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.

50 years later and 26mph slower than Italy's high speed rail,30 years later and 40mph slower than France, 15 years later and 20mph slower than Spain, in a country with an awful lot more money, greater access to modern technology, a larger engineering pool, and a lot of relatively flat land.

Still, one shouldn't complain. America is, at least, moving in a sensible direction on train travel, which is an improvement over how things were in 2000 when the Federal government weren't able to get a number of States to build train lines even if the Feds paid for everything.

It's basically a year to a year and a half off people's life expectancies, from the heat alone.

Although this is not trivial, the antivaxxer movement will likely chop 10-15 years off life expectancies and greatly reduce quality of life for much of the remainder, same again for the expected massive reduction in air quality that will result from modern political movements, and the absurd puritanical movement in the US will likely chop another 10-15 years off the life expectancies of women.

These are, therefore, substantially more significant, although politically impossible to deal with right now.

I fully expect that, if current trends prevail, by 2040, life expectancies will resemble those of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

Attending work for 2 days means I pay £190 per week to work, with no recompense from the company. Because there's a decent amount of holiday time, my wages have only dropped £9000 per year from last year. If I needed to attend 5 days a week, I would have to leave the only job that I have ever held that actually made any functional effort to handle my disabilities. In other words, if I lost this job, I would not be capable of functionally working in any job at all, simply because most companes don't give a damn about disabilities. Legally, however, I would be deemed "capable of work". As such, I would have no wages and no benefits. Once my money ran out, I'd be on the streets. There is simply no viable alternative.

If a business guy thinks adding to the homeless is the best way to improve work morale, then maybe he's not a business guy that holds any opinion of value. He may well be listened to, which will cause a LOT of problems for a LOT of people and WILL increase unemployent and, in countries with failing industry, increase the homelessness of people who are far more competent than him, but that does not make his opinion valuable, merely incredibly stupid and sickeningly naive.

I remember when IBM, SGI, Infornix, Oracle, and HP first got involved in Linux. At the time, I included patches from some of them in the Functionally Overloaded Linux Kernel.

I proposed, back then, a simple league table for commercial support of Linux: Every new major feature or software product got so many points, and every bugfix release got a smaller number of points. Kernel features that made it into the mainstream kernel would qualify as goals for, kernel features and products discontinued were goals against. Closed-source contributions got half points, and were also considered goals against.

It would then be obvious which companies were serious and which were piggybacking, and it would also be clear who understood the philosophy, not just the opportunity.

Such a table would have ensured that nobody forgot the companies who contributed. Quite the opposite. There'd be an incentive to encourage the team you supported to improve position in the table.

Of course, no such league table ever happened. I could have maintained such a table without difficulty, but it would require the vendors to openly say what they'd contributed. I couldn't invent one out of thin air.

So I'd say Oracle has to look at themselves, not just the Linux community.

It's possible to conjecture - we know it collided with something massive, so if said body contained very limited radioactive materials, one might expect this to reduce the radioactivity per unit mass.

Is this the answer? Probably not, but it's good enough (I think) to argue that a simple answer is possible.

It has never worked in any empire, it has never worked in any software development team, it has never worked in any rock or metal band. I see very very little reason for saying there "should" be a power struggle, that always ends badly with no exceptions in any domain. C++ has never been in the kernel, so it's hard to see how Rust could defeat it there. Rust is unlikely to replace C because they do different things well - if the Linux devs have half the intelligence they seem to, there will be a natural federation.

And that is the key concept. Linux is, by its very nature, a federated OS kernel, many teams working in their territory but cooperating with other teams working in other territories through a central "government" that happens to have a hereditary god as head of the state machine.

The problem there is that the BSD folk did that, once William Jolitz quit, and found that people followed a very large number of different groups, to the point where none of the BSDs really progressed the way they could, and perhaps should, have done. The scene splintered. One of the most rock-solid, reliable Unix kernels ever devised has, to put it bluntly, not died (despite Netcraft confirming it) but seriously dwindled into a small niche.

You've got to remember, 386BSD came out a year or so before Linux and had X11 running on it by version 0.1 because essentially all the major challenges had already been overcome. It was THE OS to use, for a long time, for most serious geeks, although numbers were seriously cut into when Manchester Regional Computing Centre produced what was possibly the very first Linux distro, using Shoestring as the bootstrap. The MCC distro was easy to install - far easier than any BSD - and although it couldn't do much, it did turn heads. Further, Linux was gelling around a standard framework, whilst BSD by that time was starting to fragment and bicker.

My great fear is that, when Linus finally stops running the show, Linux will suffer much the same fate. There's a LOT of highly-strung egos involved, and a LOT of very rich companies who would far far prefer Linux to be owned solely by them.

*tries to think, but his head explodes from the sheer number of counter-examples.

I really really wood knot want to corner on wooden wheels. They'd turn to Ash and would be a Birch to fix.

*ignores sarcasm because, well, I have a 4 digit UID and get to.

I think everyone pretty much knew it already, the point is that I can measure the complexity at which AI breaks, which is quite different from merely qualitatively feeling that it doesn't work as well as the claims say.

Agreed, "AI safety" is neither practical nor possible, in part because AI has no awareness or meaning, in part because AI has no capacity for introspection, but also because AI is only useful if it can handle hard questions and hard questions are, by their nature, not safe, and (as usual) because it would utterly destroy the entire economic model of the AI companies.

I can't find any obvious evidence that the guy really knows what "humanity-advancing" means, beyond advancing his own take on the world.

Gemini still struggles with complex problems and large numbers of files. These, IMHO, should take priority over personalisation. I've mentioned in my journal that it is really struggling on anything that is non-trivial. Why should I care what it remembers if it is going to be used in engineering but can't solve engineering problems in areas where you'd actually want AI?

The benchtest I'm using is, yes, more complicated than figuring out how to wire up a Christmas lights display. On the other hand, it's also where it's going to get used and where it needs to work well.

Let's leave the pretty baubles to one side and actually get Gemini working well, OK?