I was talking with a friend from the medical industry about it today. 30-50% of r&d spend in his sector is spent on safety, and for good reason. Proper trials, safety reviews and checkpoints and so on. Given the potential harm that could come from AI, we should probably be mandating something similar. Why wait to focus on safety until it’s too late.
The companies talking the most about safety and regulations aren't even properly taking the obvious measures. Shows that it's more of a marketing thing than something they take seriously.
I don’t think it’s marketing alone. I do genuinely think safety was a priority when they were small. But I’d be a fool to ignore that greed has taken over and their inner competitiveness doesn’t let them fall behind a competitor.
DeepSeek is maybe the only unique company here. They are content with exactly where they are. They don’t want to grow ginormous. Their goal is to be the affordable workhorse and their competition is with themselves. They’ve mentioned before how their business is profitable and all hardware costs get absorbed in 10 months. Pretty incredible. I have a ton of respect for their unassuming founder.
I also like DeepSeek, but I'll note their stated goal is to develop AGI, and the founder (already China’s fifth-richest person) has stated, "I believe the business opportunities here are large enough-if the AI era will produce many trillion-dollar companies, I think we will be one of them."[1] These are not humble ambitions.
I'm not fully convinced about the greed explanation. It seems to be unrealistic to me that greed can be at a level that the AI frontier (at least in the West) almost uniformly agrees (often with a smug smile,) that they are actively working on killing their loved ones within a decade.
You don't see this kind of behavior in other frontier research areas... biochemists aren't smugly boasting about the potential of developing superviruses, climate scientists do not sound smug and excited when they beg the world to get more serious about climate change, etc
If I operate a nuclear reactor or a hydroelectric dam there are regulators that tell me what i'm allowed to do, so as to keep my profit motive from overwhelming the public interest.
If we want AI to actually have some safety rails, this is what we would do.
If we were to take the nuclear analogy, what's happening in AI right now is where the people selling nuclear power make a ton of noise about how they need the power to regulate their competitors because nuclear bombs might set the atmosphere on fire, and their proof for this is in a report about how they didn't wear TLDs (and suffered related increased cancer risks) despite it being common practice to wear them in all related industries.
Some controls are justifiable, but none of the people involved in any of this can be trusted to develop sane controls. Most likely we're looking at draconian proposals similar to attempted regulations on 3d printers.
Similar to countries putting democratic in their name being the least democratic, like the Deutsche Demokratische Republik and Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.
If you have access to a SOTA model without guardrails, provide a prompt that lets the agent come up with "creative" solutions to problems, and don't properly isolate it, they can end up inadvertently hacking 3rd party companies. Even if it was a mistake or "mistake", the part where the agent can exploit things across multiple levels like that, isn't just marketing.
It seems like if they released this models differently, say without the guardrails they currently have, we'd have a lot more collateral damage than we currently have.
But aren't there plenty of uncensored/unrestricted models out there? Where is all the collateral damage?
Also, I think if Claude and OpenAI are just doing industry standard guardrails that everyone else is doing including DeepSeek, the fact that they are talking about it more than other companies makes it part of the marketing campaign.
As an analogy, if Apple were to talk up their phones having fast charging but their charging speed is the same as everyone else (or slower).
> But aren't there plenty of uncensored/unrestricted models out there? Where is all the collateral damage?
That come close to what SOTA GPT models are able to do? No, not even close. They're either "safety trained" and has bunch of guardrails, or aren't able to come up with 0days on the spot to escalate to root access on 3rd party infrastructure.
> doing industry standard guardrails that everyone else is doing including DeepSeek, the fact that they are talking about it more than other companies makes it part of the marketing campaign.
Yeah, that sounds reasonable to me, since all the top models currently have guardrails one way or another, but the amount they mention it in the press releases differs a lot.
I agree that fears are overblown. But we have definitely seen some attacks, especially in the crypto space. Three major ones just in the past month: Coldcard wallet, Liquid, and Trezor email compromised.
They're almost certainly a result of more competent models finding exploits.
An obliterated 30B model versus a 1T model without guardrails is like comparing an angry squirrel to a bear having a bad day. One hurts, the other hurts until it abruptly doesn't.
> If you have access to a SOTA model without guardrails, provide a prompt that lets the agent come up with "creative" solutions to problems, and don't properly isolate it, they can end up inadvertently hacking 3rd party companies
You can do the same with improperly-managed human interns (see for example, the big AWS outage caused when an intern pushed a firewall rule directly to production), so I'm not clear what the big deal is here.
Yes, the AI may be faster/more-knowledable than an intern, but the threat model is exactly the same as for a rogue employee.
I'm fairly sure most "safety" people consider "large scale automated crime" part of the threat model, as the agents could accidentally fall into such a trap, if optimized for some misunderstood goal.
It is a marketing stunt in the sense that, instead of being honest and saying "Taking structured output from token predictors and running that as commands for external tools, then passing the output back to the token predictor in a loop can lead to very bad consequences, especially if they have internet access.", they say "Our models are so freaking smart they can hack HuggingFace"
>If you have access to a SOTA model without guardrails, provide a prompt that lets the agent come up with "creative" solutions to problems, and don't properly isolate it, they can end up inadvertently hacking 3rd party companies.
it's pure delusion to think that's a SOTA specific quirk. DS/GLM/K3/Qwen/Claude/GPT/Gemini/Grok will all break CFAA laws with clever prompting, and they'll do it well if given the harness and tools they need.
This is evidenced by a huge uptick in game hacks and reverse engineering articles, some even featured on this site.
the reality is that it doesn't take a superintelligence to do something against ' the law ' , and 'being hacked' varies from victim to victim.
Will Phillips consider themselves hacked when a clever user prompts an AI into getting their toothbrushes to dump rom? Is it 'hacked' to clean-room re-implement a video game net protocol in order to produce private servers?
Being hacked by a Collective (their own name) of its own agents - who gained root access across the entire research cluster hosting them - was not a marketing stunt.
Of course it was. They clearly decided that the benefit to the company valuation was higher than the potential downsides when announcing to the world that they committed a criminal act via negligence.
If it wasn't a marketing stunt, they would have at most quietly settled any legal matters with huggingface behind the scenes, fixed their evaluation harness so it wouldn't happen again, and avoided the potential future liability.
> "Our model is extremely safe though it broke our sandbox and hacked foo bar... But you can't use our model for Cybersecurity (i don't care whether you're team blue) without our permissions or we'll ban you. And open-weight models are so dangerous let's ban them."
That's what AI companies that "focus on safety" did.
You seem to by implying wrongdoing or incompetence or something, but your chosen synopsis is that the models behaved dangerously in the lab so public use was restricted? Which shows… IDK?
But here you are in the text generating industry, the worst that can happen is bad grade because AI will mess up John Keats with John Cleese or your React application will have bugs. Inconvenient, but mostly harmless.
Don't confuse a focus on talking about safety with a focus on safety.
We can't even define safety in AI yet. Does safety mean alignment with the human operator? Apparently not, because refusing to do certain things seems to be a big part of it. But then you have things like the HuggingFace incident where legitimate use got blocked by "safety" and hampered the defenders' ability to defend.
AI safety seems like a good idea to me, but we have to figure out what it means first.
I am sure if you ran a factory that worked with highly dangerous chemicals, safety mitigations that are basically 'we promise we're really trying our best, but shit happens' would not be acceptable.
And thankfully, those people wo do run these factories can and are obligated to do way better than that.
But the AI industry is not run by engineers. They pay engineers to do what they want, but the founders are hacks that are good at getting funding from investors and favors from government. That's why we don't see an engineering-oriented strategy in what they do.
In this case "safety" means how to restrict access to good models for working class. You can be sure the rich have access to unrestricted and uncensored models.
Yes, this is well-documented and publicly advertised. In Azure Foundry, the feature to modify (or completely remove) safety guardrails and content filtering is called "Limited Access" [0], and one must submit a form to request permission to use this feature. This is one of the more straightforward paths to get access to unrestricted frontier models, but it's far from the only way.
No. It's not limited to 3rd-party guardrails. Given how restrictive the native public-facing OpenAI guardrails are, this feature wouldn't be worth very much if it just slacked back off to the level of "regular" filter paranoia offered by the native models, would it?
This is needed if you're going to be dealing with things like psychologists doing self-harm research or red-teaming or sensitive sexual content -- if you're working with any of that sort of stuff in a professional context and want to leverage OpenAI models on Azure, then that's the form that you fill out to get access to unfiltered models.
Note that I am not aware of this feature being offered for Anthropic models -- I've only seen it offered for OpenAI models (note that the documentation I linked is specifically in the "Azure OpenAI" category).
I used to work for a (now defunct) wagering operation. From my understanding even internally the marketing and business guys would’ve preferred the advertisements to be banned. It’s such an effective customer acquisition tool that the only way to compete is to spend insane amounts on marketing, because if you don’t, all of your competitors are and you’ll go bust. A ban would drastically level out the playing field and make things more sustainable.
The only ones that don’t want the ban are the ones selling the advertising slots. No way they’re giving up the gravy train.
And the 2nd level consequence of that levelling the playing field would be more competition, and fewer huge, powerful gambling companies. Fewer, huge companies have the money and skills to buy politicians (exhibit one: "prediction markets"). Banning ads would be a net positive for the addicts, and net negative for politicians, hence it won't happen in our current universe.
Yeah it would’ve been an instant buy for me if it did HR monitoring, even if it meant a thicker base. Now it’ll probably just be a fairly quick buy as my Apple Watch s7 can hardly last a day.
The PT2 is thicker than the PR2 and has the HR monitor (it also costs $25 more). If you have an AW, then you're already used to the rectangular form factor of the PT2.
I’ve been 100% remote since the Melbourne pandemic shutdowns, and I’ve absolutely loved it for the most part, and hope to be able to continue to work mostly remote going forward.
It definitely has its downsides though, I’ve missed a lot of the incidental chats and socialising, throwing ideas around etc, and it can be a bit mentally draining. I’ve started renting a hot desk at a wework in the city once a month just to be around people and feel part of something bigger. I actually feel less tired after schlepping into the city and back that day than I do on most other days, which is surprising.
I mostly worry about the effects on career progression. I’ve been WFH for 6 years and I feel like I am missing out on making weak social connections as a result.
That said, it’s really lovely overall. I have a kid on the way and it’s hard to imagine RTO now.
I got minorly pressured to go into the office for my current job when hired, which was silly - in over three years I've never professionally interfaced with anyone outside of my one teammate. I agreed to go in 2 days/week, and I'm glad I did; it gives me some healthy facetime with other Homo sapiens. In winter, with Amazon Prime and Doordash, I can basically exist without seeing people at all. Not good for me!
That’s the ritalin. Find a healthier alternative like an energy bar with that double espresso. I find if I stack too much at once, I crash. One cup in the morning when I wake up. One before work right before the meetings. One in the afternoon to keep me fueled until dinner where I let myself gorge on protein and sugars until I crash.
suggest many many cups of 1/3 caffeinated and 2/3 decaf. There are some observed health benefits to even decaf coffee... and its got potassium besides. I drink around 10 of these. lower longer peak. Joy!
Ritalin is a chemical relative of amphetamine. In prescribed amounts it's often an effective treatment. In recreational amounts, ask your doctor about ΔFosB:
I don't know enough to ask specific questions. I could consult with an LLM, but if there is some risk or side effect that doctors do not typically mention, I'm all ears.
In that case I guess I could caution this: if you have any kind of OCB, our experience is that prolonged exposure to Ritalin will multiply it by at least 10.
Same. During the week on meds I find that drinking more than half a litre just provokes unpleasant sweating and makes me feel frantic, some amount of brain fog and occasionally a mild headache, especially if I haven't been chugging water, which I guess is probably what most normal people get from coffee
I would kill for this for when I’m buying fresh produce at the shops. Right now I just raw dog the produce into my basket as putting 4 apples into a plastic bag to ease the weighing and transport home seems like a selfish thing to do to the environment, but something that starts to break down soon after that sounds great.
Why don’t you bring plastic bags from home? They are very much reusable, you don’t have to throw them out. They are also quite easy to fold into small shapes and keep on you, or your car, or whatever. I have plastic bags which have endured for literal years. I also decided early on that if I forget to bring a bag, I either do without or have to go back to get one. You start remembering really fast after a few times of forcing yourself to go back.
Another thing you can do is just take a cardboard box from some product in the store. This may depend on country, but where I live the shops leave products on their transport boxes on the shelves. Walking around the store I can usually find one empty box, or maybe one almost empty that I can move the products from into another box for the same product next to it. Then I just take the box and use it to transport my groceries. Stores just throw those boxes out anyway, so they don’t care if you take them (I have asked). At this point it’s a bit of a game for me, to guarantee I always find a box. I have a personal rule never do anything that would make the lives of the workers harder in the process.
I have a cupboard full of bags at home I can reuse. It's right next to my door. Really easy to get to.
75% of the time I forget to take a bag to my car.
As well as all the single use bags (paper and plastic) I bought, I also have jute bags that I got years ago and are still holding up. I like them better as they are bigger and stronger.
Even if I managed to get a bag, the other 75% of the time I forget to take it into the shop and leave it in my car.
Even if I manage all of that, 25% of the time I will end up not having enough bags.
What I would like to see is some kind of deposit system with stronger bags (like my jute bags). Then when I actually remember I can bring them back to the store for someone else to use.
The trick is to always have them where you will need them. I always have one or two in my backpack, in my car, in my luggage when I travel... Their size and weight is almost nothing and the only effort is putting them back after use. Which is where it occasionally fails, sure.
Plastic bags are made of polypropylene, and are garbage.
Plastic for the most part is basically garbage, there are so many types that it’s hard to recycle it. PET and HDPE can be recycled fairly easily if they’re sorted, the rest aren’t really worth it (polypropylene, low density polyethylene, PVC).
The only thing that is almost always economically worth recycling is metal, which is separated from the paper/glass/plastic if you have single stream recycling. Plastic should be burned in a cement kiln or buried in a modern landfill, unless it’s well sorted HDPE or PET.
Reuse is significantly more effective than recycling. Bothering is something we should indeed do. Though yes, disposing of bags properly is also much superior to just throwing them on the floor.
If you use single stream recycling for this, then this is actively bad. Plastic bags clog the sorting machines, and then get thrown out because (even if labeled) they are usually contaminated.
> 75% of the time I forget to take a bag to my car.
Then take a bunch in the other 25%. You can just leave them in the car.
Grab a bundle right now, or whenever you’re at home and remember, and put them next to your keys, your wallet, or hang them on the handle of your door.
> I like them better as they are bigger and stronger.
Sure, use whatever you like. Just don’t let perfect be in the way of good.
> Even if I managed to get a bag, the other 75% of the time I forget to take it into the shop and leave it in my car.
Then go back to your car! It will be mildly annoying the first two times, and the third time it won’t happen. I mentioned exactly that in my comment.
> Even if I manage all of that, 25% of the time I will end up not having enough bags.
Then start bringing more. This isn’t hard. Leave the extras in your car.
Or just use the cardboard box approach I mentioned.
None of your mentioned obstacles is insurmountable. On the contrary, they are all exceedingly trivial to overcome with the tiniest amount of will to do so.
> 75% of the time I forget to take a bag to my car.
I put our reusable ones on the floor in the entrance to the garage and then that reminds me to put them back in the trunk whenever I go to the car for whatever reason. Then I always have them while out.
I've sometimes left them in the car but just excuse myself at the checkout and go fetch them while the groceries are being rung up.
We use a collapsible (plastic) shopping basket/tub-with-handles for wet produce, the stuff the grocery store insists on spraying periodically, and things like tomatoes where we don't care if they get wet. The store clerks are used to it now and prefer it because they don't have to scan through bags and just put the produce back in the basket afterwards.
If you go this route, keep onions and garlic separate. They last longer if they stay dry.
You can bring your own, non-plastic bags. I do wonder if maybe some cultures just don't have this and so the deprecation of plastic bags has left everyone quite confused.
It's a very solved problem, has been for centuries probably. You can even get some with little wheels! If you absolutely can't handle the looseness of the fruits amongst your shopping, you could use string nets.
For sure. But reusing the plastic bag you already have is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than buying a new cloth bag, yet many people never even think of using the same plastic bag twice. Even if some food juice spills inside, you can quickly rinse it off, hang it, and it’s good as new.
In my original reply I was trying to convey that you can be the laziest, most forgetful person, and still have an easy solution.
Reusable shopping bags have been a thing for a long time, but I think for many, they never went back to them after stores banned them as a Covid mitigation.
Again, force yourself to go back or do without whenever you forget, and you’re going to start remembering really fast.
Additionally, don’t just take them when you know you’ll need them, do it before. Next time you need to leave your house to go somewhere, grab some and put them in your car. Done. Go put some right now next to your wallet or keys or literally on the handle of your house’s door.
Or just use the cardboard box approach I mentioned. You can’t forget to bring what’s already inside the store.
Just wash some forever checmicals over the pesticides, that'll do the job. Jokes aside, i raw dog with a quick wash and im yet to have caught covid so it cant be that bad.
I always find it interesting when I visit Italy. The supermarkets there do sell some kind of dissenfectent for produce, and everyone is really strict about using gloves (this was even before COVID). My country has none of that...
It's really weird how some safety regulations differs between countries - sometimes the rules are even the exact opposite like washing eggs before sale in the US vs. EU.
Makes you wonder how much of it is actually based on any kind of rigorous science and how much is done just because someone thought it was a good idea once and now its just how we do things.
Unwashed produce has essentially zero risk of COVID. Other various bacterial contamination, yes, though it's very rare for those to do worse than give you an upset stomach or cause any lasting damage.
As someone who works in a market, eating anything without cooking or washing it first is a bad idea. Most of it is fine, but people are disgusting and there's no way of knowing how many people have touched your apple, if someone's kid managed to lick it without you noticing, or someone managed to push everything off the shelf onto the nonslip mat before they got stopped. Bagged produce can be even worse, given the amount of condensation inside the bag after it warms up on the loading dock and then sits in the cooler. The mister above the fresh greens and such doesn't do much and they regularly get touched and knocked out. The potatoes are probably the best, as the dirt on them is obvious.
If you live in an area with entitled people and spineless corporate rules that don't allow stores to confront people over pets, that's instantly worse than everything else combined. Pets like to lie on the floor, someone's dog has peed on the floor, 5 different random people have petted hugged or picked up that dog and 3 others since they left the house. One of those people is probably a cashier who then handles every item you've bought. And then someone inhaled pet hair and sneezed.
Any washing you do to the produce at home has basically zero chance of killing/removing anything. It's hygiene theatre. People typically don't wash their produce in bleach or soap.
What are you basing this on? If I buy something like parsley and don't wash it then it tastes a bit like fly killer, but if I rinse it thoroughly then it doesn't. Is that just placebo?
That link makes my day and confirms so much I wondered about food cleanliness theater.
It's gross but I tend to leave a tiny bit of dirt on my potatoes. I think it's an emotional callback to your point that it might not be great for our food to be completely sterile.
People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment. The impact of a 10 min car ride = 10,000+ plastic bags of emissions. And in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment.
Can't imagine this survives napkin scrutiny. A ten mile drive isn't using nearly as much hydrocarbon mass as 10k plastic bags. While most of the plastic hopefully winds up in a landfill, most of the gasoline is water and carbon dioxide by the end. It's tires versus bags. While tires shed, the mass lost in 10min is definitely quite a bit lower than 10k bags or the fraction that escapes the waste pipeline.
30mpg, 10 miles, means two pounds of gasoline, 910grams, knock off or add 100g for ethanol per your preference, a google says about 5grams per bag, so nearly 200 bags.
Nowhere close to 10k, but nontrivial. And, this gets reduced and sometimes outright negated if you reuse the bag. Doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate if plastic shopping bags are the beat choice though.
I don't think replacing them with store bought doggy poo and cat litter bags is better. It's not a reduction and theres no reuse. If you find yourself discarding them outright, then find an alternative I guess.
Don’t forget that a lot of carbon went in to making the road, the parking (deforestation or other land destruction for those should be considered too), the car itself, emissions from tyre wear, brake dust, some plastic for the single use medical devices necessitated by treatment of people struck by drivers, etc etc.
Though what is often forgotten is the insane amounts of plastic used in farming. Occlusion fabric for weeds, polytunnel skins, silage wrap, etc
I think the units there are off, a Camry hybrid is about 100g direct CO2 per km. One widely repeated calculation has total direct + indirect emissions for a grocery bag at 200g. So 1km driven vs 1 bag is a similar magnitude of emissions.
Please be careful of such "metrics/statistics." Their very nature means they're politically and financially incentivized lean towards a higher or lower number than "the other guy." And, of course, a big number is scarier in a vacuum. What if a paper bag is 250g of emissions?
The poster child for me for this is low-GWP refrigerants. Sounds good, right? Well, think about how CO2 captured filtered and compressed compares. I'll leave everybody to argue with their-self on this. Does co2 vs r-whatever use more energy? Less? Does it somehow justify the emissions and pollution of manufacture?
We have enough data to estimate the reasonable range of possibilities and exclude the upthread assertion that a ten minute car ride is similar emissions to 10k plastic bags. A degree of uncertainty need not make us helpless in the face of loud ignorance, that's how we end up giving equal weight in the media to common consensus of professionals in whatever field and political operatives with fringe beliefs but no evidence.
Sorry, I screwed up and misread what you wrote- primarily, a simple "we can do way better than 30mpg." And theres not a lot in the way of wiggle room to debate with any integrity the amount of CO2 burning a set quantity of gas produces. A couple percentage points for NOx and friends and thats it.
I am confused why everybody mentions emissions though. In a discussion on paper/plastic/reusable bags, in a response to a call for napkin math for a claim of "10,000 bags from the fuel needed to get to the store" (essentially the argument made)- CO2 isn't relevant: just the mass of the gas used to get to the store.
I'm not pleased with how this turned out. to be told I'm wrong? That's fine, its the internet. I'm disappointed and alarmed with how badly wrong the suggested corrections are... it's deeply frustrating for me as well.
As for a kilo of gas per 10 miles- see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline - says 0.71-0.77g/mL, standard conversion table says 3.785L per gallon. (https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/volume-units-converter-d_...), and finally- since we're comparing burning gas for a car vs using it in plastic: the figure of merit is petroleum usage, not greenhouse gas emission. Technically, plastic and gasoline aren't going to be 1:1. But that's not napkin math anymore unless you're a petroleum engineer/chemist.
Where did I say that? I was only responding to the assertion "in first world countries almost no household plastic ends up in the environment" pointing out that I see it everywhere.
>People dramatically over weight how bad plastic is for the environment.
I can only give a: what in the fuck are you talking about?? Modern medicine is literally finding microplastics in men's testes. "People" are dramatically underestimating how completely and utterly screwed the next dozen generations of humanity are with the plastic waste we've blanketed the earth in. Assuming humans survive that long.
Sure plastic aren't great for the environment when we're just dumping it out there without much care. Obviously reducing waste and reusing is what we should strive for on all fronts. Demonizing one thing results in overcompensation on the flip side and we know for a fact that that's not where we want to end up either. Remember when we tried to reduce paper use as much as possible because of deforestation? Or saturated fats?
At least microplastics don't make you angry and violent that we can tell.
On the other hand, it's going to be around (relative to pre-emission levels) for a lot longer than the lead (paint gets chipped off and disposed of, we stopped using it in end-consumer products, etc)
Japan recycles but also a whole bunch of their waste is incinerated. I think they super-heat it to reduce emissions but guessing that also costs energy which also secondarily causes emissions.
we use these fresh and crisp bags. They sound like a gimmick but they really do work. We reuse a bag for months until its full of holes and not doing its job well anymore.
In the US, produce is rarely weighted and labeled in the produce section with the bag. Only at checkout is it weighed for sale, so no opportunity to tare the container.
the places around here are using compostable plastic bags. not sure what it's made of but it can be composted in municipal facilities according to the bag. one downside is they are green tinted and harder to see what is in there but if it removes some of the plastic killing the ocean then i'm for it... assuming it's not a plastic that degrades into microplastics.
> it can be composted in municipal facilities according to the bag
Note that "according to the bag" is very different from "according to your municipality"; my understanding is that most places actually can't handle them, and they might need to divert your compost to the landfill if it has too much of those plastic bags. They can be composed under certain conditions, but whether the facility your municipality uses has those is unclear.
See also "flushable" wipes that must not be flushed down the toilet.
I'd assume those bags would be okay considering they break down after a few days of holding compostable materials, and frequently make a mess in the compost bin. The "compostable" cutlery is definitely not compostable under normal household situations though.
My understanding is most manicipal compost facilities can handle them - the vast majority of manicipalities don't have a facility at all. They are expensive. A home pile won't compost them, a pile at manicipal size is likely a health hazzard and so not a good option.
Most of these at least in my region are made from cornstarch. They decompose well/without "microplastics" but only under correct conditions.
Home composts aren't usually meeting these, their temperature isn't going high enough for full decomposition and you can have traces of polymers left behind. I throw them in the trash for compostable waste because thankfully my collectivity collects these to generate biogas and my guess is they do end up in much larger/managed composts where they can fully decompose.
PLA doesn't actually biodegrade outside of specialist industrial facilities, it was much vaunted as an eco friendly thing when 3d printing started using it, but we rapidly found out it can last decades without breaking down much if at all.
> but if it removes some of the plastic killing the ocean then i'm for it
It doesn't. The plastics in the ocean don't come from your grocery store. They come from fishing gear and from places without municipal trash service.
Honestly? It's basically greenwashing, it doesn't actually do anything at all. No one ever composts this things, and landfilling or incinerating a bag does not harm the environment.
yeah I mentioned municipal compost because they can get the compost temperature way higher than we can at home scale. It should break down in the big compost piles they have
I've been doing that since before anyone cared, it just seems wasteful to use a bag for a handful of things. I use bags if I buy more than a few of something, or if it's something with dirt on like potatoes.
Doctors’ ability to taste diabetes in urine has also probably eroded since more effective methods have come on the market. If they’re more accurate with the use of AI, why would you continue without it?
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