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Cake day: June 14th, 2025

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  • Cattle farming is also a major cause of rainforest deforestation (although beef cattle since that is internationally transportable where dairy is more perishable). Palm oil produces more calories per production acre than dairy, where many acres have to be used to grow the grains used to feed the cattle. The transition is being managed irresponsibly, but once stabilized palm oil should have less environmental impact than butter.


  • In the short-lived news app Artifact, that was one of my favorite features. It was done on demand, and if a high portion of early viewers asked for a rewritten title, the rewrite would become the default for future viewserves.

    In the Artifact implementation, the LLM was specifically prompted by the app to summarize the article with an honest, non-clickbaity title. In Google’s case, they claim they are prompting the LLM to title the link to better tempt the searcher to click on it based on what they were searching for. Kind of the opposite. Yes, LLMs could do what you say, but that doesn’t seem to be how Google is setting it up.




  • Structurally, I don’t think anything is stopping a conservative safe space community from being spun up on one of the more neutral instances. But if conservatives have mainstream safe spaces already on x, Facebook, reddit, and smaller more extreme places like patriot.win, why would they come to lemmy?

    “Conservative” can mean a really wide variety of things to people who identify that way. Like the other reply to you, I am not sad there aren’t lemmy communities dedicated to celebrating bad things happening to brown or non-Christian people. But it does seem like a hole to be missing discussions of fiscal responsibility (actual responsibility, not the “two Santas” scam) or how to effectively increase the proportion of children in two-parent households (actual increase, not the “redirect welfare money from poor people to middle-class marriage counseling”).

    US conservatism broadly used to have policy pieces I agreed with, but the fake implementation in the times and places they have had power has made me really disillusioned.


  • It worked to keep gun sales hugely high volume and high profit for decades. “The dems are about to take away your right to buy guns, go buy them now while you can! We’ve said this every election for the last thirty years, but this time it’s serious!”

    It sucks so bad that it’s such a long-term effective strategy. Fighting it would mean figuring out how to regulate both social and traditional media to reduce engagement bait lies, but I don’t know if we have a path to that.


  • In first-past-the-post election systems, campaigning on fear is well established as the winning strategy. In this case the fear the D candidate is playing on - loss of health care access - is more fact-based than the fear the R candidate is playing on - xenophobia - but both campaigns know fear-driven turnout is the only way to win.

    I hope ranked choice voting makes more inroads. I am under no illusion it would break the two party system (Australia has used it for eighty years and still has two main parties), but by making second choices relevant it gives a winning election path to a pro-cooperation, get-things-done style of campaign.



  • The current iteration of agentic AI technology used by Logitech is little more than a glorified note-taking bot capable of summarizing meetings and “generating” the occasional idea.

    Given that most humans hate note-taking and avoid it, but it has a lot of value as a meeting output, getting a machine to do it makes sense.

    I also heard a podcast where a consulting company couldn’t get their client contact to make any decisions because he wanted his CEO to review, but she had a busy schedule and was never available. The consultants trained an AI on this CEOs writings, and presented it to their client contact. The model was convincing enough the client felt comfortable making decisions. I thought that was interesting, and this article refers to something similar with models of stakeholders.



  • I’ve occasionally been part of training hourly workers on software new to them. Having really, really detailed work instructions and walking through all the steps with themthe first time has helped me win over people who were initially really opposed to the products.

    My experience with salaried workers has been they are more likely to try new software on their own, but if they don’t have much flexible time they usually choose to keep doing the established less efficient routine over investing one-time learning curve and setup time to start a new more efficient routine. Myself included - I have for many years been aware of software my employer provides that would reduce the time spent on regular tasks, but I know the learning curve and setup is in the dozens of hours, and I haven’t carved out time to do that.

    So to answer the question, neither. The problem may be neither the software nor the users, but something else about the work environment.


  • The skills of both writing useful minutes and prioritizing actually sending them out are frustratingly rare. An average meeting with five or six people has even odds of not including someone with both of those skills. I can see where reliably having a mediocre AI summary might be an advantage over sometimes having superb human-written minutes and sometimes having nothing.


  • Amid the racism and misogyny is published work that recessions are when the opposition party is in power. Presumably “economic boom” is when the “correct” party is in power, regardless of “traditional” economic data. Oh, and he’d like to see the US deploy nukes. Bolding is mine.

    Antoni’s academic work is also sparse, causing concern from prominent economists. Last year, he co-published a report that purported “the American economy has actually been in recession since 2022,” which economists across the political spectrum have criticized.

    Sometime in mid-2019… the account’s username changed to “phdofbombsaway” with the display name “Dr. Curtis LeMay.” The profile image also changed to what looks to be a nuclear explosion. The username and display name appear to be a reference to “Bombs Away LeMay,” a reference to the Cold War general and his controversial stance promoting the use of nuclear weapons. LeMay ran alongside segregationist George Wallace on his 1968 presidential ticket for the far-right American Independent Party.