why would I want to use it?

You wouldn't, but that's fine with Match Group: JP Morgan[^1] are loving this new monetization strategy. If they think they can get more money out of their users they will, the experience and usefulness of their app be damned. Very similar to aggressively monetized mobile games, but extra icky since they're monetizing human relationships.

[^1]: I'm sure other investment firms are pleased as well, but JP Morgan was the firm mentioned in the article

Always nice to see studies of these things! I feel like there's a lot of olive oil lore out there, it's cool to see that some of that lore checks out scientifically.

Glad you found it useful! When I started writing it nobody else had answered and by the time I posted it a bunch of other people had replied (that's what I get for walking away while writing it).

(I'm going to write with confidence, but I'm not an expert, just grew up around chefs. Please feel free and welcome to fact check me.)

Yeah, EVOO is made by cold-pressing the olives, and regular olive oil by hot pressing. Cold pressing releases less oil and also several tasty compounds that come along for the ride. Hot pressing releases more oil but also other compounds that don't taste as nice, so generally regular olive oil will then be refined, removing most of the compounds that give it flavor. If you compare, you'll find that real EVOO[^1] tastes distinctly olive-y, and regular olive oil has very little flavor at all.

When it comes to cooking, traditional advice is not to cook with EVOO because it's got a low-ish smoke point[^2], whereas regular olive oil (which has been refined) will have a higher smoke point. EVOO's smoke point isn't actually that low, but I generally avoid high temp cooking with it anyway in favor of things like avocado oil (my personal go-to), peanut oil, or vegetable oil which are very tolerant of high temperatures. You absolutely can cook with EVOO though if you only want to keep one kind of oil around the house or something.

To clarify: heating up EVOO and cooking with it is fine as long as you don't smoke it. It won't make it any less extra-virgin or anything: to get those less good-tasting things into your oil, you need to heat up the olives themselves.

So are you wasting money if you do cook with it? Maybe.

Do you want what you're cooking to taste like olive oil? If you do, cook with it! Real[^1] EVOO has a distinct taste that won't go away when heated (unless you smoke it). It's great for making stuff like olive oil cake! If you don't care or don't want that flavor in whatever you're cooking, then yeah it's probably a waste of money. There are many less expensive oils that will work well and have neutral flavors or different flavors that you might prefer, including regular olive oil.

[^1]: All of this is avoiding the issue of regular olive oil being passed off as EVOO when it actually isn't. If you want something interesting to read about this evening, try researching olive oil fraud.

[^2]: In case you don't know, smoke point is the temperature where an oil starts to burn, which tastes bad, isn't very healthy, and will probably set off your smoke alarm.

Agreed. Strong (and effectively enforced) worker protections are just as important as tech-specific safety regulations. Nobody should feel like they need to put themselves into a risky situation to make work happen faster, regardless of whether their employer explicitly asks them to take that risk or (more likely) uses other means like unrealistic quotas to pressure them indirectly.

There are certainly ways to make working around robots safer, e.g. soft robots, machine vision to avoid unexpected obstacles in the path of travel, inherently limiting the force a robot can exert, etc... And I'm all for moving in the direction of better inherent safety, but we also need to make sure that safer systems don't become an excuse for employers to expose their workers to more risky situations (i.e. the paradox of safety).

This is really cool, thanks for sharing!

Report 'em too, if you're not already! It helps the mods and the admin team find them so that site-wide bans can be issued.

For sure. They tend to do a good job communicating tricky science and math concepts as well. They interview experts in a coherent way, tend to take the time to properly set up the background for topics, and the writers there seem to really care about getting things right rather than being sensational. They're one of my favorite sites for stories about math and science honestly.

I haven't had a chance to read the article linked in this post yet, but I'll be sitting in an airport in a few hours (I really need to go to sleep now) and I'll look forward to reading it then!

Ooh, good suggestion, I'll give it a try!

It seems like you're working under the core assumption that the trained model itself, rather than just the products thereof, cannot be infringing?

Generally if someone else wants to do something with your copyrighted work – for example your newspaper article – they need a license to do so. This isn't only the case for direct distribution, it includes things like the creation of electronic copies (which must have been made during training), adaptations, and derivative works. NYT did not grant OpenAI a license to adapt their articles into a training dataset for their models. To use a copyrighted work without a license, you need to be using it under fair use. That's why it's relevant: is it fair use to make electronic copies of a copyrighted work and adapt them into a training dataset for a LLM?

You also seem to be assuming that a generative AI model training on a dataset is legally the same as a human learning from those same works. If that's the case then the answer to my question in the last paragraph is definitely, "yes," since a human reading the newspaper and learning from it is something that, as you say, "any intelligent rational human being" would agree is fine. However, as far as I know there's not been any kind of ruling to support the idea that those things are legally equivalent at this point.

Now, if you'd like to start citing code or case law go ahead, I'm happy to be wrong. Who knows, this is the internet, maybe you're actually a lawyer specializing in copyright law and you'll point out some fundamental detail of one of these laws that makes my whole comment seem silly (and if so I'd honestly love to read it). I'm not trying to claim that NYT is definitely going to win or anything. My argument is just that this is not especially cut-and-dried, at least from the perspective of a non-expert.

Well I hear what you're saying, although I don't much appreciate being told what I should want the outcome to be.

My own wants notwithstanding, I know copyright law is notoriously thorny – fair use doubly so – and I'm no lawyer. I'd be a little bit surprised if NYT decides to raise this suit without consulting their own lawyers though, so it stands to reason that if they do indeed decide to sue then there are at least some copyright lawyers who think it'll have a chance. As I said, we'll see.

Yeah I've heard a lot of people talking about the copyright stuff with respect to image generation AIs, but as far as I can see there's no fundamental reason that text generating AIs wouldn't be subject to the same laws. We'll see how the lawsuit goes though I suppose.