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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Islam, just like Christianity, has many different groups that believe the same basic doctrine but disagree on many points. The main splits in Islam (that echo some aspects of the Catholic vs. Protestant split) as Sunni and Shia. Each divides and divides again into small communities centred on one mosque (just as, eg, Protestantism divides and divides down to individual congregations).

    The big question is: how do groups of people decide which parts of the religious documents, history and practice are more relevant or even correct?

    Some groups are quite ‘secular’ (like the Church of England) while others are quite ‘fundamental’, meaning that they much more strictly follow whatever the group decides are the foundation of the religion.

    Is it possible to be able so say which of these groups is right? It seems to me that we have been fighting over this since before records began, so we most definitely do not have a way to do this that any majority agrees with. I don’t think anyone can say:

    Islamist groups purposely … twist actual Islamic ideology while the Christian Right just doesn’t understand the religious text they claim to follow.




  • Actually, PDF is a turing complete programming language.

    PDF is a simplification and wrapper around the computer language PostScript - a PostScript or PDF doc literally runs on the printer or computer and outputs the rasterisation of the thing you want to print.

    PostScript is language based around a stack. You can define functions (which may be fully recursive) that run on the stack.

    Here’s a small example:

    /ANGLE {
       newpath
       100 0 moveto
       0 0 lineto
       100 50 lineto
       stroke
    } def
    
    10 setlinewidth
    0 setlinejoin
    100 200 translate
    ANGLE
    
    1 setlinejoin
    0 70 translate
    ANGLE
    
    2 setlinejoin
    0 70 translate
    ANGLE
    

    As such, PDF that’s actually similar to Python, and HTML is closer to something like a JSON or XML document.

    Note however that HTML can contain Javscript or WASM programs, but these are embedded rather than features of HTML.


  • Linux was not muscled like that in 1991 - it’s first, barebones kernel was released in September of that year.

    I remember installing Linux on a 90MHz 486 in the mid 90s and it barely ran X server with a simple window manager. And if the machine was turned off while Linux was running, you might not be able to boot again.

    Linux now, however, is unrecognizeably better.





  • I’m guessing that exactly the same LLM model is used (somehow) on both sides - using different models or different weights would not work at all.

    An LLM is (at core) an algorithm that takes a bunch of text as input and produces an output of a list of word/probabilities such that the sum of all probabilities adds to 1.0. You could place a wrapper on this that creates a list of words by probability. A specific word can be identified by the index in the list, i.e. first word, tenth word etc.

    (Technically the system uses ‘tokens’ which represent either whole words or parts of words, but that’s not important here).

    A document can be compressed by feeding in each word in turn, creating the list in the LLM, and searching for the new word in the list. If the LLM is good, the output will be a stream of small integers. If the LLM is a perfect predictor, the next word will always be the top of the list, i.e. a 1. A bad prediction will be a relatively large number in the thousands or millions.

    Streams of small numbers are very well (even optimally) compressed using extant technology.





  • Is UPF food with ultra high fibre bad?

    I don’t know.

    My thoughts are that your total daily intake is more important than considering any single food item. As such, having some UPF in your diet is ok. The problem becomes epidemiologically measurable when, like the UK and US, 60% of calories consumed by some demographics are from UPF food.

    And there are almost certainly multiple different things ‘wrong’ with UPF and so if you fix one problem, you may still be at risk from another. For example in your question, there are a lot of studies showing the importance of fibre in the diet, including those that add bran to whatever the person normally eats. So UPF with lots of fibre, all things equal, is likely less bad than UPF without.

    Is UPF with ultra high vitamin A bad?

    Fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E and K) are interesting in that they don’t show benefits above RDA, and in high doses cause a long list of nasty symptoms. In particular, vitamin A in excess is correlated with increased risk of multiple major diseases and even death.


  • Scientists only use terms like ultra processed food after defining them in their scientific papers. The problem here is that the media find it difficult to write a short article for the general audience if they have to define things scientifically.

    What specifically is bad about UPF foods is still being researched. A few leading ideas are:

    • Very little fibre
    • Starches are all immediately accessible to digestion and so blood glucose spikes much more than for the non-UPF equivalent
    • UPF foods are soft and dry (so weigh less) making it very easy to eat a lot very fast, so you eat too many calories.
    • Relatively high in salt and sugar
    • Use of emulsifiers. These may change your gut microbiota and also make your gut more leaky causing inflammation
    • Use of preservatives and artificial colours
    • Frequently have a lot of oil

    Low fibre, emulsifiers and preservatives, while lacking variety of phytochemicals found in fresh food is known to change your gut health. People on UPF diets tend to eat more and have higher blood glucose spikes leading to heart disease and diabetes.

    Altogether this is a recipe for a shorter, less healthy life