BougieBirdie

Disney just announced yesterday that they were investing a billion dollars into OpenAI. I have a hard time believing any AI company is respecting copyright because infringement is their business model. This sort of reads like “the competition’s product is worse than ours.”

It’s hard to know who to root for in a battle between giant AI firms and equally giant entertainment companies.

You’re allowed to root for nobody. Sometimes everyone sucks.

This tool wouldn’t work very well either. Ignoring the problems of collecting and verifying the validity of the data (and those are pretty big, serious problems), 2,900 images isn’t really enough to train an accurate image classifier. Especially not one that I would be comfortable using in a medical context.

Using the tool would probably result in a ton of false positives, and I’d bet the model would be overfitted to its data. Of course, I don’t think that would prevent people from using something like that nefariously.

Well, it is and it isn’t
Understanding the date labels on your food

If the product has a shelf life of less than 90 days, it must have either a best before or packed on date with specific rules about how it’s formatted. If it has a shelf life greater than 90 days, the best before date is optional. Also a best before date has no guarantee that the product isn’t spoiled, but also may be perfectly safe to consume well beyond the best before date.

To further muddy the waters, there are actual expiration dates which must be included on very specific products. Mostly medical diets, meal replacements, and infant formula. This means that best before dates are not expiration dates, although most people use the term interchangeably. Indeed, even this article does because alcohol would have a best before date and the article is quoted as saying it’s expiring.

Anyway, apart from actual “expiration dates” which are serious business, best before dates do seem to be largely based on vibes and woo-woo

Edit: And you know what else, this all Canadian regulations. I have no idea how that impacts an imported product. I’m assuming an import has to follow our regulations in order to be sold, but hey, anything goes in business

Sometimes the best-by date refers to the packaging instead of the product. Plastic bottles in particular degrade with time and give you a whole bunch of microplastics.

Most booze shouldn’t go bad if properly stored, but exceptions might occur for lighter beverages like beer and coolers.

Aside, I think the best-by date is largely a scam and if it benefits anyone it’s either the manufacturer or grocer. I wonder how much perfectly edible food my family’s thrown away because someone saw a date that made them feel funny

If I have a train of thought, it keeps getting derailed at the station

My professor tried to teach us that one too, but a classmate came up with an unforgettable mnemonic. Very cursed

The professor hadn’t heard that one before

Quiddler is also the name of a card-based word game. It plays like Gin with a lot of Qs

Top 5%, mom would be proud!

Git is what’s known as “Version Control Software” which basically means that it keeps track of the changes you make.

It’s primarily used for software development, and where it shines is when multiple people are collaborating on a project which will receive many changes. You can create a “branch” of the project with the changes you want to “commit” and then after they’re reviewed in a “pull request” you can “merge” them back inyo the main branch. If at any point in the process you discover that the changes cause issues, a history allows you to “revert” those changes back to what you had previously.

As you can probably see, there’s a fair bit of terminology in git. It’s a powerful tool that has a learning curve in order to use it.

While git is primarily used in software development, it doesn’t have to be. In fact, you could use it for any collection of files that receive changes. It’s not uncommon to see it used for technical writing , wikis, or large collaborative documents. I recall seeing a compelling argument that it could be used for drafting legislation, although I’m not aware of any government which uses it for that purpose.

Some people argue about whether or not you should use git with non-text files because the changes are much larger, but you don’t have to rigidly follow dogma.

I knew a guy who liked to use git for his RPG campaign notes. The main branch held his setting info, and when he’d run a game he’d create a new branch. If he was pleased with the game and wanted to enshrine it in canon, he’d merge it into main. Otherwise, he could leave the branch alone, but he’d still always be able to go back and look at the adventure with the details of the setting as it was at that time. I thought it was overkill, but he had fun.