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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.


  • the Allies could have kept fire bombing cities and it would’ve caused far more deaths

    This is an underappreciated fact. I grew up in U.S. public schools learning in elementary school about the massive scale of destruction that atomic bombs did bring (and, well, the Cold War was still going at the time). We knew the words Hiroshima and Nagasaki very early on. But it wasn’t until I was in college that I learned about the destructive scale of firebombing Japanese cities (and frankly, I learned it from a film class discussing Grave of the Fireflies, not from a history class).

    And maybe I’m jaded because I’m a combat veteran who has seen firsthand the toll that an extended period of conventional warfare and insurgency brings on urban areas with millions of residents, but I don’t think of nuclear war as really that big a departure from the shittiness of things that are actually within more recent memory. Or maybe that’s a misconception I hold that should be corrected, and these anti-nuclear people are right to express concern about cultural attitudes towards nuclear weapons, I don’t know.


  • 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.