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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • A wok? The raised sides of the wok are not supposed to get too warm. That is actually the “secret” of the pan. You have very centralized heat in the middle and you move things to the edges to just keep them warm while you cook the new ingredients through in the center/bottom.

    How much of a gradient does indeed depend on your heat source. The propane tornado of horror in my backyard makes the center ridiculously hot but the edges are no slouch. A campfire is going to be a lesser and more controlled version of that. A smaller gas burner or an induction burner is mostly going to just heat up the center a lot.

    But that is also why you let the wok come to temperature, same as any pan. ALL heat sources have hot spots. Some bits of wood burn hotter than other. The actual flame jets from your gas stove are hotter than the ceramic bit on top. Even the flamenado has hot and less hot spots. Hence why you always agitate food. Or, in the case of going for a sear and not understanding why restaraunt chefs insist you only flip once, you rotate/move the pan itself.


  • Your mileage may vary, obviously

    But a friend has one of the bigass battery models (the expensive fancy one because he was impressing his inlaws). Cooked a full friendsgiving dinner with the only problem being his burners being tiny (which we all knew but didn’t want to say…).

    Which, conceptually, makes sense. I basically only have my induction at full power when I am rapidly bringing something to a boil so I can then add the noodles and back off. So maybe a minute every 30-60 minutes during a big cooking day? And the rest of the time it is at between 40-70% on 1-2 of the 4 burners.

    So if we assume the stoves are properly rated to power all four burners at 100% on a 240V circuit? That should actually be pretty within reason for a 120V circuit to handle with the battery pack being for bursting beyond that.

    I would still be incredibly wary of buying one since the batteries do have a limited number of cycles. But if you are spending that much for a new stove? You probably are planning to do that again within the next decade?



  • Yeah… homie, I think you are very much overthinking this.

    Understand that “stir fry” is kind of a catch all for how a lot of Chinese folk (I think more the Southern regions but don’t quote me on that) cook. It is conceptually no different than sauteeing some food for dinner and it is 100% a “week night dinner” deal.

    Go watch a video or two on what a (home) stir fry should look like. J Kenji Lopez-Alt and Chinese Cooking Demistyfied did a collab a few years back on almost this exact topic. Then… just make sure you are doing that when you cook. If stuff doesn’t sizzle “right” you are adding too much or the heat is too low and you should adjust that. And then, after a few times, it just becomes second nature.

    No different than knowing that if you put the meat in the pan and there is no sizzle then you aren’t going to get a good brown and need to raise the heat or wait longer. Similarly, if the oil explodes across the kitchen when you put that thigh down? Maybe turn it down a notch or five.

    A lot of this is just what you grew up with. A LOT of people (self included) over-stuff tacos. And I am sure there are people who get confused over how to make a sandwich. Hell, a friend always laughs when I am “over thinking curry” and points out it is just a stew that even kids make and I shouldn’t be measuring anything beyond “two bricks or four”. And stir fries are a lot like that.

    Don’t get me wrong. There are some truly heinous things you can do with a wok. But stir fries are almost always what people are talking about when they insist that electric can’t be used for authentic Chinese cooking (and then ignore how much of China actually have electric stoves…).

    OH. Another thing people tend to forget: There are flat bottom woks for a reason. Yes, it is less “authentic”. Except… most woks were cheap ass family everything pans and would get dinged and dented anyway. And as long as you are agitating the food, it doesn’t matter if the bottom is perfectly round or has a big flat spot so that the heat can be more directly applied.



  • Technology Connections has a great video or three on the subject. People very much underestimate just how much “bad stuff” is given off from burning gas indoors.

    And from an anecdotal perspective? I am of Chinese descent and cook with a wok probably 3-4 times a week. I grew up on a shitty resistive heat stove. I have stayed in apartments with gas and with modern resistive heat. I now have an induction stove.

    Induction is, hands down, the fastest for boiling water by a very large margin. And I can cook in the summer with minimal worries about making the house way too hot. Don’t get me wrong, gas is fun as hell and I actually ended up getting an outdoor propane burner for the big/fancy wok nights. But there is a lot to be said about people perceiving gas to be a lot more powerful than it is just because it looks powerful.

    As for resistive? It is definitely a step down. But… not that much of a step down. Mostly it just maths out to when I turn on the stove. For gas or induction it is a minute or so before I plan to cook. For resistive? Usually when I have maybe one more bit of veg left to prep. As for stir fries? it just means I cook in smaller batches which you generally should be doing anyway unless you have a full industrial kitchen stove (or said outdoor burner). And… you probably still want to because most people (self included) just aren’t coordinated enough to handle a full blown meal and all the positioning to avoid burning or overcooking stuff over the course of a minute or three of actual cook time.

    But if you think that consumer grade gas stove is giving you “wok hei”?

    1. Wok hei is something that is almost exclusively about very regional street food and is not actually what you or the white guy you watched on youtube think it is
    2. Your home stove does not provide anywhere near enough heat or open flames to pull that off
    3. your home stove ALSO doesn’t have enough to keep a wok fully “charged” with heat. And what you think is “lack of wok hei” is actually just you overcrowding the pan and steaming things in soggy oil rather than rapidly pan frying it

  • Western Europe had an “advantage” in that, for whatever reason, many of their factories were rebuilt in the 1950s or later. So a lot of the tooling was closer to Japan (who ALSO weirdly had to rebuild a lot of factories in the back half of the 20th…) and China (who were more or less industrializing during that period). But all the jokes about the electrical system in (Western) European cars being a mess is “truth in television” due to having a lot of the tooling but not the expertise.


  • Much of it goes back to the 60s-80s when Western factories were largely outdated and realizing that East Asian factories were rapidly outpacing them and able to offer better products for MUCH cheaper. Rather than acknowledge they had become complacent and didn’t want to train their worekrs they instead focused on “made in America” bullshit and insisting that that new vacuum was no longer repairable. And… mostly that boils down to the idea that if you have vacuum tube transistors you can replace them easily whereas you can’t replace a transistor on a single chip.

    But, as we have learned in the intervening decades, you can… just replace the board. And many of those evil computers in cars actually drastically increased repairability/maintainability because you can actually tune many aspects with a computer and get VERY useful data out of the sensors.

    Because the reality is that you can make an SOC device that is INCREDIBLY repairable by focusing on how you do chip layout and what modules can be repaired. And you can make a multi-board setup that is immensely unrepairable by locking down parts with effectively DRM. And… there are also times where it actually does make sense to lock down/register those parts just like there are times it actually does make sense to glue the fuck out of that assembly.

    But that is nuance. And nuance is for women and The Gays™. So buy American and purchase a radio that you can repair until the day you die! And then buy a new radio next year.


  • To be clear:

    EVERYONE should have a cheap set of electronics screwdriver bits (and the ifixit kit is really nice. So are the much cheaper knockoffs from the same factories. Up to you if you care). And having basic soldering skills and knowing when you can get away with heat shrink connectors is a really useful skill. You’ll be repairing the headphones the dog ripped off your desk in no time and save yourself a lot of money.

    But when you are listening to people tlak about how this cell phone needs to be repairable or how you NEED to have the DAC be a separate board so it can be removed and replaced? Same with demanding chip diagrams for that SOC in your laptop. Ask yourself: How likely is it that you will EVER do a repair like that? How often do you actually hold onto hardware? And how much do you trust the guy with a shop in the mall to not scam you on this?

    I am generally a strong supporter of Right To Repair, even when it is something I, as a consumer, am never going to even consider doing. But it is also worth remembering that a lot of the “this is horrible because it is all computers” is still rooted in racism and xenophobia. And it is always worth looking at what a repair actually will cost versus buying a new one.

    For example. Last year my dishwasher failed. I did some diagnostics, did some very deep cleans, and even opened it up. And I mostly narrowed it down to a failure in one of three parts. I looked up the price of those parts and… they were all most of the cost of a dishwasher on their own. And if I paid a professional to replace them, it would be well over the price of a new dishwasher. So… I could try and get lucky and replace the right one, by myself, on the first try… or I could just buy a new dishwasher during a holiday sale. And… damn I love my new dishwasher.






  • Apalrd has done some great “popular computer science” videos on the various remote KVM devices that is well worth looking up. One of them specifically goes into the ridiculously sketchy methods that are used to fetch and execute unsigned code in random buckets to handle firmware updates.

    But as for the mic? Honestly, if you open up a LOT of consumer devices you are going to find random microphones. Not because they are all secretly spying on you. But because they use “off the shelf” chips and boards that already have those embedded. Especially since microphones and speakers are kind of the same hardware in most cases and we ALL love a good beep.

    I 100% agree the software stack shouldn’t be on there. But, as the blog post points out, there is a LOT of developmental code and packages in that image that shouldn’t be. It is likely just a case of not removing unnecessary packages from the base image.

    Because… the entire point of a device like this is that you plug it in somewhere you aren’t. MAYBE JetKVM corp can hear me muttering profanity or wondering where I left that USB c splitter when I am trying to assemble it the first time. The rest of the time? It is plugged into the back of a server that I am booting up so that I can install proxmox without having to drag a monitor over. And while you can potentially get some juicy info out of that? It is not at all worth the hassle to set up fake companies and market a fake (moderately high demand in the right circles) device.





  • Strong disagree on sociopathy being linked to a hierarchy.

    The reality is that pretty much EVERY system of governance (that is meant to scale beyond five people in a field) needs a hierarchy of some form. Its the Whitest Kids U Know gag on anarchy where you quickly find out that there are people better suited to certain jobs and you need some degree of a social safety net to allow them to keep all of you alive (n that case, keeping a nuclear power plant from melting down… and then making t-shirts).

    It is why there are basically no flat Democracies. You inherently end up in some form of a Democratic Republic where The People elect representatives who can then (theoretically) spend all day educating themselves on important issues and figuring out how to make an educated vote that represents the will of their constituents.

    The core concept is just the reality of needing special skills and knowledge to make many decisions. There can be arguments that the people in charge of Directing The Military are still equal to the custodial staff keeping the streets clean but… moving on.

    Where sociopathy comes into play is that those roles tend to inherently attract power mad people (there is a DIFFERENT WKUK gag on this…). But hierarchical systems are a natural knock on from just having to have a socioeconomic system that scales.



  • Part of it is that the vast majority (all?) of the communist regimes of the 20th century pretty rapidly descended into authoritarian hellscapes (Democracy/Capitalism took a few decades to catch up…). So people tend to less say “Well. The horrors that unfolded in X were a result of a misapplication of the core tenets of communism” and instead “My family literally had to flee a communist regime because we were being ethnically cleansed”

    Part of it is that Democracy/Capitalism won and very much built up Communism as a bogeyman for obvious political reasons.

    And the last part is that… Communism fundamentally requires a central source of power/truth. You can’t have a managed economy without folk managing it. Which, inherently, centralizes power which is one of the big first steps towards authoritarianism. Similar to how Democracy fundamentally enables populism and Capitalism oligarchy.