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brians commented on Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)   ucsf.edu/news/2016/09/404... · Posted by u/aldarion
llm_nerd · a month ago
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one.

See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.

> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you

The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.

Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".

brians · a month ago
The US FDA requires that schools not serve whole milk or any products containing normal and natural saturated fats, and instead serve “low fat” versions which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.

You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.

brians commented on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”   twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/rishabhaiover
simonw · a month ago
I'm not arguing for using LLMs as an abstraction.

I'm saying that a key component of the dependency calculation has changed.

It used to be that one of the most influential facts affecting your decision to add a new library was the cost of writing the subset of code that you needed yourself. If writing that code and the accompanying tests represented more than an hour of work, a library was usually a better investment.

If the code and tests take a few minutes those calculations can look very different.

Making these decisions effectively and responsibly is one of the key characteristics of a senior engineer, which is why it's so interesting that all of those years of intuition are being disrupted.

The code we are producing remains the same. The difference is that a senior developer may have written that function + tests in several hours, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Now that same senior developer can produce exactly the same code at a time cost of less than $100.

brians · a month ago
A major difference is when we have to read and understand it because of a bug. Perhaps the LLM can help us find it! But abstraction provides a mental scaffold
brians commented on Gpg.fail   gpg.fail... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
ekjhgkejhgk · a month ago
Is anyone else worried that a lot of people coming from the Rust world contribute to free software and mindlessly slap on it MIT license because it's "the default license"? (Yes, I've had someone say this to me, no joke)

GnuPG for all its flaws has a copyleft license (GPL3) making it difficult to "embrace extend extinguish". If you replace it with a project that becomes more successful but has a less protective (for users) license, "we the people" might lose control of it.

Not everything in software is about features.

brians · a month ago
No. You can always take the MIT-licensed source. And GnuPG got used through a CLI “API” anyway.
brians commented on Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo   blog.mozilla.org/en/mozil... · Posted by u/recvonline
cosmic_cheese · 2 months ago
At the risk of becoming the infamous iPod and Dropbox posters, I really don't think so. My browser having an LLM directly integrated adds nothing for my use cases that couldn't be accomplished with a web service or dedicated tool/app. For me, an integrated LLM running concurrently with my browser just represents a whole lot of compute and/or network calls with little added value and I don't think that this is unusual.
brians · 2 months ago
Having something that read everything I read and could talk with me about it, help remember things and synthesize? That’s awesome. Follow links and check references.
brians commented on 10 Years of Let's Encrypt   letsencrypt.org/2025/12/0... · Posted by u/SGran
RonanSoleste · 2 months ago
When you request an EV. They call you by the phone number that you give to ask if you requested a certificate. That was the complete extend of the validation. I could be a scammer with a specificity designed domain name and they would just accept it, no questions asked.
brians · 2 months ago
Having run an EV issuing practice… they were required to contact you at a D&B listed number or address.
brians commented on Pixar: The Early Days A never-before-seen 1996 interview   stevejobsarchive.com/stor... · Posted by u/sanj
muglug · 3 months ago
It does diminish slightly though? Snow White is not a Disney tentpole the way it was in the 50s or even in the 80s.

How many 8-year-olds could pick out Snow White in a line-up?

brians · 3 months ago
…all of them. Which is why the scene in Ralph Breaks the Internet works. And why some of the Shrek jokes work.
brians commented on All praise to the lunch ladies   bittersoutherner.com/issu... · Posted by u/gmays
ilamont · 3 months ago
Growing up near Boston, my public elementary school built in the 1920s didn't have a proper kitchen or even a cafeteria because kids at one time always brought meals from home and ate at their desks. Indeed, we did too, bringing metal lunchboxes or brown bags, until the mid-1970s.

At that point, something changed and we all ate together in a repurposed room in the basement, eating the same unhealthy and unappetizing meals that were heated from frozen tinfoil platters in a towering steamer that a few harried lunch ladies managed.

One particularly gross option was the "pizza burger," literally a rectangular cheese pizza with a tired looking hamburger patty on top. There were no fresh vegetables. Everything hot came out of a can or freezer. We did get apples, but they were mealy Red Delicious or Macs that most kids threw away.

Around the same time, we began to get free milk in the mornings. I know this because we would hang out at the loading dock in the morning and beg the delivery driver for small boxes of chocolate milk. There might have been some sort of breakfast item too, like a pastry or small box of cereal.

If I were to hazard a guess at what was happening, someone correctly determined that many kids weren't eating healthy food or had unequal access to food. Subsidies were granted for providing free healthy meals, and children were forbidden from bringing meals from home.

The problem was the school and the staff didn't know how to provide such meals, and the city had a mix of schools ranging between 10 and 70 years old, mostly with limited kitchen and cafeteria facilities. I believe they took the easiest way out - put it out for bid, and chose the cheapest and easiest option to implement: little red cartons of milk in the morning, frozen and canned food for lunch or maybe a sandwich, and a checkmark on a government compliance form.

My kids attended the same school system starting in the 2000s. They had gotten rid of elementary school lunches for everyone. My spouse who comes from another country insisted on better quality lunches, which we would heat up and place in a thermos or bento box-type thing. Families who needed help with lunch were still provided with them I believe through SNAP or a similar program.

brians · 3 months ago
And now every kid in Massachusetts gets free lunch—funded through the millionaire’s tax. Unfortunately, the food is in general pretty gross. It has to conform to Federal guidelines, which means low fat, low sodium, high sugar to hit calorie targets.
brians commented on Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams   sherwood.news/tech/meta-p... · Posted by u/donohoe
malfist · 3 months ago
This isn't a situation we accept out of other industries. You water provider doesn't get to pipe you sewage every now and again because its too expensive to moderate. We shouldn't accept it for big tech either. And we certainly shouldn't make it the responsibility of the end use to protect themselves
brians · 3 months ago
The permitted number of rat parts per pound of breakfast cereal is not zero.
brians commented on Linux gamers on Steam cross over the 3% mark   gamingonlinux.com/2025/11... · Posted by u/haunter
cedws · 3 months ago
Does anybody have security concerns about running games with Proton/Wine? Games already have a massive attack surface and I can imagine there are some nasty bugs lurking in the compat layer that would enable RCEs not possible on Windows. This is kind of holding me back from making the jump.
brians · 3 months ago
There are. But there are many more such bugs in DirectX on Windows, and it’s a much bigger target. If a national intelligence organization wants to burn a Proton zero-day on my Steam Deck, cool!
brians commented on My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4   michael.stapelberg.ch/pos... · Posted by u/secure
asdff · 3 months ago
I used to have a 2006 macbook pro with the matte screen. It was glorious. None of these issues were present or really noticeable. Maybe you'd notice it in lab setting but not irl. Kind of like 120hz and 4k; just useless to most peoples eyes at the distances people actually use these devices. I've only owned matte external monitors as well and again, no issues there.

The glossy era macbooks otoh have been a disaster in comparison imo. Unless your room is pitch black it is so easy to get external reflections. Using it outside sucks, you often see yourself more clearly than the actual contents on the screen. Little piece of dust on the screen you flick off becomes a fingerprint smear. The actual opening of the lid on the new thin bezel models means the top edge is never free of fingerprints. I'm inside right now and this M3 pro is on max brightness setting just to make it you know, usable, inside. I'm not sure if my screen is actually defectively dim or this is just how it is. Outside it is just barely bright enough to make out the screen. Really not much better than my old 2012 non retina model in terms of outdoor viewing which is a bit of a disappointment because the marketing material lead me to believe these new macbooks are extremely bright. I guess for HDR content maybe that is true but not for 99% of use cases.

brians · 3 months ago
We have different eyes and different purposes, I think.

u/brians

KarmaCake day2378January 19, 2014
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Chief Architect, Information Security, Akamai Technologies. I do not speak for my employer.
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