Interesting Links for 03-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Introvert meetups are fun

(tags:introversion social )

2. Japan Decides Copyright Doesn't Apply To AI Training | BIIA.com | Business Information Industry Association

(tags:copyright ai Japan )

3. John Cage - 4' 33'' Death Metal Cover

(tags:music silence video art )

4. New Jersey: Twins born on new year won't share same birth date nor same birth year

(tags:twins birth date )

5. The Plan to Put Pig Genes in Soy Beans for Tastier Fake Meat

(tags:meat vegetables pigs genetics )

Comments

[cmcmck]

5 How to really not get it but then, as a veggie, I don't eat meat, fake or otherwise!

[andrewducker]

As a carnivore, I will happily switch away from meat when the taste is at least as good as it. So I hope that things like this succeed!

[channelpenguin]

I've just gone (wholefood unprocessed) vegan and I can see both sides. Personally I don't like eating "industrial" foods, rather just cook in a way that suits the ingredients - but as a pragmatic move to get meativores to eat less meat then I can see it might be very helpful.

Direct conversion of plant to human food is better for the environment PLUS the fewer animals we keep en masse in close confinement and proximity to humans, the fewer new nasty new viruses will we get appearing. Less antibiotics used and so fewer antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Etc.

Not sure that the future is best with still large corporate interests better controlling more of the food supply, but since we are already there, meh.

[cmcmck]

I'm veggie on the simple basis that I really don't like meat at all and as you say,cooking fresh is such a great thing.

3

[danieldwilliam]

What do you suppose the copyright position is if you release a short EP of two tracks of creative silence, each of 2 minute and 10 second duration with a 13 second interval?

Re: 3

[andrewducker]

I think that, as with most creative attempts to avoid copyright by doing something obvious, a judge would probably Have Opinions.

(If, of course, the copyright owners actually bothered to take you to court.)

5

[danieldwilliam]

I've no idea if putting pig genes in soybeans is a good idea or not but I think the CEO of Moolec, Paladini is right, plant-based foods will displace meat when they are some combination of tastier and cheaper than meat.

Re: 5

[andrewducker]

Totally agreed. At the moment, there's something about meat which vegetables alone don't satiate for me*. Once they do, I think the changeover will be remarkably quick.

*This is not always the case. The vegetarian breakfast at Greenwoods is fantastic, and I don't actually feel the need to have bacon on it. But it's mostly true.

Re: 5

[channelpenguin]

Interesting on saiety. I find the opposite - but I'm eating bean and whole grain veg stews / soups, huge salads, nuts, seeds etc. In a huge variety of colours. A lot of sheer mass, a lot of fibre, a lot to chew, not hyper salty, and slow to eat.

Re: 5

[channelpenguin]

Just worry about tastier *how*. Highly processed, hyperpalatable industrial foods aren't especially good for health, and are very successfully designed to make users eat more of them.

But since I'm not sure that actually *can* get worse, then at least skipping intensive animal farming seems like a win.

2

[danieldwilliam]

I can a bit of an international fight brewing over different approaches to copyright and AI training data.

Re: 2

[andrewducker]

Definitely.

I am not convinced that the USA will find that "scanning information about something into a computer" violates copyright on that thing. Generating new works that are remarkably similar to it, on the other hand...

Re: 2

[jducoeur]

What really struck me, last week, was folks showing how very easy it is to generate Disney-trademarked characters in the image generators. That gets the most vicious IP lawyers on the planet potentially lined up against the LLM industry. (And in the US, the biggest lawyers tend to win.)

Re: 2

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. That's going to cost someone a lot of money.

[lilysea]

The Plan to Put Pig Genes in Soy Beans for Tastier Fake Meat

I wonder if this will cause problems for people with tick-induced meat allergy. :(

(Not an allergy I have personally, but one I have seen a lot of articles about)

https://www.allergy.org.au/patients/food-allergy/mammalian-meat-tick-faq

[redbird]

Twins with a different birthday may have an easier time than those who share a birthday, given how many systems still treat the set "surname, date of birth, home address" as a unique identifier. I know someone with twins who, like most twins, were born on the same day, who has already had to argue with the health insurance people about covering both her daughters, born on the same day to the same parents.

[andrewducker]

That's *got* to be deliberate on the part of the health insurance companies. 1 in 250 births is a multiple birth, so they'll have lots of them in their systems!

[redbird]

It's not just the insurance companies, though: parents of twins also find themselves arguing with pediatricians' offices, which don't have that incentive, and with schools, whose incentives tend to run in the other direction. At least in the US, school funding depends partly on the total number of student-days, so the school or district has an incentive to list all their students, sometimes including children who dropped out or moved away.

[bens_dad]

I see an NHS source for the 1:250 figure, though that is for identical twins - about one third of all twins.
https://www.babycentre.co.uk/a539828/how-common-are-twins says: After natural conception, just over one per cent of pregnancies are twins.Both match my understanding which was that it was about 1:80.

I suppose that is uncommon enough that it could slip through the spec and initial implementation, but failing to fix it must be deliberate.
Fraudulent claims with the same birth-date might be sufficiently common that they wish to guard against them.

[andrewducker]

Good catch on the frequency!

And I can see them wanting to be careful with fraud. Holding up both babies to the camera at the same time should prove they exist ;-)

[calimac]

1) I can imagine this happening in a British pub. I can't imagine it in an American bar. That sums up much of the difference between the types of establishments.

3) It's possibly relevant that one of the inspirations for 4' 33" was the idea of having a record of silence in jukeboxes to afford patrons a break from the incessant noise.

[andrewducker]

I know my mother certainly used it that way!

[fub]

One would think that Japan, which relies on "soft power", mostly fueled by it's content-generating industries, would be more protective of those same industries. Penny wise, pound foolish in the long run, I believe.

[movingfinger]

5. They made the choice to use genes from an animal many humans won't eat.

[snippy]

There has already been a rabbinic determination that pork meat grown in a lab, even though the real thing just not taken from an animal, can be kosher.

[bens_dad]

They made the choice to use genes from an animal many humans won't eat. ... and put them into one of the "big eight" most common food allergens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_allergy#Common_food_allergies

[bens_dad]

John Cage
4'33" has three movements (33", 2'40" and 1'20" according to https://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=17).
I haven't managed to spot those transitions in the Dead Territory performance; if they missed this bit of the score, they would not be the first performers to have played it straight through without separating the movements.