A California-based biotechnology startup has officially launched the world's first commercially available butter made entirely from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, eliminating the need for traditional agriculture or animal farming. Savor, backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates through his Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, announced the commercial release of its animal- and plant-free butter after three years of development.
The revolutionary product uses a proprietary thermochemical process that transforms carbon dioxide captured from the air, hydrogen from water, and methane into fat molecules chemically identical to those found in dairy butter. According to the company, the process creates fatty acids by heating these gases under controlled temperature and pressure conditions, then combining them with glycerol to form triglycerides.
While I think this is pretty amazing science stuff, the writing is terrible. Here is the progression of the story as written:
They made butter from carbon...
Well, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen...
OK, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, and methane...
Well, no, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, methane, and glycerol...
Wait, hang on, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, methane, glycerol, natural flavor, and lecithin...
Now, the source of glycerol is in question, because they say this butter is both animal and plant-free. Glycerol can be made synthetically, but it's WAY more expensive to do it. Also, I'm not seeing any way to create lecithin without plants. They never say what the "natural flavor" is.
A reminder that "natural flavor" doesn't mean healthier or even something you might want over the artificially created flavors. It just means it comes from a natural source and is not lab created.
Castoreum, sometimes used for vanilla and raspberry flavoring, comes from beaver anal secretions. That would be labelled under a "natural flavor" and you'd never be told more than that.
I'll take the artificial stuff any day just on principle there.
I think it's worth pointing out that vanilla extract is from vanilla beans and artificial vanilla is whatever the fuck they feel like that tastes like vanilla. Also, modern artificial vanilla extremely rarely, if ever, is derived from Castoreum because it's hard as hell to farm beavers and expensive as all fuck. The "artificial vanilla comes from beaver anal glands" is basically a prevalent internet myth that gets passed around like the, "You eat 7 spiders a year in your sleep." myth.
You said artificial vanilla is whatever the fuck. It's not, artificial vanilla is the main ingredient of natural vanilla, but without the other flavors
Ah gotcha! I for sure was not following what you were saying. I don't know if that's he real thrust of the point in my above comment, but I was more referring to the fact that artificial vanilla doesn't necessarily come from vanilla beans. I should've been more precise with my language, but it's worth noting that artificial vanilla is largely synthesized and comes from a variety of sources, not just vanilla beans (see below for the source/pertinent excerpt).
It also gets weird as to how the FDA regulates the term. I believe the key term is actually "Pure" in the "Pure Vanilla Extract" but don't quote me on that. Not sure how it's done by other regulatory agencies but it's probably equally convoluted in a lot of places.
However, many alternate routes to vanillin are well documented, including vanillin derived from spruce tree lignin, corn sugar, rice or wheat bran, clove oil, curcumin, or guaiacol.
They can still be your prime years in terms of quantity of beaver ass eaten, if not in quality. But I think you sell yourself short. They're gonna love you!
My ex wife's uncle was the director of the south American division of the arm that made coloring and flavorings of one of the big Food/Chem groups, Procter & Gamble, or unilever, or one of those. Can't remember.
No one in his household ate any processed/ultra processed foods.
It kind of sounds like the beginnings of star trek's replicators...
But that aside, somehow I doubt those are the exact only "ingredients" they use. And it wouldn't surprise me at all if the end product contains all kinds of trace elements of various not so healthy chemicals used to get the parts to combine into the actual butter. Like the process to get the glycerol or lecithin in a state they can use.
Ofcourse a lot of our dietary ingredients are contaminated in various levels anyway.
I'd actually be willing to give it a try if it's vaguely price-competitive, but their website is all glam shots of butter and people doing things with butter and not only doesn't sell it but doesn't tell you where you can get it.
Also, they did not do a good job of choosing that name. It looks like there's a very-similarly-named French Canadian manufacturer of butter, Savör, which apparently isn't too religious about using their umlaut:
At Savor, we believe the best butter starts with the best environment. That’s why we source our grass-fed dairy butter from New Zealand, a country renowned for its pristine landscapes, sustainable farming, and exceptional dairy quality.
Savor makes delightfully rich foods without animals, farmland, fertilizers, hormones, or antibiotics. These are real fats, not a substitute. That means all the calories to carry all the flavor.
Pretty sure I know the factory that this butter comes from. The Miraka plant; north of Taupō. Geothermally powered, restricts it to a relatively small region in NZ.
Maybe the manufacturer is in New Zealand and the French-Canadian people are the guys who package and sell it or something. Dunno, just did a quick skim of their site.
Yeah well... I never liked Savör products too much. They go out if their way with all their branding and claims, but you can get very tasty butter from local creameries at similar prices, without the need to ship it frozen halfway across the globe. Especially with milk sourced from the eastern townships or the Saguenay region. And Quebec (where Savör is operating) runs on 100% hydro power, which is equal or better to geothermal. So whatever Savör is gaining from the Miraka plant, is lost on the need to import basically.
You're probably right, but I can't wait to see the egg on your face if it does turn out to contain glycomacropeptides, α-lactalbumin, β-lactoglobulin, serum albumin and immunoglobulins!
To put it in simple terms, Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heat them up, oxidize them and get a final result that looks like candle wax but is in fact fat molecules like those in beef, cheese or vegetable oils.
So their process sounds like it creates synthetic lard, not butter. This can still be a good thing as the extra ingredients to make it "butter" aren't really the hard/impactful part of butter.
I'm not giving up a small pleasure like butter just so that a billionaire can buy another private jet and wipe out whatever tiny carbon footprint savings comes from giving up butter
We focus too much on efficiency and cost sometimes. Sometimes efficiency is only a "nice to have" while being outweighed by practicality, convenience, safety, and any of the other factors we choose to make a priority.
It is expensive and inefficient for an airplane to have two engines instead of just one. We do it anyway because it's required for safety and redundancy. We made that the priority, and that was an active choice. We need to start making more active choices about what the priority is when it comes to our energy futures. All priorities have tradeoffs. Cost and efficiency have their own tradeoffs. Question it when people tell you that things can't be done because of "cost" or "efficiency". When they do that they're presupposing what the priority is, but often it's billionaires trying to cut corners to make themselves richer at our expense, our safety, our futures. We can do inefficient things. Sometimes it's even the right choice.
I think you're missing that there are better ways to produce fuels for cars than to chemically synthesize petroleum. It's all about cost and efficiency if you're just looking for portable energy. Or we could burn more coal so we can generate the energy needed for synthetic gasoline....
Or we could burn more coal so we can generate the energy needed for synthetic gasoline…
The problem is, people can, do, and will use that exact same argument to say we don't need any more solar panels or wind turbines, because we don't need and can't use or store the excess power for anything and that's why we need to keep thermal plants as backup for base load generation. Look, when we produce too much electricity, the electricity cost goes to zero and negative! It's "wasteful and inefficient"! But these two problems can solve each other. Synthetic fuels (doesn't have to be gasoline, hydrogen is step 1, methane/LNG is a bit more manageable as a chemical fuel. As long as the carbon source is atmospheric, then it and other synthetic hydrocarbons are carbon neutral to burn) provide an on-demand energy sink/storage method that can support and drive more electrification and renewable power, it just has to be part of a consistent and systemic approach with strict regulation and a clear view of the big picture (something sorely lacking these days).
We need a solar grid that can meet our demand during a 9-hour, overcast, low-angle winter day. That same grid will be producing more than 4 times as much power as we need during a 15-hour, high-angle summer day, even after we include air conditioning loads.
We need massive, seasonal loads to soak up that excess power and keep solar profitable.
Fake butter isn't going to do it, but things like desalination, hydrogen electrolysis, and Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbon production are all likely candidates.
A federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent on a Chicago area task force used Palos Heights Detective Todd Hutchinson’s login credentials to perform unauthorized searches this past January.
A Palos Heights police officer has been disciplined and retrained
That is automatic fired in any place I've worked IT.
The detective stated it was “common” to allow others in the group to use his login for drug investigations
That's an investigation in any place I've worked IT.
State legislation prohibits Illinois license plate reader data from being used for immigration enforcement purposes.
Like that matters.
Meh, read the damned article. It's more damning than I can post about.
As usual, I'll sign off by saying, get strapped, learn gun safety and local laws, practice, be ready to fucking die in a firefight. Human rights will never come cheap to defend. But in no caselie down for this shit. Don't have a "brown people" pic, but they're as important as any of us.
If your life is more important than your liberty, you do you, I will not judge. But I've made my own decision on the matter.
I wish more people who believe in justice had your attitude. We wouldn't be degrading into Orwellian 1984 standards if the powers that be received just 2% pushback with the same magnitude of force they employ.
Democracy dies because Americans, the gun-toting, freedom-fighting, liberty-loving citizens they are, are in fact giant. fucking. cowards. In general.
They do feel pretty free to do that, and they also heavily signal that if you’re of a darker complexion, even if they barge in unannounced, that they’re going to fill your house full of holes but if you’re white, even if you knew what was going on, they’ll detain you alive. It happens all the time, and in “unarmed” societies that aren’t massively shit people don’t need to worry about it anyway.
“Greatest country on earth” but everyone needs to be constantly afraid of their neighbours and government.
A bit of missing context - the officer with the access to the FLOCK system shared his account details with many other officers including the DEA agent because he thought that’s just what was done since he was the only one with an account.
Also on this:
State legislation prohibits Illinois license plate reader data from being used for immigration enforcement purposes.
Why?! Why is immigration enforcement being stifled so much? Imagine if there was a police database that could help find murderers whenever they drove their car in public and legislators said “no you’re not allowed to use that to help find wanted murderers”. It makes no sense.
A bit of missing context - the officer with the access to the FLOCK system shared his account details with many other officers including the DEA agent because he thought that’s just what was done since he was the only one with an account.
LOLLLLLLLL
And I suppose any arrests or convictions based on that were not legal or overturned, right??
Because immigration enforcement is a civil violation, not a criminal one. Imagine if the government said that license plate readers could be used to enforce copyright violations, or defamation. Say a bad word about the President and they will use the system to find your car and wait for you to send you to Alligator Auschwitz without a trial.
Entering the country illegally is a crime under federal law, not civil. Remaining in the country after your legal immigration status is up is a civil issue, but deportation is a lawful response.
Why do you think people should get to stay in a country illegally? I’m genuinely curious.
Do you think a person should be seperated from thier families, put into prison, subjected to violence, and sent to a country they've never been to for a misdemeanor?
Because thats a criminal misdemeanor, not civil like immigration. But you dont care do you? You got yours..
If law enforcement had access to all of your social media, e-mails and live video feeds from inside your house then they would be able to catch criminals more effectively.
We have laws specifically limiting police powers because we recognize that there are more things to consider than simply maximizing arrests.
Protection against unreasonable search is written into the constitution, after all
It does make sense. Police are not perfect saint-like beings, and the government is not composed of perfect beings either. I'm not sure what kind of person you are, but I'm sure there are some things you enjoy and partake in which some other social group really despises. If you're religious, it may be militant atheists who despise you going to church. If you're not religious, it may be militant theists who despise you not going to church. The point is, there's probably some social cultures out there that hate you for the things that you love. Those people may not be in charge right now, but they might be one day. Those people can end up in police departments, as developers for these camera companies, as administrators for the database that collects information on where you drive and when. Those people, being imperfect as they are, may not always resist the temptation to use this system in a way to track down and identify people like you for doing whatever it is that you love and they hate. Now you end up on a list for that.
There's no denying that sophisticated surveillance technology does make it easier to catch criminals and does legitimately protect from the threats those criminals pose. But surveillance technology, by it's very nature, cannot surveil only the criminals - it has to surveil everyone to find the criminals. And the notion of what is criminal may change. If your favorite hobby becomes criminalized, or if the government criminalizes your identity itself, these beautifully effective tools are suddenly turned against you.
There is a happy medium to be found between giving your society tools to enforce the will of constituents, vs. giving your society tools that be too easily abused. Given that this tool is already being abused, it probably isn't worth the benefits.
But if they did criminalise my favourite hobby, and they had evidence that I’m continuing to do that hobby in plain sight, they see me doing it every day……I’d expect them to come get me. That makes sense. It makes no sense to have that technology there to be used to find some crimes but not others.
I see what you're saying. You're not talking about "making sense" in an ethical or social well-being sense, you mean it's literally confusing why the technology wouldn't be used for all kinds of crimes, given that it already exists - irrespective of whether the technology should be used. Is that right? I think you're getting downvoted because it kinda sounds like you're saying this is all a good idea when you say it "makes sense". Unfortunate English ambiguities. But you're saying, like, sure it's dystopian and creepy and wrong, but why wouldn't the creepy dystopia use the tech for all cases then rather than just some? That's a good question. I think because there is legitimately some understanding of the dangers of using these powerful tools willy-nilly. While people aren't perfect angels, they also aren't perfect devils either. Another factor is that there is some pressure to appear not to be overly heavy-handed with these tools - as we see in those chats, they knew it made them look bad for this to get out.
And the final most pessimistic factor is that this Flock company almost certainly charges per seat, so giving direct usernames and logins to every officer or even every department is probably absurdly expensive. Companies (in this case the police) will often try to limit their license seats to as few people as possible and then just funnel as much different people's work through that one person's license as they can.
Despite all the downvotes, I think it's a reasonable enough question. It happens to have a very reasonable answer though.
First of all, your concern is largely addressed, since immigration control can still access law enforcement databases if they have a warrant.
As for why this law exists at all, well it's actually to the benefit of law enforcement: the idea is that immigrant communities are more likely to cooperate with law enforcement if they aren't scared that they will be the target of immigration control. This is all the more practical now, when ICE has degraded into a largely lawless and authoritarian organization, since you can imagine most immigrants wouldn't want to say a word to any police officer unless they at least have the protections of the 2017 TRUST act in place.
Now, what I'm a bit confused about is why you are so up-in-arms about the existence of this law instead of the violation of this law. Surely if you are so law-abiding as you make out to be in your comments, you should be shouting for legal action against the police officers involved in breaking the law.
A federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent on a Chicago area task force used Palos Heights Detective Todd Hutchinson’s login credentials to perform unauthorized searches this past January.
Following the murder, 'Israel' shared a document it claimed was from Hamas' Al-Qassam Brigades, intended to prove Al-Sharif's membership. This document, whose authenticity is vehemently denied by his family, Al Jazeera and international organizations, was meant to be the final word, a definitive justification for targeting a member of the press.
Even if one were to entertain the authenticity of this document for the sake of argument, its contents incriminate the 'Israeli' military completely. The document alleges that in early 2023, months before the October 7 attacks and the subsequent 'Israeli' assault on Gaza, Anas Al-Sharif was wounded in a training explosion. It goes on to detail the consequences of this incident, stating he was left with severe, debilitating injuries: "Severe hearing loss in the left ear + vision impairment in the left eye + dizziness and headaches."
The document’s own conclusion is unambiguous: as a result of these injuries, Anas Al-Sharif was deemed incapacitated and unfit for military service. This is not a footnote; it is the central point. By the logic of the very document 'Israel' presented to the world as justification, Anas Al-Sharif held zero military capacity or role during the entire period of the war in which he was killed.
(•_•) / ( •_•)>⌐■-■ / (⌐■_■), usually referred to as “Puts on Sunglasses”, is the ASCII-interpretation of the popular C.S.I. multipane comics featuring Lt.
Jan v1 delivers 91% SimpleQA accuracy, slightly outperforming Perplexity Pro while running fully locally. It's built on the new version of Qwen's Qwen3-4B-Thinking (up to 256k context length), fine-tuned for reasoning and tool use in Jan.
Small language models (SLMs) are inherently limited in knowledge-intensive tasks due to their constrained capacity. While test-time computation offers a path to enhanced performance, most approaches treat reasoning as a fixed or heuristic process.
Like many teachers at every level of education, I have spent the past two years trying to wrap my head around the question of generative AI in my English classroom. To my thinking, this is a question that ought to concern all people who like to read and write, not just teachers and their students. Today’s English students are tomorrow’s writers and readers of literature. If you enjoy thoughtful, consequential, human-generated writing—or hope for your own human writing to be read by a wide human audience—you should want young people to learn to read and write. College is not the only place where this can happen, of course, but large public universities like UVA, where I teach, are institutions that reliably turn tax dollars into new readers and writers, among other public services. I see it happen all the time.
There are valid reasons why college students in particular might prefer that AI do their writing for them: most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce. There are also reasons I consider less valid (detailed in a despairing essay that went viral recently), which amount to opportunistic laziness: if you can get away with using AI, why not?
It was this line of thinking that led me to conduct an experiment in my English classroom. I attempted the experiment in four sections of my class during the 2024-2025 academic year, with a total of 72 student writers. Rather than taking an “abstinence-only” approach to AI, I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs. We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.
What could go wrong?
In the weeks that followed, I had my students complete a series of writing assignments with and without AI, so that we could compare the results.
My students liked to hate on AI, and tended toward food-based metaphors in their critiques: AI prose was generally “flavorless” or “bland” compared to human writing. They began to notice its tendency to hallucinate quotes and sources, as well as its telltale signs, such as the weird prevalence of em-dashes, which my students never use, and sentences that always include exactly three examples. These tics quickly became running jokes, which made class fun: flexing their powers of discernment proved to be a form of entertainment. Without realizing it, my students had become close readers.
During these conversations, my students expressed views that reaffirmed their initial survey choices, finding that AI wasn’t great for first drafts, but potentially useful in the pre- or post-writing stages of brainstorming and editing. I don’t want to overplay the significance of an experiment with only 72 subjects, but my sense of the current AI discourse is that my students’ views reflect broader assumptions about when AI is and isn’t ethical or effective.
It’s increasingly uncontroversial to use AI to brainstorm, and to affirm that you are doing so: just last week, the hosts of the New York Times’s tech podcast spoke enthusiastically about using AI to brainstorm for the podcast itself, including coming up with interview questions and summarizing and analyzing long documents, though of course you have to double-check AI’s work. One host compares AI chatbots to “a very smart assistant who has a dozen Ph.D.s but is also high on ketamine like 30 percent of the time.”
My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point. They use it to make study guides, interpret essay prompts, and register for classes, turning it loose on t…
WPlace is a desktop app that takes its cue from Reddit’s r/place, a sporadic experiment where users placed pixels on a small blank canvas every few minutes. On Wplace, anyone can sign up to add coloured pixels to a world map – each user able to place one every 30 seconds. By internet standards one pixel every 30 seconds is glacial, and that is part of what makes it so powerful. In just a few weeks since its launch tens, if not, hundreds of thousands of drawings have appeared.
Scrolling to my corner of Scotland, I found portraits of beloved pets, anime favourites, pride flags, football crests. In Kyiv, a giant Hatsune Miku dominates the sprawl alongside a remembrance garden where a user asked others to leave hand drawn flowers. Some pixels started movements. At one point there was just a single wooden ship flying a Brazilian flag off Portugal. Soon, a fleet appeared, a tongue-in-cheek invasion.
Across the diversity and chaos of the Wplace world map, nothing else feels like Gaza. In most cities, the art is made by those who live there. Palestinians do not have this opportunity: physical infrastructure is destroyed while people are murdered. Their voices, culture, and experiences are erased in real time. So, others show up for them, transforming the space on the map into a living mosaic of grief and care.
No algorithm, no leaders, but on Wplace, collective actions emerge organically. A movement stays visible only because people choose to maintain it, adding pixels, repairing any damage caused by others drawing over it. In that sense it works like any protest camp or memorial in the physical world: it survives only if people tend it. And here, those people are scattered across continents, bound not by geography but by a shared refusal to let what they care about disappear from view.
Wplace is exploding onling amid a new ear of youth protest.
From political pixel art to vigils over Gaza, this beautifully chaotic internet project is showing how young people are reinventing protest.
because the power draw is so heavy, the power supply to the building where grok lives is being supplemented with generators. grok is polluting the air over memphis. AND grok is being cooled with 1.5 million gallons per day of the city’s drinking water from the memphis sands aquifer instead of from the water treatment plant they promised to build but didn’t.
China announced a 75.8 per cent preliminary tariff on Canadian canola on Tuesday, following an anti-dumping investigation launched last year in response to Canada’s tax on Chinese electric vehicles.
Hopefully an impetus for broader trade deal between the 2 countries. US more likely to take trade from China while its allies still cling to propaganda hatred in support of the empire.
current general tariffs on China are 30% = 10% + 20% fentanyl emergency. Somehow 35% vs "it's friend", Canada. US has same tariffs on EVs as Canada, which Trudeau imposed the day after being ordered by Sulivan to do so. Allowing some protective but revenue generating tariff rate, somewhere under 40% for EVs, would be a good compromise to open China to Canadian resource markets. Canada is one of the largest (8th) auto markets in the world. Failure to get any deals, or public talks, with companies and countries is innaction that doesn't help get US to submit to stable historical alliance.
It's worth noting that EV tariffs make some sense for the US because they're protecting domestic industry, they make zero sense for Canada which does not have its own domestic car industry. The rational thing for Canada would've been to invite Chinese companies like BYD to do manufacturing here.
make zero sense for Canada which does not have its own domestic car industry.
Canada produces almost as much vehicles as it consumes. They are mostly foreign owned companies, but it's a sizeable employment base in Ontario and Quebec.
In an unjustified US trade war, threats of nationalizing plants is reasonable, and then selling them to Chinese makers with employment guarantees a win for entire sector and country. But a reasonable tariff/quota level as part of greater Chinese market access/long term supply contracts deal would be the balanced strategy.
The key is that Canada can produce vehicles from both American and Chinese companies. And if we did nationalize existing plants I don't see why we'd sell them to China. Just keep them under public ownership.
A new report from Dropsite News makes the claim that Meta is allegedly scraping a large amount of independent sites for content to train their AI. What’s worse is that this scraping operation appears to completely disregard robots.txt, a control list used to tell crawlers, search engines, and bots which parts of a site should be accessed, and which parts should be avoided. It’s worth mentioning that the efficacy of such lists depend on the consuming software to honor this, and not every piece of software does.
Meta Denies All Wrongdoing
Andy Stone, a communications representative for Meta, has gone on record by claiming that the list is bogus, and the story is incorrect. Unfortunately, the spread of Dropsite’s story is relatively small, and there haven’t been any other public statements about the list at this time. This makes it difficult to adequately critique the initial story, but the concept is nevertheless a wakeup call.
However, it’s worth acknowledging Meta’s ongoing efforts to scrape data from many different sources. This includes user data, vast amounts of published books, and independent websites not part of Meta’s sprawling online infrastructure. Given that the Fediverse is very much a public network, it’s not surprising to see instances getting caught in Meta’s net.
Purportedly Affected Instances
The FediPact account has dug in to the leaked PDF, and a considerable amount of Fediverse instances appear on the list. The document itself is 1,659 pages of URLs, so we were able to filter down a number of matches based on keywords. Please keep in mind that these only account for sites that use a platform’s name in the domain:
Mastodon: 46 matches
Lemmy: 6 matches
PeerTube: 46 matches
There are likely considerably more unique domain matches in the list for a variety of platforms. Admins are advised to review whether their own instances are documented there. Even if your instance’s domain isn’t on the list, consider whether your instance is federating with something on the list. Due to the way federation works, cached copies of posts from other parts of the network can still show up on an instance that’s been crawled.
Access the Leaked List
We are mirroring this document for posterity, in case the original article is taken offline.
Regardless of the accuracy of the Dropsite News article, there’s an open question as to what admins can do to protect their instances from being scraped. Due to the nature of the situation, there is likely no singular silver bullet to solve these problems, but there are a few different measures that admins can take:
Establish Community Terms of Service – Establish a Terms of Service for your instance that explicitly calls out scraping for the purposes of data collection and LLM training specifically. While it may have little to no effect on Meta’s own scraping efforts, it at least establishes precedence and a paper trail for your own server community’s expectations and consent.
Request Data Removal – Meta has a form buried within the Facebook Privacy Center that could be used to submit a formal complaint regarding instance data and posts being part of their AI training data. Whether or not Meta does anything is a matter of debate, but it’s nevertheless an option.
(EU-Only) Send a GDPR Form – Similar to the above step, but try to get the request in front of Meta’s GDPR representatives that have to deal with compliance.
Establish Blocking Measures Anyway: Even if private companies can still choose to disregard things like robots.txt and HTTP Headers such as X-Robots-Tag: noindex, you can still reduce the attack surface of your site from AI agents that do actually honor those things.
Set Up a Firewall: one popular software package that’s seeing a lot of recent adoption for blocking AI traffic is Anubis, which has configurable policies that you can adjust as needed to handle different kinds of traffic.
Use Zip Bombs: When all else fails, take measures into your own hands. On the server side, use an Nginx or Apache configuration to detect specific User Agents associated with AI, and serve them ever-expanding compressed archives to slow them down.
In all reality, fighting against AI scraping is still a relatively new problem that’s complicated by lack of clear regulation, and companies deciding to do whatever they want. The best we can do for our communities is to adopt protective measures and stay informed of new developments in the space.
When it comes to blocking AI bots, scrapers and crawlers, you have a few different options, depending on your web platform and how aggressive you wish to be
Don’t feel bad. It looks to me like they made what they thought would be a clever comment but it turned out to be uninformed, and now they are saying “I was just joking.”
Wouldn't people just leave? I feel like that's such an easy thing to do these days. If they are too old, they probably weren't using Chrome anyway and default to edge since its just there. I know not everyone would, but I wonder what the percentage would be in the end. They have been killing it themselves lately with the removal of the blockers. I've been on Firefox for over a decade now. If Firefox did something like this, I would be gone in a day.
It’s bizarre to see how many people and companies don’t see a bubble, it seems so clear to me that yeah, machine learning will continue, but this current iteration isn’t something that people respond well to
Isn't something that you don't respond to, sure. And here in social media you're surrounded by like-minded people. But perhaps AI is more popular with the general public than you think?
Weird comment as this iteration has spawned the fastest growing products of all time. There's no comparison possible with bubbles such as NFTs or the Metaverse.
Financially it's a bubble because those products are grossly unprofitable even by VC standards, but the consumer appeal definitely is there.
You kidding? Google Chrome has the biggest market share. It’s the window to the internet for many. Control that and you practically control the internet as a platform.
I see you're really enjoying those BIG BLACK DICK videos on GAY PORNHUB. Would you be interested in preventing me from sharing this knowledge? I only ask for 0.01BTC in payment to not inform everyone in your social circle of your PECULIAR TASTES IN PORNOGRAPHY. --perplexity
AI startup Perplexity has offered Google $34.5 billion to buy the Chrome browser. The price might be below evaluation, but the company may be forced to sell the browser at the request of U.S. authorities as part of a case in which it was found guilty of being a monopoly.
https://x.com/80Level/status/1955488788861555082
Might as well be wanting all that juicy personal information from which to mine not only for profit but also for sending a SWAT team through the door without a court order and a search warrant. Or, sending a Hellfire missile through a window of a house somewhere in Pakistan.
For those who missed it, perplexity is the one happily powering truth social's AI search with their logo front and centre
Remember your browser choices aren't that of everyone you know. Many of them will happily continue with Chrome and may end up looking at a profile of yours or something—just not using it is really not gonna cut it
Yea, me too, I got a cheap pro subscription and use it often. It is a fast way to find info for me. But I guess behind the scenes they are tracking us in the worst possible way.
The CEO also said in an interview that he would use Chrome to mine endless amounts of user data. As the dead internet becomes a problem, he wants to use Chrome itself to detect when it’s being used by a human and scrape all the data they produce. I instantly uninstalled the Perplexity app after seeing that.
I did some checking around on the web and it seems that the partnership is a standard API license where Perplexity provides the technical infrastructure and Truth Social makes requests to there. The AI does contradict Trump regularly according to the Washington post: washingtonpost.com/technology/…
So I'm not sure if this is massively wrong. Or at least, not as bad as I thought it would be.
Since both lemmy and Mastodon use the fediverse, is it possible to view comment threads under posts from lemmy in Mastodon? How to find a link that works in both/ is it related to the posts id?
You can find Lemmy posts on Mastodon, yeah, but only if it's been federated there.
In regards to Lemmy, there's two means of federation I'm aware of:
When a user of a Mastodon instance is following a Lemmy community, posts made to it are federated to their instance.
Any registered user on a Mastodon instance can enter the URL of a Lemmy post in their instance's search field to actively federate it in
You should then be able to find the post on Mastodon either over the community's profile, via potential hashtags used in it, or possible the author's profile if that got federated over too (idk if this happens automatically).
If the post was made by an Mbin user, then there's also the option to follow the user directly instead of the community the post was made in. Not sure if this also applies to Piefed, but definitely doesn't for Lemmy.
So it is possible if it has been federated to both. There are different reasons why that might happen, in this case it is because that thread's OP posted it on Mastodon but mentioned a Lemmy community.
Another reason why it might happen is that a Mastodon user is following a Lemmy community or user.
"This Week in Plasma" brings the news that Plasma 6.5 will have automatic day/night theme switching, that you can choose which Global Themes to show on the Quick Settings page, and that you can set dynamic wallpaper coloration to be based on the background color scheme or the time of day, or always light, or always dark.
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
I see this post on Akkoma by #Fediverse and answered it. Another person from dot social on Mastodon also commented it. It's weird that those comments can't be readed here in the post. I've tried to comment from there before and seems to work. So I'm not sure what happens when you interact outside of Lemmy.
@glowing_hans @AWUutgQ5inc7fMWpTk.fediverse@lemmy.ml hello, in my experience it is possible and yes, hashtags works. Right know I’m seeing your post and giving an answer from #Akkoma thanks to your...
Much of what’s known as ‘AI’ has nothing to do with progress — it’s about lobbyists pushing shoddy digital replacements for human labour that increase billionaire’s profits and make workers’ lives worse.
When I think of a scam, I think a one-off, obviously amateur attempt. An email with awful grammar saying the government will fine me a bajillion dollars if I don’t download a file is a scam. A scam will also leave you alone.
A grift is done by career slimeballs. Used car salesmen, big C-suites and corrupt politicians are grifters. It’s more offensive and more aggressive. You can’t escape a grift.
Not sure of an official difference, but my take is a grift is something that everyone's kind of doing on the DL, but nobody is admitting that it's a scam.
Think like a cult. Everyone's a part of the cult, but nobody actually wants to believe they're getting scammed or scamming others, so it's more of a grift. People assume what they're doing can't last/sustain, but they do it anyway because the benefits are good.
A scam is straight up the party knowing it's illegitimate and going out of their way to execute the scam so they can benefit at the expense of others.
Basically, I've always taken it as one is self aware (scam) and one is only self-aware at the top levels (grift).
chatbots like gpt and gemini learn from conversations with veiwers, so what we need is a virus that will pretend to be a user and flood its chats with pro racism arguments and sexist remarks, which will rub off on the chatbots making them unacceptable for public use
AI has some legit uses but the hype around it is mostly VC's throwing money at buzzwords while the actual tech is nowhere near the "AGI revolution" they keep promising us lol.
This. Everybody wanted it to be AGI right out of the gate. It's just a tool, like Photoshop. It will get better over time but it's not the end all be all.
A machine learning suite that spends hour after hour screening trillions of potentially medically useful molecules = kind of interesting.
A subscription to a chatbot that writes buggy code that has to be meticulously combed over before you dare put it into production, and might wind up appearing in Google search results = awful, but it's what's selling for some reason?
The former is important, but attracts little attention from the tech & mainstream press, is not heavily marketed by major corporations to other corporations and the general public, and makes VCs fall asleep. Whereas the latter gets ALL the coverage, marketing, and gives VCs big fat boners. My comment expresses my bewilderment at this state of affairs (hence the "for some reason?"). You want to white-knight machine learning, expert systems and pattern recognition? Call VentureBeat, Andressen-Horowitz, PitchBook, and TechCrunch. And while you're at it, tell them to stop vaporizing genAI slop.
But can we at least be thankful that it shifted focus from augmented reality? Prior to AI, the buzz was around things like the metaverse and digital avatars in your teams meetings.
Even crap AI is more useful than avatars in teams.
So whenever someone says, we are making AI, the response should be “oh fuck no” (using bullets and fire if required)
New tagging and auto-completion is fine (there is probably a whole space of new tools that can come out of the AI research field; that doesn’t risk human extinction)
We are so far away from a paperclip maximizer scenario that I can't take anyone concerned about that seriously.
We have nothing even approaching true reasoning, despite all the misuse going on that would indicate otherwise.
Alignment? Takeoff? None of our current technologies under the AI moniker come anywhere remotely close to any reason for concern, and most signs point to us rapidly approaching a wall with our current approaches.
Each new version from the top companies in the space right now has less and less advancement in capability compared to the last, with costs growing at a pace where "exponentially" doesn't feel like an adequate descriptor.
There's probably lateral improvements to be made, but outside of taping multiple tools together there's not much evidence for any more large breakthroughs in capability.
I agree currently technology is extremely unlikely to achieve general intelligence but my expression was that we never should try to achieve AGI; it is not worth the risk until after we solve the alignment problem.
"alignment problem" is what CEOs use as a distraction to take responsibility away from their grift and frame the issue as a technical problem. That's another word that make you lose any credibility
I think we are talking past each other. Alignment with human values is important; otherwise we end up with a paper clip optimizer wanting humans only as a feedstock of atoms or deciding to pull a “With Folded Hands” situation.
None of the “AI” companies are even remotely interested in or working on this legitimate concern.
Much of what’s known as ‘AI’ has nothing to do with progress — it’s about lobbyists pushing shoddy digital replacements for human labour that increase billionaire’s profits and make workers’ lives worse.
UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought
It’s a brutally hot August across the world, but especially in Europe where high temperatures have caused wildfires and droughts. In the UK, the water shortage is so bad that the government is urging citizens to help save water by deleting old emails. It really helps lighten the load on water hungry datacenters, you see.
The suggestion came in a press release posted on the British government’s website Tuesday after a meeting of its National Drought Group. The release gave an update on the status of the drought, which is bad. The Wye and Ely Ouse rivers are at their lowest ever recorded height and “five areas are officially in drought, with six more experiencing prolonged dry weather following the driest six months to July since 1976,” according to the release. It also listed a few tips to help people save on water. playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2… The tips included installing a rain butt to collect rainwater for gardening, fixing leaks the moment they happen, taking shorter showers, and getting rid of old data. “Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems,” the press release suggested.
Datacenters suck up an incredible amount of water to keep their delicate equipment cool. The hotter it is, the more water it uses and a heatwave spikes the costs of doing business. But old emails lingering in cloud servers are a drop in the bucket for a data center compared to processing generative AI requests.
A U.S. A Government Accountability Office report from earlier this year estimated that 60 queries of an AI system consumed about a liter of water, or roughly 1.67 Olympic sized swimming pools for the 250,000,000 queries generated in the U.S. every day. The World Economic Forum has estimated that AI datacenters will consume up to 1.7 trillion gallons of water every year by 2027. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has disputed these estimates, saying that an average ChatGPT query uses “roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon” of water.
Downing Street announced plans in January to “turbocharge AI” in the U.K. The plan includes billions of pounds earmarked for the construction of massive water-hungry datacenters, including a series of centers in Wales that will cost about $16 billion. The announcement about the AI push said it will create tens of thousands of jobs. It doesn’t say anything about where the water will come from.
In America, people are learning that living next to these massive AI data centers is a nightmare that can destroy their air and water quality. People who live next to massive Meta-owned datacenters in Georgia have complained of a lack of water pressure and diminished quality since the data centers moved in. In Colorado, local government and activists are fighting tech companies attempting to build massive data centers in a state that struggled with drought before the water-hungry machines moved in.
Like so many other systemic issues linked to climate change and how people live in the 21st century, small-scale personal solutions like “delete your old emails” won’t solve the problem. The individual water bill for a person’s old photos is nothing compared to the gallons of water required by large corporate clients running massive computers.
“We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions,” Helen Wakeham, the UK Environment Agency’s Director of Water, said in the press release. “Simple, everyday choices—such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails—also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife.”
Representatives from the UK Government did not immediately return 404 Media’s request for comment.
Two metro Denver construction sites offer a glimpse into the power and water needs of the growing data center industry as it tries to provide capacity for artificial intelligence and our online liv…
Edit: It seems that it may be 40MB and that the other 629 MB is from the Texturino plugin that generally gets bundled with it. I believe it is just two separated direct downloads. Not sure why there would be inconsistencies in the file size though (669MB vs 678MB)
Note: I am not requesting for a link nor a source, but rather I just want to know if I am direct downloading the correct file. Specifically, is the bundle supposed to be 40MB or 678MB?
I found torrented versions are 678MB, but direct downloaded versions are only 40MB. motka (dot) net (from the megathread) had one for 678MB, but the download is a 404 sadly.
Also, is the latest version 3.9.1? I see direct download ones showing up as 4.1.0, and 4.2.0 (which doesn't seem right to me)
The job market is queasy and since you're reading this, you need to upgrade your CV. It's going to require some work to game the poorly trained AIs now doing so much of the heavy lifting. I know you don't want to, but it's best to think of this as dealing with a buggy lump of undocumented code, because frankly that's what is between you and your next job.
A big reason for that bias in so many AIs is they are trained on the way things are, not as diverse as we'd like them to be. So being just expensively trained statistics, your new CV needs to give them the words most commonly associated with the job you want, not merely the correct ones.
That's going to take some research and a rewrite to get it looking like those it was trained to match. You need to be adding synonyms and dependencies because the AIs lack any model of how we actually do IT, they only see correlations between words. One would hope a network engineer knows how to configure routers, but if you just say Cisco, the AI won't give it as much weight as when you say both, nor can you assume it will work out that you actually did anything to the router, database or code, so you need to explicitly say what you did.
Fortunately your CV does not have to be easy to read out loud, so there is mileage in including the longer versions of the names of the more relevant tools you've mastered, so awful phrases like "configured Fortinet FortiGate firewall" are helpful if you say it once, as does using all three F words elsewhere. This works well for the old fashioned simple buzzword matching still widely used.
For those using it on Android, a reminder that the older app is not maintained anymore and you might want to replace it with Catfriend1/syncthing-android.
But also - maybe wait for the app v2.0 to be released to upgrade the desktop client at the same time; I don't know if using v2.0 on the desktop would work with the v1.x app.
Oh wow, they already have a 2.0 prerelease build. That was fast!
I'm in no rush. 1.x has been doing its job without demanding any of my attention since I set it up a year or so ago. Setup was a bit complex, but it was definitely worth learning.
I tried it, but it didn't work for me, so I had to reintroduce the device and share the directories again. But you don't have to transfer all the data again, it'll just do a full scan and transfer the diff as usual.
Thanks for the info. I will try upgrading now. To save people a click, here are the instructions:
On Syncthing on the official app, go into the settings and create a backup. Confirm you can see that backup in your files. Now stop the official app entirely using the system app settings for Syncthing (force stop the app basically - we need to ensure it's not running). Install Syncthing-Fork v1.29.7.1 Now start Syncthing-Fork. In the Syncthing-Fork settings, restore the backup you created earlier. Like magic, everything should be as it was in Syncthing official. Confirm everything looks good. Uninstall the official Syncthing app. Delete the syncthing configuration backup from backups/syncthing. Upgrade to the latest Syncthing-Fork version
I could export and import with minimal issues around half a year ago after it was discontinued. Based on what @eager_eagle@lemmy.world said maybe try installing an older version, importing, then updating.
I just tried. Old app exports a directory, new one wants a zip. Zipped the dir and offered to new one. New one complained that some expected file was missing. Gave up and set it up again with it's new keys (phone only syncs one dir off my home server, not a big deal) and now it's going great.
You had me scared there for a moment, but the Syncthing people are dependable and support hasn't been dropped, it's just the prebuilt binaries that no longer will be provided.
I remember using SQLite like 12 years ago as a backend for Minecraft mods, and even more recently as a backend for HomeAssistant and switching away to something else for performance…and now switching back. Kudos to them for all the work that went into that! Worst to first!
As much as I would like to agree with you, permissive licenses are killing open source software as a whole since corporations absolutely abuse the software, provide very little value back to the code in return, and often DEMAND the authors patch their vulnerabilities.
Open source props up the world and the least that corporations could do is throw 0.0001% of their revenue their way. But they can't even be bothered to do that.
SQLite is one of the very few open source projects with a reasonable plan for monetisation.
Do you want to use one of the proprietary extensions? Fork up a few thousand. No biggie.
Do you operate in a regulated industry (aviation) and need access to the 100% coverage test suite along with a paper trail? Fork up ”Call us”.
Is your company insisting that you only use licensed or supported software? Well, you can apparently pay them for a licence to their public domain software.
Basically, squeeze regulated industries, hard.
I’m all for open source, but at some point developers should stop acting surprised when people use their work at the edges of the licence terms (Looking at you Mongo, Redis and Hashicorp). As for developers running projects on their free time, maybe start setting boundaries? The only reason companies aren’t paying is because they know they can get away withholding money, because some sucker will step up and do it for free, ”for the greater good”. Stop letting them get it for free.
Looks like RedHat is kinda going in this direction (pay to get a paper trail saying a CVE-number is patched), and basically always have been squeezing regulated industry. Say what you want about that strategy, it’s at least financially viable long term. (Again, looking at you Hashicorp, Redis, Mongo, Minio and friends)
It is beautiful. I haven't even thought of using a database server for personal projects in years. SQLite all the way. It's so simple and performant (for my use cases).
I relied on Syncthing for a few years until my laptop became so powerful that a desktop was no longer needed (I do pro-audio work in Logic with lots of plugins; but I'm also just a nerd power-user). This has me thinking about getting back into using it to sync a much smaller amount of data, such as my Bash profile and custom functions, as well as some custom binaries that I keep in ~/bin. But I'll wait until a few releases into the 2.x cycle before I install while others help find the rough edges.
Hooray for development of awesome tools. Hats off to all the devs involved.
It’s really weird reading your comment because it reads as if I wrote it.
I do pro audio work in Logic & Ableton
Was syncing projects between my desktop, laptop and homelab for a few years
No longer need to with my M3 Max macbook
Am a nerd power user and sync my dotfiles between my machines (i’d recommend chez-moi instead of syncthing for that because there’s less risk of messing up a machine and conflicts)
Easily one of the most integral and convenient pieces of software in my use. I've got six machines syncing up in various degrees: desktop, laptop, Android, ereader, media server, and laser controller. It along with Tailscale are among first things I install. I'm hoping version 2.0 is as stable as 1 has been. The only trouble I've ever had out of was when I was syncing something in my local cloud directory.
Good Point to start fresh? Mine ist totally fucked. Dont even know how i should start over 🙁
(Some syncthin-fork update or android update fucked the folder paths and trying to fix it while also adding a new folder somehow created some loops/crashes/conflicts)
Can I ask about the change of not keeping record of deleted files after 6 months by default. Does that mean if I sync two directories constantly so that if syncthing sees one of them has a file deleted, it will delete the file on the other too, if I copy back that same file into the synced folder, after 6 months pass Syncthing would sync that file again? Or what else does this mean?
Currently I am just using this to have an easy transfer between two computers, I keep moving out files that have been transferred from both folders, so I would think this has no effect on how I use it?
I don't think your use will be effected. I believe the only thing is your database will be less bloated with deleted items that have never been removed previously.
If you add a file back after it's removed from the database, It should sync as usual.
(This is my interpretation of the change notes, i'm no experto, maybe a real experto can confirm this is true or not).
KDE has this mindset where if someone wants to implement something they think is cool, and the code is clean and mostly bug free, well -- have at it! Ever wonder why there's 300 options for everything?
Usually (because there's a bunch of people trying to optimize the core for speed and load times and such) this also means that the unused code-paths are required to not contribute negatively to things like load times. So a plugin like this that doesn't get loaded by default unless enabled, and thus doesn't harm everyone else's performance. It also means that if it stops working in the future and starts to bitrot, it can be dropped without affecting the core code.
This Patch Tuesday has brought a slew of Intel CPU microcode updates for the past few processor generations to address six new high severity vulnerabilities.
Simply put, modern processors aren't just converting instructions directly into transistors, they actually have code that controls how they operate. That's the microcode.
This is clearly AI and Chinese Propaganda. Get back to me when this actually rolls out and is shown to be effective. The endless stream to AI hype and bullshit is sickening.
Remember, the Straeberry flavor in your Yogur, Ice cream and smoothies, is made from saw dust destilations, not from Strawberries (Ethyl methylphenylglycidate)
Skip to the section "defectors." Essentially, information on the DPRK is hard to verify, and 70% of defectors are unemployed, so many turn to selling sensationalized stories that are more fantasy than reality in order to make a living. See Yeonmi Park for perhaps the most famous "celebrity defector."
The authenticity of her claims about life in North Korea – many of which have contradicted her earlier stories and those of both her mother and fellow defectors from North Korea – have been the subject of widespread skepticism. Political commentators, journalists and professors of Korean studies have criticized Park's accounts of life in North Korea for inconsistencies,[8][9][10] contradictory claims, and exaggerations.[11][12][1] Other North Korean defectors, including those from the same city as Park, have expressed concern that the tendency for "celebrity defectors" to exaggerate about life in North Korea will produce skepticism about their stories.[13][14] In 2014, The Diplomat published an investigation by journalist Mary Ann Jolley, who had previously worked with Park, documenting numerous inconsistencies in Park's memories and descriptions of life in Korea.[13] In July 2023, a Washington Post investigation found there was little truth to Park's claims about life in North Korea.[3] Park attributed the discrepancies to her imperfect memory and language skills,[3][13] and her autobiography's coauthor, Maryanne Vollers, said Park was the victim of a North Korean smear campaign.[15]
These are both just Wikipedia, you can find way more elsewhere why defectors aren't a good source of information on the DPRK. is a good documentary on the horrible treatment of defectors in the Republic of Korea and why the celebrity defector industry exists.
dogslayeggs
in reply to Gsus4 • • •While I think this is pretty amazing science stuff, the writing is terrible. Here is the progression of the story as written:
They made butter from carbon...
Well, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and oxygen...
OK, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, and methane...
Well, no, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, methane, and glycerol...
Wait, hang on, it's actually made from carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, methane, glycerol, natural flavor, and lecithin...
Now, the source of glycerol is in question, because they say this butter is both animal and plant-free. Glycerol can be made synthetically, but it's WAY more expensive to do it. Also, I'm not seeing any way to create lecithin without plants. They never say what the "natural flavor" is.
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halcyoncmdr
in reply to dogslayeggs • • •A reminder that "natural flavor" doesn't mean healthier or even something you might want over the artificially created flavors. It just means it comes from a natural source and is not lab created.
Castoreum, sometimes used for vanilla and raspberry flavoring, comes from beaver anal secretions. That would be labelled under a "natural flavor" and you'd never be told more than that.
I'll take the artificial stuff any day just on principle there.
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MBech
in reply to halcyoncmdr • • •SatansMaggotyCumFart
in reply to MBech • • •NoForwardslashS
in reply to SatansMaggotyCumFart • • •dubyakay
in reply to NoForwardslashS • • •like this
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blargle
in reply to MBech • • •Hobo
in reply to halcyoncmdr • • •I think it's worth pointing out that vanilla extract is from vanilla beans and artificial vanilla is whatever the fuck they feel like that tastes like vanilla. Also, modern artificial vanilla extremely rarely, if ever, is derived from Castoreum because it's hard as hell to farm beavers and expensive as all fuck. The "artificial vanilla comes from beaver anal glands" is basically a prevalent internet myth that gets passed around like the, "You eat 7 spiders a year in your sleep." myth.
Source: smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/…
iopq
in reply to Hobo • • •Hobo
in reply to iopq • • •iopq
in reply to Hobo • • •Hobo
in reply to iopq • • •Ah gotcha! I for sure was not following what you were saying. I don't know if that's he real thrust of the point in my above comment, but I was more referring to the fact that artificial vanilla doesn't necessarily come from vanilla beans. I should've been more precise with my language, but it's worth noting that artificial vanilla is largely synthesized and comes from a variety of sources, not just vanilla beans (see below for the source/pertinent excerpt).
It also gets weird as to how the FDA regulates the term. I believe the key term is actually "Pure" in the "Pure Vanilla Extract" but don't quote me on that. Not sure how it's done by other regulatory agencies but it's probably equally convoluted in a lot of places.
Source: sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/technic…
Pertinent excerpt:
nurple
in reply to halcyoncmdr • • •ivanafterall ☑️
in reply to nurple • • •qyron
in reply to halcyoncmdr • • •elucubra
in reply to halcyoncmdr • • •My ex wife's uncle was the director of the south American division of the arm that made coloring and flavorings of one of the big Food/Chem groups, Procter & Gamble, or unilever, or one of those. Can't remember.
No one in his household ate any processed/ultra processed foods.
Do the math.
crank0271
in reply to dogslayeggs • • •...it's people?
HugeNerd
in reply to crank0271 • • •vacuumflower
in reply to crank0271 • • •crank0271
in reply to vacuumflower • • •Dragomus
in reply to dogslayeggs • • •It kind of sounds like the beginnings of star trek's replicators...
But that aside, somehow I doubt those are the exact only "ingredients" they use.
And it wouldn't surprise me at all if the end product contains all kinds of trace elements of various not so healthy chemicals used to get the parts to combine into the actual butter.
Like the process to get the glycerol or lecithin in a state they can use.
Ofcourse a lot of our dietary ingredients are contaminated in various levels anyway.
tal
in reply to Gsus4 • • •I'd actually be willing to give it a try if it's vaguely price-competitive, but their website is all glam shots of butter and people doing things with butter and not only doesn't sell it but doesn't tell you where you can get it.
savor.it/
Also, they did not do a good job of choosing that name. It looks like there's a very-similarly-named French Canadian manufacturer of butter, Savör, which apparently isn't too religious about using their umlaut:
I foresee a collision between those two.
Savor
www.savor.itlike this
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absGeekNZ
in reply to tal • • •tal
in reply to absGeekNZ • • •absGeekNZ
in reply to tal • • •dubyakay
in reply to absGeekNZ • • •absGeekNZ
in reply to dubyakay • • •I get that, why import stuff that you produce locally....
I try to never get imported food products that we make here.... It just seems wasteful.
MCasq_qsaCJ_234
in reply to tal • • •jordanlund
in reply to Gsus4 • • •My #1 fear of this... I'm sure they'll fix it:
(Yes, I used AI to make that. "Black Butter" is also apparently real and actually looks super tasty!)
3abas
in reply to jordanlund • • •like this
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jordanlund
in reply to 3abas • • •Black apple butter looks amazing!
interdimensionalmeme
in reply to Gsus4 • • •So, like every other butter and oil, that's why we call them hydrocarbon.
I imagine this "butter" doesn't contain any glycomacropeptide, α-lactalbumin, β-lactoglobulin, serum albumin and immunoglobulins
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Valmond
in reply to interdimensionalmeme • • •ivanafterall ☑️
in reply to interdimensionalmeme • • •qyron
in reply to Gsus4 • • •chemical reactions that convert carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbons
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)partial_accumen
in reply to Gsus4 • • •So their process sounds like it creates synthetic lard, not butter. This can still be a good thing as the extra ingredients to make it "butter" aren't really the hard/impactful part of butter.
iopq
in reply to partial_accumen • • •elucubra
in reply to Gsus4 • • •giantpaper likes this.
Bosht
in reply to Gsus4 • • •CodingCarpenter
in reply to Bosht • • •9488fcea02a9
in reply to Gsus4 • • •bluefootedbooby
in reply to 9488fcea02a9 • • •SocialMediaRefugee
in reply to 9488fcea02a9 • • •_cryptagion [he/him]
in reply to Gsus4 • • •Kokesh
in reply to Gsus4 • • •MuskyMelon
in reply to Gsus4 • • •Gsus4
in reply to MuskyMelon • • •cecilkorik
in reply to Gsus4 • • •We focus too much on efficiency and cost sometimes. Sometimes efficiency is only a "nice to have" while being outweighed by practicality, convenience, safety, and any of the other factors we choose to make a priority.
It is expensive and inefficient for an airplane to have two engines instead of just one. We do it anyway because it's required for safety and redundancy. We made that the priority, and that was an active choice. We need to start making more active choices about what the priority is when it comes to our energy futures. All priorities have tradeoffs. Cost and efficiency have their own tradeoffs. Question it when people tell you that things can't be done because of "cost" or "efficiency". When they do that they're presupposing what the priority is, but often it's billionaires trying to cut corners to make themselves richer at our expense, our safety, our futures. We can do inefficient things. Sometimes it's even the right choice.
AmidFuror
in reply to cecilkorik • • •cecilkorik
in reply to AmidFuror • • •The problem is, people can, do, and will use that exact same argument to say we don't need any more solar panels or wind turbines, because we don't need and can't use or store the excess power for anything and that's why we need to keep thermal plants as backup for base load generation. Look, when we produce too much electricity, the electricity cost goes to zero and negative! It's "wasteful and inefficient"! But these two problems can solve each other. Synthetic fuels (doesn't have to be gasoline, hydrogen is step 1, methane/LNG is a bit more manageable as a chemical fuel. As long as the carbon source is atmospheric, then it and other synthetic hydrocarbons are carbon neutral to burn) provide an on-demand energy sink/storage method that can support and drive more electrification and renewable power, it just has to be part of a consistent and systemic approach with strict regulation and a clear view of the big picture (something sorely lacking these days).
Rivalarrival
in reply to cecilkorik • • •Nailed it.
We need a solar grid that can meet our demand during a 9-hour, overcast, low-angle winter day. That same grid will be producing more than 4 times as much power as we need during a 15-hour, high-angle summer day, even after we include air conditioning loads.
We need massive, seasonal loads to soak up that excess power and keep solar profitable.
Fake butter isn't going to do it, but things like desalination, hydrogen electrolysis, and Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbon production are all likely candidates.
cecilkorik
in reply to Rivalarrival • • •SocialMediaRefugee
in reply to Gsus4 • • •