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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)V
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99
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Sounds like you're on the right path, and I know you didn't ask, but just wanted to chime in. I love cooking, and have both stainless and cast iron skillets. The circlejerk for cast iron is strong, but I have to say, it's genuinely the best available non-stick pan once it's seasoned properly. I can make a perfect omelette, sear scallops, steaks, sautee vegetables, & use it as a pan for oven roasting chickens and roasts. I use it for bread baking as well. They're cheap (compared to clad cookware) and I'm not sure I could damage my pan even if I wanted to. They're extremely sturdy, and hold heat very well. I clean mine with cold water and a stiff bristle brush, dry, lightly oil (when it looks like it needs it) & it's ready to go.

    Down side to cast iron pans is that they need some care in the initial seasoning stages, and it stinks up the house when you season them (do it outside on the bbq if you have one!). It's a bit messy to keep them oiled. They're heavy and not ergonomic. Can't use them to simmer acidic sauces because that actually will soften and strip the seasoning, so I use my stainless for that. Get one, season it correctly, and you'll never look back.

  • Uncarbonated liquids are dead simple to titrate, it's true. For a carbonated product like beer, it's actually a much more complicated problem than it seems. The amount of foam you get on a keg pour of beer is effected by a lot of variables - how clean the lines are, how cold the lines are, how long the lines are, the diameter of the lines, whether you're using beergas or co2, how old the beer is, if it's keg conditioned or force carbonated, how recently the keg was moved into refrigeration, how cold the beer itself is, if it's the first pour of the day or if the tap has been running frequently, the mechanical design of the faucet, the temperature, cleanliness, shape, and size of the glass it's going into, and more. It's really fiddly business, I can't see how a push button system could take everything into account and render less wastage than a human operator with a feel for the system. Draft systems are voodoo, ask me how I know.

    Anyway companies typically have an unrealistic expectation of what draft wastage ought to be. I would advise any bar to expect something like 15% wastage at minimum on professional draft equipment, more if they're using bargain grade hardware anywhere in the system, but ownership doesn't want to hear that.

  • Managed a shop for over 10 years and took on duties to the point that the owner was only there for a few hours a week in the morning to check emails. The store did record business during the early covid days, and never closed the doors for a single day. The staff was stretched thin, stressed, and everyone was working like crazy and a bit nervous about health because we had a couple older guys working with us and nobody knew the harm profile of covid at that time. The owner bought expensive store improvements (with profits, and fraudulently claimed federal covid benefits) instead of paying the staff, or even saying thanks in any way. See ya!

    I want to report them for the fraud thing, but I'm the only one who knows about it aside from the owner, so they'd know it was me who reported it.

  • I would visit but my waifu body pillow scolds me when I suggest we travel.

  • we’d need to make our society one that’s less hostile to having kids

    You allude to some of this, but in addition, and as a precondition, we need to make our society one that's less hostile to the people that currently exist in it.

  • Black lights

    Nice.

  • Would be curious to know your thoughts about fragmentation - I'm not an nfl guy but I follow hockey and mma, and I think there is a shared issue, where, a handful of communities will crop up across multiple instances, all essentially following the same subject matter and material. Seems to me this will make for smaller, less active conversations that are spread around, instead of having one canonical hub where fans can go and you can get a robust community and lots of people chiming in. What do you think? Is this actually an issue? If it is, is it just a side-effect of decentralization that fans will have to deal with?

    Cheers, thanks for modding. I've never done it but I imagine it's hard work.

  • All sweeping generalizations are bad!

  • I'm not 'standing up' for anything in particular and I don't mean to express anything here as an outcome that I want, I'm just thinking out loud and wondering where this all goes.

    I understand that you really dislike AI, and feel that what AI makes and what humans make will always and forever be categorically different in some important way. I can see where you're coming from and a fruitful debate could be had there I think. I'm less sure than you are that AI can be tamed or bottled or destroyed. I think it's something that is here to stay and will continue to develop whether we like the outcomes or not. As open source AI improves and gets into the hands of the average person, I don't see how it's possible to put effective limits on this technology. Geriatric politicians won't do it, this is painfully obvious. Complaining (or advocating, which you could note I have not done here) in a small corner of an obscure comment thread on an obscure platform won't make a difference either.

    I get the sense that you believe there is a moral responsibility for everybody commenting in an online forum to call for the complete destruction of AI, and anything short of that is somehow morally wrong. I don't understand that view at all. We're musing into the void here and it has absolutely no effect on what will actually occur in the AI space. I'm open to changing my mind if you have a case to make about there being some moral responsibility to wave the flag that you want to wave, on an online forum, and that wondering aloud is somehow impermissible.

  • Sure, and I think the kinds of things that you mention might come to pass. But for the record I didn't say that I thought it was good. It's just a direction I think these things could go. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle. The view that AI will remain in the background, or merely solve problems that we already have solutions for, or cannot possibly bear on the character and influence of human creativity, I think underestimates the possibilities for change that this still very young technology could bring. That's all I'm saying, sorry if that wasn't clear.

  • >"Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car" by advisers who had never run diagnostics, Reuters quoted a source as saying. Advisers offered tips to customers on how to increase their mileage by changing driving habits

    Holy shit, can you imagine being told this by your vehicle manufacturer when requesting a service appointment?

  • I didn't know this, that's really cool.

  • I like NoScript exactly for the rabbit hole it opens! Now I'm very aware of what scripts are running on which pages! Actively blocking blatant ad scripts & data scraping scripts makes me feel good.

  • I didn't say any of that.

  • AI is still very much in its infancy, and seeing the sort of progress that has been made even over the past 12 months, I don't see how anyone can imagine that it will remain a small and discrete slice of the pie, that it doesn't have radical transformative power.

    My vision - gen z artists will reflexively use AI to enhance their material as artist and AI become entangled to a point where they're impossible to distinguish. AI art will increase in fidelity, until it exceeds the fidelity that we can create with our tools. It will become immediately responsive to an audience's needs in a way that human art can't. What do you want to see? AI will make it for exactly your tastes, or to maybe confront your tastes and expand your mind, if that's what you'd like. It will virtualize the artistic consciousnesses of Picasso, Goya, Michelangelo, and create new artists with new sensibilities, along with thousands of years of their works, more than a person could hope to view in a lifetime. Pop culture will be cheaper than ever, and have an audience of one - that new x rated final season of Friends you had a passing thought about is waiting for you to watch when you get home from work. Do you want 100 seasons of it? No problem. The whole notion of authorship is radically reformed and dies, drowned in an unfathomable abyss of AI creations. Human creativity becomes like human chess. People still busy themselves with it for fun, knowing full well that it's anachronistic and inferior in every way.

    Donno, just a thought I have sometimes.

  • Right, if this sort of browser wall thing happens (which, the doctrine of enshittification seems to dictate that it probably will), and it can't be spoofed or worked around. Alright, I'm seeing the issues here. Thanks for chiming in with your thoughts. This is a huge deal, if it goes in this sort of direction.

  • The thought here is that, a website could be programmed to, for example, only be accessible to users of chrome (or even an android device), correct? Other than google itself, why would any website want to do such a thing? Is the idea that google is trying to bring users to chrome, by blocking google services on other browsers? That could be really transformative for the web, because then you'd have microsoft doing the same thing with edge, apple doing the same thing with safari, other companies like fb or whatever launching their own bespoke 'browsers' to access their services. Will users actually put up with the degree of fragmentation that this move might bring? Won't it just push users to the 'old internet' where you can simply go to a website and interact with it?

    Sorry, I'm kind of talking out loud here trying to wrap my head around this. I see people grousing about DRM and ads, and I'm struggling to connect all the dots.

  • Then ecommerce sites. “You must have DRM enabled to be allowed to buy anything.”

    I'm actually not sure about this one. Money is money. If I'm a vendor, and a bunch of bots want to give me money, I say bring it on. Why would any ecommerce vendor add that layer of friction, which could actually prevent a user from buying something from them? What's in it for the vendor?

    Seems to me the more likely anti-consumer hell is a points dystopia leveraged by monopolistic companies. Like apple, microsoft, or disney moving to some sort of loyalty points system where you can only buy their products using a currency and credit system that they control. Like, 'stream this movie using your disney points card'. We're not far off from that really.

  • Can someone shed some light for me? I'm a noob and I'm not sure I understand what is being proposed by google here. From what I can tell, they're proposing a cryptographically signed token that details information about a website user's 'environment', which I take to mean, their device OS and browser information, for the sake of verifying their humanity for website owners and advertisers. Isn't this sort of information already collected when a user visits a webpage, and doesn't google (or whomever) already collect and use this data (and more) for fingerprinting? How is this new proposal different, and something to be specifically concerned about?

    I know there are anti-fingerprinting browser privacy addons that spoof this information, or prevent its collection. Is the concern that these tools will become inoperable?

    For the record I don't like google or any company collecting any fingerprinting information, but it's already being done widely and in an unregulated manner, isn't it?