descriptive summarization?

Kudos! I no longer have to deal with any of that, but I appreciate it’s been a problem and am glad you took action. Thank you!

Read the title. Thought this was going to be about people spraying Roundup on their lawns. How dare you trick me into reading an interesting piece on perverse market forces?!

What happens when there’s a risk a crop could fail? “It puts pressure on me to consider cheating, because I’m not so profitable that I can afford to lose even one.”

I didn’t realize the growers operated on such thin margins.

For each batch tested, the lab issues a certificate of analysis (CoA) with contaminant testing results and details about the product’s chemical composition. Products that fail may be remediated — moldy cannabis might be treated with ultraviolet light to kill the microbes, for example — or destroyed.

The fatal flaw in this system is that cannabis labs are paid by the producers, which creates a financial incentive for labs to falsify results

That’s the same issue we have with bonds getting triple-A ratings.

But following the rules often means losing a client, he said. “They’re just going to go to another lab who will do exactly what they want, even if they charge double the price.”

So, as in with bonds ratings, honest and scrupulous labs will go broke, leaving us with labs that give reassuring results for high THC potency or low pesticide contamination.

For example, surveys have found that 25 percent to 37 percent of Parkinson’s patients use cannabis to reduce symptoms such as tremor, stiffness, and pain. But research suggests that organophosphate pesticides, which are common contaminants in cannabis, may be linked to the onset or faster progression of Parkinson’s disease.

Well why aren’t their stricter rules?

Recently, state legislators killed a proposal to expand the list of pesticides that labs must test for from 13 to 60.

Dammit. I blame the stupid rhetoric on how ‘regulation stifles industry!’ for letting such bozos govern. We could have a government that didn’t allow businesses to poison their customers, but nooooo, the U.S. thinks poison is fine if it gets us fewer laws and less government. I want to hear people saying, “Regulations are written in blood. They exist because people were injured and killed without them.”

I like the positive note about Maryland towards the end , but it shouldn’t be so hard to get decent information.

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me a spider’s web with a red light that attracts male fireflies to come have a good time at the web bordello

I misinterpreted your first sentence… until I read the rest of your comment.

I thought you were saying null results shouldn’t be published. Hackles go up. Keep reading angrily. Ohhhh… ALL results should be publicly available! We’ll that’s very different!

I do have a nitpick, though: if the internet has taught us nothing else, it is that all kinds of scammers, influencers, conspiracy theorists, deniers, and exploiters will ALL post lies and disinformation in any unvetted space they can find. Somebody has got to do some curation and somebody has to pay them enough to ensure that work gets done.

Could be worse. Could be an Elsevier site (Lancet, Cell, ScienceDirect, etc.).

Please read wonky news, vote, and tell your friends and neighbors about the stuff you learn about candidates. We get crappy government by voting for it. We could fix the government if we elected people who would write legislation to stop corruption, was there to fix roads and balance budgets rather than scream about triggering issues, and wanted to make a better rather than to simply ‘win’ no matter the price.

The bits that hit me most:

It wasn’t just author profiles that the magazine repeatedly replaced. Each time an author was switched out, the posts they supposedly penned would be reattributed to the new persona, with no editor’s note explaining the change in byline.

authors at TheStreet with highly specific biographies detailing seemingly flesh-and-blood humans with specific areas of expertise — but … these fake writers are periodically wiped from existence and their articles reattributed to new names, with no disclosure about the use of AI.

We caught CNET and Bankrate, both owned by Red Ventures, publishing barely-disclosed AI content that was filled with factual mistakes and even plagiarism;

Wanna be the bigwig on your block? Have I got a product for YOU! Solar Panels! Make your house shine with newfangled tech that’ll be the envy of all your neighbors! Go solar, baby! Stick it to the electric company and make THEM pay for a change. Solar! You’ll be beaming.

ok, I suck at faking ai chat

“Godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton, in recent public talks, explains that one of the greatest risks is not that chatbots will become super-intelligent, but that they will generate text that is super-persuasive without being intelligent, in the manner of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. In a world where evidence and logic are not respected in public debate, Hinton imagines that systems operating without evidence or logic could become our overlords by becoming superhumanly persuasive, imitating and supplanting the worst kinds of political leader.

Why is “superhumanly persuasive” always being done for stupid stuff and not, I don’t know, getting people to drive fuel efficient cars instead of giant pickups and suvs?

H-h-how? HOW? do they ‘anonymize’ DNA?!?! Remember how in 2007 ‘anonymized’ netflix data was linked back to actual members? That was just checking what people watched on Netflix compared to what they rated on IMDB.

With DNA, you should be able to figure out who someone is by the fact you an exact DNA record! I mean, it’ll share similarities with your parents, and children, and to a lesser degree, more removed relatives. How hard can it be to figure out that this woman is related to that guy with an arrest record. Or more specifically: this is the exact person because we see other records from any doctor or whatever with the same DNA.