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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • McDonald’s also fries things in beef tallow, iirc

    Edit: after confirming online, there are multiple reports saying that McD’s stopped using animal-based fats for cooking some 5-30 years ago depending on the market (e.g. US, Canada, etc.). The big push to move away from beef tallow in the US was in the '90s, and now McDonald’s confirms that there is beef flavoring in their fries.

    Edit 2: and I guess McDonald’s uses mostly a canola-based oil blend, but beef flavoring still goes into the blend.

    Edit 3: And looking at the ingredients of the vegetable oil itself, the beef flavorants come from hydrolyzed milk derivatives, so not vegan. Apparently McDonald’s uses different oils for different things, so I wonder if in the future people could ask for the oil without the flavoring.




  • Elder zoomer here. I have a wallet for all of my cards, those for pay, for insurance, for identification, etc.

    Unfortunately my country doesn’t have the option for those to all be digital, so I’m still limited to something physical. Probably for the best anyways. It’s better to have redundant versions of those, in physical or digital form, in case one method is lost.

    If zoomers at large don’t carry wallets, even in countries where digitization is easy, that’s just as risky as only carrying those cards in a wallet. It might be even more risky because you need your phone to be on to access that information, meaning chargers are necessary as well as a source of electricity. Not so easy in all regions of the world. Solar + batteries would work, but that’s more to carry around, when you could simply carry a wallet.




  • I agree with all of this as an electrical engineer in the field. Base load is only base load because of the load profile of devices connected to the grid having either an on or off switch. Most of the time this means motors/HVACs, but the world of electronics is coming to that equipment just like how inverters have changed how we export solar PV and wind to the grid. VFDs, soft starters, and the like will make our industrial processes that much more efficient. We just need to spread awareness and ramp up implementation, just as much as for renewables themselves.










  • Yeah I thought OpenAI came out and said that they modeled the voice of a different actress, and they don’t want to share their identity out of a respect for privacy.

    It could just be a coincidence that Altman tweeted the image from Her, and people made the connection between the voice and ScarJo, especially since she did something extreme similar in that movie.

    Could be coincidental. Could not be. We don’t really have the evidence to say either way, but maybe ScarJo’s suit will affect change so that better rights are granted to people and their digital twins.



  • The US has a representative democracy. We elect people by voting so that those people can represent our beliefs in the action of government without us being there to make sure our voice is heard and considered.

    While I agree that everyone should be more involved in civics, especially at a local level, it’s not really efficient for a society to implement a vanilla democracy. There are lots of other jobs like generating food/removing waste, generating energy/removing pollution, constructing/maintaining housing, transporting people including democratic representatives to and fro based on their obligations and desires, entertaining people so they can offset the pain in their lives and continue on with the struggle that is life, defend citizens from others or ourselves, etc.

    Having a group of people act out government on our behalf is a good thing because we can specialize in other things to allow them to do so.

    This all being said, there has been a disconnect with our representatives and with reality in general, so there is a giant need to reconnect with civic life in the US at all ages and at all levels for that matter.