What's the deal with mold? Is it ok to eat moldy food if you cut off the moldy bit?

I read some articles that quoted mold researchers who said things like (paraphrasing) "if one of your strawberries gets mold on it, you have to throw away all your strawberries because they might be contaminated."

I don't get the logic of that. If you leave fruit out for long enough, it almost always starts growing visible mold. So any fruit at any given time is pretty likely to already have mold on it, even if it's not visible yet. So by that logic, you should never eat fruit ever.

They also said things like "mold usually isn't bad, but if mold is growing on food, there could also be harmful bacteria like listeria." Ok, but there could be listeria even if there's not visible mold, right? So again, by this logic, you should never eat any fresh food ever.

This question seems hard to resolve without spending a bunch of time researching mold so I'm hoping there's a mold expert on LessWrong. I just want to know if I can eat my strawberries.

I don't understand how not citing a source is considered acceptable practice. It seems antithetical to standard journalistic ethics.

we have found Mr Altman highly forthcoming

He was caught lying about the non-disparagement agreements, but I guess lying to the public is fine as long as you don't lie to the board?

Taylor's and Summers' comments here are pretty disappointing—it seems that they have no issue with, and maybe even endorse, Sam's now-publicly-verified bad behavior.

I was just thinking not 10 minutes ago about how that one LW user who casually brought up Daniel K's equity (I didn't remember your username) had a massive impact and I'm really grateful for them.

There's a plausible chain of events where simeon_c brings up the equity > it comes to more people's attention > OpenAI goes under scrutiny > OpenAI becomes more transparent > OpenAI can no longer maintain its de facto anti-safety policies > either OpenAI changes policy to become much more safety-conscious, or loses power relative to more safety-conscious companies > we don't all die from OpenAI's unsafe AI.

So you may have saved the world.

The target audience for Soylent is much weirder. Although TBF I originally thought the Soylent branding was a bad idea and I was probably wrong.

This also stood out to me as a truly insane quote. He's almost but not quite saying "we have raised awareness that this bad thing can happen by doing the bad thing"

Some ideas:

1. Make Sam Altman look stupid on Twitter, which will marginally persuade more employees to quit and more potential investors not to invest (this is my worst idea but also the easiest, and people seem to pretty much have this one covered already)
2. Pay a fund to hire a good lawyer to figure out a strategy to nullify the non-disparagement agreements. Maybe a class-action lawsuit, maybe a lawsuit on the behalf of one individual, maybe try to charge Altman with some sort of crime, I'm not sure the best way to do this but that's the lawyer's job to figure out.
3. Have everyone call their representative in support of SB 1047, or maybe even say you want SB 1047 to have stronger whistleblower protections or something similar.

"we would also expect general support for OpenAI to be likely beneficial on its own" seems to imply that they did think it was good to make OAI go faster/better, unless that statement was a lie to avoid badmouthing a grantee.

What do you think is the strongest evidence on sunscreen? I've read mixed things on its effectiveness.

Update: I finished my self-experiment, results are here: https://mdickens.me/2024/04/11/caffeine_self_experiment/