Palm oil is a butter substitute. Every baked product at the grocery store that used to be made with butter is now made with palm oil, because it is cheaper. Palm oil is made up of long highly-saturated fatty acids that cause it to be solid at room temperature, giving it physical properties very similar to butter, making it suitable as a substitute. However saturated fatty acids are bad for your health. Butter is also saturated fat and is also somewhat bad, but palm oil is much worse because the varieties of fatty acids it contains are much different from animal fat fatty acids and the human body metabolizes them differently, so they have a much higher impact. Similar physical properties but worse health properties!

It is nearly impossible to find frozen baked goods that are still made with butter. This pie claims to be made with healthy ingredients, and specifically touts its butter content, but it conveniently omits mentioning palm oil entirely. Since palm oil appears first on the ingredients list before butter, that means there is more of it. Possibly almost the entire "butter-like" fraction of the pie consists of palm oil.

This pie alone contains 400% daily value saturated fat, which is terrible for long-term health. I love apple pies and I was planning to eat this pie as my sole food over the course of 2 days for my One-Meal-A-Day (OMAD), but I'm not willing to risk eating palm oil. Thanks for nothing for getting my hopes up, pie box!

• traditional wholesome German ingredients like palm oil
• palm oil - just the way grandma used to make at home
• contains memories of butter

I'm sure someone below will mention how palm oil is also bad for the environment and bad for the farmers and bad for the economy. I will only be answering questions about the film Rampart.

inspired by https://lemmy.world/post/39777765

Unruh effect should work for any acceleration, including centripetal acceleration of a James Bond-style killer centrifuge/amusement ride. The "thermal bath" experienced by such an observer is composed mainly of photons, but also some elementary particles, in proportion to quantum field coupling strengths or something, coming in as a "particle shower" from the direction of the Rindler event horizon - namely down. The accelerated observer can capture these particles for use later. Did I get it all correct?

Bring your bike and join up with Social Cycling NYC (@socialcyclingnyc on instagram: https://imginn.com/p/DNhbKgMMXRf/) to support DOT redesign of Astoria 31st Street to improve safety and cycling accessibility (catchup on the news: https://piefed.ca/post/151967). Meet at Columbus Circle, Thursday 8/21 7pm, head for Astoria at 7:30pm.

Based on the product title, the design of the bottle, the product description, and even the brand logo, you'd think vitamin D is vegan. Every marketing design decision on these store pages lures you into such a conclusion. But it's not! Vitamin D/cholecalciferol is a molecule that is exclusively made in animals. Almost all vitamin D in production is extracted from lanolin, the waxy secretions in sheep's wool. In theory, lanolin could be called a vegetarian product, since wool is something sheep are sheared for and not something sheep are made of. In practice, almost all lanolin is extracted from the wool waste byproduct of dead sheep slaughtered for meat. If a company doesn't claim a specific non-kill source for its lanolin on the bottle, the lanolin came from dead animals. It is up to debate whether a product that is the side product of animal slaughter that would have happened anyway is vegetarian or not. Vegan it is certainly not.

There is vitamin D for sale from vegan sources, extracted from lichen. It also costs at least 20x more. These bottles are not it! The vegan-sourced product pages go to great length to emphasize their cholecalciferol does not come from lanolin. These pages just list "cholecalciferol" in the ingredients list with no specific source. Technically, none of the language on these pages is a lie! "Veggie capsules" refers to the cellulose the pill walls are made of. If you "somehow" end up believing that the whole pill is made of vegetables, that's your own fault! If you see a brand name like "forest leaf" and think its products are made from leaves, nobody can help you! The company is blameless! The only outright lie in these screenshots is the "vegan friendly" label. Curiously, that claim only appears in the product image, and not in the text searchable description of the product itself.

Ok then, you'd say, that's innocent marketing speak, nobody would be mislead by it, we all know about cholecalciferol. Yet half of all customer comments on the "vegan friendly"-in-image-only product praise it for its vegan content! (Thanks AI summary!) Many of them bought this product because they thought it was vegan. Tsk tsk! And what is vegan-"friendly" anyway? Am I vegan friendly because I am a friend of vegans? Is that a legally-enforceable phrase?

My opinion is that while the amount of lanolin in vitamin D pills is tiny and comes from waste products, these pills are still not vegan and not vegetarian. A pure vegan lifestyle would not condone them. Yet these companies say everything short of a lie (and sometimes literally lie) to make consumes falsely think their products are vegan. And vegan consumers let them! And even praise them for it.

I would be fine if vegans/vegetarians accepted that a negligible amount of animal product to supply a vital ingredient that could not be acquired in any other way (until a few years ago when lichen cholecalciferol became available) where sun exposure alone is not sufficient for modern climates and lifestyles is acceptable. But in the meantime, these companies are exploiting the naivete and well-wishes of consumers for profit by greenwashing their products, spreading misinformation rather than knowledge. The customer reviews is proof that misinformation is happening, even if no single phrase describing the product is legally a lie. We should not allow ourselves be exploited!

Shoutout to the "kosher" and "no shellfish" labels.

Shamelessly stolen from you-know-where.

Bicycle/pedestrian path on the Queensboro Bridge in New York City. The two trenches are worn entirely by bicycle tire traffic. These are not car tracks as the width slightly varies later. The city has done zero effort to clean the bridge paths after the snow and almost zero effort to clean protected street bicycle paths. The intended use for this path is for pedestrians to be on the right half (you can see the middle dividing white line if you look for it), and for bicyclists to use the left two quarters. You can notice the yellow line intended to divide the two directions of bicycle traffic, with about 2ft per direction. The actual spacing resulting from natural use is on display and apparently way different.

Needed a replacement 700C front wheel for my commuter bike after the old aluminum rim exploded like a looney tunes cannon. It's hard enough to find the right size when there are 3 competing tire/rim sizing systems currently in use, it doesn't help when the people selling the wheels have no idea what the numbers mean either! All of these examples are from separate storefronts at the big online store. Ended up buying the wheel identical to mine from my local bicycle shop at the same price as online and with no shipping fee or delivery time.

The 3 systems in use are the American customary inch fraction notation like 26x1+3⁄4 (which is NOT interchangeable with American customary inch decimal notation like 26x1.75), the French metric notation like 650x45C, and the ISO 5775 metric notation like 47-571. I found the wikipedia conversion tables and Sheldon Brown's tire size chart invaluable.

To better understand how neural networks function, researchers trained a toy 512-node neural network on a text dataset and then tried to identify features within the network that are semantically meaningful. The key observation is that while individual neurons are difficult to attribute specific functionality to, you can find groups of neurons that collectively do seem to fire in response to human-legible features and concepts. By some metric, the 4096-feature decomposition of the 512-node toy model explains 79% of the information within it. The researchers used an AI nicknamed Claude to automatically annotate all the features by guessing how a human would describe them, like for example feature #3647 "Abstract adjectives/verbs in credit/debt legal text", or the "sus" feature #3545. Browse through the visualization and see for yourself!

The researchers called the ability of neural networks to encode more information than they have neurons for as "superposition", and single neurons being responsible for multiple, sometimes seemingly unrelated, concepts as being "polysemantic".

Full paper: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/index.html
also discussed at: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/god-help-us-lets-try-to-understand
and hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38438261

OC just for you! ♥️