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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Stop arguing semantics. We’re done here.

    Compare to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

    “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.

    Yeah, if you want to make up your own definitions to the words you use, and then order those around you to stop arguing semantics, then you’re basically not having a conversation at all.

    Your comment was confusing because you don’t seem to understand what is or isn’t part of an operating system, and the mere mention of the operating system was pretty far removed from any relevance to your own point.

    It’s a proprietary service, and if you want to argue that companies can run proprietary services in a closed manner, denying access to third party clients, cool, that can be your position, but it would be an incoherent position to claim that only OS developers should have that right.





  • To me, the obvious answer is stainless steel. There are cheap ones and expensive ones, and everything in between. The more expensive ones tend to be constructed with more even surfaces, with better heat transfer (things like an aluminum or copper core), and more durable to regular or even careless use. But even the cheap ones are great.

    Stainless advantages over traditional Teflon-based nonstick:

    • Metal utensils and scrubbers don’t damage it, which means you can use thinner spatulas and scrub more aggressively, or do things like whisk in the pan (helpful for making sauces or gravies)
    • No need to worry about maximum temperature (Teflon reacts poorly to high temperatures, degrading quickly and off-gassing fumes that are mildly harmful to humans but deadly toxic for birds)
    • Oven-safe (if the handle is oven safe), which is good for certain recipes that are easier to just transfer to the oven (certain sauces or braises)
    • Much better thermal conductivity, for faster temperature response to turning the heat up or down.

    Stainless advantages over ceramic non-stick:

    • Metal utensils and scrubbers OK (ceramic nonstick is more resistant to scratches than traditional nonstick, but the guides still all tell you not to use metal)
    • Can withstand higher temperatures (ceramic nonstick isn’t as bad as traditional nonstick at high temperatures, but it still loses nonstick properties under high heat, over time).
    • More likely to be oven-safe (some ceramic nonstick is oven safe, but you’d have to look and check, and still be mindful of temperature limits)
    • Better thermal conductivity

    Stainless advantages over cast iron:

    • Better thermal conductivity (cast iron actually sucks at this but nobody seems to acknowledge it)
    • Easier care, no need to season
    • Can handle acids no problem, so things like slow cooking a tomato sauce or deglazing with wine/vinegar/juice are possible without weird dark discoloration in your food.
    • Much lighter in weight, so much easier to use when transferring or pouring food, washing the pan, etc.

    Stainless advantages over carbon steel (including carbon steel woks):

    • Easier care, no need to season
    • Can handle acids

    Don’t get me wrong: I literally own every single type of cookware listed here, and I cook on all of them for different purposes. But the stainless is my workhorse, the default I use on weeknights, because it’s easy and mindless and I literally can’t mess it up.

    EDIT: Wow, can’t believe I forgot to actually list the disadvantages of stainless. Main disadvantages:

    • Not non-stick. When things stick, it can be a huge pain in the ass, ranging from making your food ugly to actually ruining a dish (for example, if the sticking causes you to destroy the structural integrity of the thing you’re cooking, or the the stuck food starts scorching and adding bitter burnt flavors to your food).
    • A little bit more effort to clean in typical situations, and a lot more effort to clean when there’s food residue stuck to the pan.

  • I guess it’s a two-part observation. The first part does include a qualitative assessment of whether the destruction was “worth it.” The second part, though, I don’t think includes any moral assessment, just an observation that destruction is happening with or without us, so there’s plenty of creation that is possible from merely saving something from destruction, or leveraging an already-gonna-happen destruction to extract some creation out of it.


  • The weasel word in all this is “overweight (but not obese)”.

    I think that’s the whole point of the article. Lots of doctors seem to assume that all-cause mortality is correlated with BMI in a straight line, but this article argues that it’s actually U-shaped with the minimum in the “overweight” range. It’s arguing that these specific people in that overweight but not obese category are getting bad medical advice and treatment because of assumptions derived from observations of the group of people who are overweight or obese.


  • I don’t think of it as “destruction” so much as “consumption.” And there’s no requirement that the magnitude of each side of the equation be anywhere close to symmetrical.

    Buckets of paint are inherently less interesting than a beautiful mural on the wall. Unused bits in flash memory are less interesting than a digitized photograph taking up that storage space.

    Basically, creation can be a big positive, on net, because the cost of that creation is often many orders of magnitude less than the value of the thing being created.

    Moreover, even with a very generous definition of “destruction,” the comparison should still be made to what would’ve been destroyed anyway, in the absence of the hypothetical creation. When I take a bunch of tomatoes and other vegetables to make a pasta sauce, maybe I have fundamentally changed or even destroyed some plant matter to get there. But if I hadn’t made the sauce, what would’ve happened to those plants anyway? Would the tomatoes have just rotted on the vine? If I spend a day doing something, what did I destroy by letting that day go by?

    In a sense, everything boils down to opportunity cost, rather than the framework of destruction. The universe is in a state of destruction all around us, with or without us. We have ways of redirecting that destruction, even in locally creative ways, but even in our absence the destruction would still happen.


  • Organized sports with formal teams and team jerseys and calendars and refs was fun in my 20’s, but I was mainly doing pickup games by my 30’s. Now in my 40’s, I still do some participation in semi-organized leagues for inherently less serious sports, but it’s easy to enforce a “fun first” atmosphere when people are drinking beers while waiting their turn.

    That all being said, I still do really enjoy individual, non-competitive sports where you’re trying to get your own personal best: weight lifting (whether powerlifting or olympic lifting), running, swimming, biking, etc. I like putting up better numbers than before, in all of those sports, even in a non-competitive environment. Or combinations of numbers (not my fastest 5k ever, but maybe my fastest 5k in the same month that I put up these deadlift numbers, etc.).

    The competitive assholes are in youth sports, too, by the way. I think the last time I saw two 40-somethings almost get in a fist fight, they were dads at their daughters’ basketball game.


  • I’m slightly annoyed at my kid’s new school. My kid is getting ready for school in a Chinese immersion program, which is great, but the new school wants to gently ramp up with half days with parent participation, with only part of the class signed up for specific half-day blocks. This is annoying because parents, you know, have jobs to go to, and taking 3 hours in the middle of the workday to get the kid to school, stay with them for a half day, and bring them home early is pretty inconvenient. Plus the days my kid isn’t participating (with other half classes signed up), I’ve gotta get childcare coverage.

    Can’t wait until we get to the normal 8:30am start time with regular after school care.



  • It’s Always Sunny did a pretty great use of a character taking some kind of brain enhancing chemical and learning Mandarin almost overnight. In real life, it was all gibberish, but someone fluent in Chinese would probably let it slide because movies/TV never actually get Chinese fluency on screen. And then later on it’s revealed that it actually was gibberish in the show, too, and the Chinese speaking person was just humoring the idiot who thought he was becoming smart.