FZDC

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I wonder how the built-in Google and Apple IMEs compare.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That's basically what Arlington National Cemetery is. The union government seized the land of Robert E. Lee, and planning for if they couldn't keep it after the war, decided to turn it into a cemetery to basically make it useless as a farm/estate. Lee's heirs eventually sued and won the land back, but didn't have much use for it, so they sold it back to the government.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

 

So I got to watching Elemental over the weekend, and wow. I'm the U.S.-born child of Asian immigrants, and really didn't expect to see a kids movie tell a story that resonated so well with me.

This movie was basically mismarketed as some kind of cross-cultural love story, about a couple that defies the odds to get together despite a society that doesn't approve. And yes, some of that does exist in the movie, but mainly as a plot point about the relationship at the core of the movie, between an immigrant father and his adult daughter, and the decisions he made early on to build a life full of opportunity and potential for her.

I thought the themes were genuinely beautiful:

  • The sacrifices made by the older generations, and how the challenge for younger generations of showing appreciation for that sacrifice without necessarily being boxed into the expectations that might derive from that sacrifice.
  • The struggle to "belong" when tugged between multiple cultures.
  • Prejudice and how it affects people long term, decades after these key moments, and how it manifests in unhealthy and unfair behaviors.
  • Different cultural values not just creating conflict, but also providing valuable background for thriving in cross-cultural environments, as well.

I thought it was valuable to have these moments play out in a way that could evoke my own memories of growing up in a diverse city, being raised by parents who loved me but didn't always fully understand the society they'd chosen to raise a family in, little bits of racial or ethnic tension, whether small or large.

My 3-year-old didn't get any of this while watching. But she loved the movie at a superficial level, and I'm hoping when she's older we can have those conversations about these themes and the stories of her grandparents and the family history that brought us where we are today.

And who knows, maybe I'm overstating the primacy of the immigrant story over the love story. It's just that I don't normally get to see depictions on television and film that focus on these themes.

Anyone else get these feelings from watching this movie? Any other television shows or movies evoke similar feelings for you?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I still say "y'all."

Y'all means all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I'd argue the opposite.

Because you can use metal utensils on stainless, that means that an ultra thin fish spatula is an option when you're cooking something delicate. Silicone or wooden utensils tend to be too thick and clumsy for working with anything delicate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

From what I read the cleanup is just warm water, soap, soft cloth.

What's stopping you from using just warm water, soap, and soft cloth on every other type of pan? If the answer is that it doesn't do a good enough job cleaning those things, then you'll want a pan that can stand up to more aggressive cleaners/scrubbers.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I guess it's a two-part observation. The first part does include a qualitative assessment of whether the destruction was "worth it." The second part, though, I don't think includes any moral assessment, just an observation that destruction is happening with or without us, so there's plenty of creation that is possible from merely saving something from destruction, or leveraging an already-gonna-happen destruction to extract some creation out of it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I don't think of it as "destruction" so much as "consumption." And there's no requirement that the magnitude of each side of the equation be anywhere close to symmetrical.

Buckets of paint are inherently less interesting than a beautiful mural on the wall. Unused bits in flash memory are less interesting than a digitized photograph taking up that storage space.

Basically, creation can be a big positive, on net, because the cost of that creation is often many orders of magnitude less than the value of the thing being created.

Moreover, even with a very generous definition of "destruction," the comparison should still be made to what would've been destroyed anyway, in the absence of the hypothetical creation. When I take a bunch of tomatoes and other vegetables to make a pasta sauce, maybe I have fundamentally changed or even destroyed some plant matter to get there. But if I hadn't made the sauce, what would've happened to those plants anyway? Would the tomatoes have just rotted on the vine? If I spend a day doing something, what did I destroy by letting that day go by?

In a sense, everything boils down to opportunity cost, rather than the framework of destruction. The universe is in a state of destruction all around us, with or without us. We have ways of redirecting that destruction, even in locally creative ways, but even in our absence the destruction would still happen.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Organized sports with formal teams and team jerseys and calendars and refs was fun in my 20's, but I was mainly doing pickup games by my 30's. Now in my 40's, I still do some participation in semi-organized leagues for inherently less serious sports, but it's easy to enforce a "fun first" atmosphere when people are drinking beers while waiting their turn.

That all being said, I still do really enjoy individual, non-competitive sports where you're trying to get your own personal best: weight lifting (whether powerlifting or olympic lifting), running, swimming, biking, etc. I like putting up better numbers than before, in all of those sports, even in a non-competitive environment. Or combinations of numbers (not my fastest 5k ever, but maybe my fastest 5k in the same month that I put up these deadlift numbers, etc.).

The competitive assholes are in youth sports, too, by the way. I think the last time I saw two 40-somethings almost get in a fist fight, they were dads at their daughters' basketball game.

 

As my oldest goes into pre-k, in a formal school, it's a big transition to how we approach our family's relationship to the teachers, administrators, and the school as an institution. It's clear that the other parents are also in the same boat, with some unspoken undercurrent of competitiveness that I don't personally want to participate in.

Parents of older kids, what do you think other parents should know as their kids transition into elementary school?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I'm slightly annoyed at my kid's new school. My kid is getting ready for school in a Chinese immersion program, which is great, but the new school wants to gently ramp up with half days with parent participation, with only part of the class signed up for specific half-day blocks. This is annoying because parents, you know, have jobs to go to, and taking 3 hours in the middle of the workday to get the kid to school, stay with them for a half day, and bring them home early is pretty inconvenient. Plus the days my kid isn't participating (with other half classes signed up), I've gotta get childcare coverage.

Can't wait until we get to the normal 8:30am start time with regular after school care.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Why can't we just wirelessly transmit the power, maybe have it hit a collection device that can harness about 4 kwh/m^2/day

 

(Gift article link, doesn't require a subscription to view without paywall.)

This article, from a few weeks ago, describes the linguistic phenomenon where a highly bilingual community starts incorporating direct translations of phrases from Spanish, to where those non-standard phrases get adopted by English speakers who don't even speak Spanish themselves.

I thought it was interesting, because I've seen this very same phenomenon play out in Chinese American communities, where certain Chinese idioms or phrases (especially of prepositions) tend to show little remnants in the English translation of that idea.

Have you seen this in your bilingual community? What are your favorite examples?

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