I agree. Most of the life-changing content I've consumed has been either freely available (in the public domain or online) or a one-time-purchase, ad-free book.
You didn't "consume" that "content", that's newspeak which we'd all be better off without. You read books, listened to music, saw movies, plays, etc. You didn't "consume" them either, they're still there after all? You're not a "content consumer" but a person, an individual who reads, listens, sees, experiences.
I don't like that phrase either, but do you have a direct replacement? Language usage tends toward efficiency, and sometimes I want to speak generally rather than specifically, and so if my options for conveying the idea 'read books and/or listened to music and/or saw plays and/or watched tv and/or ......' are to write that out or to say 'consumed content', I'm probably going to hold my nose and go with the latter, at least once I've heard it enough times for it to feel relatively normal.
edit: actually, and this is just a tangential point, I don't think 'content' covers plays or other live experiences. It's usually screen-based, and the main possible exceptions are things that are almost interchangeable with their screen-mediated forms, like books or magazines.
Going straight to surveillance and unable to think "nicer" ways... is strange.
1. process graphs and charts
2. process handwritten math formula, also chinese characters writings
3. process design sketch and wireframe
4. process scanned documents
... etc
in fact these transformer models currently suck for surveillance, too slow and expensive. There are already faster and better facial/gait/object recognition models out there.
a starch is not fiber and generally not broken down the same way in digestion afaik
fiber is great and under-consumed (especially soluble) and is very well-studied on modern populations [0]. we don't really need to make mechanistic reasonings about evolutionary adaptations that occurred hundreds of thousands of years ago or rely on studies of a small, homogenized population whose lived realities are far from yours and mine
plus, following the the hierarchy of evidence, mechanistic guesses are considered extremely low quality, only ranking above things like mouse studies [1]
> Resistant starch – Soluble fermentable fiber found in legumes, unripe bananas, cooked and cooled pasta, and potatoes that acts as a prebiotic. Adds bulk to stools but has minimal laxative effect. May help to normalize blood sugar and cholesterol levels.
"Fiber" is a vague term that is used for the carbohydrates that cannot be digested by humans, so they reach the large intestine, where they are fermented by bacteria.
This includes a part of the "resistant starch", which is poorly digested by humans, so a big part of it reaches the large intestine.
So yes, the "resistant" starch counts as "fiber", but not all of it, because some part of it is hydrolyzed into glucose, which is absorbed.
this is bordering on pedantry but aren't there classifications by different regulatory and medical institutions of what fibers are and aren't? as far as I'm aware, a starch isn't a fiber unless a special exemption is carved out for it and only if that starch meets certain criteria for how it behaves
looking into RS's in general, it seems like there is a special carve-out after a lot of industry lobbying for very specific forms of RS's to be classified as fibers and only if they have physiological effects similar to the classic definition of fiber: https://www.fda.gov/media/113663/download
for practical reasons, I suppose I'm just not understanding why you don't eat more 'classical' fibers. psyllium husk, for eg, which is cheap and effective and has been utilized as a digestive aid in Chinese traditional medicine for centuries (one of the few to survive rigorous empirical evaluation, naturally)
We shouldn't assume that because we are a great ape that we eat the same as other great apes. Humans spent two million years away from the jungle evolving in the savanna, with very different food sources. Our guts changed quite a bit in that time, and our digestion doesn't work the same.
Their is no doubt that for millions of years the humans have eaten much less fiber than their ape ancestors.
You just have to look to the belly of a healthy, non-obese human and compare it with the bellies of the apes. The bellies of the apes are much bigger, despite not having the fat of humans, because they have much longer intestines, which are packed in there, which are required for the fermentation of the large amount of fiber included in their diets.
The intestines of humans are not so reduced as those of the obligate carnivores, but they are still much shorter than of most apes or monkeys.
Our health is still dependent on eating a decent amount of "fiber", but the amount we need is not comparable with what an ape needs.
Fiber is not a supplement, or at least it’s not just a supplement. It’s the primary thing that makes fruits and vegetables healthy.
We’ve already known fruits and vegetables are healthy. Fiber is the reason why eating an orange is good, but drinking a glass of orange juice is about equivalent to a bottle of coke. That’s not an exaggeration, by the way, it’s about the same sugar content.
If you want to eat the recommended 35g of fiber a day, you won’t be able to reach it with just supplements. You need to be eating fruits and vegetables at every meal. For my entire life, everyone has been saying to eat fruits and vegetables at every meal in large quantities.
I think there's more to an orange than just fiber. And it's disingenuous to say there isn't, and hurts your credibility to say it. And you absolutely are saying that, no dithering or hem-hawing needed
Yes there are additional vitamins in oranges, particularly vitamin C, but for most Americans they are not at risk of a vitamin C deficiency. We supplement and enrich our food a lot, you’re really not at risk of not eating enough essential vitamins. Getting, say, scurvy would be pretty much impossible in modern day America. Not to mention most of the vitamin C survives.
But the fiber does not survive. The fiber alone is what makes the sugar intake okay - fiber slows and prevents blood sugar spikes, which, over time, is what causes insulin resistance and then diabetes. Drinking orange juice is diabetes fodder. Again, it’s basically soda. Eating oranges doesn’t have that effect because of the fiber.
Also, another note on vitamins: for most vitamins, once you get enough, the rest is wasted. It’s not like eating more vitamin C gives you more and more benefits. No, your body has an amount it needs, which is quite low. Past that, you pass it in urine. The amount you need you reach every day with no effort.
And, additional vitamins still have to be metabolized in the liver and go through the kidneys. Too much vitamin intake is damaging, many doctors can tell you stories of acute liver failure as a result of excessive vitamin intake. It’s basically impossible to do that via food. But when you see those vitamin supplements that are like “2000% daily value” - yeah, don’t take those. You’re not getting any benefit.
We don't really know the situation with C. The urine tube is cleaned but only for a while. We are the only creatures who cant produce it. Some animals produce 200 mg/kg, a 70kg goat makes about 13000 mg. Our RDA is based on scurvy which seems something you'd want to stay far away from. I hear you can safely increase the dosage until you get digestive issues (farting) Nobel laureate Linus Pauling (chemist) lived to be 93 taking 18000 mg per day.
Eating enough protein is also important, especially for older people, to prevent the loss of muscular mass, but that does not change the fact that the food must also include enough "fiber".
The US had for a long time a much too low recommendation of around 0.8 g of protein per kilogram of body weight per day.
That has been discredited by various studies. It is an amount that is sufficient to keep you alive, but it is not sufficient to keep you in good health until an old age.
It is not known with any certainty which is the optimum amount of protein intake. On certain lab animals protein restriction lengthens life, but for now there is no evidence that this also works for humans. Too much protein is known with certainty to be harmful for humans.
I believe that it is likely that the optimum protein intake is somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 grams of protein per day and per kilogram of body weight, for a person with no overweight. For an overweight person, the protein needs do not increase proportionally to the total mass, i.e. the extra fat does not need much protein.
I wonder whether the so low protein recommendation of USA was actually intended for average Americans, which are likely to be overweight, in which case that number might provide an adequate protein intake.
The US is clearly on a path to crumbling infrastructure, waste, inefficiency, and corruption. Seeing that other countries seem to be doing some actual thinking about the future is demoralizing when you cannot get your leaders to care.
I've read and seen more about it than I should have, as a non-American that's never going to live in the US. Press cycles in smaller countries are inundated with US news.
There is probably a lot I don't know so please ask and I'll do my best to explain my knowledge on the topic to the best of my abilities.
> This was done intentionally, with great care, by people far smarter than a ragebait post on HN.
Ad-hominem, you're assuming things without knowing me.
Those people had no prior art except for the Athenian democracy and a handful of other partial examples. They were not gods. They lived in an age without the telegraph, the telephone, TV, the internet, and many other force multipliers for intelligence, communication and country level organization.
They did all right for their time but every garden needs... periodic gardening.
> There are two houses of Congress (the second of which is allocated by population).
Again with the assumptions. I know about the House of Representatives.
> It was done for balance of power
Back in the day when there was no American nation. There are other ways to protect state rights these days, for example by adding more explicit state rights in constitutions.
> The EU has literally emulated this model (see European Commission allocating one per member state).
LOL. Are you comparing the EU, a loose confederation of nation states, with a full-blown federal states? The EU starts from a VERY different historical context (Latvians, Portuguese and Austrians have far less in common than Oregonians, Virginians and Texans). The EU is also hobbled by this system and the US and China constantly mop the floor with the EU in geopolitical terms. Required reading: history of the Articles of Confederation and its outcome.
> Imagine if Germany was allowed to overrule every law and decision in EU because of population alone. EU would cease to exist.
Again, totally different starting position. Also, there are ways to avoid this. The EU uses some for Parliament voting.
Oh, the US badly needs to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, that would help with lots of things.
* * *
Any way, the worst part of this discussion is: the US has such outsized international impact that its shortcomings inflict pain on people around the world, otherwise I would not care.
1. Intentionality does not preclude a mistake. The makeup of the Senate gives outsized power to rural states with very few people in them, and in practice is a huge giveaway to the right wing.
2. The House's size is also capped, and not directly based on population, which is completely unnecessary in this age of digital communication. There is no reason why we couldn't return the number of representatives to being explicitly population-based—say, 1 representative per 50k constituents, or the like. That would increase the size of the House by about 15-fold, make every representative much more dependent on the votes of their particular district, make gerrymandering much harder (as districts will be smaller and there will be more of them), and make the electoral college much more representative and harder to game.
3. See #1.
4. The European Commission is widely criticized as being the least democratic, most unresponsive, most oligarch-friendly body in Europe.
5. "Representative government" does not have to mean "tyranny of the majority". There are plenty of checks and balances even in the current system that would prevent that sort of thing, provided the enforcement mechanisms weren't entirely operated by and for Trump.
lol no, if this is the case then we would have banned beef: a grossly inefficient protein source that takes absurd amount of energy and water, and produce significant greenhouse gas waste. We would also ban disposable cheap goods.
Yet we don't.
If people don't like AI, they should just say so, no need to skirt around.
LLMs rely on many core AI concepts and techniques: neural networks, backpropagation, transformer inference, etc. An LLM is essentially an implementation of AI.
The term AI has been around since 1955, and has been used by the academics ever since then.
You might not like ChatGPT and co, but they're definitely AIs lol, at least in academic sense.
Eh I think the writer should visit poor countries and live among locals. Mistakes and poor judgements compound, and it leads to horrific living conditions (malnutrition, nonexistent hygiene, quack medicines, short-sighted violence, etc)
In fact developed countries are built on top of these "earrings": it's called math (and by extension science in general). If the math is right, it's always right, and it has spared their lucky citizens a LOT of needless misery and wheel-reinvention.
"Thinking for yourself" is overrated if you don't have good framework. See antivaxxers and their "research"
No, this story takes it to the extreme, that you end up basically having no brain.
Take it this way. People seem to judge that LLMs are not conscious and thus have no real inner experience. And that humans do. So if you replaced a human brain with a very powerful LLM (with some simply residual neural matter), you've basically killed the human. He isn't feeling anything at all anymore, he's just an automaton, basically a flesh robot.
I think this story is a weirdly good discussion point because many people still don't seem to "get it" that success is completely fundamentally irrelevant, and what matters is having a good inner life. You are what happens in your mind -- overall good thoughts and inner life = good life; bad thoughts and inner life = bad life. You can theoretically be the richest man in the world and about the most miserable, and very poor and living the best life.
If we don't kill our definition of good life and success (i.e. reaffirming value as pertaining exclusively to the mind), it will sooner or later kill us, or kill what's good in us. The more we can orient our entire society toward good inner lives and not anything else, the better our lives will be.
Then went back to a society safeguarded by the "earrings" (OSHA, FDA, CDC, etc). Poor countries usually don't have the resources and enough HDI to enforce public safety.
Not saying his experience doesnt count, but 1 week is not enough to experience that crushing learned helplessness when everyone around you keep doing stupid sh*t and sabotaging themselves and others near them.
Which is why Trump defunding public safety agencies is baffling to me, a person from a poor country. Such a decadent behavior.
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