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Comment Re:There is already a safe subset of C++ (Score 1) 82

Ish.

I would not trust C++ for safety-critical work as MISRA can only limit features, it can't add support for contracts.

There have been other dialects of C++ - Aspect-Oriented C++ and Feature-Oriented C++ being the two that I monitored closely. You can't really do either by using subsetting, regardless of mechanism.

IMHO, it might be easier to reverse the problem. Instead of having specific subsets for specific tasks, where you drill down to the subset you want, have specific subsets for specific mechanisms where you build up to the feature set you need.

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Journal Journal: Antiques being melted down 3

A restoration expert in Egypt has been arrested for stealing a 3,000 year old bracelet and selling it purely for the gold content, with the bracelet then melted down with other jewellery. Obviously, this sort of artefact CANNOT be replaced. Ever. And any and all scientific value it may have held has now been lost forever. It is almost certain that this is not the first such artefact destroyed.

Comment Re:Credit scores are not what you think they are (Score 1) 105

Credit scores don't reflect how well you are doing. Their purpose is to tell lenders how well they can milk you. It's an indicator of how exploitable you are and many people out there completely miss this fact.

My credit score is well over 800 and I don't see how I'm exploitable. I haven't paid any CC fees or interest in decades, and have no debt anywhere else. But maybe I'm missing something obvious. Can you explain a bit? (serious question).

Comment Re:An interesting problem. (Score 1) 76

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.

Comment An interesting problem. (Score 1) 76

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.

Comment Re:Not a good direction (Score 1) 155

Most of the restaurants I go to don't even serve alcohol. Of course, I live in Utah, which is at the very bottom of the alcohol consumption per capita chart. Here restaurants all have normal fountain drinks, water, and then a wide array of specialty drinks, many of which are just normal sodas with some stuff added in.

Being a restaurant owner is hard. The margins on most food is slim. The margins on drinks (alcoholic or not), on the other hand, are ridiculous. There's a reason why sit down restaurants start you with something to drink, and why fast food places bundle sodas. To a very real extent these businesses make their money upselling you from drinking plain water.

Comment Re:Everything About AI is Harmful (Score 2) 72

I have yet to see AI do anything actually useful, that couldn't be done with existing tools.

I take it you're not a developer. Used properly it's a huge time-saver. It does a lot of the grunt work while I do the thinking and planning and reviewing. I've been programming since 1980. After 44 years without it and 1 with it I wouldn't want to go back.

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