• 8 Posts
  • 514 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: September 19th, 2023

help-circle


  • Two things:

    1. I have an old refurbished Thinkpad that I originally bought as a backup navigation computer for a month-long sailboat voyage. It had Windows originally and was “fine”, by which I mean slow but acceptable for navigation purposes. When I was forced to update to Windows 10, the performance was no longer tolerable, so I hardly used it for about four years. I also had a Windows gaming PC, so no big deal.
    2. About a year ago, I got a shiny new Windows gaming PC. I was trying to decide what to do with my old gaming PC, which had the same problem as my laptop: it could barely crawl under the weight of years of Windows OS “upgrades”. I got it into my head that I should build a media PC with it since Netflix kind of sucks now. That lead me down the self-hosting and Linux rabbit hole.

    Before I knew it, I had my old gaming PC running Proxmox and attached to my main television, I bought an old Dell Poweredge server (also running Proxmox), an old Compellant storage shelf with 20 SAS drives, a Tripp-Lite UPS, and a 24-port network switch. I also discovered Docker. So, now I fucking love Linux and I’m a fiend for self-hosting and media streaming. And how do I centrally control all of this infrastructure? That’s right, my old Thinkpad got a new lease on life running Arch and I can run all of my server infrastructure using the terminal, emacs, and web interfaces. Fuck yeah.

    And what happened to my beautiful, expensive new Alienware Windows gaming PC? After playing a couple hundred hours of Cyberpunk, it just sits there. Now I’m addicted to Dwarf Fortress on my old Arch Thinkpad and I don’t think about high-spec AAA games much.

    I had no idea this would happen when I started this Linux journey. Life is strange.




  • As everyone else has said, this is a risky practice due to heat-tolerant bacterial toxins. Here is an article about it, if you want to do some more reading:

    https://blog.foodsafety.ca/what-are-bacterial-toxins

    The reason the meat smells better after you partially cook it is that you are killing the spoilage bacteria coating the outer surface and washing away or destroying their smelly byproducts. Oddly enough, those aren’t the really dangerous bacteria. The ones that cause serious food poisoning mostly do not stink.

    Also, cutting the larger chunk of meat up into smaller pieces is a very bad idea. You are just spreading the surface contamination into the muscle. Also, using water as a medium actually limits the upper temperature you can achieve. If you really want to save a piece of meat while minimizing your risk, do this instead:

    1. Leave the cut of meat intact.
    2. Put a high-heat vegetable oil like canola or sunflower oil into a steel frying pan.
    3. Heat it until the oil smokes just a little. The smoke point of sunflower oil is 248 Celsius, whereas water boils at 100 Celsius, so you can easily see why this method is more effective than boiling.
    4. Pick up the piece of meat with two pairs of tongs and place it into the hot pan. Rotate it around until a brown crust forms on the outside. This is called searing.
    5. Remove the meat from the pan and let it cool.
    6. With a clean sharp knife, cut off the seared meat at the surface and discard.

    Note that you should not attempt this with poultry, only whole, non-tenderized cuts of beef or pork. This, by the way, is how restaurants prepare beef for serving raw dishes like steak tartar. Or at least that’s how they are supposed to prepare it from a food safety perspective.

    Note also that this doesn’t guarantee that the meat is safe, but raw, whole, non-tenderized cuts of meat are usually only contaminated on the outer surface. Obviously it is safer to avoid the risk altogether, but if you must try to save the meat, this method is far, far better than your current practice.



  • Oh man, reading your comment just gave me 90s vibes. That was the peak when atheism was quite controversial. Nowadays, it is a bit weird if someone does practice a religion. Religious beliefs are not an innate trait, but a choice, at least in the West. We should be actively discouraging people from being religious in the same way we discourage misogyny, racism, etc. I’m very uncomfortable with some of the comments in this thread that suggest that discouraging the wearing of religious symbols is some form of crypto-racism. Religion is a completely different category and we need to be able to criticize it harshly and relentlessly without the suggestion that it is a type of racism.




  • While I agree that our FPTP system is archaic and the PM may have too much power, I’m not necessarily convinced that the alternatives would make the country much better.

    The longer I watch governments at home and abroad, the more I see that all democratic systems of government depend on a set of unwritten rules of honourable behaviour, respect for compromise, and fair-dealing. If those norms of behavior are ignored, the written rules won’t save us. In short, good people can make a bad system work, and corrupt people can corrupt any system. The US constitution was famously designed as a system of checks and balances specifically intended to prevent too much power from resting in the hands of one man, and yet look what they’ve done to themselves in the last couple of decades.

    That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try to continuously make the system better. But I’m less inclined than I used to be to think that the specific structure we implement is overly important.



  • This exact thing happened in the wine world in 1976 during the “Judgment of Paris” wine-tasting event. The top wine critics in the world did a blind taste test of the best French wines and a bunch of unknown California wines. Naturally, everyone, including the critics, thought France would win hands-down. California won, shocking everyone. Before revealing the results, the judges were asked whether they thought the California or French wines had won. They all assumed that the wines they rated the highest were French, claiming they could tell which was which even while blinded. The interesting thing isn’t so much that California wines were good, but rather that the professional judges couldn’t tell the difference in a blind taste test.


  • No job, no credit, no references, and a backed up landlord-tenant board, meaning that the landlord can’t evict for at least a year if they don’t pay the rent… no surprise that they had to put cash up front.

    The bigger issue, though, is why stay in downtown Toronto? It’s the second most expensive real estate market in Canada and an extremely competitive job market. There are a hundreds other less expensive places of live that would greatly value an influx of people with skills. Where I live (not Toronto), half of our IT department are newcomers from India and Africa who were smart enough to realize that there is more to Canada than Toronto.



  • It is true that they could resurrect the tapes if they had a compelling reason to do so. Denying the request indicates that they don’t believe the reason to be sufficiently compelling to warrant the extra expenditure of resources. That is subtley different from “we don’t want to”, which implies a level of capriciousness.

    Government departments get FOI requests all the time and they take resources to fulfill. FOI is not intended as a way to have taxpayers fund people’s pet projects. That’s why FOI law doesn’t require your government to spend (even more) money to acquire technology they don’t have or need for anything other than the FOI request itself. Rather, something that requires that kind of extra effort and expenditure should be submitted as a research request, normally with its own funding.


  • You are totally right. We are living in a golden age of not only video games, but entertainment in general, thanks to ridiculously powerful computers and the internet. People with video game nostalgia remember how those old games made them feel, because the games were new and exciting and they were young. But video games (and board games) have done nothing but improve over the years as developers figure what works and what doesn’t.

    Nowadays there is just of ton of…everything. We are spoiled for choice. There are so many excellent games at every price point, and also tons of crap, and yes, too much shovelware and too many rehashed franchise games. But here’s the thing: these things aren’t mutually exclusive. We have all of it, all at once, and reviews and advice are everywhere. If someone is tired of rehashed AAA franchise games, they can spend the rest of their lives playing clever indie games and they’ll still barely scratch the surface of what’s available.




  • This seems like a natural evolution of the market: a period of expansion followed by saturation and contraction. And there can be no doubt that we have hit a saturation point. There has been an absolute explosion in the number of games available, largely because platforms like Steam have simplified the logistics of distribution tremendously.

    On the positive side for small developers, if you look at which games are rated “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam, the vast majority are not high-end graphic-intensive AAA games. There is a huge market for lighter, innovative games that can run on a cheap laptop. For every massive Cyberpunk type games in my collection, I have three Stardew Valley, Caves of Qud, and Undertale type games.