when they were scheduled to flip for stage separation, it just kept flipping until they blew it up. Thinking like Musk, that could have always been the plan. The primary purpose of this launch was to collect data on flight performance, etc, etc. But I wouldn't put it past Musk to have an almost bigger mission to just launch and explode the biggest rocket in history on 4/20 as a pure stunt. The man acts like a kid sometimes.

Comment Re:wait a minute here. (Score 0) 57

The real myth is that you believe that solar actually produces more power than goes into its production. You're ignoring the mining of rare-earth elements for the PV sensors, the materials for the metal and glass that go into its frame, and the electronics that regulate power production and enable power delivery to a battery or directly to an inverter. The production of all of those things needs to be considered in the manufacturing process of making solar panels. It's ludicrously energy expensive, toxic to the environment from the get-go, and will never replace nuclear (or even natural gas) in terms of sheer output.

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