Before we come to a final conclusion on this, we need to reexamine the NOVA food classification system. It holds some rather baffling contradictions. For instance, if you buy a deep fryer and a mandolin slicer to make your own potato chips at home, they're classified as processed foods. But if you buy a bag of plain potato chips (ingredients: potatoes, oil, salt) they're classified as ultra-processed.
This whole concept just doesn't make sense to me - this study included peanut butter and jelly as part of the "highly processed" meal and cheese as part of the "minimally processed" meal. I don't think that either peanut butter or jelly is more processed than cheese.
I suppose it's partly because it's the whole meal that is being represented and they match it for nutrients.
I'd guess they wanted to include store purchased bread, hence the pb&j.
The other thought i had was that most peanut butter includes (at least) palm oil (ultra processed) and sometimes other emulsifiers to prevent separation. Though you can buy pb that is just peanut and salt.
The jelly would contain quite a bit more in the way of preservatives, regulators and flavour enhancers etc than the jelly i'd make at home (if i did such a thing)
I'd guess it's just regular cheese which does require quite some processing to make but unless it's got extra additives to extend shelf life, change texture or taste it's just processed.
Yeah the other response to you is right. As someone who’s gone down the UPF (ultra processed foods) rabbit hole, it’s based on the additive ingredients.
And at least in America, most commonly-bought peanut butter has additives, and most store-bought bread has 40 different UPF ingredients. Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
It’s possible to have a non-UPF peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I might have one today! It’s just that the default options for most Americans contain a ton of crazy ingredients.
Depending on the cheese you buy, many are very simple, and rarely have weird additives. But if you buy a block of cheese or even usually the sandwich-sized slices, it’s not ultra-processed.
>As someone who’s gone down the UPF (ultra processed foods) rabbit hole, it’s based on the additive ingredients.
So if you add enzymes that completely change the characteristics of the food (aka "industrial reformulation") that's perfectly fine but you add an emulsifier to improve the mouthfeel and texture now it's suddenly a "ultra processed" food and is pure evil and should be regulated like cigarettes? Now it has "crazy ingredients" and "weird additives"? I'm sorry but this stance is totally and completely illogical. You aren't going to convince me that this makes any sense.
>Even the jelly will often have “natural flavors” (intentional scare quotes) and pectin.
For fucks sake, jelly requires pectin to be jelly. Sure, you can rely on the naturally occuring pectin in fruit, but adding additional pectin makes it so you have a consistent product and can add less sugar and don't have to cook it as long - aka healthier and less processed.
I don't really have a horse in this race, I found the picture of the "highly processed meal" gross on a visceral level, I just hate the illogically of it all. This is a religious belief.
So you bring up emulsifiers and in my opinion, that is one of the big baddy's in UPF. Yes, we have been using emulsifiers for centuries, but the effectiveness of modern emulsifiers is on another level then something like lecithin from soybeans. The strength and ubiquity of modern emulsifiers has completely changed the food we eat. They are almost literally in everything we eat today.
Why are they bad? What do emulsifiers do? They combine substances that don't want to be combined. What in your body might this affect? Your mucosal lining. Emulsifiers don't break down in your gut as they pass through. They just emulsify everything as they move through. Including your mucus. That layer is extremely important for a normally functioning gut. Lose it and then chime will contact the gut lining. This disrupts the microbiota and allows things to get through your gut that are not supposed to. It causes inflammation.
UPFs contain many bad things, but they HAVE to be categorized to fully appreciate the levels of badness. Some things are just not that big of deal, and the "health industry" does everyone a disservice by not clarifying it.
It’s not a religious belief. There is a mountain of scientific evidence supporting the idea that ultra processed foods are bad for you, including the study linked in this HN submission, for reasons linked to the biological effect of specific ingredients and processes.
Type any enzyme or emulsifier off an ingredient list into Google and you can easily find a study about its health impact.
We have been using emulsification for centuries, dude. This is fully a religious belief about purity. The fact that the package the food comes in is considered in the nova classification just makes me double down on this stance, you don't eat the packaging.
>including the study linked in this HN submission
This study proves absolutely nothing - the participants were not blinded to what they were consuming (and presumably could consume it at any speed/order). We already know how you perceive a food will effect hormones/biological response [1].
Avoid any food additives that you want; you just won't convince me 1) this framework is something logical or 2) cheese is a minimally processed food.
I mean there are different levels of processing, yes, and many of the additives that have been researched do have negative effects. Maybe minor negative effects, but over time the combination of a lot of chemicals with minor negative effects can absolutely affect your health and cognition in a perceptible way.
There is research for a lot of additives, but many have limited evidence or small studies that aren’t replicated. Usually the result is either “it doesn’t affect health either way” or “it is negative to health”. Very rarely is there an ultra processed ingredient with a large body of science that says “we should eat more of this specific thing, it has a positive effect on longevity!”. And if we do, it’s usually medicine rather than a food additive, which due to being heavily researched and tailored to individuals, prescription medications are healthy (obviously). But these aren’t that…
So I think you have to stretch your reasoning that the practice as a whole is probably negative, but I feel like I’ve personally seen enough negatives of certain UPF that I limit my intake whenever reasonably possible.
Obviously having small amounts isn’t going to be horrible but they’re in everything now
Peanut butter definitely is. Even if you make it home-made you need to add some sort of oil to get the persistent creamy texture, but it naturally separates. To get that permanent creaminess you get from the store it's going to have various sorts of chemical additives - emulsifiers, stabilizers, etc. You also generally want to add some sort of a sweetener. I use honey, but with store bought stuff you're looking at all sorts of stuff including e.g. high fructose corn syrup.
By contrast cheese is completely natural outside of a few exceptions like American cheese. You take milk, add something to curdle it like an acid (e.g. vinegar) or rennet - an enzyme obtained from the stomach of young calves, separate the coagulated stuff, salt it, dry it, age it - you now have cheese. Ricotta can even be made straight from raw milk with no additives. Cheese's long shelf life is natural.
Well the peanut butter I get from the store is just peanuts and salt and there is plenty of brands available. It does have to be stirred because it separates. But yes the Jiffy and Skippy that most people refer to as peanut butter is really just peanut flavored palm oil.
I think you mean peanuts, salt, and oil, because otherwise there's nothing to separate. The oil is already usually going to leave it something as either high or ultra high processing.
> Peanut butter definitely is. Even if you make it home-made you need to add some sort of oil to get the persistent creamy texture, but it naturally separates.
False, peanuts contain their own oil. Nothing needs to be added, not even salt.
Anything containing more than peanuts and salt should be referred to as something else, like peanut spread.
> Peanut butter definitely is. Even if you make it home-made you need to add some sort of oil to get the persistent creamy texture, but it naturally separates.
Depends on how you make it - it's definitely trickier at home to get a creamy texture without extra oil, but with the right machine (i.e. peanut butter maker) it comes out smooth with just peanuts (and salt if you like); some wholefoods shops have the machine where you can make it yourself.
Many store-bought peanut butters use oil as an additive as the peanut oil is more expensive, so they remove that to sell as peanut oil, and replace it with cheaper oils
> Something is making us fat, and it sure looks like its the UPFs.
A couple of years ago I lost 20kg (~40lb) of body weight.
I find this phrasing odd. -- Should I say "something made me lose 20kg of body weight", or should I say "I was able to improve the food I ate, and I lost 20kg of weight".
I tend to think that even without scientific literature, people know that e.g. lettuce is "healthier" than chocolate cake and fried chicken.
The term "UPF" seems like a weird term that puts the moral responsibility on the food manufacturers, rather than on "us" who are fat and want to lose weight.
"Moral responsibility" feels like a weird term to use here.
From an epidemiological standpoint, something changed in the environment that caused obesity rates to start rising in the 70s and 80s. There are many theories as to exactly which environmental change is the cause. Figuring out what that change was would be a good thing.
If your concern is about your own health as an individual? I want to lose weight now? I think it's useful to say "I have agency, I can lose weight". If you have the agency to lose weight, it makes sense you can take on the responsibility for having gained weight.
"Why did society in general get fatter?" is a different question. And if your main concern is "how can I lose fat?" it's not directly interesting.
There's also some interesting science with stuff like MREs, where I have significant water content but it has somehow been made non-bio-available to smaller organisms.
I guess i can see how packaging makes a difference to the desirability / convenience of the food.
I guess i'm less likely to eat chips if i have to make them myself compared to grabbing a bag and more likely to over eat them if it's super convenient.
It's both, though. Yes, the Earth can support more humans with a lifestyle closer to that of the West in the 19th century than with a lifestyle closer to the the West in the 21st, but even in the 19th (and earlier) deforestation and the like were happening. And it's just reality that as societies prosper they use more resources per person. 50 years ago the vast majority of Chinese didn't use cars but walked and and bicycled. Now they are quite car dependent.
I'm not sure that's an easy argument to hold up. Where would you draw the line on lifestyle that can and should reasonably change?
We've populated large portions of the planet that we really have no business living in without climate controlled indoor environments. HVAC is also a huge energy suck with all the externalities that come along with it. If we were to really want to cut energy use, for example, and climate control had to go we almost certainly couldn't continue to sustain as many people as we have today.
Yes, people at a much smaller scale figured out how to make it work and through many generations both adapted physically to the environment and found clever ways to work with the environment.
I can't imagine Canada or Europe could support their current population sizes without HVAC, or refrigeration, or pesticides and herbicides.
The list goes on, but in my opinion and understanding there is too strong of a correlation to ignore between those types of modern inventions and population growth.
> Where would you draw the line on lifestyle that can and should reasonably change?
I'm with you, but let's just say it.
People, as a whole, don't want to make the changes we all know would make the world better.
People, as individuals? While there are exceptions, the reality is a classic tragedy of the commons. Individuals generally won't accept a short-term drop in their standard of living while watching their neighbors refuse to do the same.
It is what it is, frankly. We can and will change our lifestyles at the very last possible moment. Let's hope it's enough.
Yep, totally agree on the observations and concerns. Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I don't expect major changes in lifestyle until its too late and we're forced with no other choice.
Just imagine how many more grandpas and great grandpas will be around for you to shout this at.
The problem with the population isn't (yet? only?) the absolute number of individuals but the age distribution. Most societies rely on young people to support themselves and the old, and this only works if there's a good balance between the numbers of each. Living longer isn't guaranteed to offer a longer productive period. We might just end up with more old people in need of support and not necessarily more children. This is already a major problem today in most developed countries.
There are probably so many more factors to consider. Like the psychological impact of living substantially longer. Even things like that crappy boss who won't retire from another 60 years, the dictator who won't die for another hundred years, or any number of the many society destroying tech CEOs getting to entrench themselves for decades more.
This will happen no earlier than the 2080s. The world population is expected to increase every year until then. We will add nearly 2 billion people in that time. Consider that the entire world population was less than 1 billion for all but the last 221 years.
If they keep it up, their population will remain stable up to the 22nd century. There will be no further noticeable ageing and thus no threat to anyone's retirement.
Decline fails to uphold the prevailing world economic ideology. That's the real problem with population decline the way I see it. We will need to adjust in ways that don't support the idea of "unlimited growth".
The sad thing about this is that, despite this clarification, in schools, it'll still be taught as a Watson/Crick discovery, not Franklin, just as the telephone is still taught as a Bell invention rather than something he stole while working at the patent office and Edison gets credit for the light bulb even though he was a johnny-come-lately. Once these things are in print, it's hard to get them changed. I remember once in school being taught something (don't remember what it was) and sticking my hand up to say, "but that's not right. We now know X to be true." The teacher said, "But it's that way in the book, so that's how it'll be on your exams."
Wilkins produced the initial samples, trained Gosling (who took photo 51) and then had his samples and assistant (Gosling) taken when the high flying Franklin was hired.
Wilkins took lower quality photos before Franklin was even in the lab, and showed them to Watson at a conference.
Yes, Franklin built a way better x-ray camera.
But she was also allegedly pretty horrid to Wilkins. She mocked Wilkins as a "middle class" idiot and refused to share her data with him (Gosling did show Wilkins photo 51 when ordered by higher ups, which Gosling had taken, we don't talk about Gosling because PhD students don't get credit right?).
Franklin held a funeral for the double helix, because I guess she thought Wilkins was an idiot to suggest DNA was a double helix.
Yeah, Wilkins was a little bit rude, giving as little credit to her as possible. But if some privileged upper-class rockstar moves into your lab, tries to freeze you out, mocks you for your theory, then you figure out you can prove your theory is correct (using a photo your former assistant took using the rockstar's camera, and some help from a couple of other researchers) then yeah ... are you really going out of your way to praise them, even if maybe they could have eventually figured it out?
Wilkins was immediately convinced of helix from his earlier work; double helix was only arrived at later by Franklin (and Crick interpreting Franklin's work) because they were the only ones in this group who understood x-ray diffraction math. She mocked him after her own helix images were taken, because she believed the more complicated images of the A-DNA form (well beyond his skillset) held all the real secrets.
Crick stands quite supreme in that drama though. The others could form supervillains, like Lex Luther. Would have been interesting to see Crick and Pauling as a team. Pauling would have figured out the structure with the whole dataset IMO. I think he did not have the full dataset that Crick and Watson had available, due to Wilkins. It may be more fair to name all five as discovers though, even if only Crick and Watson got the main credit.
Franklin and Wilkins weren't bad, they just didn't get on very well. Wilkins was a bit sensitive and Franklin was arrogant; but neither were really bad people. Wilkins later gave Franklin a lot more credit, he was just a bit peeved off at the time.
People do look a bit funny at Watson though ... he apparently became a bit of a crackpot in later years.
Wilkins is the one who seemed to get shafted the most in history. Franklin honestly seems like she barely did anything in the actual DNA discovery, and got all of the inferences wrong.
Franklin made the phosphates-on-the-outside discovery first. That was a detail the others got wrong. She also made the images good enough to see C2 symmetry in A-DNA, which was key to inferring double helix (though there was chemical evidence of this too), but she was late to developing that idea and got scooped.
Attribution and glory-sharing is a tricky thing. The discovery was piecemeal and has a lot of names attached. For a lot of reasons, some her own, some the sexist institution she was part of, she did not publish first. Watson and Crick did. Even though they were privy to what she knew, and had seen Photo 51, and only briefly reference Wilkins/Franklin from KCL that gave them key insights... they published first.
I believe Franklin would have shared the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick had she not died before she could be nominated. The Nobel committee just don't offer posthumous prizes. That compounds the problem of Watson and KCL minimising her contribution. But if she had survived, I'm confident there would've been a huge dust-up as to whether she or Wilkins got third spot on the Nobel prize. As she was already dead before the DNA structure was confirmed, history couldn't go that way.
It's misattribution of causality. She wasn't nominated because she was dead and she suffered academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery, especially from Watson. It's not that she wasn't nominated because of academic sexism, chauvinism and skullduggery.
Arnold's principle (after Vladimir Arnold) says that no invention is attributed correctly to its true inventor. The principle applies to itself, of course.
Bell didn’t steal the invention. There were many people working on it at the same time, but he and Watson were the first to actually a) patent it, and b) demonstrate it functionally.
While I wouldn't go as far as claiming Bell stole the patent, that he filed his patent within hours of Elisha Grey is so fortuitous a coinicidence that one can't help but wonder if it weren't a coincidence.
Pedantic aside: the word "fortuitous" means "happened completely by chance", which is the opposite of what you seem to be implying here. You probably want a word like "incredible" or "unlikely" instead.
> Many object to the use of fortuitous to mean simply “fortunate” and insist that it should be limited to its original sense of “accidental.” In modern standard use, however, fortuitous almost always carries the senses both of accident or chance and luck or fortune. It is infrequently used in its sense of “accidental” without the suggestion of good luck, and even less frequently in the sense “lucky” without at least a suggestion of accident or chance
"People object" because it's confusing to use the word 'fortuitous' (which means accidental) if 'fortunate' (which means lucky) is intended, unless the situation happens to also be accidental and the goal is to highlight the chance aspect. I wouldn't "insist" about this, unless working as a copyeditor, but many uses of the word "fortuitous" make it clear that the speaker/writer doesn't really know what the word means, and it often ends up sounding pretentious when people use "fancy" uncommon words incorrectly.
In any case, neither of these words is the right choice in the context of the previous comment. A word like "incredible" or "unlikely" or "amazing" would more clearly express the idea.
> Commissioner Anabell Brumford: Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to introduce a most special American. Tonight, he is being honoured for his 1000th drug-dealer killed.
> Lt. Frank Drebin: [to applause] Thank you. But, in all honesty, the last three I backed over with my car. Luckily, they turned out to be drug-dealers.
Here, "luckily" gives the dark implication that the police covered up Drebin's killing of three people by posthumously framing them as drug-dealers... and maybe the other 997 people as well. "Luckily" is nicely understated where "amazingly" would be too obvious, and "incredibly" doesn't work at all.
I read through these once. For those where I've been in the wrong, it's two patterns repeating. Either that I learned something in school / as a kid, and it was "correct" at the time but now we know better. Or that the common belief has just always been wrong.
Examples include that "glass is liquid", "bulls hate red", "touching a baby bird will make the mother abandon it", "you only taste salt on part X of your tongue" etc.
I've never believe that one. I have sometimes eaten a little bit of salt in the form of grains and it was completely obvious that I could taste the salt all over the top of the tongue.
I cannot for the life of me understand how anybody ever came to believe something like that.
It's not like modern people don't have plentiful access to cheap salt, sugar, citrus/lime juice, etc.
> "glass is liquid"
This one makes a lot more sense but the belief that old glass panes in windows are thicker at the bottom because glass is liquid rather than it being an obvious consequence of the manufacturing method -- blow a glass bubble and cut it up and flatten the pieces -- also seems insane to me. It's on the level of Americans believing rail gauges are derived from the width of Roman carts and refusing to accept that people used (and still use) many different rail gauges.
The fact is that after taking that image, she spent some 8+ months on a completely different research direction that yielded no results (A-DNA). She was not the first to take a picture showing helical structure (Wilkins' lab hired her after they had done this, and Pauling inferred helix from even earlier cruder images). She was the last person in the group to be convinced that A-DNA was also helical, and that it was time to start building molecular models. She is on the record mocking Wilkins for his non-specialist confidence in the simple helical structure, during the period she had Photo 51. She was yet to even attempt to model how base pairs (complimentary or otherwise) would fit together in the anti-parallel double helix phosphates-outside model she had by the time they published.
While it's fair to say that she contributed more (EDIT: Crick actually developed a lot of the mathematical theory which Franklin herself used so I'm not decided) than Watson/Crick (phosphates on the outside, precise helix and double helix measurements), and that her contributions were minimized at the time, she did not solve the DNA structure herself, and she certainly didn't do it alone. There are many others who made large contributions to this project and whose names are totally unknown to the average person. She was acknowledged by Watson/Crick and her work was published in the same issue of Nature - nobody could be unaware of her contributions. Watson later tried to rewrite history with himself at the center and was widely panned, even at the time.
I don’t know if it just depends on the state but I’m 29 years old and i learned the true inventors/scientists behind both of these in public school, and I went to school in NV which regularly scores near or at the bottom nationwide.
Shifting reputational fortunes. He definitely had his issues but this modern geek caricature of him as some sort of opportunistic nasty is not justified by the historic record. The man contributed to human society, unquestionably.
Which is how we ended up with a famous electric car company named after Tesla, whereas Edison was far more involved with the type and contributed to battery technology for EVs of the day.
People seem to really simple, strong narratives. It used to be that Edison was a titanic genius who invented countless things solely through his own brilliance and hard work. Now he's some kind of scheming con man who did nothing but steal the work of others. Nuance is not popular.
There's an awful lot or Franklin in print and the like, maybe more than she really deserves as it seems to have become the most famous story of alleged sex discrimination in science.
I'd be looking for the person who told wanted the hacking done. I doubt an AI agent does these things without someone instructing them. That would be like seeing a self-driving car go joyriding.
More than likely the instruction was "Fetch this information from the website", and when the agent didn't find that information, it decided that the best way to get it was to hack the site.
If so, it illustrates quite well the lack of common sense in LLMs. A person, especially one with sufficient skill to actually hack a website, would presumably think twice about doing it (considering that it is illegal) for a simple information gathering request.
I wonder if there is any other ways to solve this long-term than to introduce strict liability for model providers...
Edit: An obvious other choice would be strict liability for the operator, but considering how much weird shit LLMs get up to without being asked to, that would get out of hand quickly.
But you see, they never asked a humanoid robot to rob the jewelry store. They just drove robot right next to the store doors, dumped a tools box with hydraulic cutters and diamond saw next to it and instructed an autonomous robot to collect a million dollars until the morning. But they didn't instruct the robot to "rob" the shop specifically, nonono, your Honor. They are honest blokes and never intended to breach the law, it was the robot's intention, see. :)
I think the intent was to get some healthcare statistics, which seems like the kind of thing they would use to test agents; and the agent thought "what is a good way to get the statistics? Hack into Austrlian government and fetch it".
Some people on Hacker News would argue that's what agents should do! I remember the other thread about hacking chess engines, multiple people argued "yeah I want the agent to do that"!
An AI agent can't make decisions, so there's that. But, as for purpose, it's not the purpose of an AI agent we need to fear, but the person wielding it.
Weird, when I tell it "pick between the options you presented the one you think it's best" it does make a "decision". But now you are going to say "nothing was decided here, no more than how a flipping coin decides on what side to fall".
The Linux desktop does need work, but it's not 100% up to speed yet, either. The ultimate UX can be found when the user has 100% control over the experience and we aren't there yet. Wayland won't allow window size/position to be remembered between sessions and too many UX designers think the desktop is just a big phone. Yes, we need work on UX and the first step should be to get Wayland to allow the user the same flexibility we enjoyed with X11. Using Linux with multiple screens means reverting to X11 just to keep from going nuts.
> Wayland won't allow window size/position to be remembered between sessions
It's not on the program itself to restore its position, but on the compositor, who has every right and control to do just that. AFAIK it does work in plasma Wayland.
That sounds great, but I don't fully agree... IMO a compositor should be able to provide a data structure (unchangeable, mostly or fully opaque) that the app can save/restore across sessions.
But then what's the point, what do you do with it that the compositor can't?
Then instead have stable window IDs so the compositor can do its job properly - there is absolutely no need to self-position and outside of certain privileged apps I absolutely don't want random programs to move their windows around.
That's the problem. The compositor can't reliably distinguish windows, and it definitely doesn't know when the data should be deleted in case the same window never opens again.
This was just business as usual 50 to 100 years ago. People started at the bottom and worked their way up. There were no I've-got-a-degree shortcuts because degrees weren't about training for a job, they were about finding out about the world around us. It's interesting that things are starting to circle around, but I doubt any corporation will drop the degree requirements... unless AI CEO's start rejecting all human applications.
As a high school dropout, with a GED, I can relate. Pretty much all of my education has been OJT and seminars/classes.
It's earned me lots of sneers, over the years, but the people that mattered, didn't care. I spent most of my career at one of the world's best optical equipment companies, working as a peer with some of the top people in the world. It was quite humbling, and extremely gratifying.
