1. Any substance that has most atoms covered by Fluoride are 'PFAS'.
2. C8 is strictly speaking PFOA (by-definition).
3. C6, and all other acids that has similar chemical properties to C8, can all be generically classified as PFOA-like materials. But for ease of communication people also call them PFOAs or just short for PFOA.
4. PFOAs are crucial for manufacturing Teflon.
5. The problem is manufacturers just dump waste water from PFAS production plants (containing PFOA) without post-processing into natural water bodies and let these toxic substances participate in the food chain and eventually land in our own bodies.
So the problem isn't PFAS or Teflon. It's the dumping of intermediary chemicals during manufacturing? This is the part that just comes off as fear mongering
How is the PFOA ending up in food? Is it from contaminated groundwater near the plant? Isn't the solution to not consumer agricultural products from that limited area?
And.. how is it ending up in polar bears?
The video just seems sensationalist. Somme chemical use in a step to make teflon is pretty toxic.. big surprise. But then it's ending up everywhere... somehow? And it's never really explained. But lots of hangwringing
Because it’s “forever chemical”. Factories release it into environment, it never chemically degrades, it gets into drinking, water, into animals and fish. You eat the animals and fish, etc.
Give it couple of decades of these cycles and you get trace amounts of those chemicals everywhere. Even where human may haven’t been.
You will notice other links in this discussion and suggested in the video - that consumer products are contaminated with these chemicals. As far as I understand these chemicals are supposed to be purely part of the manufacturing process. Is it in products or not..? Or only the non-dangerous long chains are in products? The whole discussion is muddled and unclear - and designed to spark outrage (click and subscribe! and don't forget to check NordVPN)
> Give it couple of decades of these cycles and you get trace amounts of those chemicals everywhere. Even where human may haven’t been
I skeptical this is factory run-off that goes down the rivers, dilutes in the vast gigantic ocean, and then ends up in a polar bear. Maybe that's what's happening.. but they're not dumping gigatons of this stuff and the ocean is infinitely large in volume. You'd have vastly different orders of magnitude for anyone near the river vs at the north pole..
So things aren't adding up. I'm not saying these chemicals aren't a problem. I'm just saying the discussion is disingenuous and just doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.
> As far as I understand these chemicals are supposed to be purely part of the manufacturing process. Is it in products or not..?
Video clearly states - factories did not care about cleaning it as it was uneconomical. I assume with existing “chemical whack-a-mole” current plant will not care as long as substance is not obviously banned. Secondly, video also states that even if those products are collected - they leach from landfills.
Personally I could bet that trace amounts of chemicals from “manufacturing process” still end up in final product anyways.
> Or only the non-dangerous long chains are in products?
IMHO, we should drop “non-dangerous” as a myth from teflon commercials of the 70s. As also from the video - due to heat you can consume harmful chemicals, even with acute consequences.
PFAS, from my understanding is a group of thousands of chemicals, most of them with no research on harmfulness. Though we know that some of them are directly linked to increasing some cancers or some other illnesses.
> they're not dumping gigatons of this stuff and the ocean is infinitely large in volume.
As per videos - we are talking about ridiculously miniscule amounts. Amounts in terms of couple parts per trillion of PFAS are considered harmful.
There were examples - PFAS is everywhere. Food packaging, hygiene products, tooth floss, fire extinguishers, clothes, kitchen appliances, etc. It’s manufactured all over the globe in multiple factories for seemingly everything.
It gets into the water cycle and trace amounts of PFAS is now found in polar circles and remote mountain tops from rain and snow.
We are exposed to it through water and through the things we use that contains it.
If you look for it in Mariana trench - maybe you won’t find it, but everywhere we do find it and that’s just a fact.
My personal biggest takes are:
- It’s not only c6/c8 that are harmful, there’s GenX and others thar also are and a plethora that haven’t even been tested, and they all are under PFAS umbrella;
- Most of those chemicals accumulate and don’t deteriorate. You get part per quadrillion there, part per trillion there, maybe permille next to a factory or a landfill. Give it 70 years and all animals and humans have >1 ppb of most harmful known PFAS in their blood. When we know that at 30ppb you get double chance of getting kidney cancer (and that’s just one cancer);
- The nature of indestructability is the main problem of cleaning it up. It doesn’t matter if something is “only used in manufacturing process”. It’s already somewhere, in the product, on the packaging, in the water that cleans the factory, in the landfill that collects it;
I think you're engaging in the same hysteria as the video
> It’s already somewhere, in the product, on the packaging, in the water that cleans the factory, in the landfill that collects it
If the chemical is used during manufacturing.. why would it do anywhere outside the factory? Why would it not be infinitely reused? It's just used as part of the way they deposit the harmless teflon
> IMHO, we should drop “non-dangerous” as a myth from teflon commercials of the 70s. As also from the video - due to heat you can consume harmful chemicals, even with acute consequences.
It doesn't say that in the video. They clearly say it's not harmful
> PFAS, from my understanding is a group of thousands of chemicals, most of them with no research on harmfulness
> PFAS is everywhere. Food packaging, hygiene products, tooth floss, fire extinguishers, clothes, kitchen appliances, etc. It’s manufactured all over the globe in multiple factories for seemingly everything.
I think you didn't watch the video. Or maybe you're just hearing what you want to hear. They explain it's from a small handful of factories. It's not explained why it's in floss (if that's even true?). If it's some byproduct, then maybe the solution is not to stop using PFAS, but understanding how to eliminate the contamination from manufacturing byproducts.
They make a clear distinction between substances like teflon and stuff like C8.
> PFAS, from my understanding is a group of thousands of chemicals, most of them with no research on harmfulness
It's clear from the video some are found to be harmful while others are not. Therefore it's absurd to conclude anything about this category. The category doesn't tell you anything about safety. I'm sure an onion has thousands of chemicals "with no research on harmfulness".
The point is the starting point of this conversation is already disingenuous and poorly communicated
PFAS is short for 'Per- and poly- FluoroAlkyl Substances'. The Teflon that's used on your pans, which are 'poly-' materials, comes in extra long chains (hundreds of thousands of molecules). Most of its chemical bonds are hidden behind the extremely reactive Fluoride atoms (so if Fluoride is bonded onto that position, it's hard to take it off) and are extremely inert, so they don't interfere with typical biological reactions, thus are perfectly safe.
C8 is known as PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid). Per for its chained molecule shape (no carbon side chains), 'fluoro' for the F part, 'octanoic' for the 8 carbon atoms, and 'acid' for its chemical property. Unlike Teflon:
- C8 has a really small molecular mass, making it easier to flow around your body participating in all kinds of biological operations;
- It is an acid (having the carboxylic '-COOH' group) and can pretend to be all kinds of acids and actively take part in reactions. Once they start to get inside, the consequences can be unpredictable and devastating.
- All other atoms on C8 except for the last -COOH group are covered by fluoride atoms. This means that C8 is not biodegradable (no enzyme can break apart the C-F covalent bond since it's bond energy is really too high), and when it gets into the environment, it stays that way.
C6 has a highly similar chemical property akin to C8 (it's a carboxylic acid, and has all atoms covered by fluoride), so is equally harmful.
I'm not sure why you're summarizing what's explained in the video.
It's clear PFAS contains chemicals that are likely dangerous (like C8) and chemicals that are likely not - like Teflon. So, unless I'm misunderstanding, as an umbrella term for dangerous chemicals it's useless from the get go.
I understand the potential danger of C8 and similar acids.. it's explained in detail. But the part that's not explained is why is it in final consumer products. It seems like a chemical that only forms a step in the processes of making Teflon (and I'm guessing other similar products). Is the problem they were just dumping it into the soil at the plant? How is it getting to polar bears? (they keep talking about polar bears)
Let's just say Windows 11 is a complete different OS compared to Windows 7 lest 10. That's still not counting Windows 11 being a new OS every couple of months, packed with brand new AI features that literally breaks your entire workflow because it's "more AI".
Yes, one more precise way to phrase this is that the expected value of the dot product between two random vectors chosen from a vector space tends towards 0 as the dimension tends to infinity (I think the scaling is 1/sqrt(dimension)). But the probability of drawing two truly orthogonal vectors at random (over the reals) is zero - the dot product will be very small but nonzero.
That said, for sparse high dimensional datasets, which aren't proper vector spaces, the probability of being truly orthogonal can be quite high - e.g. if half your vectors have totally disjoint support from the other half then the probability is at least 50-50.
Note that ML/LLM practioners use "approximate orthogonality" anyway.
That link doesn't contradict the person you're replying to. Actual orthogonality still has a probability of zero, just as the equator of a sphere has zero surface area, because it's a one-dimensional line (even if it is in some sense "bigger" than the Arctic circle).
If you're picking a random point on the (idealized) Earth, the probability of it being exactly on the equator is zero, unless you're willing to add some tolerance for "close enough" in order to give the line some width. Whether that tolerance is +/- one degree of arc, or one mile, or one inch, or one angstrom, you're technically including vectors that aren't perfectly orthogonal to the pole as "successes". That idea does generalize into higher dimensions; the only part that doesn't is the shape of the rest of the sphere (the spinning-top image is actually quite handy).
The visualization is useless. IF the 2D embeddings were any good they might be useful to R1's developers but still not to end users. What am I supposed to with it?
I believe they clear out the launch site within a few kilometres so nobody gets hit by random concrete debris or just melt away, literally. The control centre is probably invitational.
But you can freely watch them live on Twitter. Just follow the official @SpaceX account.
Most of those devs back in 2011 were rookies, and many still are now. It would've been lucky enough for them to have even heard of the word 'asymmetric encryption'. And you can still find many public APIs in the WeChat docs (in 2022) that uses hand-written AES stuff that, unfortunately, uses ECB.
Back in those days where the CN internet infrastructure as we see today was laid down, devs and PMs literally didn't know for sure what were they doing, but they still worked overnight because it the new features must be shipped before next weekend.
And since the services worked pretty well until today it's kinda better to keep the s__tpile there and don't change it. Also there's a lot of unmaintained 'PWA's in the wild that relies on legacy APIs that you dare not to break.
While it is most proper and convenient to use these out-of-the-box products for fit scenarios,
Doing so will at the very least not help us with our interviews. It will also restrict our mindset of how one can make use of LLMs through the distraction of sleek, heavily abstracted interfaces. This makes it harder, if not impossible for us to come up with bright new ideas that undermine models in various novel ways, which are almost always derived from deep understanding of how things actually work under the hood.
Devs are forced to do something by the manager to please the skip manager. Teams do things the hard way to make it look as if they're actually doing things. Organizations hide from leadership what users really like lest the org got disassembled because they were creating literal crap. And leadership went to marketing team to cover this all up from the investors. Traders would buy in these stocks just because these big companies have good marketing to pretend they were making the right decisions.
Most if not all big companies without tasteful people would eventually turn into monstrosities like this. Everyone were telling 'stories' around 'stories' that fold into a tangled web of everyone else, but sooner or later one day the bubble's going to pop, and down the stocks be gone.
People with bad tastes aren't the worst to deal with. They have taste, it's just that it's different from others'. Tasteless people will do anything in their power to keep the wheels turning, and that means to let tasteful people surrounding them surrender their tastes, so everyone can and will become tasteless people who would do anything to keep the wheels turning.
1. Any substance that has most atoms covered by Fluoride are 'PFAS'. 2. C8 is strictly speaking PFOA (by-definition). 3. C6, and all other acids that has similar chemical properties to C8, can all be generically classified as PFOA-like materials. But for ease of communication people also call them PFOAs or just short for PFOA.
4. PFOAs are crucial for manufacturing Teflon. 5. The problem is manufacturers just dump waste water from PFAS production plants (containing PFOA) without post-processing into natural water bodies and let these toxic substances participate in the food chain and eventually land in our own bodies.