Can confirm, they're great! I will sometimes take a day trip from London to a different town, and it's nice to take the bike with me on the train, disembark, and be able to cycle around without worrying about which bus to take, how to pay, etc. But I can still take the bike on the bus if needed!
Brompton is probably the #1 brand bike thieves will target though, everyone I know who has one never leaves it out of their sight. That's way too stressful for me, I don't want to take it with me in the supermarket or watch over it at the pub. I just got a cheap Decathlon with very low thief appeal.
> These tests blew me away. At the very least, I expected that presoaking the beans and pitching the water would reduce fartiness. After all, the sugars are water soluble, so they should leach into the soaking water and get discarded. As it turns out, not so much. I still don’t understand this result.
I don’t buy it. He’s says it doesn’t work but can’t explain why it didn’t work. Could be his method was faulty, the type of bean, the age of the bean, etc.
I rather take the experience of an entire country.
Not to dismiss the experience of Brazil, but Korea believed you would die if you had an electric fan on with no windows open. Safe to say entire countries are not infallible either.
Brazilian here. It's not a superstition, I can see my wife's belly literally inflate if the process is not done correctly. I cook beans at least once a week, I've made mistakes and there's no way to hide it. We don't get them cooked from delivery as we don't know how they were prepared, lesson also learned the hard way.
That said, the process is soaking the beans in water for, at least, 10 hours. You have to change the water four or five times during this period and toss the water at the end.
On the other hand, adding bay leaves are totally a superstition. Saw my mother-in-law trying to hide she forgot to soak the beans overnight by adding bay leaves and my wife had a bad aftermath.
Yeah, boiling water with lemon helps, but without it my wife has a lot more gases. One article that they tested, can't explain it properly and we have seen over and over working, I very much don't believe they did it right
> a lot of doctors are using ChatGPT both to search diagnosis and communicate with non-English speaking patients
I think that's the problem. Who's going to claim responsibility when ChatGPT hallucinates or mistranslates a patient's diagnosis and they die? For OpenAI, this would at best be a PR nightmare, so that's why they have safeguards.
Adults bear responsibility for choices about their own lives. In fact, the more educated they are, the better choices they can make.
A doctor who gets refused by ChatGPT doesn't stop needing to communicate with the patient; they fall back to a worse option (Google Translate, a family member interpreting, guessing). Refusal isn't safety, it's liability-shifting dressed up as safety.
If there's no doctor, no interpreter, no pharmacist, just a person with a sick kid and a phone, then "refuse and redirect to a professional" is advice from a world that doesn't exist for them. The refusal doesn't send them to a better option; there is no better option, it's a large majority of people on this planet.
Hell is paved of good intentions, but open-education and unlimited access to knowledge is very good.
It doesn't change the human nature of some people, bad people stay bad, good people stay good.
About PR, they're optimizing for not being the named defendant in a lawsuit or the subject of a bad news cycle, it's self-interest wearing benevolence as a costume.
This is because harms from answering are punishable (bad PR, unhappy advertisers, unhappy investors, unhappy politicians / dictators, unhappy lobbies, unhappy army, etc); but harms from refusing are invisible and unpunished.
> A doctor who gets refused by ChatGPT doesn't stop needing to communicate with the patient; they fall back to a worse option
I think AI proves the contrary. There are plenty of examples of things that are getting worse because of technological advancement, particularly AI. Software quality, writing, online discourse, misinformation have all suffered over the last few years. I truly believe the internet is a worse place than it was 5 years ago, and I can't imagine bringing that to medicine would work out differently.
The medical system shouldn't rely on falling back to crappy workarounds, it should aspire to build the best system it reasonably can.
I was answering for hallucinations, not really for translation. Re-reading your initial post I do agree with what you are saying (i.e. you are explaining why OpenAI is looking to avoid a PR nightmare). What I meant to express is that I would personally trust doctors to use these tools as best they can to provide care.
"what you see is all there is." it's generally much easier to verify something you've been made aware of than it is to know of it in the first place (and still verify it.)
The irony is that licensed interpreters / translators usually perform worse than AI.
Only the liability shifts from OpenAI to them.
Furthermore, where the alternative to a licensed professional was nothing, or a random untrained person or a weak professional, then it's harming the user on the pretext of protecting him.
-> You are in China, you go to emergency, nobody speaks your language
Move hands ? DeepSeek is better than using hands, even Baidu Translate, ChatGPT or whatever you find.
Other solutions are theoretically nice on paper but almost delusional.
An imperfect solution is better than no solution.
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Similarly, a deaf-person is theorically better with a certified interpreter that can talk with the hands, but they may prefer voice-recognition software or AI tools.
(or... talking with hands is more confusing and annoying or less understandable for them).
Of course ChatGPT transcription can have issues, but that's the difference between the real-world and Silicon Valley's disconnected lawyers world.
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If ChatGPT says: "sorry I won't be able, please go to see a licensed interpreter, good luck!" then it's just OpenAI trying to save their asses, at your risk/expense.
If you have a choice, you can make the choice, and you can double-check what is said. In other cases, you have no choice, nothing to check, only problems but no hints of solutions.
When I registered with my GP in the UK, they asked me whether I would need an interpreter and what language. They then provide professional interpreters.
There are a few differences. For one, it's much easier to regulate the sale of alcohol and tobacco, the level of friction is much higher and usually involves an in-person interaction with an adult. Visiting some dodgy website or downloading a VPN is much easier.
Second, the peer pressure to drink/smoke has never been as strong as the network effect of social media. Almost all 15-year-olds are on some form of social media, I don't think you can reasonably expect they will suddenly stop wanting to socialise outside school. Their entire identities are built around their online presence; that was never the case with smoking or drinking, at least not on this scale.
I'm sure it will have some effect, but kids are clever, and they have lots of time, they will find ways to bypass these fairly weak bans. Imo, the only way to do this is to provide an alternative along with the ban, like what the Russians are doing with Max as a replacement for Telegram/WhatsApp, though that's not entirely successful either.
So your argument is that journalists must be wealthy because otherwise they'd be poor? Have you considered the alternative, that we just live modest lifestyles, like most other working class people?
You can get cheap Android phones for like $15, and they each get a difficult to ban cellular IP. You also need to buy the server box to make it all work, they're about $300 on Amazon and cheaper elsewhere. So you can get 20 devices going for $600. All in all, I think it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
I imagine the data won't be very useful considering it's public knowledge the store is run by AI and most of the customers will be people specifically interested in that aspect of the business. Much like that meetup organised in Manchester, where the people who showed up were there for the novelty: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/05/ai-bot-pa...
That only counts if the unique selling proposition is that AI are better suppliers or customers than humans.
What is more likely is that people enjoy the novelty of the experiment, which is not something that will be reproducible for long.
If the transactions the AI make are thus influenced, then the study merely demonstrates people like novelty, which is already well known, and says nothing about whether AI can sustainably orchestrate a business.
While the BBC is in charge of collecting it, and it is largely (but not exclusively) spent on the BBC, the TV licence is imposed by and paid into the government's funds. The government then "grants" the money back to the BBC.
> The revenue and associated expenditure [...] are those flows of funds which are handled on behalf of the Consolidated Fund and where the BBC acts as agent rather than as principal
It is, effectively, a subscription. But it is partnered with statute law which makes it an offence to receive TV broadcast signals without paying this subscription (and now also an offence to watch iPlayer, etc.)... which is unlike most subscriptions.
It's seen as strictly better than the government providing funding from general taxation, which would mean directly controlling the state broadcaster and its purse-strings.
And generally speaking, there are very good reasons to fund your country's own film/TV industry, rather than rely on other countries supplying the funding and the media (and the opinions and the cultural sway and the power and the control).
Brompton is probably the #1 brand bike thieves will target though, everyone I know who has one never leaves it out of their sight. That's way too stressful for me, I don't want to take it with me in the supermarket or watch over it at the pub. I just got a cheap Decathlon with very low thief appeal.
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