why would I want to use it?

You wouldn’t, but that’s fine with Match Group: JP Morgan^[1] are loving this new monetization strategy. If they think they can get more money out of their users they will, the experience and usefulness of their app be damned. Very similar to aggressively monetized mobile games, but extra icky since they’re monetizing human relationships.

Always nice to see studies of these things! I feel like there’s a lot of olive oil lore out there, it’s cool to see that some of that lore checks out scientifically.

Glad you found it useful! When I started writing it nobody else had answered and by the time I posted it a bunch of other people had replied (that’s what I get for walking away while writing it).

(I’m going to write with confidence, but I’m not an expert, just grew up around chefs. Please feel free and welcome to fact check me.)

Yeah, EVOO is made by cold-pressing the olives, and regular olive oil by hot pressing. Cold pressing releases less oil and also several tasty compounds that come along for the ride. Hot pressing releases more oil but also other compounds that don’t taste as nice, so generally regular olive oil will then be refined, removing most of the compounds that give it flavor. If you compare, you’ll find that real EVOO^[1] tastes distinctly olive-y, and regular olive oil has very little flavor at all.

When it comes to cooking, traditional advice is not to cook with EVOO because it’s got a low-ish smoke point^[2], whereas regular olive oil (which has been refined) will have a higher smoke point. EVOO’s smoke point isn’t actually that low, but I generally avoid high temp cooking with it anyway in favor of things like avocado oil (my personal go-to), peanut oil, or vegetable oil which are very tolerant of high temperatures. You absolutely can cook with EVOO though if you only want to keep one kind of oil around the house or something.

To clarify: heating up EVOO and cooking with it is fine as long as you don’t smoke it. It won’t make it any less extra-virgin or anything: to get those less good-tasting things into your oil, you need to heat up the olives themselves.

So are you wasting money if you do cook with it? Maybe.

Do you want what you’re cooking to taste like olive oil? If you do, cook with it! Real^[1:1] EVOO has a distinct taste that won’t go away when heated (unless you smoke it). It’s great for making stuff like olive oil cake! If you don’t care or don’t want that flavor in whatever you’re cooking, then yeah it’s probably a waste of money. There are many less expensive oils that will work well and have neutral flavors or different flavors that you might prefer, including regular olive oil.

Agreed. Strong (and effectively enforced) worker protections are just as important as tech-specific safety regulations. Nobody should feel like they need to put themselves into a risky situation to make work happen faster, regardless of whether their employer explicitly asks them to take that risk or (more likely) uses other means like unrealistic quotas to pressure them indirectly.

There are certainly ways to make working around robots safer, e.g. soft robots, machine vision to avoid unexpected obstacles in the path of travel, inherently limiting the force a robot can exert, etc… And I’m all for moving in the direction of better inherent safety, but we also need to make sure that safer systems don’t become an excuse for employers to expose their workers to more risky situations (i.e. the paradox of safety).

Report 'em too, if you’re not already! It helps the mods and the admin team find them so that site-wide bans can be issued.

For sure. They tend to do a good job communicating tricky science and math concepts as well. They interview experts in a coherent way, tend to take the time to properly set up the background for topics, and the writers there seem to really care about getting things right rather than being sensational. They’re one of my favorite sites for stories about math and science honestly.

I haven’t had a chance to read the article linked in this post yet, but I’ll be sitting in an airport in a few hours (I really need to go to sleep now) and I’ll look forward to reading it then!

Ooh, good suggestion, I’ll give it a try!

It seems like you’re working under the core assumption that the trained model itself, rather than just the products thereof, cannot be infringing?

Generally if someone else wants to do something with your copyrighted work – for example your newspaper article – they need a license to do so. This isn’t only the case for direct distribution, it includes things like the creation of electronic copies (which must have been made during training), adaptations, and derivative works. NYT did not grant OpenAI a license to adapt their articles into a training dataset for their models. To use a copyrighted work without a license, you need to be using it under fair use. That’s why it’s relevant: is it fair use to make electronic copies of a copyrighted work and adapt them into a training dataset for a LLM?

You also seem to be assuming that a generative AI model training on a dataset is legally the same as a human learning from those same works. If that’s the case then the answer to my question in the last paragraph is definitely, “yes,” since a human reading the newspaper and learning from it is something that, as you say, “any intelligent rational human being” would agree is fine. However, as far as I know there’s not been any kind of ruling to support the idea that those things are legally equivalent at this point.

Now, if you’d like to start citing code or case law go ahead, I’m happy to be wrong. Who knows, this is the internet, maybe you’re actually a lawyer specializing in copyright law and you’ll point out some fundamental detail of one of these laws that makes my whole comment seem silly (and if so I’d honestly love to read it). I’m not trying to claim that NYT is definitely going to win or anything. My argument is just that this is not especially cut-and-dried, at least from the perspective of a non-expert.

Well I hear what you’re saying, although I don’t much appreciate being told what I should want the outcome to be.

My own wants notwithstanding, I know copyright law is notoriously thorny – fair use doubly so – and I’m no lawyer. I’d be a little bit surprised if NYT decides to raise this suit without consulting their own lawyers though, so it stands to reason that if they do indeed decide to sue then there are at least some copyright lawyers who think it’ll have a chance. As I said, we’ll see.

Yeah I’ve heard a lot of people talking about the copyright stuff with respect to image generation AIs, but as far as I can see there’s no fundamental reason that text generating AIs wouldn’t be subject to the same laws. We’ll see how the lawsuit goes though I suppose.

Totally agreed, but I was also surprised not to see raisins on your list! They’re great cooked right along with the oats: they’ll soak up a little water (or milk if you do it that way) and plump back up a bit, and they make for delicious bites. I also usually make steel-cut oats in a rice cooker – they don’t come out quite as delicious with quick oats because they don’t get as much opportunity to suck up water, but they’re still good.

I agree completely, especially about the negative knock-on effects on the quality of science overall. Making replications worthwhile for researchers to spend time and money on is certainly going to be a challenge that the institution of academia will need to figure out sooner or later (fingers crossed for sooner, but realistically probably later).

Good luck with your PhD too! I hope it’s going well so far!

With all due respect to Penrose – who is indisputably brilliant – in probability when you start to say things like, “X is 10^10^100 times more likely than Y,” it’s actually much more likely that there’s some flaw in your priors or your model of the system than that such a number is actually reflective of reality.

That’s true even for really high probability things. Like if I were to claim that it’s 10^10^100 times more likely that the sun will rise tomorrow than that it won’t, then I would have made much too strong a claim. It’s doubly true for things like the physics of the early universe, where we know our current laws are at best an incomplete description.

Maybe all of those PhD students would have their time better spent on this task than pretending, as if often the case, they’ve done some original work on an important theory that’s found something “for the first time”.

I mean I’m personally biased as a PhD student myself, but I think this is a great idea. I made the core of my project to basically take a picture of a phenomenon that has been inferred from spectroscopy but not observed directly. So verification, not exactly replication, but same idea. Turns out that doing something like this is very hard and makes a worthy PhD project. (I haven’t managed it yet, and am starting to wonder if my eventual paper might actually end up being in support of the null hypothesis…)

But I’m also not looking to go into academia after I graduate, so I’m not to worried about trying for something high impact or anything like that. I think for someone angling to be a professor the idea of a replication or verification project may be a harder sell, which is largely down to the culture of academia and how universities do their hiring of post-docs and such. I mean, even in this case more people are still going to be familiar with the names of Lee and Kim than any of the researchers who put in work on replication studies (can you name any of them without checking the article?).

tl;dr definitely a worthy goal and replications should absolutely be encouraged, but it’s going to take a while to change the whole academic culture to reinforce that they’re valuable contributions.

…sip delicious iced coffee all hot summer day long, until you jitter yourself into bed and realize that wasn’t conducive to a restful night’s sleep.

Relatable content!

On that note though, I have a lot of coffee that’s past its peak freshness (I was gifted a bunch of beans at once) which might be good for making some cold brew…

Yeah, persistence hunting! It’s cool stuff.

I remember learning about this applied to various animals

Another one of the studies I found while googling around about this yesterday mentioned something about kangaroos right at the end, and apparently their fast hopping gate is especially efficient. The mention seemed to come a bit out of the blue right at the end of the conclusion, but I was also just skimming so I may have missed a discussion of kangaroo gaits earlier in the paper.

I think the biomechanics of walking and running makes this a little more complicated than that. The efficiency of moving your body in different ways is different. I’m certainly no expert, but if I’m reading this study right (it’s open access so feel free to check me), then walking will pretty much always use less energy to cover a given distance than running/jogging, unless you force yourself to “fast-walk” at high speeds where a running/jogging gait would feel more natural.

I’m also pretty sure that for a given distance you would count fewer steps while running than you would if you walked the same distance, since each step covers a lot more distance when you run. So in terms of step counting, steps taken while running should be “worth” a lot more in terms of exercise than steps taken while walking.

In either case, my understanding of the evidence is that it has pretty consistently been shown across many different studies that almost any amount of daily exercise – walking, jogging, cycling, etc – is way, way better than no daily exercise at all. This study seems to fall nicely into that pattern.

Automated drug discovery is a very interesting area at the moment, especially for cases like these where you’re confined to a relatively small subset of possible biomolecules. This kind of thing works much less well in other kinds of settings where the process chemistry can vary wildly between seemingly similar compounds. It’ll be neat to see how far they can take this idea!

I’d not heard of him before reading this, is he a big name in climate dynamics research?