That’s why it’s funny that the bicycling community talks of “dentists” with all their gear. The people best equipped to really pursue that hobby wholeheartedly are the people who make a shitload of money doing something completely different.

It’s saying that it’s just a fucking hobby. It’s purpose is to be enjoyed not mastered.

Yeah, too many people preemptively gatekeep themselves: you’re not a real (hobbyist) unless you master (narrow part of the hobby), so you’re not allowed to take up that hobby until you’re ready to commit to that boring/tedious/difficult part.

I play chess and I don’t know the names of openings (and still have a lot of trouble with following notation). Who gives a shit, I’m not going to win tournaments. But I still have fun with it, occasionally play strangers in the park, and have been having fun teaching my kids how to play.

I half-ass my fitness and workout routine. Sometimes I go months in between gym sessions, and sometimes I go 6x a week for months, break some PRs, and then go on living my life. Sometimes I run 500 miles in a year, sometimes I run 10. Whatever. Life gets busy, and my own preferences shift between whether I want to do cardio, weights, sports, yoga, metcon/CrossFit style classes, or just sit on my ass and get weak and fat for a year. I’m in my 40’s, so I’ve been all over the place on all of these things.

I can watch a TV show without needing to start from the pilot and watching every episode that came out. I can watch a movie without trying to understand every reference to everything else in the same cinematic universe. I enjoy watching basketball and football even when I can’t name all the players, much less their whole career histories.

And after all that, a funny thing starts to happen. You find that you actually are pretty good at certain things compared to the public, even though you didn’t wholeheartedly devote all your effort to that thing.

I like being a dilettante. It’s awesome and I’d recommend this lifestyle to anyone. The best way to enjoy a hobby is to be unburdened by expectations.

I’m convinced that Damon Baehrel is a semi-fake restaurant. Like, it’s real, but doesn’t actually take reservations or serve real guests, and the owner/chef lies about everything in order to seem more mysterious.

This article from 2016 lays out the case.

So I don’t think it’s a particularly good example of fine dining, as it’s doing a lot of things different from a normal restaurant that is open to members of the public.

With Georgia dropping, I’m starting to wonder just how many at large CFP bids are gonna go to SEC teams.

Ah I see Georgia Tech actually knows how to kneel to run out the clock. Really rubbing it in Cristobal’s face there.

I’ve been pondering orbs, don’t know what y’all are doing.

I’m new to this community. What is this thread? Do people submit their own votes for a straw poll here?

As far as I can tell, it seems like most commenters have their own computer ranking systems that they’re explaining as they submit.

It’s all pretty interesting, but pretty intimidating for someone new to this place.

Which room though?

recipes are basically an engineering text

I would love to see more systematic recipe formats.

Around 15-20 years ago there was a website called “Cooking for Engineers” that used a table format for recipes that was pretty clever, and a very useful diagram for how to visualize the steps (at least for someone like me). I don’t think he ever updated the site to be mobile friendly but you can see it here:

Cheesecake
Dirty Rice

He describes the recipe in a descriptive way, but down at the bottom it lists ingredients and how they go together in a chart that shows what amounts to use, what ingredients go into a particular step, what that step is, and how the product of that step feeds into the next step.

Depends on the topic. From what I can tell, Lemmy skews young and technical and towards certain personalities and interests, so there are going to be topics that go to those strengths, but also topics where the discussions get mired down in either discussing the basics or get stuck in a pretty unsophisticated understanding of the topic.

It’s obvious with the hyper local discussions (where should I eat in this city when I visit), because there just aren’t enough knowledgeable people to form a quorum for quality discussion. But it’s also true in many of the hobby/interest discussions, simply because there aren’t enough people to where good discussion encourages more high quality discussion in a feedback loop.

Partially. I think it’s a good drop in replacement for:

• Anything technology oriented, from software to hardware to what different open source projects are up to, to what tech corporations are doing, and various discussions around ecosystems (the internet itself, specific services like Discord or Reddit or LinkedIn, app stores, social networking, etc.)
• Funny memes or other humor

It’s got pretty good coverage of certain topics:

• Politics, at least on specific sub topics
• Science and specific scientific disciplines

It has a few pockets that work for very specific things:

• Specific TV show or movie franchises (looking at you, Star Trek)
• ADHD or neurodivergent support/advice
• Noncredible Defense is actually here. Love it.

And it’s just missing a bunch of things I loved on Reddit:

• Sports, especially the unique culture of the NBA subreddit
• Other specific interests in television, film, music, or other cultural interests.
• Local things in specific cities
• Finance and economics stuff
• Lots of specific interests/hobbies are missing, or just aren’t as active.
• Advice/support for career/work life, especially specific careers (in my case, the legal industry and life as a lawyer)
• Advice/support relating to personal relationships, from parenting to dating to very specific support forums for things like divorce or cancer. Even what does exist here is disproportionately neurodivergent, so the topics of focus seem to be pretty different than what would be discussed in other places.

In earlier generations more people didn’t even go to college. If you’re in the 70% of silent generation that never went to college, you’re certainly not going to meet a spouse there. Especially if you attended a university that was only for one gender.

Probably. But it’s also a bit of a difficult question to compare the two.

One prominent estimate is that about half of all humans who have ever lived died from mosquito-related illness, about 50 billion of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived.

For humans, it’s estimated that about 3-4% of paleolithic humans died from violence at the hands of another person, and that number may have risen to about 12% during medieval history, before plummetting in the modern age.

But that’s the comparison of direct violence versus illness. Humans have a strong capacity to indirectly cause death, including by starvation, illness, indirect trauma. How do we count deaths from being intentionally starved as part of a siege? Or biological weapons, including the time the Nazis intentionally flooded Italian marshes to increase malaria? Do we double count those as both human and mosquito deaths?

And then there’s unintentional deaths, caused by indifference or recklessness or negligence. Humans have caused famines, floods, fires, etc.

So yeah, mosquitoes probably win. But don’t sleep on humans. And remember that the count is still going on, and humans can theoretically take the lead in the future.

Ok but mosquitoes historically are the #1 killers of humans, by an order of magnitude

Homo sapien: am I a joke to you?

You’re comparing animals with fat throughout the muscle to birds that don’t.

No, I’m comparing the same species of animal. We’ve gone from 100+ day old birds weighing 2.5 lbs to 47 day old birds weighing 6.5 lbs in the last century. That seems comparable to the difference between old roosters for coq au vin or old dairy cattle for vaca vieja and their respective supermarket counterparts.

Also, the connective tissue only starts to break down once getting to about 192f and needs to hang out for a good while between there and 210 to slowly break down.

No, collagen starts to break down slowly as low as 130°F, but the breakdown speeds up as the temperature rises. There are ways to play around with this with different techniques, where doneness is more than just getting the meat to temperature. It’s why poaching chicken used to be more common than it is today. It’s why chicken wings taste best when double fried. It’s why confit works so well for duck legs.

Also, steak was best 200 years ago as it is now.

Ok, again, if you’ve ever had to work through cooking something like vaca vieja, you’ll notice that it doesn’t cook the same way as a steak that’s been dry aged, or a regular steak at Costco, or a lean grass-fed steak. If your steak technique is the exact same for all of them, you’re probably missing out.

And I’m guessing the NY Times wasn’t exactly building this conclusion based on only steak recipes. 150 years is gonna have a lot of non-steak recipes in the mix.

Methods changed because we got better at cooking.

That’s part of it. But also, trends come and go. I’d rather have a 1950s cheeseburger than a 1990s cheeseburger, and much of the post 2010 scene has been re-implementing some old techniques that fell out of favor (smashing patties, simpler bread for buns, fewer toppings) and a backlash at some of those things that got out of control. Cocktails went through something similar too, with old classics coming back (either as is or with a new variation).

I’m sure any comprehensive catalog of recipes over decades is going to include some fads that fizzled out, like low fat stuff in the 90’s, etc. It’s not some kind of inexorable march of progress.

I’m betting chicken always could have cooked faster.

Chicken can be cooked to temperature quickly, but that alone likely wasn’t enough. We know this for plenty of cuts of pork and beef that the connective tissue needs time to break down, not just a pure cook to temperature (see braising, smoking, and sous vide techniques).

Something like coq au vin, which was developed for cooking older, tougher roosters, traditionally calls for a low and slow cook to break down the tougher animal.

You can also see the difference when buying cuts like vaca vieja (old dairy cattle slaughtered for meat), which calls for different preparation based on the tougher meat.

So no, I can believe the meat itself is very different today, and the recipes adjusted to the change in ingredient characteristics. We’ve documented that the manner of raising animals is totally different, so why would you be skeptical that the meat is different?

Interesting that egg sizing labels aren’t that universal. In the U.S. most big stores primarily stock Large (minimum weight 56.7g) and Extra Large (63.8g), while Jumbo (70.9g) is still probably more common than Medium (49.6g).

(My methodology for getting weights was that I used the government labeling requirements for minimum weight per dozen, converted ounces to grams, divided by 12).

No sorry this is gastro-entomology.

Yeah, I’m not going to pretend like I’m good with money. I’m not. I have a decade of experience of being a young adult on a tight budget to know that’s not one of my strengths. I wasn’t great at stretching each dollar to its most efficient use. And I still am not.

I won’t speak on whether student loans are worth it. I think, like everything, it depends. I think a bachelor’s degree is definitely worth the cost (both in tuition and time), but it might still be worth doing it cheaper if there’s a cheaper path available.

Or are you just speaking about cash reserves?

Yes. Cash reserves are like unused RAM to me: I have it, so I might as well put it to work. If it turns out I need it somewhere else, I can always go rearrange things to make that possible.

Realistically, I think I’m rich because my wife and I both have strong ability to command high salaries, switch jobs, etc., even in a pretty severe downturn. The main things that might tank the value of that expected future cash flow are disability or death, and we at least insure against those.

We also only need one of our two incomes to support our lifestyle, so we have a certain resilience that just comes from having that buffer. At our current ages, we also already have substantial retirement savings, so we have some resilience there, too.