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Is everything the worst?
  • Remember that there are biases at play here. There's the negativity bias (we worry more about bad things happening, than we are uplifted about geed things happening), and media bias to report the worst. As Pinker wrote:

    News is about things that happen, not things that don't happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, "I'm reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out". (...) As long as bad things have not vanished from the face of the earth, there will always be enough incidents to fill the news, especially when billion of smartphones turn most of the world's population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

    Combine the two, and you will naturally have all media preferentially report (and often blow out of proportion for the views and clicks) bad news over good news.

  • Justice Alito questions possibility of political compromise in secret recording
  • Well, you do also have what you could call atheist extrimists. Richard Dawkins is pretty well known for his lack of tolerance towards religion that in my opinion isn't much different in its intensity from religious extrimists' opposition to non-their religion. Don't get me wrong, I'm an atheist myself, I'm just saying that I don't think that the complete lack of tolerance to the opposing world view is a problem confined to the religious right.

  • France vs. 'Shrinkflation': Starting July 1, All 'Shrinked' Products Must Be Labelled For Consumers
  • Me too, but there is one UK retailer (Co-operative) that makes it hard for you. They will have, say, a punnet of strawberries with 200g strawberries in it for £3.50 and another one with 300g for £4.50. The labels will say "unit price: £3.50/unit" or "£4.50/unit". (No, really?) So you have to do your own maths. Luckily other markets are sensible enough to actually provide price per weight. And in Tesco, when a given product is cheaper for clubcard holders, it will even give price per weight twice, for both normal price and clubcard price.

    Btw. I don't work for Tesco. I just needed to vent about Co-op being dicks; Tesco just serves as a good counter example of how this should be done, in case any Co-op executive is reading this.

  • Can we all agree that whatever version of predictive text we have nowadays is crap, and has been for a long time?
  • I actually can't complain. It's not perfect, but I'm far from being as outraged as the OP. I used to love SwiftKey, it was amazing with text prediction, even when you had two languages on at the same time (I'm bilingual, so it was really handy). Since Microsoft bought it, it started going downhill and when I found that I can't just transfer my settings when I get a new phone, I switched to Gboard. Again, not perfect, but not terrible either. I will try out some of the recommendation from this thread though.

  • What's your favourite field of science? 🔬
  • I'm a molecular biologist, but I'm into so many branches of science! I love maths (arguably not science) - the elegance, the consistency, and pi that pops up everywhere. Physics - the laws that actually govern the universe and it's most basic level. Chemistry - the science of change where so much emergence happens. Biology - the science trying to solve the actual mysteries of life. Psychology, especially evolutionary psychology - understanding what makes us tick and how it came about. And linguistics - the science of the original sharing app.

    Edit: typo.

  • For people who've taken philosophy classes, was there something you learned that you now use everyday?
  • I do the same things. Half of my conversations with people is me first rephrasing everything they said to me to make sure I understood them correctly before I answer their question or address what they said. And I also always want to give relevant answers but find myself circling around them more than I'd like. I didn't study philosophy tho.

  • Speedrun timers on self checkouts
  • Was it really AI powered? I've never used one (we've not had them in the UK) so I'm genuinely curious. I heard it just had chips in every product, so when you leave the shop through a gate, everything you bought got scanned, and you were charged automatically. But in my description there is no AI in the modern sense of pattern recognition based on vast training data.

  • What is the most advanced chemistry you've done on your own at home or work?
  • Does uni count? I synthesised aspirin.

    Does biochemistry count? I exponentially copied very specifically selected short fragments of DNA. From 1 to up to 1,099,511,627,776 copies in just 2 hours. I've also very specifically cut and glued together DNA strands.

    And at home, I just extracted juice from red cabbage and played with changing its colour by adding lemon juice or baking soda.

  • What do you use AI/LLMs for in your personal life?
  • I use it as my travel agent. It planned my trip to one of a big US cities (did a really good job) and to advise me what I should know as a European driver driving on American roads for the first time.

    Edit: Also, Claude by Anthropic is great at re-writing passages of generic text in the style of Donald Trump.

  • When people use "minimum" or "maximum" and then follow that with a range.

    I once applied for a job where one of the requirements was "minimum 5 to 10 years experience in X". My friend told me to submit a CV saying I have 3 to 6 years experience in X and see if they shortlist me.

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    viralJ @lemmy.world
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