Vegan French toast recipe
I'm quite pleased with myself because I just came up with a pretty decent (imo) recipe for vEggy Bread or French Fauxst:
Ingredients:
-silken tofu
-soy milk
-cornflour
-cinnamon
-salt
-pepper
-frying oil
-chonky bread
-syrup
Whisk the silken tofu and soy milk together with an electric whisk til it's more liquid than solid.
Heat some oil.
When the oil is hot, dip the bread in the Soy Concoction on both sides
Put some cornflour on both sides (I'm still not sure of the best way to do this, perhaps sprinkle some on a plate/chopping board and put the bread down on it, renewing for each slice because it gets tofu-y)
Fry the bread for a couple minutes on both sides.
Eat with syrup (or whatever else).
It's not exactly the same as eggs ofc but it did tick the boxes on vibes, imo (gloopy oily sweet proteiny). And looked very similar to conventional French toast!
Daniel Filan likes this.
Demonstrating attributes and competencies is hard?
Whenever I have to do a job application that's like "describe a time when you [demonstrated attribute]", it always feels incredibly difficult. Often, I can't think of a suitable instance. Do people relate? I wonder which of the following are true:
Maybe I just don't have these attributes/competencies, the apps are hard because I'm actually a bad fit?
-- But: sometimes I feel like I do have the attributes but I just can't think of a specific work-related time they came up.
Maybe most other people are better at remembering stuff that has happened during their lives?
Maybe these questions are calibrated for "you've had a 9-to-5 office job" and less so for my mixture of work/academic experiences?
A big part of this is that it feels a bit bullshitty somehow. like it's a very fake form of self-description.
Hmm that's interesting! The most recent one was for a social work program (I'm exploring the idea rather than 'definitely want to do it'), and I've heard that the UK civil service also uses questions like this (I do not know if this is evidence for or against your point XD)
I guess for jobs that involve working with people, they have to resort to questions like this because it's harder to test your people skills/soft skills in thte application process? Although, maybe there are ways to ask for written answers that capture some bits (e.g. 'here's a difficult scenario, imagine you're a social worker/civil servant and write an imaginary email to the people involved'. They actually already had a multiple choice quiz a bit like this!)
like this
I see.
In British culture at least, I’m taught to expect and prepare for this genre of difficult (because memory-taxing) so called ‘time when’ question, and rehearse little anecdotes that answer “tell me about a time you did [a team work]”. And one is ‘supposed’ to answer this standard formula with another standard formula: the so called STAR format: Situation, Task, Action, Result. That’s the game people have aligned on. (Not that hiring managers should _want_ to have predictable questions…)
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
Huh. Are you going to say it's Latin? That would be pretty wild.
My guess before you asking would have been Spanish I think.
Latin practice day 1
Ego in ¿Superstimulūs? sum - is that how that goes? probably not.
Ego nōn valeō - had a slightly rough time with a flu+covid shot today after coming off of a cold.
Another cool #hamradio fact is that, since right now we're near a maximum in the solar cycle, around dusk and dawn you can basically communicate directly with any place on the planet. To communicate with daytime places, you use the 10m band, and to communicate with nighttime places, you use the 40m band. The pink speech bubbles on this map show people who reported hearing my 10m signal in the last hour. If I switched to transmitting on 40m, you'd see a similar set of speech bubbles but going east instead of west.
When the solar cycle is in a trough, only the nighttime signals get through.
like this
reshared this
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
A slightly horrifying / cool thing I learned from doing #hamradio and in particular the FT8 mode:
Every 15 seconds, thousands of computers let out a wavering, wailing tone into the void. Then there's 2 seconds of silence. And then they do it again. Since they're doing this by sort-of "pretending" to be sending audio signals, you can listen to it: soundcloud.com/vartchcodpiece/…
It sounds kinda like a mashup of whalesong and digital ghostly wailing. Wailsong, I guess.
What are they saying to each other, you ask? They're basically having the same conversation over and over again. I'll tell you how it goes:
"Hi, anybody there? I'm Alice and I live in Appalachia."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I live in Bermuda."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and I hear you really clearly."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I hear you not-so-clearly."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and goodbye!"
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and goodbye!"
FT8 - 3.573 Khz - 80m
FT8 or Franke & Taylor 8 is a form of digital communication used primarily by amateur radio operators to communicate on amateur radio bands with a majority of traffic occurring on the HF amateur bandsSoundCloud
like this
like this
like this
Ben Millwood likes this.
like this
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
a friend just told me about Framework laptops and it seems like a compelling philosophy of laptop design: it's modular and user-serviceable, and indeed they ship it to you in bits with a screwdriver 😅
Curious if anyone here has had any experience with them. Some reports on the internet that they have fan noise / temperature troubles?
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
They're popular enough among hacker-types that typical linux compat issues seem to be mostly ironed out (suspend/resume, graphics, wifi, etc.).
The main reason I'm not using one is because I want a silicon root of trust that can attest to the integrity of the whole effective TCB of the platform, and only their chromebook variant has a plausible story of even attempting to (TPMs don't normally cover the embedded controller firmware), but last I checked the chromebook variants has pretty limited max specs (not enough ram for comfortably compartmentalizing desktop workloads into VMs with the desired granularity). This is understandable, since chromebooks are thought to be a low-end market segment, but still unfortunate.
like this
like this
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
like this
Ben Millwood likes this.
like this
like this
like this
Then yeah, seems reasonable – the biggest variance on wait times is typically security, TSA pre cuts that down a lot in most airports, and the rare cases that cause a significant delay there are likely to delay a lot of people, which means a good chance the flight will be delayed as well. And domestic flights are typically pretty easy to reschedule if you miss them, unlike international.
There are caveats if you're at an unfamiliar airport or checking bags, but I imagine you're accounting for those already.
I recently had the unfortunate experience of an unreasonably long pre-check line at Newark airport. There was a lot of "wait, *this* is the pre-check line??” There were even signs advertising that you could skip this line if you get "pre-check clear." Everyone has a fastpass, so they invented a fasterpass.
(I think it would've been ~30-50 minutes of total waiting in the line if I hadn't apologeticly wormed my way up the line, explaining to people that I was about to miss my flight)
Daniel Filan likes this.
like this
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
Some #hamradio updates:
- Because US amateur radio licenses are public and include addresses, you can see a map of everyone with a license. It's way denser than I would have expected in Berkeley:
And hey, there's @Daniel Filan with his fancy Extra-class license a bit further down on the map!
- Today I managed to hear my first trans-pacific signal, from Nauru (a tiny island country 5,000 miles from here). Apparently it's what's called a "DXpedition", where a group of radio amateurs go on holiday in order to help other amateurs check "rare" countries off their lists. Unfortunately from their website, it looks like they're transmitting with more than ten times as much power as I have (or at least they brought equipment for broadcasting at that power level), so this isn't much evidence about whether I'll be able to have a full conversation with them or not.
like this
hitting enter after typing password on 2FA settings page deletes 2FA config · Issue #14464 · friendica/friendica
I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates Bug Description On the 2FA settings page, you need to enter your current password before making any changes. If I hit Enter on this field, it s...GitHub
like this
like this
AI Art Turing Test
I enjoyed this!
I got just over 50% correct, ie little better than chance. Clearly I don't know shit XD
Regardless of 'can you/can't you tell', my favourite pictures in this were all AI-generated, including both some I really thought were human, and some I correctly identified as AI.
like this
I got 77%
I'm realizing a decent amount of real human art might involve strange out-of-place choices
like this
Correctly identified as AI: 18
Correctly identified as human: 19
Labeled human as AI: 4
Labeled AI as human: 7
(This might be off by 1 or 2, because 1 or 2 things in Scott's answer key didn't seem to perfectly line up with the test?? I think????)
Similar incident maybe not known to the Americans: they ran a poll to name a polar research ship, where people could write in suggestions. Someone suggested the name "Boaty McBoatface", and this won by a landslide. However, the powers-that-be boringly decided not to honour this :p (They called the ship RRS Sir David Attenborough)
like this
There's a line in a Dessa song ("Dixon's Girl") that I particularly like:
"There was a snow storm in Jackson
When you and I met
At a club called Saint Sebastian's
But the sign said something different"
Why would a club in Mississippi be unofficially called "Saint Sebastian's" and officially called something else? Makes u think.
(St. Sebastian is the unofficial patron saint of homosexuality.)
like this
Amber Dawn likes this.
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
like this
Chana likes this.
I mean, sure, but my mind unfairly translates that section into "yeah, you're right, but I can't be bothered to actually change my mind just because of something like that. Don't @ me."
He points out that many popular views are self-defeating, and is like "well surely all these self-defeating views can't be wrong!" But, like, yes they can? And also this is an especially apt case, since the question is directly about what-to-believe! You're not even really going up a meta level.
Ben Millwood likes this.
Yeah I don't necessarily buy his counterargument either, just wanted to point out that it has been discussed :P
I guess in fact if you believe in epistemic modesty, deferring to the fact that most people don't believe in it doesn't actually fix your problem, because that tells you to not defer and follow your own beliefs, but then your own beliefs tell you to defer again. It's not just that it recommends that you don't use it, it's actively paradoxical.
I think you and I probably disagree about how much it matters to have an inconsistent / seemingly arbitrary "do epistemic modesty unless it's paradoxical, then don't" rule. I think I can make it sound more reasonable if it's something like "it's surprising if you alone are right while a large number of relevant experts are wrong, so usually reject this thesis, but in some cases this rejection is even more surprising / obviously incorrect, so in that case you have to stick with your beliefs".
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
Court houses have this kind of Objective Beauty that I find offputting. I think it's something to do with
1. marble floors are too noisy and squeaky
2. hallways are too echoey, makes you feel exposed
3. not enough windows
4. half the people there are miserable for various reasons
(I expect that people in a supreme court are less miserable than in the average court, but more miserable than in the average office building)
like this
Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to Daniel Filan • •Daniel Filan likes this.
Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • •Daniel Filan likes this.
Ben Millwood
in reply to Daniel Filan • •like this
Amber Dawn and Daniel Filan like this.
Daniel Filan
in reply to Ben Millwood • •Amber Dawn
in reply to Ben Millwood • •I kind of had the opposite reaction, which is 'the intellectual greats of the past do deserve their reputation, but are we sure there aren't proportionate amounts of intellectual greats today also?'
I wonder if it's more that there's a fixed quota of fame for being an intellectual great, or something? Like it's easier for someone to become famous and go down in history if they're the one best philosopher/scientist/writer/inventor/whatever in their region. Whereas if there are 1000 such ones, even if they are producing equally good work to the people of the past, people don't have like a 'famous people Dunbar number' that could absorb knowing about that many people, so the culture gravitates to making just a few famous (either the best, or maybe people who are intellectual but also charismatic/notorious/good at marketing themselves).
like this
Ben Millwood and Daniel Filan like this.