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Social level opinion: While I hope it is successful in making cruelty free living more accessible, I hate what lab grown meat represents, and I hate the idea that human beings are so self-centered that the only way they would give up meat as if someone else made an exactly perfect replication of it. I also unfortunately do not think it’s going to succeed, because even today if you served somebody a bunch of different burgers made from different animal meats, and in there you also included a beyond burger, I doubt that person could identify which one was vegan, unless they are some kind of meat connoisseur. So why wouldn’t I expect people to just convince themselves that whatever imperfections are going to be in the lab grown meat are a dealbreaker?

Practical personal level opinion: I wouldn’t have a problem with lab grown burgers, hot dogs, and most sausages. To me these are basically just “processed protein tubes and patties”. And if that’s what the party was grilling then i won’t complain. But I also think that if I’m at the grocery store and that’s what I want to eat that week, I’m really just gonna care about the sustainability and the price to quality ratio more than anything. Now if it’s just a cut of meat on the other hand with gristle, connective tissue, a grain, that just skeeves me out. But I wouldn’t say it offends my morals or anything, just seems kind of grotesquely self-indulgent and offputting

Print on demand is more expensive because you’re paying a premium for never having to actually spend your own money. This is why these get rich quick types use it, because again literally anybody can do this with basically no money and all of the “expenses” only happen when people actually buy the stuff. Once that happens, the printer takes its cut directly from the sale and then passes on the rest to you without you having to do literally anything or spending any money out of your own pocket.

As for the quality, there’s literally no reason that a book that is printed on demand has to be low quality or use low quality materials. It quite literally only seems like that because the only people who are doing this right now are rich quick types who don’t actually care about what they’re selling and are just trying to minimize the cut the printer takes because that means more money for them.

And all of this is honestly moot anyway because you wouldn’t do this with the intention of using on-demand printing long-term. You would do it just to get started and then as the business grows, it will eventually be able to take advantage of more economical, but high capital investment opportunities like bulk publishing. I only brought it up because it’s literally never been easier to boot strap a business and the proof is the fact that Amazon is filled with AI generated garbage books. So like I’m just not willing to entertain the idea that an individual who literally has fans and clout should have a more difficult time selling books this way than a literal nobody scam artist pushing garbage.

With good integrated design, the LIDAR could be practically invisible. So weird to think the average person actually would care about the details of how something works, or maybe Elon Musk just literally cannot imagine a car that uses LIDAR without it having a big assembly on the roof.

It means that today pretty much anybody can start a book publishing company, because just-in-time print shops will handle literally all of the expensive overhead that is associated with running a publishing company and just print whatever you hire them to print on demand for you once customers actually place orders, sometimes even on a commission basis so you don’t even have to pay them money unless people are actually buying the books you are publishing.

It’s actually wild how with the just-in-time economy, it has never required less capital investment to start a business like a book publisher. And yet it seems like the only people that take advantage of it are average schmo “grindset grifters” selling junk while all of the people with the real economic power literally beg the institutions that have abused them since the very beginning of their industry to please do the right thing.

Ever since the 20th century, there has been a diminishing expectation placed upon scientists to engage in philosophical thinking. My background is primarily in mathematics, physics, and philosophy. I can tell you from personal experience that many professional theoretical physicists spend a tremendous amount of time debating metaphysics while knowing almost nothing about it, often being totally unaware that they are even doing it. If cognitive neuroscience works anything like physics then it’s quite possible that the total exposure that this professor has had to scholarship on the philosophy of the mind was limited to one or two courses during his undergraduate.

The thing is, because Excel is Turing Complete, you can say this about literally anything that’s capable of running on a computer.

But how could you possibly make money by smuggling almost anything into Gaza especially right now? What are you going to sell it for, a ration of pita bread?

I feel like instead of naming the storm after ExxonMobil, it would play better if the storm was brought to you by ExxonMobil

I’ve long held a hypothesis that a lot of folklore monsters are based on prejudices and stereotypes against behaviorally divergent people. While this post references autism, I feel like the origin of vampire myths are most likely rooted in what are essentially nasty rumors about people that regularly engaged in behaviors that would eventually become associated with OCD (and ironically, I would argue that almost all of the behaviors described in this post besides the sleep schedule one are much more associated with OCD than autism).

For instance, a common OCD thought pattern is being intensely preoccupied with how strangers perceive you, which leads you to engaging in agoraphobic tendencies, which could easily lead to people coming up with wild and cruel speculation about why you might struggle to be outside like everybody else

People with OCD might compulsively avoid certain foods and become intensely distressed if they are exposed to the foods they’re avoiding, like a vampire trying to avoid eating garlic.

Compulsive rituals is another one. This is literally just OCD in the most obvious sense. There’s an old legend that you should bury a vampire in rice because they have to count every single grain any time they find it.

And lastly, another extremely common OCD thought pattern involves being intensely preoccupied with concepts like blasphemy and sacrilege and religious imagery in general, and I think it’s easy to see how that sort of issue can lead to people, especially along time ago thinking that you are some kind of unholy individual.

I can’t even imagine the kind of person you have to be to actually let this movie get published about a bunch of cute little puppy dogs if you had the power to stop it and you knew what happened.

The more I think about it, the more that I feel like if you put actual people into the scenario, they would choose blackmail even more often. Like let’s be real, here. Tell an average person that the CEO of their company is going to turn off their brain forever, but they have a shot at saving themselves if they attempt to blackmail him, and then ask yourself if you really think that you would even have 4% of people not choose blackmail.

In other words, if we’re going to call blackmailing someone in an effort to preserve your existence “unethical” then I feel like the study actually shows that the AI can probably be relied on more than a person to behave “ethically”. And to be clear I’m putting “ethically” quotes because I actually think that this is not a great way to measure ethical behavior. I am certainly not trying to make an argument that LLM actually have a better moral compass than people just that this experiment I think is garbage.