Tootfinder

[To Microsoft Copilot] What is your advice to congenitally blind people: better spend effort to master The vOICe visual-to-auditory sensory substitution, or better wait for Elon Musk's Neuralink Blindsight brain implant? https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/RN1SY5UjZsX7ca…

What is your advice to congenitally blind people: better spend effort to master The vOICe visual-to-auditory sensory substitution, or better wait for Elon Musk's Neuralink Blindsight brain implant?
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[To ChatGPT] What is your advice to congenitally blind people: better spend effort to master The vOICe visual-to-auditory sensory substitution, or better wait for Elon Musk's Neuralink Blindsight brain implant? https://chatgpt.com/share/686c0879-2904-8004-b138-318cd95…

ChatGPT - Chicago population overview
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So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.

Osa Odighizuwa learning from Dallas Cowboys' legend this offseason https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/osa-odighizuwa-learning-from-dallas-cowboys-legend-this-offseason

@… The update is great! Thanks for putting in all the effort and work to make my favorite weather app even better! 💪🏻❤️

This is the next stages of Columbus’s long-running effort to update its 1950s-era zoning code. This phase will incorporate a housing component to address affordability issues by better aligning work and residential areas.
We also need to build more houses.
https://

“What AI sells is vastly different from what it delivers, particularly what it delivers out of the box.”
The post gives some great context on the study of “the difference between work-as-imagined (WAI) and work-as-done (WAD),” and says:
“If what we have to do to be productive with LLMs is to add a lot of scaffolding and invest effort to gain important but poorly defined skills, we should be able to assume that what we’re sold and what we get are rather different things. That gap implies that better designed artifacts could have better affordances, and be more appropriate to the task at hand.”
5/

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

Michael Sweater is at it again:
https://sweater.substack.com/p/new-comics-and-some-news
I find it hard to believe he has less than 250 subscribers (hint, hint). FWIW, there are another 3 (better drawn) pages to this story covering his angsty meta-narrative about soci…

"We think of generating source code from a prompt as an AI-powered feature of modern IDEs, but the general problem has a rich history in research efforts and domain-specific programming systems." Join William Benton at this year's Berlin Buzzwords to hear him talk about the history of program synthesis, its relationship to the history of AI, and the lessons we can learn from it today.
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