howlin

I'm a vegan so experienced bean eater. There are a couple things I found that help, but they do come at a cost of flavor or texture:

Soak and rinse, but the soak water should be boiling when the dry beans go in.

Alkaline. Sodium Carbonate (baking soda) or calcium hydroxide (lime) work. Throw away the cooking water. This has to be done carefully, as too much of either can give the food a mineral taste and/or dissolve the beans entirely.

Fermentation also works. Lactic acid (like kimchee or pickles) helps a little. Koji (either added or grown on the beans themselves) helps a lot. Both will have a big impact on the flavor and what the beans will be good for in the end.

It seems like if the content is this hollow and useless, it shouldn't matter if it was a human or spambot posting it.

A lot of these problems are already managed by nurses or clinic assistants. It's pretty rare to get a lot of face to face time with an actual M.D. Certainly this is true the more you look at poorer communities.

Resources on wild pig management usually recommend trapping or baiting rather than trying to shoot them. Shooting at them with a semi-auto while they are fleeing is a particularly cruel way to address the problem, as you're not making clean kills in this sort of situation.

There's clearly a sweet spot in the amount of entropy/unpredictability that is "interesting". Otherwise observing white noise would be the most interesting thing imaginable.

I don't know the details, but probably you would want to seek unpredictability in a higher level representation of the observed state. White noise is highly unpredictable per pixel, but will get a very predictable representation after a layer or two of featurization if the features are trained/designed for real world observations.

Career focused culture has destroyed a large amount of social cohesion. If machines do more work, humans can go back to community building. Type A personalities that demand social mobility can play politics to see who leads their respective tribe. The rest of us can spend the time learning about the world, developing engaging hobbies, reading philosophy and experiencing great works of art. Maybe just focus on a personal spirituality and/or self-actualization.

There is so much humans should be doing to make our brief existence a little more happy and fulfilling. Little of this has to do about contributing labor.

It's worth considering how old the US version of democracy is, and how many systems came after.

Americans have a deep reverence for their personal brand, but it's worth considering they don't install their government model on countries they conquer. Japan, Iraq, Germany, etc are all Parliamentary.

Fungi make up one of three primary kingdoms of multicellular life. Mushrooms and other fungus have a variety of flavors already, and some of them are quite meat-like. Given fungus cells are more similar to animal than they are plant, it is possible that they can be selectively bred or engineered to taste more meat-like.

I wouldn't be too dismissive of the potential here.

Anyone visiting wine country north of SF can visit a vineyard and tasting room that is/was tied to their family. It is almost a little museum with various artifacts from the family.

The wine is also decent, and many bottles are quite affordable. They make a lot of Italian grape varietals that are a little hard to find elsewhere.

I don't really understand why iron is being considered over aluminum. Is aluminum production from ore too complex compared to iron? I would have to imagine burning metallic aluminum produces much more energy per gram.

I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.

Plenty of people will have plenty of issues with a major corporation. But it's worth pointing out that McDonald's is one of the most prominent fast food chains which has no problem with animal abuse in terms of products from horribly treated livestock animals. They have trouble even making their french fries livestock-torture free .

Maybe this issue doesn't personally matter to you, but it does create a huge problem for a company that does something so shamelessly unethical.

It's very hard to take this essay seriously. Mostly because it so completely dances around the obvious purpose of a "superstore" that it is hard to connect this described experience much at all to what people actually do in such a store.

This essay kind of describes this sort of store as one would describe a walk through the woods. But the purpose of a walk in the woods is so distinct from the purpose of shopping that no comparison can be made.

It's popular to connect The Plague to mid 20th century fascism. The message is actually much deeper and more broad than that specific point in time of Western history.

Maybe really low/no interest loans for first time home buyers so they can at least get into the market.

One big reason homes are priced so high in places like the USA is because home loans are already government subsidized. When people think of what they can afford, they look at their net monthly mortgage payment less the income tax break. And prices seem to rise to meet whatever monthly payment buyers can afford.

LLMs is the confident hallucination of incorrect facts

This is a very common feature of delirium in people. Chatting with an LLM seems a lot like what it would be to talk to a clever person with encyclopedic knowledge, who is just waking up from anaesthesia or is sleep talking.

My friends and I would build CounterStrike maps that were the layout of our highschool and would then run around and shoot each other. This was very taboo at the time.

I had a friend that was the victim of a local news "expose" on this. Just a harmless high school geek who thought it would be fun to combine the School blueprints with his CAD course to build a "fun" way of digitizing the blueprints.

The main lesson we learned from this exercise is that the Duke Nukem 3D pistol is totally OP when used in realistically proportioned hallways. Auto-aim and all.

The other lesson we learned is that local news investigative reporters care more about a compelling story than to represent the mundane truth.

The US government accepts these for debts and issues debts denominated in these.

There are a lot of problems that arise from lack of domain expertise, but they can be overcome with a multidisciplinary team.

The biggest defeating problem for pure AI teams is that they don't understand the domain well enough to know if their data sets are representative. Humans are great at salience assessments, and can ignore tons of the examples and features they witness when using their experience. This affects dataset curation. When a naive ML system trains on this data, it won't appreciate the often implicit curation decisions that were made, and will thus be miscalibrated for the real world.

A domain expert can offer a lot of benefits. They could know how to feature engineer in a way that is resilient to these saliency issues. They can immediately recognize when a system is making stupid decisions on out of sample data. And if the ML model allows for introspection, then the domain expert can assess whether the model's representations look sensible.

I'm scenarios where datasets actually do accurately resemble the "real world", it is possible for ML to transcend human experts. Linguistics is a pretty good example of this.

Nuclear should be heavily subsidized regardless. Whenever they aren't needed for immediate demand, these power plants can be put to use for so many other tasks: desalination of water, energy storage in terms of hydroelectric pumping, direct carbon capture. Chemical fuel creation (hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, methane, etc).

If we want to unscrew ourselves of the ticking time bomb we set, we need all the "clean" energy we can get, and then some. Nuclear is potentially an existential requirement to the mix.

We need more gas and oil fast.

We need more reliable and consistent base energy in overabundance fast. Nuclear can do this without creating a climate catastrophe. Even if you need energy dense chemical fuels, nuclear energy can be used to create these without net climate impact.

Hydrocarbon fossil fuels are the addiction that modern society needs to break from. Nuclear is an excellent "methadone" to ease the transition. But society seems to be split between denying there is a problem at all, or insisting we're all ready to go "cold turkey". Neither approach is reasonable to bet the continuance of human civilization on.

That this comment is in every discussion of TV tropes is a weird trope in and of itself.

In theory it could empower amateur storytellers to punch above their weight by creating semi-professional animated films. Though to be fair, there was a similar realization when it was clear the Quake engine could be used for filming custom narratives rather than just recording gameplay. Not too much came out of that era. Professional artists still better understand what media humans want to consume.

Even if TWTR paid TSLA, this is still an obvious conflict of interest.

For medium and somewhat hot peppers, the rule is pretty simple. Don't eat more than you are willing to chew. Mostly this is a problem of eating whole seeds or big chunks of pepper you aren't actually chewing up and digesting.

Once you go hot enough, this won't matter. But I guess it's part of the experience.

The conscious mind is along for the ride, not in charge.

If you look at extremely simple choices, you may be able to say this. But these generally aren't the sorts of decisions we walk about when we talk about free will. Perhaps an analogy to business can help make the distinction. A CEO is only going to be informed after the fact, if at all, of the minor details of how a business operates. But the CEO is setting much broader directions and is indirectly regulating those who make the minor decisions.

Or more logically pedantically, you could simply say that the existence of some choices that happen before conscious awareness of them doesn't mean all choices happen that way.

Generally at some point the microbes die but some of the enzymes they've produced are still active and slowly breaking things down into tastier chemicals.

You can neutralize some of the acid by adding alkaline ingredients. Sodium bicarbonate or calcium hydroxide are two common ways. But this may neutralize the pH to the point where the sauce isn't naturally preserved from molding or otherwise spoiling.

You can cultivate "chicken of the woods" fungus on certain wood mediums. This has decent flavor texture and protein content. It's a little fickle to cultivate and getting spores or plugs may be tricky. But this is probably your best bet at growing something similar to Quorn without a proper lab space.

Looks an awful lot like the patterns left by woodpeckers who probe wood for critters to eat. Perhaps this is an animal that occasionally checks for sound, chemicals or some electrical field that would indicate a burrowed creature nearby to eat.

The issue with this analysis is that culture isn't genetic. A steady stream of people coming from high birth rate cultures are going to be adopting these modern lower birth rate cultures. Especially if they are intrinsically appealing or if they offer social benefits (e.g. higher education, business opportunities, etc).