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Side effects include all of your contacts calling you freakin nerd.

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Could be your freezer cycling up and down. Mine gets real warm right after I load in a week of groceries. I also should probably store more stuff in the freezer for thermal mass.

A large part of food cost is processing.

A regular burger patty is processed by butchering a cow, running meat through a grinder, and then pressing the grind into patties.

A vegan burger patty has to combine multiple ingredients and seasonings with different preprocessing steps, and then it still has to be pressed into patties.

Out of this, cow butchering is by far the most intensive and costly processing step, but the cost of that is amortized over many cuts of meat, not just the hamburger.

The vegan patty has more things to process in it. And if you’re looking at Beyond or Impossible, then some of those things are fancy lab grown proteins.

Was this 4k video from an arbitrary source, like a random YouTube video? Or from United’s website?

I haven’t flown outside is Southwest in a while, but they have a bunch of licensed video content that is hosted locally on the plane. And therefore cheap.

It’s illegal to use your cell phone’s cell modem on a plane, because of an FCC rule, not an FAA rule. The cells in the cell network are designed for traffic on the ground. At cruising altitude, your modem can see way too many cells at once.

Plane WiFi is a modern technological marvel and you’re lucky to be able to have it at all.

Not so long ago sat phones were the domain of the super rich, because they were paying several dollars per minute. Then it was down to 10 dollars for two hours of multiplexed satellite access. And now apparently it’s down to where advertising will work. That’s amazing.

Can only shop during a specific enrollment period

With cars it’s relatively easy to determine if a particular collision occurred before or after you bought insurance. It’s also very hard to predict exactly when these commissions will occur. Consequently, it is not so easy to delay and only buy a policy when you already have a claim ready to go.

With many progressive diseases, it’s much easier to wait and only buy insurance if you think it’s going to be expensive, but haven’t been diagnosed with anything yet. That’s why health insurance has open enrollment periods.

The deal with LLMs is that it’s very difficult to say which piece of training material went into which output. Everything gets chopped up and mixed, and it’s computationally difficult to run backwards.

My understanding of the image generators is that they operate one pixel at a time too, looking only at neighboring pixels. So in that sense, it’s not correct to say they understand the context of anything.

Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie

The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.

I wonder how much of this is just the Minuteman replacement.

Green slip sounds like the return receipt part of “certified mail, return receipt requested.”. Really, the post office should be returning those, since it’s a service they pay for.

That is, if they’re even paying for real certified mail, and not trying to forge their own green slips.

“natural born” is part of the qualification to be President of the United States in the constitution.

“Under God” is a clause that was officially added to the pledge of allegiance in the 1950s. The pledge of allegiance doesn’t really have much legal significance at all in the United States, even if it is recited daily in schools.

“Natural born woman” sounds a lot like an Aretha Franklin hit.

These are both old men… They both take a lot of drugs. This is America. Have you seen an older person who doesn’t have weekly pill organizer?

A big part of WWI is that the web of treaties and alliances were all secret, as in classified information by each country.

NATO is not a secret. The membership roster and terms and conditions are known to all, including potential adversaries like Mr. Putin. This has a major effect on stabilizing international relations because nobody has to guess what NATO would do.

Despite his rhetoric, we know that Putin understands how NATO works, because he has been pulling materiel out of Kaliningrad. This leaves the Russian exclave extremely vulnerable to an invasion from NATO territory. But Putin is not worried about that, probably because he actually trusts NATO to follow the NATO charter.

I see this and I get the Atlanta Braves fight cheer stuck in my head:

“Don’t… Stop… The… Chop…”

So do you hire a repo man for that kind of thing?

Pretty sure DEA allows religious use of Ayahuasca because the government lost a court case on free-exercise-of-religion grounds.

No court case has established a specific right to treat cancer with psilocybin.

Why hasn’t PA held elections for 20 years or so?

In a world with an egalitarian UN, but no great powers in it, everyone is just going to pay attention to what the great powers are off doing on their own. Nobody would care what the UN is doing.

Only the five permanent members have a veto power on the security council. USA, China, Russia, UK, and France.

No one else has the power to veto.

In fact, I think grandparent was talking about a hypothetical and counterfactual world where every nation had the same powers at the UN.