monotremata

joined 11 months ago
[–] monotremata 5 points 1 week ago

So, in defense of this, the corned beef in question usually has a pretty complex seasoning profile. It'll have a big packet with peppercorns, cloves, bay leaves, dill, mustard seed, coriander, and a few other things. (Sometimes mace or nutmeg? It varies with the seller.) The "corned" in the name comes from all the spices (it's "corn" like in peppercorn). And at the table it's often also served with mustard or Worcestershire sauce, which brings a whole additional suite of spices, as well as pickled beets. So it's not as flavorless as that description makes it sound. But it's true that the corned beef does contribute a salty, savory note, especially to the cabbage.

It is legitimately a very mild, comfort food kind of dish. Vindaloo this isn't. And we like that too! This just fits a different kind of mood.

I guess I just think it's hilarious how much of an anti-advertisement the name is. Like, it's so emphatically not going to appear on the menu of any fancy gastropub. Caramelized pear and arugula flatbread with candied walnuts and gorgonzola? Nope. Boiled dinner. Deal with it.

[–] monotremata 8 points 1 week ago (5 children)

My brother-in-law considers it frankly offensive that there's an actual thing called "New England boiled dinner." My sister and I love it, but he can't get past the name.

[–] monotremata 2 points 1 week ago

It turns out the real inefficiencies were the friends we made along the way.

[–] monotremata 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They're not saying that slow growth is definitely evidence it's exponential. They're saying that slow growth doesn't prove that it isn't exponential, which seemed to be what you were saying.

It's always hard to identify exponential growth in its early stages.

[–] monotremata 11 points 2 weeks ago

This exactly. "Do you think free will exists" could, in fact, be small talk, if neither of you is particularly interested in the topic.

[–] monotremata 5 points 2 weeks ago

I think he's literally talking about making a credit that's contingent on a certain IQ test score, or something along those lines. He seems to be a straight-up, unabashed eugenicist.

[–] monotremata 1 points 2 weeks ago

You can use that kind of HP cartridge and also modify it to take ink from a reservoir. It's perfectly possible to buy ink suitable for an inkjet printer in bulk for much cheaper than HP will sell it to you, and that kind of reservoir mod will let you use the print head built in to the HP cartridge.

[–] monotremata 5 points 2 weeks ago

It's a compact notation, but making change takes way too long.

[–] monotremata 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Oh, I didn't know about that, but it isn't hugely surprising.

I guess I should have mentioned this, but there's a lot of stuff in the book that kinda seems like coded libertarian stuff, and it even flirts with pro-authoritarian stuff. It's not a book I would recommend to kids or deeply uncritical people. That's part of why this thread seemed like a safer place to mention it.

[–] monotremata 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If Trump was going to agree to a staged shooting, it 100% would not have involved someone actually shooting live ammo in his direction. Collateral doesn't matter to him, but he matters to himself to a pathological degree, and even a slight chance of serious harm would not have been acceptable to him.

[–] monotremata 9 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Yeah. There's a fan-fic I read recently (also the only HP fan fic I've read) called "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," which is set in an alternate universe in which Harry is raised by perfectly pleasant folks with an understanding of the scientific method, and arrives in the wizarding world and immediately starts deconstructing all the bizarre nonsense going on there. It's very well done, but it's really hard to recommend precisely because it does refer back to a ton of the stuff that's developed in the books, so I had to keep looking up stuff I didn't recall, and I don't really want to devote brain space to that stuff. (Some of the "rationality" stuff has aged a little bit poorly through the replication crisis, too, though I'm a bit more forgiving of that since it talks so much about updating your beliefs.)

But for anyone who did read the books back when and was frustrated at times by the characters behaving so irrationally, it's kinda cathartic in that way. For those who are interested: https://github.com/rrthomas/hpmor

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