bean

Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

the new season has been out since mid-April and we are already halfway through it. i know the WTNV team has been posting about it on their social channels for months leading up to it. i dont think we are doing anything differently, promotion-wise, than we did with the first three seasons which seemed to find their audience much more quickly.

personally i find it rather frustating given the amount of work we put into this show, but im not really sure what to do about it. i know part of it is down to the fact that audiofiction is a far more competitive field than it used to be, and there's also so much noise and chaos in the world these days that its hard to find anything, and so many terrible problems that fiction feels less important.

via @corazondebeskar

Because they've never met or spoke with a scientist.

so, this happened..

for anyone not from here, they are trying to build a underground train system in ottawa to get people to their commute faster.. and build the downtown mall bigger, because its so busy there. they have had most of the road shut down for weeks… just buses through the narrow opening in front of the mall.

today, early, there was shake.. then a big sinkhole opened.

thing is… see that third pic?

it opened in the middle of the busiest street in the city. even if its only being used for buses, every bus in the city gets routed though there pretty much.

also it busted water mains and gas pipes, which meant there where some evacuations..

see, right up the street from this? like literally a few blocks up the street is our parliament buildings.

People on tumblr massively overestimate the amount of hallucinations LLM generate, and broadly ignore the part where the output you can get from LLMs is most often proportional to the quality of the input (e.g how good you are at prompting). They're genuinely game-changing in synthesising huge quality of information much faster than a human can, and genuinely pretty accurate in producing outputs they've been trained in (vs. more "niche" or recent subjects in which they hallucinate way more often, but that is part of knowing how to use it.)

Some people also have a very distorted view of the environmental impact of genAI queries specifically vs. other polluting behaviour people often engage in, such as streaming, online gaming etc. <- I find this one very annoying because it really reeks of misguided moral superiority. Victoria Justice voice I think we ALL pollute. I'm not saying this in a "then it doesn't matter!" way, I'm saying this in a "we should be more mindful of our carbon footprint beyond using it as a gotcha in ai discourse" way. Like, idc if you hate chatgpt if you order takeout every night and swim in single-use packaging.

Another thing that's less of a misconception and more of a consequence in branding one specific tool as ontologically and uniquely evil is, like, lowkey romanticising other kinds of misinformation because they're not AI.

(this post has 100k notes btw. most of them agree with op)

I also find that there's a general mischaracterisation of people who use LLMs that borders on the ableist — if you could substitute "stupid" with the r-word in your post about those losers who can't even wipe their ass without a machine, maybe you should not be making those posts. Not to quote a celebrity, but Keke Palmer was recently asked about her thoughts on AI and said something like "the environmental stuff is very concerning but [AI] is also democratizing a lot of spaces for people that otherwise couldn’t reach them" and I think this is a very fair assessment of a good part of genAI users, who go way beyond the "obsessed loser wants an AI girlfriend" caricature I see on here.