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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I like cooking competitions, more so the high end ones than the average cooks ones because I aspire to cook dishes that are amazing. Still working my way up there, but shows like Culinary Class Wars have been great for inspiration.

    Also helps that I’m in a financial position where I can afford to grab new kitchen toys, whether it’s wider bowls, nice knives, or gadgets to accomplish specific tasks.

    I suggest reading up about specific techniques, because a lot of it has nuance that isn’t obvious. Like for example, for a long time I thought I was frying things when I was actually steaming them because just hearing a sizzle doesn’t mean you’re frying (and I still haven’t fried anything but I do sautee things now).

    Other then that, think of something you want to make, then look up a recipe for it and try to make it. Cooking allows for a ton of variation. Hell, even baking allows for it, though the differences you try out can have a larger than expected effect on the final result. But seriously, experiment and be creative, your failures will help as much as your successes. Other than fires, allergies, and freak accidents, the worst result you’ll generally see is needing to throw out some food. But even that is rare from my experience. Most often I either pivot into something else or say “this would have turned out better if X” as I serve it anyways.

    Learn how to balance flavours and while it won’t make everything you make amazing, it will bring up your baseline to “not bad”. Also there is a very fine line between “tastes absolutely amazing” and “tastes boring/gross” and knowing how to balance flavours will help you get to that “amazing” state consistently when your food has the potential to be there.

    Also knife safety is important. It won’t make you an amazing cook (though knife skills can really help), but following knife safety could have a huge impact on your life, especially if you get some good knives. They say sharp knives are safer than dull knives, but I’d add a caveat: as long as you are using them safely in the first place. A dull knife can make you use enough force that it ends up going through your finger when it gets free from whatever it was stuck on, but a sharp knife will go right through your finger without any force if you’re cutting in a way that aims it at your finger. And as an added bonus, the technique that I use also makes my cutting better because my finger deliberately acts as a guide, which helps with consistency.

    Other than that, play around and have fun! And take notes, it sucks so much to make something that is amazing but then realize you don’t remember how you did it the next time. Something as small as forgetting a teaspoon of mustard can have a huge impact on the final result.


  • What a fucking whiny loser. Gets caught cheating and starts crying about how curling is based on trust probably because he exploited that trust to get to the olympics in the first place.

    Send him home. Even if it costs the team any medals they have a chance at, better to shut that shit down hard than stand by it to get medals that will be tainted by the whole thing anyways.

    Glad I already dgaf about curling or the olympics, otherwise I’d be concerned that remarks like that might make people think that curling should just be a casual backyard sport that doesn’t belong in the Olympics if “trusting your opponents” is more important than “following the rules”.

    What a dumb fucker. Hope he doesn’t have a lot of other trash like him to rally around his worthless take.


  • I don’t recall much of my process learning touch typing on qwerty but the process was frustrating at first learning dvorak because the qwerty muscle memory kept getting in the way. But I made myself use it in IRC and kept a diagram of the layout on my 2nd monitor. I also played some typing games. Then, over time, I got better and better with it and started moving other programs over until it was my main layout. Now the first thing I do on a new to me PC is go looking for keyboard layout options (and holy fuck MS has moved that shit all over the place).

    Wayland (or something in KDE) has the best handling I’ve seen yet. Gaming was always kinda annoying as different games have different levels of support for alternate layouts.

    On windows, some would just work, remapping the default keybinds to the layout (because moving isn’t about hitting wasd specifically, but the keys in those places) and text types as expected. Some I’d go into options and remap to dvorak. Some I’d just switch the layout and be annoyed any time I had to type text instead of hitting keybinds.

    On Linux, Fedora Cinnamon, it was just random whether the layout would work like I wanted or do something else, like reverse (where even switching layouts keeps the incorrect dvorak layout), or sometimes it just ignored the system layout entirely. I had to remap and reset to defaults a lot.

    But then I switched to Fedora KDE and it’s perfect. Only “issue” is I had to set the default to qwerty, but then it uses that layout to remap the bindings for other layouts and both bidings and typing just works all the time now.


  • I’m disappointed that it took seeing that ad for so many people to realize what should have been obvious: ring, along with teslas, and any voice assistant listening devices, or any other cloud-based tech that monitors video, audio, or even other data, can be used to set up an unprecedented surveillance network. Phones are a part of it, too, at the very least as tracking beacons, assuming the mics and cameras aren’t being tapped more often than that little activity dot indicates.

    There’s a reason why the venn diagram of people who really understand tech and people who are enthusiastic about most new tech in the last decade and a bit aren’t the same circle. The Snowden revelations weren’t surprising on the “what they are capable of” side of things, though there had been hope before they came out that they weren’t crossing the lines that tech would have easily allowed them to. Just like when zuck bragged about the information fb users just gave him, that wasn’t all new but there was an unspoken (and perhaps naive) rule that admins should respect their users’ privacy.

    When I was on the webteam for a gaming community, it would have been trivial to set up the login page to also store all user/password/email combos in a location none of the other team would be likely to notice. We hashed the password in the db, but I could change the source code to do whatever. Even if it was hashed on the client, I could have added a temporary unhashed field and get all the plaintext credentials to check who uses the same password for their email. I didn’t because I respected our users, but from then on just assumed that any site admin could see my credentials and never reuse passwords.

    That also applies to Lemmy, btw. At the very least, you shouldn’t use the same password for you email and anything else (though also be aware emails are just sent as plaintext to a bunch of servers while being routed to your email provider).





  • Yeah, windows came from a different era where if you’re seeing a new exe, it’s because you put a disk in the drive and explicitly navigated to it. Speaking of which, this isn’t even the first time that convenience ended up opening up a wide security hole because they handled CDs differently and added an autoplay feature that would check the disk for autorun.exe and just run it if autorun was enabled. I started disabling it after word about sony’s rootkits got out but have been appalled to see it enabled by default still ever since then.

    I was one of the few that appreciated UAC when it was there and kept it on one of the stricter settings. I’d rather my PC ask than assume, but people bitched about it so they weakened it and eventually just got rid of it entirely I think?

    Though a permissions setup would be even better. I didn’t like that UAC was an all or nothing prompt, plus it didn’t give any details about what a program wanted to do. Are you asking because this program is trying to create a new directory in program files or because it wants to replace system32 dlls with its own versions?

    It’s an area even Linux can improve in (though probably depends on flavour). I like the android permissions model, where there’s various actions and you can allow or deny categories (though GrapheneOS does it even better by also sandboxing everything). I’d love to see something like that for my desktop, where apps are free to save files but can’t touch files that aren’t their own unless an explicit share is set up, where I might want one app to have network access and no disk access and another to have the opposite. I’d love to be at a state where I could just run any executable from the internet because I know that my OS won’t let it fuck anything up other than its own address space. Hell, could even dedicate a core to monitoring apps to detect if one breaks out of its sandbox without my explicit permission (while the OS also doesn’t use that to enforce the desires of other developers over my own).


  • If a director’s vision involves either potentially disturbing neighbours or not being able to understand dialogue, fuck their vision. I’d much rather my devices be controlled by what I want, not anyone else’s desires.

    And the existence of idiots doesn’t mean everything needs to be limited so that the idiots won’t screw themselves. We exist in an age where if you don’t understand something, you can easily look up information about it. Enshittification might ruin that over time but it hasn’t done so yet. And it can be designed in a way that can make it easier to figure out. Don’t stick it deep in the settings, make it easy to find in “volume settings” or “audio settings” with preset options that cover common sound system setups. If such a system were common, then plenty of people will learn it and know what’s up when grandma’s TV only plays the music track very loudly (which actually might be kinda nice if you just have the TV playing for background noise).






  • Can you elaborate a bit on how notepad following a link can result in running arbitrary code? Cause it sounds more like a second vulnerability is involved, because a text editor following a link still shouldn’t result in running whatever code is on the other side of the link.

    Though it is a privacy issue on its own, just like a tracking pixel or images in emails.

    I’m also curious what the actual use case is for having a link that notepad automatically follows on load in markdown. Or why they got rid of wordpad (their default rich text editor) and put it into notepad (their plain text editor), ruining one of the reliable things about notepad: it would just show you the actual bytes of the file, whether it was text or not, kinda like a poor man’s hex editor (just without the hex).

    Makes me wonder if eventually opening an html file in notepad will make it render it like a browser. “Back in my day, we edited html in notepad instead of browsed it!”


  • You might get better results by going outside their channels and using legal options. Like not through the courts, but I think some jurisdictions have a law that you data must be deleted if a request is sent in writing or something like that. You might also be able to request they send you all the data they have (though this might cost money because they print it and mail it). I remember someone did that with their Tinder data for some article about how shitty Tinder is, though it depends on where you live.





  • Over time, the more common mistakes would be integrated into the tree. If some people feel indigestion as a headache, then there will be a probability that “headache” is caused by “indigestion” and questions to try to get the user to differentiate between the two.

    And it would be a supplement to doctors rather than a replacement. Early questions could be handled by the users themselves, but at some point a nurse or doctor will take over and just use it as a diagnosis helper.


  • (Assuming you meant “you” instead of “I” for the 3rd word)

    Yeah, it fits more with the older definition of AI from before NNs took the spotlight, when it meant more of a normal program that acted intelligent.

    The learning part is being able to add new branches or leaf nodes to the tree, where the program isn’t learning on its own but is improving based on the expeirences of the users.

    It could also be encoded as a series of probability multiplications instead of a tree, where it checks on whatever issue has the highest probability using the checks/questions that are cheapest to ask but afffect the probability the most.

    Which could then be encoded as a NN because they are both just a series of matrix multiplications that a NN can approximate to an arbitrary %, based on the NN parameters. Also, NNs are proven to be able to approximate any continuous function that takes some number of dimensions of real numbers if given enough neurons and connections, which means they can exactly represent any disctete function (which a decision tree is).

    It’s an open question still, but it’s possible that the equivalence goes both ways, as in a NN can represent a decision tree and a decision tree can approximate any NN. So the actual divide between the two is blurrier than you might expect.

    Which is also why I’ll always be skeptical that NNs on their own can give rise to true artificial intelligence (though there’s also a part of me that wonders if we can be represented by a complex enough decision tree or series of matrix multiplications).