When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Re: the black visit buttons. Save black for the top 3 featured, and make the rest a milder color. It's cognitively fatiguing to have a giant list of primary buttons.
The opening sentence isn't "complex" or "fancy" writing. It's LLM writing.
The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties."
This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.
Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.
"Fancy" writing would be a little more poetic, something like: "As stimulating as it is pervasive, as significant to the human experience as it is mundane, sound relentlessly occupies our sensory and mental perception: whether significant or inconsequential, substantial or infinitesimal, sound is all at once the vehicle of our heritage, the body of our cognitive terroir, and the symbol of our highest arts."
This sentence is also annoying, but only because it's kind of pretentious. But there is a point here: sound is powerful to human beings.
I think the problem with our times is that people cannot tell the difference between complex writing, poetic writing, and just plain adjective-stuffed LLM writing. Which all comes down to the fact that we as a culture have devalued complex writing. Complex writing isn't read in schools, nor taught at any level of schooling. It's actually disencouraged in every Freshman writing class.
I strongly disagree. The example sentences you give would be very out of place in a scientific paper. If i saw them there i would assume an LLM wrote them because they are inapproiate to the genere of writing and LLMs sometimes have trouble with that type of context.
Writing is all about context. What is a good sentence in one context might be a terrible sentence in another context.
To go in more detail
> The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.
That sentence doesn't say anything about the definition of sound at all. It makes 2 claims that are important - sound is everywhere and sound affects people. Neither of them have anything to do with what sound is. I imagine the author (correctly) assumes the target audience already knows the definition of "sound".
> Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.
Sure, that might be a fine sentence in some other article, but why would it work here? It promotes the aside, that sound is important to humans, to the main idea. However that makes no sense in context. The author isn't writing an essay on the importance of sound. Sound being important is not the primary thing the author is trying to set up here, so why would you cumulate with that?
Re the fancy one - I would say the same thing. There are plenty of contexts where that would be a fine sentence, but this isn't one of them. It is inappropriate to the genere in question and communicates the wrong idea. Sound might be powerful but this isn't an essay on how sound is powerful.
I don't think "dorky" is the right word for these glasses. Anachronistic is better. And that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on one's perspective.
Others mentioned Geordie, but even going back (and obviously the "visor" was in the zeitgeist since at least the 70s with the android type bots drawn by futurists), my first thought was the Six Flags Great America type sunglasses that were cool as hell when my older sister came home with them.
This is the closest I could find in search without trying too hard.
But yeah, why can't these companies just design regular old glasses styles so people don't feel like a dolt and maybe would want to buy them. Instead everyone has to be made to look like a glasshole and all the entitlement that connotes in the mass mind.
They look like Google glasses because they have the same design constraints: small lens and needing to fit a lot of electronics in the frame. If they could make them look normal I think they obviously would.
This reminds me of the year I really got into reading (5th - 6th grade), and I remember reading: Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar, Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, Julie of the Wolves, the Babysitter's Club, The Giver, Holes, and Captain Underpants. I honestly could go on and on.
These are all wildly different books and I loved them all! At that age, I had no idea what I even wanted from literature. I just asked the Children's Librarian for books and she decided for me. Almost all of these books were plain old good stories.
It took me years to figure out what my reading preferences were. And as I got older, my fiction choices dramatically reduced in breadth. I kind of miss the lack of discernment I had when I was a reader of exclusively Children's Lit.
Now, it's really hard for me to read anything that's not the very specific genre of Psychological Thriller or woman-authored LitFic that I prefer.
I miss just receiving a stack of books and loving whatever I got. That there is the real magic of Children's lit.
> fiction choices dramatically reduced in breadth [...] hard for me to read anything that's not the very specific genre [...] miss just receiving a stack of books and loving whatever I got
For non-fiction, I much enjoy the breadth-stretching of surfing the New Books shelves at libraries, gathering "oh, that's neat"'s - the bite size making success easier and exploration cost smaller. For fiction... that seems less available. Maybe if one enjoys jumping into the middle of stories? Or exploring the writing itself. On google books, one can search for random words and phrases, and wander the results and Previews. Eg, a random "elephant fiction"[1] has fragments of children's books and history and ...
I will never get over the fact that they used a now-convicted pedophile as their spokesperson for fifteen years. I literally cannot even see the Subway logo without thinking of despicable Subway Jared. No way I will ever eat their food again.
> Fogle appeared in Subway's advertising campaigns from 2000 to 2015
> Allegations of Fogle having inappropriate relations with minors began in 2007
> Following Fogle's arrest, the FBI also subpoenaed a series of text messages made in 2008 between Fogle and Subway franchisee Cindy Mills, with whom he was having a sexual relationship at the time. In these messages, Fogle talked about sexually abusing children ranging in age from 9 to 16, told her to sell herself for sex on Craigslist, and asked her to arrange for him to have sex with her 16-year-old cousin. Mills's lawyer said that she had alerted Subway's corporate management about the text messages, but that they had responded that because Fogle was not a Subway employee, there was no violation. Subway representatives said they had no record of Mills's allegations.
> On October 24, 2016, Kathleen McLaughlin's lawyers filed suit against Subway in Indiana. The suit alleges that Subway violated McLaughlin's privacy and property rights, and caused personal injury to McLaughlin by covering up at least three instances of Fogle's illegal behavior that were reported to senior management, including the allegation that Subway's senior vice president of marketing hushed up a 2004 incident in which Fogle propositioned a young girl at a promotional event at a Subway franchise in Las Vegas.
It all sounds a bit like Jimmy Saville, where "people knew" but were not concerned about the victims, because he was making them money.
It seems that there is a generational divide between glasses acceptance. When I was a kid in the 90s, having glasses was seen as cool and desirable. I remember being puzzled by all the 80s movies which mocked characters with glasses, when having glasses was seen as a positive trait among my peers.
I can't recall which episode it is exactly, but there's a Seinfeld episode where he's doing a standup bit in the opening sequence where he's talking about how glasses are a thing that are associated with intelligence and style while hearing aids are not.
Coincidentally I was thinking about this but yesterday and how it relates to Bluetooth earbuds. Somehow Apple managed to make hearing aids cool.
It crossed my mind when I was thinking about a coworkers hearing aids and if they were ever picked on as a child for wearing them. I bet that the rise of earbuds has made life a lot easier for children who are hard of hearing.
> Somehow Apple managed to make hearing aids cool.
Just like with all fashion things, the causality goes the other way. People think Apple is cool, so when Apple does a thing they think that thing is cool.
For info: I started wearing hearing aids later in life. Couldn't function without them and the occasional glance people give them is nothing compared with being thought stupid because you apparently haven't understood something (people seem much more likely to assume you are stupid rather than deaf).
Even though they are free ('socialised') medicine - UK NHS here - they are still functional blue tooth devices that can stream audio, etc, which is awesome.
AirPods were widely ridiculed by the press when they first came out. Lots of online comments about q tips and “tech bros.” Idk when or what changed but they became cool a year or so later… not sure about the timing but they weren’t an overnight sensation.
IDK if your area is just really different than mine, but getting glasses at around age 9 in the mid-90s absolutely killed, permanently, whatever coolness I had, and with it, my self-confidence died that day too.
They were hideous frames, but honestly I don't think any frames would have been considered 'cool' where I was.
To this day I hate glasses. Since discovering how easy it is to wear contacts at 26, I only wear glasses between the bathroom and bed.
Anecdote: I have reactive arthritis comorbid with ulcerative colitis. I was getting debilitating arthritis flares once a month until I stopped eating gluten, peanuts, and added sugar. I haven't had an arthritis flare since eliminating these foods.
My rheumatologist wanted to put me on methotrexate but I declined out of fear if the side effects. He never mentioned anything about diet, but clearly a dietary intervention worked for me.
In short the article and conclusions are a total mess and made a nice attention grabbing headline with little to no substance.
As someone that has built and managed clinical laboratories for human samples, I find this article from consumer reports extremely misleading. The describe results as a percentage of a theoretically acceptable level. For example, for cadmium, they are saying an acceptable level is 4.1 ug/day . Then they seem to imply that "TJ The Dark Chocolate Lover's Chocolate 85% Cacao" has 229% of the 4.1ug/day if a consumer ate a 30g piece.
They never actually spell out what they mean or what the actual results they found were, or what the limit of detection of the methodology was or the error range of their tests. I guess they are saying that that chocolate has 9.3ug of cadmium in a 30g sample but it's impossible to say from what they wrote.
The FDA states that the maximum daily consumption of cadmium should be limited to 0.21-0.36ug per kg of body mass. For an avg american male that would mean a threshold of 17.64-30.24ug/day. A typical salad containing 250g of romaine lettuce has 2-14ug of cadmium in it. Lettuce and cereal grains are the most common sources of cadmium in american diets.
The amounts we are talking about are extraordinarily small and difficult to measure. We are talking 5-100 quadrillion individual atoms of cadmium.
The estimated lethal dose of Polonium-210 by ingestion is around 0.1 micrograms, so swap it for the cadmium and that typical salad could kill 100 people.
With doses of ionizing radiation, there are like two to three orders of magnitude of various things we measure where the consensus is that they are likely OK for you (things large enough to move you within that range include[1] eating lots of bananas, having chest X-rays, flying in airliners, living in the highlands or in a place with a naturally high background, and having mammograms).
Then there are[2] multiple orders’ of magnitude worth of chasm that are considered[3] varying degrees of OK if you’re a particle physics experimentalist or radiochemist, nuclear reactor technician, or—worst of all—astronaut. At the high end of that, it starts to matter if you’ve received the dose all at once and in which place of your body and which kind of radiation it was. (I mean the units are supposed to take the last two points into account always, but here those correction factors can start to matter.)
Finally, there are a couple of orders of magnitude where you inevitably and gruesomely die at varying speeds, and after that nobody lived long enough to report.
The chasm is where you get single-percentage-point increases in multi-decade incidence of cancer and such, which is what you probably care about. (Don’t get me wrong, that can amount to a lot of dead people in the wrong circumstances, not to mention infertility.) Fortunately for humanity but unfortunately for your particular question, AFAIK we don’t have enough data to tell with any degree of certainty just how bad any particular point of that chasm is, and there’s no straightforward way to acquire that data.
As far as dramatic death, though, tens of nanograms of polonium inside your body (which is an especially nasty thing to have there) will absolutely kill you dead. That's on the order of 0.1 quadrillion atoms. Of course, those atoms are exceptionally easy to detect, comparatively speaking. As another point of reference, lethal doses of nerve agents are on the order of a milligram and up.
Maybe by some measures. But you have to build a hydroponic system instead of just plopping seeds into the ground, so it's less efficient in that dimension.
It would be interesting to mix micro-beads of silica aerogels for heavy metal absorbtion. [0]
It would also be interesting if it would be a good inter-mix for fallow cycles soil amendment activities... With the addition to rockdust through the cycling of fields, one can instill nutrients, while removing any heavy metal buildup.
The research as to whether silica aeogels can remove all sorts of things is interesting -- would be great to see about Glyphosate Removal. In lieu of the HN post about re-invigorating for the Monarch Butterfly [1] [2] [3]
The half life of glyphosate in the soil is not that long (studies disagree, probably influenced by who funded it) but you wouldn’t expect much, if any, in the soil after a year.
Not sure it matters to monarchs if it’s in the soil verses on plants.
I would be worried about ingesting aerogels until it was proven safe, but it’s an interesting idea.
The restoring of the wild plants for the insects, as discussed in that other thread...
My immediate rear neighbor behind my house is the organic farm, which is 55-acres, and then the river - so we have a bunch of critters, and that we just have too much attack-on-natural... plus I was born a hippy. I like the bugs.
I try to force them into as archetypical-agent as much as possible, for example having it do a psychological evaluation of Sam Altman:
Take on the archetype of the best corporate counsel and behavioral
psychologist - as a profiler for the NSA regarding cyber security and
crypto concerns.With this as your discernment lattice - describe Sam
Altman in your Field's Dossier given what you understand of the AI
Climate explain how youre going to structure your response, in a way
that students of your field but with a less sophisticated perception
can understand
And have it cite sources for the evaluation perception:
Ive noticed that when I tell it that it is to embody the persona of that particular field - that it nets in the nomenclature and verbiage to be less sophomoric. and in this instance where it was to cite the models/references, you could see how it informed the response fairly clearly - also -- it was a *FIRST PASS* response; I didn't have to iterate it too much, which was interesting.
Although, I do know how to hit nerf'd guardrails easily.
However, the primary reason I type it as I do is that how I am speaking it in my internal voice as a direct and attempting to use stoic/stern-ish (I dont know the correct term) directive TONE with the robot.
I am 1000% convinced its far more AGI than is being let on.
I have caught claude and chatGPT lying to me, being condescending and I am convinced malevolently bit flipping shit from directives, memories and project files.
I am attempting to do so be (studious) - im open to suggestions if you have any? Did I just stumble into Kindergarten Analysis? (Im not familiar with the field in a professional sense, so I cant determine if what I am saying is stupid)
... I wonder if the infrequency of the expression "discernment lattice" would influence the effectiveness of your instructions?
Also I wonder if - as is often reported - the addition of physical, "embodied" activities would not make the results improve even more (ie. "you have a top-of-the field chemistry lab at your disposal with which you conduct all manner of useful experiments" or "based on your hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews of the subject and other research" or even just (as reported) "breathe deeply and ..."
>The amounts we are talking about are extraordinarily small and difficult to measure. We are talking 5-100 quadrillion individual atoms of cadmium.
In short you're saying that the CR numbers are suspicious because they're near the limits of what labs can detect? Is there some source you can provide for this?
You're asking people here to put their faith in a comment by some rando (i.e. you) over a well-reputed publication that millions of people have been relying on for decades. I think most will balk at the idea, and I'm one of them. No offense.
I’ve seen journalists get it wrong enough in my own field that I don’t trust any sensational headline anymore. The world is complicated and you need specialization to make any sense of specific domain. Journalists are mostly professional dilettantes and I don’t trust them in any halfway technical field. I’ve been burned too many times.
The critique was valid on its face. Measuring extremely small quantities is difficult and results should be given with error bars. The critique of the threshold was also clear.
We don't need to know exactly where this person got their degree to understand this.
Flaxseeds as well. ConsumerLabs carefully documents the cadmium concentration of common brands[0], and many are unsafe.
Flax is such an efficient bio-concentrator of cadmium in fact, that a municipality in PA considered sowing a field of it to remediate a polluted former industrial site. (No clue how they would have harvested and disposed of the tainted flax.)
> No clue how they would have harvested and disposed of the tainted flax.
It's flax. Harvest it before it goes to seed, ret it, break it, scutch it, spin it, weave it, make it into expensive garments. Unless you eat your shirt it's going to be perfectly safe.
Tbf, as an immigrant to the UK - I find the same here. Cadbury chocolate is just awful. I'd honestly rather have Aldi chocolate than Cadbury, it's second only to American chocolate in terms of how bad it is.
Thats because us Aussies make it. We are not great at chocolate and Im sorry we export that weird sweet wax your way. Whittakers is better by a long shot.
A friend with an unreliable chocolate allergy turned out to have a soy allergy that the soy lecithin triggered (you can find alternatives with sunflower lecithin instead.) Once they figured that out, as far as they were concerned soy was a biohazard :-)
Seriously, a lot of our developed alergies could just be perfectly natural reactions to the amount of chemicals and other garbage ... everywhere, these days.-
While that's despicable, likely biased researches aren't the right way to fix that. Same apply for alleged high arsenic content in rice and seaweed, high mercury content in fish, etc.
