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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • During prohibition grape (formerly wine) producers sold grape juice with the warning label “don’t store in a cool dark place for multiple weeks or this product may become illegal”. (or something to that effect) You can do much the same with any grain or fruit.

    For Marijuana you have to at least get seeds/the plant first, which are now a controlled product. Yeah it’ll grow anywhere (hence “weed”), but you still have to source it and plant it somewhere with sunlight.

    Brewing at scale and/or for a specific product is difficult, making alcohol is easy.


  • Partial and group ownership is incredibly common now because everything is so expensive. I’m making ~$60k and ‘own’ 1/20th of a plane (Cessna 177) that none of us could reasonably afford alone. Admittedly that’s not struggling, but it’s not a ton of money in my part of the country either. It’s just prioritizing spending on getting to fly instead of other hobbies.

    Most flight instructors / people going for the airlines are in similar partnerships or at a flight school using those small planes to eventually get enough hours to go to the airlines. They’re usually making less than I am.










  • The important part about Flat Earther beliefs that always seems to get left out is that they’re a fundamentalist christian sect.

    They don’t believe the Earth is flat because of “the evidence”, or even necessarily that the Earth is flat that’s just the corner of their belief structure that got famous. They believe that the biblical Truth from God is the enemy of Science and that “they” are trying to keep that from people, in order to lead people away from God. Then comes the “evidence” and “debates” which are them trying to meet non-believers halfway, but fundamentally not understanding how/why science is a way of processing information.

    Fortunately/unfortunately most Flat Earther’s got made fun enough publicly enough that they’re not really preaching it anymore. They’ve since moved on to other apocalyptic religious movements like Qanon/MAGA.


  • LLMs are at least a quaternary(?) source. They’re scraping secondary/tertiary sources. As such they’re little better than asking passersby on the street. You might get a general idea of what the zeitgeist is, but how true any particular statement actually is will vary wildly.

    Math itself is designed to describe relationships between things. That doesn’t mean you can’t mock up a ‘reasonable seeming’ equation that is absolute nonsense after further examination, but that a layman will take as ‘true enough’.

    LLMs don’t cite things. They provide an approximation of what a human might write. They don’t know what they’re writing or how it relates to the ‘real world’ any more than any other centerpiece of a Chinese Room.