chithanh

> So what’s the evidence that banning artificial sweeteners leads to positive outcomes in a free living population, considering you said: “I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners”?

It depends on the context. In the context of school lunches (which is discussed here) they absolutely need to be banned, same as added sugars. Giving children (sugar or artificially) sweetened meals trains children's palates and shapes lifelong preferences for sweet foods.

The original study was:

DALDERUP, L., VISSER, W. Effects of Sodium Cyclamate on the Growth of Rats compared with other Variations in the Diet. Nature 221, 91–92 (1969) https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0

But of course the manufacturers of feed additives also extensively studied which artificial sweetener compositions achieve body mass gain / feed efficiency increase for which group of animals. There is an extensive review e.g. on pigs here:

https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14203032

No. What I say is if we introduce a public health policy, then we need to take human behavior and adherence rates into account.

Example: Abstinence is 100% effective against STDs and teenage pregnancy in any controlled setting. That does not make it a good public health policy to tell teenagers to abstain from having sex. In fact despite condoms having lower efficacy than abstinence, teaching people the proper use of condoms is overall more effective.

If we want to solve obesity then randomly adding/substituting artificial sweeteners to human food will not work. Instead we need to reduce access to hyperpalatable foods, which can be done through economic means (e.g. taxes).

Yes, replacement can work to adjust weight trends in a controlled setting.

But all empirical observations so far show that artificial sweeteners in people's diets do not have the desired effect when people's food and beverage intake is uncontrolled.

In fact results from animal studies are that you can even substitute part of the feed with just the artificial sweetener to achieve the same body mass gain. And this is known since 1960s with Cyclamate and rats: https://doi.org/10.1038/221091b0

More studies in the meantime varied a bit on the size of the effect, and some were inconclusive, but generally the results held up.

So no, artificial sweeteners do not help to manage weight. What the studies actually show is that controlling people's intake does.

> “it’s a cheap approach to make animal feed taste better, so the animals eat more and thus gain more weight/produce more milk/etc”.

No, not at all.

Feed conversion efficiency is the body weight gained per unit of feed consumed. If you add artificial sweeteners to animal feed, they will gain more weight when consuming the same feed, or gain the same weight when consuming less feed. This leads to cost savings for the farmer.

This observation may be a bit surprising as artificial sweeteners have 0 calories. But then again, antibiotics and growth hormones have the same effect.

> What do studies on humans say on the actual real-life effects of people using artificial sweeteners instead of sugar?

When it comes to soft drinks and all-cause mortality, artificially sweetened is not better nor worse than sugar. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478

When it comes to weight, results are either neutral or inconclusive.

The evidence actually suggests that soft drink consumption is equally associated with higher all-cause mortality and artificially sweetened is every bit as bad as sugar sweetened. Even when controlling for smoking status, BMI, physical activity, and alcohol consumption.

https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2478

It was suggested elsewhere that the primary mechanism for soft drink associated mortality is acidic fluids causing tooth decay, which in turn causes cardiovascular disease. (Bacteria entering the bloodstream through inflamed oral mucosa, and forming plaques along arterial walls.)

And the evidence for artificial sweetener benefits on population level is practically non-existent. In fact animal farming points to a detrimental effect.

I think the reference was maybe about the butter vs. margarine controversy? That margarine was lauded as more healthy, but turned out to be actually less healthy than butter, due to hydrogenation producing trans fats which elevated cardiovascular risk.

Since mid-1990s, margarine no longer contains appreciable amounts of trans fats.

Butter also contains trans fats but these are ruminant TFAs which I understand are not so bad.

This is why despite butter composition being worse "on paper" there is no empirical observation that it is less healthy than plant margarine.

Agreed, I do think that hyper-palatability is the actual problem and not some poorly defined idea of "ultra-processed"

Some do, some don't.

Worse is that artificial sweeteners increase feed conversion efficiency (an effect which has been known since 1960s experiments with rats and Cyclamate), and are for this reason frequently added to animal feed.

For humans however this effect is undesirable, as it exacerbates the problem which they are supposed to solve.

> (i) The food or beverage contains 10 percent or greater of total energy from saturated fat.

Interestingly, dairy products like butter are explicitly allowed, despite the fact that 50%+ of its fats are saturated

> I'm not a nutritionist, but there are some basics that are braindead simple that don't involve banning Sucralose.

I'm in favor of banning artificial sweeteners. Just look at why they are used in animal farming to see why it is a bad idea to randomly add them to human food.

Bread is a bit of an exception here, as it undergoes extensive mechanical (milling), biochemical (fermentation) and thermal (baking) processing. Yet it does not count as ultra-processed.

Bread is made from dough, which is mainly made from flour (the "minimally processed" food), which is made from grains (the unprocessed food)

Other limitations are that modern Adobe products will no longer install on Windows 10 LTSC as it is based on a too old version (but there are workarounds).

WMR situation isn't great but there are ways out. If you have a NVIDIA GPU then you can use Oasis on Windows 10 LTSC (AMD GPUs require Windows 11 24H2 for Oasis). Also on Linux, support for WMR devices has improved markedly via Envision / Monado, but some tinkering is required and it is still behind Windows.

Nested virtualization is a problem for systems with AMD CPUs I think, Windows 10 Hyper-V supported nested virtualization on Intel only. Since Windows 11 it is supported on AMD too.

Not everything can be installed easily, or at all. WMR is one example which cannot be installed.

Yes, limitations are that some services do not come preinstalled by default.

Some like the Microsoft Store can be installed afterwards.

Some like Windows Mixed Reality cannot be installed afterwards.

So check carefully what you actually need and decide based on that.

Yes, here are 3 PC games which don't run at all on Linux:

Halo Wars 2

Crackdown 3

Gears of War 4

The reason is that these are UWP-only games which are only available through the Microsoft store. Which means they will likely never run on Linux.

From the top 100 most played Steam games I count 26 (including 5 of the top 10) which are unplayable on Steam Deck for one reason or another.

But not all popular games are available on Steam, Fortnite or Rocket League are examples.

It is just an urband legend that Apple caused Nokia to fail. Apple didn't even compete in the price range where Nokia sold most of their smartphones.

When you look at where most Nokia customers defected to, it is Samsung and Android.

They are sorted by their Unicode character names obviously

U+0038 DIGIT EIGHT

...

U+0030 DIGIT ZERO

The sorting order is only defined between strings of the same locale, not between strings of different locales.

You can specify the sorting order per command like

LC_COLLATE="tr_TR.utf8" ls

if it differs from your system or user locale.

An alternative is to first transliterate the strings to ASCII and then sort them (but this does not preserve the sorting order of non-latin scripts).

Here in Germany many passengers are even against air conditioning in buses and open the windows in summer so the AC doesn't work.

The windows often contain labels like "Fahrzeug klimatisiert" (Vehicle is air conditioned) so it is not that people are unaware.

You are right that Windows on ARM cannot be called a success. But if you make Windows/macOS cross platform software then your software needs to be written for ARM anyway.

So if you support macOS/x86, macos/ARM, and Windows/x86, then the additional work to add Windows/ARM is rather small, unless you do low-level stuff (I remember Fortnite WoA port taking almost a year from announcement to release due to anticheat).

The GPU solder joint issue was NVidia's fault. I remember also Dell and others were affected, and I think MacBooks used only AMD dGPUs afterwards.

But otherwise, between the Butterfly keyboard, Flexgate, and placing the backlight driver voltage pin next to a data pin on the display connector (Louis Rossmann complained a lot about that one, as debris or moisture could easily cause a short and fry your CPU), indeed Apple does have their fair share of design issues.

The ISA not but the platform does.

Like you can make an x86 computer that is not a PC. PS4 is one example: https://fail0verflow.com/media/33c3-slides/#/22

But when you make a PC, you are stuck with multiple layers of legacy crap, any of which can prevent proper low power states or suspend.

Xunlong (Orange Pi) operates similarly to Pine64, throw hardware at the community and then let the community figure out the software part.

They provide official OS images at release but don't care much afterwards.

Yes, lots of Intel and AMD based SBCs have SO-DIMM slots, but you'll have to accept the 3.5" format.

Regarding RISC-V SBCs, there was serious consideration to release the Milk-V Oasis with SG2380 and LPCAMM2. But this didn't work out as the SG2380 was held up by geopolitical issues.

For the first years of school, it is actually very beneficial to pretend that calculators don't exist.

Students must be accustomed to do simple arithmetic without the help of a calculator, or else their mathematical abilities will be negatively impacted. Same for learning multiplication tables, recognizing the associations between the numbers is important.

Only when they begin to calculate things which exceed the number of mental tokens that they can handle, then they can start using a calculator with no ill effects.

One is the observation that first- and second-generation black immigrants have much higher share of college admissions than their share of the black population, despite similar socio-economic status to African Americans with longer family history in the US.

https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/10/09...

> which unfortunately stifles other open alternatives by the virtue of being "good enough".

In China at least, the hardware companies are smart enough to not put all eggs in the RISC-V basket, and are pursuing other open/non-encumbered ISAs.

They have LoongArch which is a post-MIPS architecture with elements from RISC-V. Also they have ShenWei/SunWay which is post-Alpha.

And they of course have Phytium (ARM), HeXin (OpenPower), and Zhaoxin (x86).

To add to the other reply, there were even targeted malware campaigns through ad networks. Because nowadays, you can choose who sees your ads so precisely (by IP block or geolocation) that you can target individual organizations.