Welcome! This is a good community for non-political US questions, and for more general questions there’s !asklemmy@lemmy.world, and maybe others depending on the nature of your questions

My diet is pretty SAD. It’s probably higher quality than average, since I’ll avoid the cheapest possible foods that are chock full of artificial this or that, but it’s still not as good as eating real food.

Do you know if there’s something like this chart, but for food instead of supplements?

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-scientific-evidence-for-nutritional-supplements-vizsweet/

I’ve seen that seed oils are bad. I’ve also seen people that say all oil is bad, and (without having looked into this at all), it seems like the “all oil is bad” people are probably overreacting and it’s something more specific like seed oils or something like that (though what specifically about them is bad?). It’d be nice to see a chart like above with handy links to scientific papers.

While looking this up btw, I found that Scientific American just published something today about seed oils:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/are-seed-oils-bad-for-you-debunking-a-viral-social-media-myth/

I wonder if it might be a kick in the pants to get us out of a local minimum. That’s probably optimistic as you point out, but what if there’s a huge shift towards better food, so that even if you’re not on it, it’s more effort to eat bad food?

Huh, just discovered that it’s now generic in Canada

Semaglutide’s patent protection expired in Canada at the beginning of 2026. (Novo Nordisk failed to pay a required patent maintenance fee.)

My understanding is that it’ll be generic in the US soon too, and any improvements are just in delivery methods (pill vs injection). I’d agree that if it is able to be locked behind expensive patents that there might not be much societal change, but if you assume that it’s as easy to get as tylenol or something, that seems big.

The Bitter Lesson talks about speech recognition instead of synthesis, but I would guess that it’s a similar dynamic:

In speech recognition, there was an early competition, sponsored by DARPA, in the 1970s. Entrants included a host of special methods that took advantage of human knowledge—knowledge of words, of phonemes, of the human vocal tract, etc. On the other side were newer methods that were more statistical in nature and did much more computation, based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Again, the statistical methods won out over the human-knowledge-based methods. This led to a major change in all of natural language processing, gradually over decades, where statistics and computation came to dominate the field. The recent rise of deep learning in speech recognition is the most recent step in this consistent direction. Deep learning methods rely even less on human knowledge, and use even more computation, together with learning on huge training sets, to produce dramatically better speech recognition systems. As in the games, researchers always tried to make systems that worked the way the researchers thought their own minds worked—they tried to put that knowledge in their systems—but it proved ultimately counterproductive, and a colossal waste of researcher’s time, when, through Moore’s law, massive computation became available and a means was found to put it to good use.

Also posted over in !discuss@discuss.online here, since I was reminded of the essay

I posted about this a bit ago, but that likely wouldn’t work:

In a First, AI Models Analyze Language As Well As a Human Expert

https://discuss.online/post/30279537

Any language you picked or invented would just add to the training data and help the AI out.

Neither, “Good” and “Evil” can’t exist absolutely and the universe doesn’t care one whit about any of us. Our morality was shaped by what was evolutionarily adaptive, and we developed post-hoc reasoning for it with the nice big brains we evolved.

I’ve noticed that. Shoutout to !smbc@discuss.online btw, where I post SMBC comics daily. I wonder if Zach would be amenable to integrating with the Fediverse somehow, seems like that would work nicely for comments.

I thought these two books were good. Written by a neuroscientist talking specifically about grief:

https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/books/the-grieving-brain

https://maryfrancesoconnor.org/books/the-grieving-body

One crucial thing is that the popular conception of grief as 5 sequential stages is completely wrong. Those are 5 possible options out of more that you’ll likely bounce between over time. Grief is also not improved by a hangover, so it’s best to avoid alcohol and the like.

Some people will never admit it and go to absurd lengths to hate on him, like the person that wrote this article, Mamdani picks his mentor: The woke, radical, anti-Israel YouTuber Ms. Rachel:

Why would the man about to be sworn in as mayor of America’s largest city elevate a woke, anti-Israel YouTube children’s entertainer to his inner circle, appointing her as a prime member of his inaugural committee?

Simple: Because Mamdani himself is a child.

I thought it was parody at first, but it seems to be real.

As much as possible, I don’t use proprietary software. I bought a Pixel phone specifically so that I could run GrapheneOS (which has been great), and the only non-FOSS stuff I use is basically web tools for communication, like Slack/Discord/etc. As much as web-as-a-platform sucks (and it has many shortcomings), at least things tend to just work now on Linux, one way or another.

Lemmy just released 0.19.14, which addresses this somehow, but the announcement is vague:

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-12-08_-_Lemmy_Release_0.19.14

https://discuss.online/post/31855056

Recently some malicious users started to use an exploit where they would post rule violating content and then delete the account. This would prevent admins and mods from viewing the user profile to find other posts, and would also prevent federation of ban actions.

The new release fixes these problems. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to solve this.

Sourcing your posts from microfiche is one of the more impressive ways of contributing to the Fediverse, congrats!

The big news will be that John Titor is being sent back in time to save us from the Epochalypse:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

In his online postings, Titor claimed to be an American soldier from the year 2036, based in Tampa, Florida. He said that he was assigned to a governmental time-travel project, and that as part of the project he was sent back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer, which was needed to debug various legacy computer programs that existed in 2036

Generally speaking, in the US, you can leave with no notice. I’m sure the company would like a couple of month’s notice, but I’m not aware of any way they could force that (IANAL). There’s situations where it might matter, like if you signed something that has language like “i’ll keep working for you for at least a year, if you pay for my school”, but at that point you should talk to a lawyer.

Generally you’ll have sign an employment contract that you should check, and have a lawyer look over if it’s going to matter. A lot of non-competes on paper are unenforceable, but IANAL.

OTOH, the threat is sometimes good enough. I know a hair stylist that left her job and had to work other jobs for a year. The non-compete was almost certainly unenforceable, but the owner at her previous employer was crazy and petty, and likely would’ve tried to throw lots of legal resources at it.

IMO free will is commonly misunderstood. It’s not an absolute property, it’s a relative statement. In other words, something doesn’t “have” free will, the term is merely shorthand for “behavior that can’t be predicted”. To me, a rock doesn’t have free will because I can use relatively simple physics to predict its behavior perfectly. Other humans have much more free will because it’s much harder to predict their behavior. A bug is somewhere in the middle. To a superhuman intelligence (supercomputer, aliens, deity, take your pick), humans don’t have free will, because our behavior can be perfectly predicted.

That squares with my opinion on QM in that even if deterministic interpretations of QM are eventually rigorously ruled out, I would still be of the opinion that if we could poke through the underlying substrate and query an intelligence there, our behavior would be perfectly predictable. Much like a video game character discovering the math behind the RNG that controls their universe. So they’re kind of orthogonal concepts, but somewhat related.

100%, I avoid using plastics as much as possible around anything that I ingest that involved heat somewhere in the production process. Not entirely possible, but I do what I can.