That's an interesting link, thank you.
The "nuances or causal factors" do show up -- somewhat -- farther down that report:

I definitely can't imagine any issues running a functional market economy under the theory that the first amendment allows you to make or conceal any claim you like about a product.

Will this change my tax exposure when providing 'gratuities' to supreme court justices?

I think this is the latter case, where the backups are useless to signal or law enforcement, and can only be decrypted by the keys that you hold on your device (or in a backup if you made one). The keys get spread to all the devices you have logged in to signal, so if you have more than one you're reasonably ok to not make an effort to back them up explicitly. If you lost all your logged in devices and had no backup of the keys, their cloud backup would be useless, but it's not super likely I don't think.

It's absolutely the case that you could just use any random cloud backup provider, and that their service is basically an overpriced, limited version of what you can get elsewhere. But even with all those caveats, I think it's a pretty good idea for them to offer this service. Most non-technical people could understand how to back up their chat data to some other cloud provider, but they simply don't want to learn. They'd rather tick a box in the app and pay $24 per year forever.

Personally that's not me, sounds like it's not you, but I'm not offended that the option exists, and I think it's an ok way for them to secure $2 recurring donations in exchange for a token service.

It seems like an open question whether being repetitive and rule based is actually a virtue as an AI use case or not.

'AI' is an easy sell for people who want to do some 'digital transformation' they can thought-leader about on linkedin without actually doing the ditch-digging involved in solving the problem conventionally "Hey, just throw some unstructured inputs at the problem and the magic of Agentic will make the answer come out!"; but that's not really a a good argument in favor of doing it that way. Dealing with such a cryptic, unpredictable, and expensive tool is at its most compelling when you have a problem that isn't readily amenable to conventional solutions; while it looks a lot like sheer laziness when you take a problem that basically just requires some form validation logic and a decision tree and throw an LLM at it because you can't be bothered to construct the decision tree.

There are definitely problems, some of them even useful, that are absolutely not amenable to conventional approaches; and those at least have the argument that perhaps unpredictable results are better than no results or manual results; but if you've got some desperately conventional business logic case that someone is turning into an 'AI' project either because they are a trend chaser or because they think that programming is an obscurantist conspiracy against the natural language Idea Guys by fiddly syntax nerds that's not a good sign.

As a direct test of the tool that sounds pretty underwhelming(and it's not a cheap upsell); but what seems really concerning is the second order effects. Your average office environment doesn't exactly lack for emails or bad powerpoint decks; and both get chiseled right out of the productivity of the people expected to read or sit through them. The more cynical sales types just go directly to selling you the inhuman centipede solution; where everyone else also needs a copilot license so they can summarize the increased volume of copilot-authored material; but that only bandaids the "if it's not worth writing why are you trying to write more of it?" problem.

I do very much understand what you're saying and it certainly adds to the complexity. One cannot put sociological or psychological factors on a box.

That aspect of the problem is indeed going to be much harder to deal with than, say, salt, trans fats, or known carcinogenic compounds.

Honestly, I'm not sure what you can do about those aspects - financial incentives help a little, but honestly I don't believe they make a huge difference - which is why I've concentrated on unsafe levels of ingredients, because although we don't know exactly what those should be, we've at least got a rough idea for some of them. It's going to be a delicate one, though -- you don't want to overly restrict sources of sugar because diabetics can suffer from crashes due to excessively low sugar just as badly as excessively high levels, and some items get unfairly maligned (chocolate, per se, isn't bad for you, it's the additives, and indeed particularly high percentage chocolate can be helpful for the heart).

But, yes, I absolutely agree with your overarching point that the problems are primarily psychological and sociological. I just don't have the faintest idea of how these can be tackled. Jamie Oliver tried (albeit not very well, but he did at least try) and the pushback was borderline nuclear, and that was where there was clear and compelling evidence of significant difference in health and functionality. If you can barely escape with your life for saying eating better reduces sickness and improve concentration, and pushing for changes where these two factors essentially dictate whether a person is functional in life, then I don't hold out hope for change where it's more ambiguous or the economics are much tougher.

There are papers arguing that smoothies aren't as good as eating real fruit because it seems that there's actually a benefit to having to break down cell walls, even at the expense of not getting 100% of the nutrients from it. However, cooking food breaks down cell walls, although obviously not to the same degree. It's not clear that breaking down cell walls is harmful, even if it's not beneficial.

A lot of ultra-processed foods have been accused of having unhealthy levels of certain ingredients (usually sugars or salt) and certain styles of cooking can add harmful compounds.

It would seem reasonable to say that there's a band at which a given ingredient is beneficial (analogous to a therapeutic threshold), with levels above that being increasingly harmful, eventually reaching a recognised toxic threshold. In terms of the harmful compounds from cooking, it seems reasonable to suggest that, below a certain level, the body's mechanisms can handle them without any issue, that it's only above that that there's any kind of problem.

So it would seem that we've got three factors - processing that can decrease benefits, ingredients that follow a curve that reaches a maximum before plunging, and processing that can increase harm.

Nobody wants to be given a complicated code that they need to look up, but it would seem reasonable that you can give a food a score out of three, where it would get 3 if you get maximum benefit and no harm, where you then subtract for reduced benefit and increased harm. That shouldn't be too hard for consumers, most people can count to 3.

Yeah, understood, food is going to vary, since it's all uncontrolled ingredients and processing itself is very uncontrolled. So take two or three examples as a fair "representative sample". Further, most manufacturers can't afford to do the kind of testing needed, and our understanding of harm varies with time. No problem. Give a guidebook, updated maybe once every couple of years, on how to estimate a value, which can be used, but require them to use a measured value if measured, where the value is marked E or M depending on whether it's estimated or measured.

It's not perfect, it's arguably not terribly precise (since there's no way to indicate how much a food item is going to vary), and it's certainly not an indication of any "absolute truth" (as we don't know how beneficial or harmful quite a few things are, food science is horribly inexact), but it has to be better than the current system because - quite honestly - it would be hard to be worse than the current system.

But it's simple enough to be understandable and should be much less prone to really bizarre outcomes.

It's also not clear why we'd need investors if AI good enough to eat all the jobs exists. Even without 'AI' a fairly massive amount of investment is handled by the relatively simple 'just dump it in an index fund and don't touch it, idiot' algorithm; and even allegedly sophisticated professionals have a fairly tepid track record when it comes to actually realizing market-beating returns.

Obviously it's this guy's job to promote retail investing as a cure-all; because that's what he sells; but this seems transparently stupid.

If 'AI' has eaten all the jobs; why exactly would we have humans 'investing' for a living? Surely AI good enough to eat all the jobs could also match or exceed the performance of the average trader?

This proposal basically seems like UBI, but capitalism-washed with a pointless (and likely dangerous; given that retail noise trading is basically gambling for people who think they are too smart for gambling) financial services layer tacked on to avoid admitting that it's UBI by pretending that everyone is an investor instead.

We may not have had the safety culture to the same degree; but, given the number of insecticides that are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors not miles off the efficacy of their more alarmingly named colleagues among the g-series and v-series nerve agents; it seems pretty likely that 50s chemists knew full well that they were poking some very, very, troublesome compounds.

Probably not in a position to tease out some of the more subtle neuroanatomical changes at low prenatal doses or the like given medical imaging of the time; but with a bunch of these we are talking about either compounds we worried about IG Farben tinkering with during the war or close analogs thereof.

Fair. MY point is that I don't trust that source because whomever/whatever wrote it made a logical error.

OK. But copied the quote from where? I can't find a source worded like that.

How is 868 a decrease from 813?