I'm surprised that sampling bias is not in the list. Is it possible that these fossils simply haven't been found yet?
I think the postulation is that the cats would be so abundant, it shouldn't be hard to find their fossils.
Readit Newsnotepad0x90 commented on From Azure Functions to FreeBSD jmmv.dev/2025/12/from-azu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
in my experience, Azure functions are best used by .NET executables and powershell scripts. GCP functions are what I recommend for anyone entering serverless (from limited experience of course).
Your question is rather ambiguous. Do you mean using chemistry to develop new techniques or combine unusual ingredients to create food that has novel flavors or textures? That would fall under Molecular Gastronomy, which has been highly influential within fine dining in the last few decades.
Do you mean processing ingredients with the goal to take cheap ingredients and make a product as hyper-palatable as possible? That would generally be called "ultra-processed food"; you're not going to find a Doritos chip in nature.
Do you mean developing completely completely new flavors via chemical synthesis? I don't think there's much possibility there. Our senses have evolved to detect compounds found in nature, so it's unlikely a synthetic compound can produce a flavor completely unlike anything found in nature.
Also, I think you're overestimating jelly. Gelatine is just a breakdown product of collagen. Boil animal connective tissue, purify the gelatine, add sugar and flavoring and set it into a gel. It's really only a few of techniques removed from nature. If you want to say it's not found in nature, then fair enough, but neither is a medium-rare steak.
I mean using chemistry to create food using atypical ingredients that aren't normally classified as food or entirely synthetic. Take more simpler or more abundant compounds to create original food instead of using plants and wildlife. Flavors don't need to be new, but as others mentioned there are plenty of recently invented flavors. Doritos is ultra-processed corn, what i'm saying is Doritos but there is no corn involved. The original article is about meat-like food, I was saying "why meat-like" , if it is food that has similar taste like meat, that's fine, but it doesn't need to be like meat, it just needs to taste good and have palatable texture. Maybe we can have something tastes better than meat!
The trouble is that “tastes good” isn’t a blank canvas. It’s built on hardwired signals plus learned associations. Our basic tastes evolved as nutritional indicators: sweet signals energy, umami signals protein, bitter warns of potential toxins. And our brains are rather insistent about finding flavors more pleasant when they match patterns we’ve already learned are safe.
Jell-O actually proves this rather than refuting it. It succeeds because it hits that hardwired sweet preference, not because it invented some novel taste dimension. A truly new taste that doesn’t map onto the existing five basics would likely register as “off” rather than delicious. Your brain wouldn’t know what to do with it, nutritionally speaking.
So you’d have to either work within those existing taste channels while creating novel combinations and textures, or somehow condition people to associate genuinely new sensations with safety and reward. The latter is slow going. We’re quite literally built to be suspicious of unfamiliar foods.
I was not suggesting inventing a new fundamental taste but new foods that are unlike existing foods. "meat" is not a taste for example. I can't give you an example, because that's the whole point, someone needs to experiment and find out. But the fundamental tastes like sweet and umami will remain of course.
meet tastes great and all, but I wonder where science is at (if at all) on making original food that tastes good. How about food that doesn't taste like any natural food we've had, but still tastes really good?
Jell-o (gello?) is a good example, nothing tastes like it naturally. Why aren't there tasty food that are original in terms of taste and texture but good for health and the environment? I suppose part of the struggle is that food is entrenched into culture so much. burgers and bbq are inextricable from july 4th and memorial day for example.
notepad0x90 commented on Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1 libroot.org/posts/going-t... · Posted by u/libroot
Since it's been a while now, what are the thoughts on the snowden leaks contributing to the rise of distrust in the government and governmental institutions in the US?
I'm wondering if trump could have ever succeeded without that path being prepared for him by snowden's leaks and occupy wallstreet. I'm not saying snowden did anything wrong, to the contrary, he thought things would change and they didn't, I'm wondering whether that contributed to the feeling of americans feeling disenfranchised. Relations with europe also started souring around that time.
I think snowden did the right thing, but like many in tech (especially here on HN), he didn't understand that American's didn't care about what's in the leaks all that much. it wasn't his burden to weigh the pros and cons, his burden was to do what he thought was right. But looking back, nothing good came out of the leaks, I wish they didn't happen to begin with. Of course if you're not an American lots of good things came out of it. I'm certain we have less privacy now, more governmental spying, and even more support for it. at least before we had the illusion that we had some rights to privacy from the government. Now that they're exposed and gotten away with it, I fear they've become more emboldened.
I guess I am glad the whole thing was exposed, but I am regretful of how things turned out. Would it have been better if there was more trust in governmental institutions, and if the US IC kept their capabilities secret for longer? would they have been able to interfere with russian influence campaigns in 2015-16 if so? Is the world better of now?
I suppose in 5-10 more years these things will be historical events and historians might answer these questions with a more objective perspective.
Yeah, this is a bit relative. Use microsoft tools/products (especially cloud/office) that came out in the past decade and you'll appreciate every other naming pattern.
My subjective view is that names should be exotic, flamboyant, unique and generally wild when it comes to tools. sticking your company's name as a prefix into everything (or the flagship product's) is confusing and only hurts you.
I've been told by multiple people in medicine that alcohol not only causes cancer, it might be more cancer causing than even cigarettes. I assumed this was common knowledge, but this research suggests there might not be strong correlations yet?
I think the problem with cancer is that things that cause it don't really "cause it", they increase the number of cells that die in a particular part of the body, thus increasing the likelihood of replication errors. But that threshold for errors is different from one person to another. some can drink and smoke until they're in their 100's because they either don't experience enough inflamation/cell-death or they do and their cells have a higher replication-error threshold. So it isn't a matter of chance or probability but genetics and what else the involved organs involved have been exposed to over the person's lifespan.
Obviously, alcohol is a toxin, it directly harms the body and inflames parts of it. So those parts that process it the most might age faster than the rest of the body and start exhibiting replication errors sooner as a result. Things like microplatics though, that I don't get, they're tiny but exactly are they inflaming or harming, what's the data there? But with alcohol, it's nice to have the correlation, but there is a clear path of causation right? Same with cigarettes. I literally felt my lungs hurt when i breathed with cigarettes and I've had many bad hangovers and situations where i was cramping so bad I almost went to the ER. the body already is letting us know these things are causing hardships on it.
But don't get me wrong, I'm just stating my understanding of how it works, I am neither in medicine nor well informed to make factual claims.
drinking the piss of a microscopic organism causes cancer?
How do you feel about bread or yogurt?
Do you need better auto-completion? Do you need code auto-generation? do you need test cases to be generated, and lots of them? maybe llms can are ideal for you, or not.
Personally, the best use i've gotten out of it so far is to replace the old pattern of googling something and clicking through a bunch of sites like stackoverflow to figure things out. and asking llms to generate an example code of how to do something, and using that as a reference to solve problems. sometimes i really just need the damn answer without having a deep debate with someone on the internet, and sometimes I need a holistic solution engineering. AI helps with either, but if I don't know what questions to ask to begin with, it will be forced to make assumptions, and then I can't validate the suggestions or code it generated based on those assumptions. So, it's very important to me that the questions I ask an AI tool are questions whose subject domain I have a good understanding of, and where the answers are things I can independently validate.