quixotic120

I don’t even care about flirting with women I just want a free app where I can practice speaking my second language with actual people and not some sanitized AI that doesn’t understand context or slang instead of watching cringe youtubers

Like Duolingo/genki or google translate doesn’t really capture おっす. Duolingo probably doesn’t bother with that kind of informal speech. Google just translates it as “hey”, which isn’t wrong, but it’s not really right either. Even deepl just translates it as yo!, which is much closer but still kind of not really it. It’s more like a sup brah kind of thing. Like a really masculine youthful colloquial greeting I guess is the best way to explain it.

But not discord, fuck discord

Sad to hear, my og one still runs fine but it’s old at this point from like 2014 or so

The polyscience is definitely a workhorse but it’s wild overkill for 99% of users. I will again point to I have a chinese no name one I’ve had for like 8 years now that has held up fine and was $13 from AliExpress because I wanted a backup. I have used it quite a bit for whenever I host a large meal and need to cook 2-3 baths at once

And honestly for what the polyscience costs you don’t get the value, imo. I have read people who have had them fail on the Chefsteps forums, it does happen. I don’t hold this against polyscience of course, failure is inevitable, but frankly for $1200 you should get a significant warranty period. You don’t get that, it’s like 12 or 24 months. If and when it breaks you’re hosed and on the hook for (very expensive, given brevilles track record) repairs

What you’re buying with polyscience is very strong power and a high degree of precision. The first point is why restaurants use them; if you’re preparing 30+ portions at once you need a circulator that can heat a significant amount of water. And to this point a lot of commercial kitchens doing this now use external heaters on the bath like this so that the circulator doesn’t need to be as powerful. The other thing polyscience does (or at least did) is higher precision on the thermocouple but this is unnecessary for culinary applications. It was necessary for laboratory circulators that they were making before this was popularized but with culinary applications you really just need accuracy within .1 degree C, which is not all that precise

This is simply not true

Modern meat is generally pretty safe and chicken tartare is definitely a thing. Is it something you should do if you are immunocompromised, a child, or elderly? Probably not. Is it something you should do if you are unsure of how the meat was handled? Probably not

But if you buy quality chicken from a trusted butcher, freeze the surface, blanch it for a few seconds, you can pretty safely eat it raw assuming you’ve done a good job keeping your surfaces and hands clean. You could probably do it with grocery store chicken tbh but the risks are much greater because you have no clue if the $12/hr kid packing chicken breasts properly washed their hands (handling is overwhelmingly where foodborne illness is going to come from in this scenario)

Is it going to be safe 100% of the time? No, of course not. But neither is eating medium rare steak, or eggs with runny yolks. But could you do this every day for a year with issue? Probably.

Although I wouldn’t necessarily consider this the same over the next 4 years of american deregulation

Raw chicken is kind of like scallops btw

Sad to hear. I have the og version and it runs like a tank, the one with the big wheel. I never use the connectivity options

I can’t in good faith recommend a company that is hostile to their consumers, so fuck anova

Anova is all around pretty good and should be available in the EU

That said these are simple machines. I’ve been using immersion circulators for cooking since around 2011 with a home built setup. They’re just a heater, a thermocouple, a relay, and a PID controller to adjust the temperature as needed based on input from the thermocouple. Don’t submerge it and it should last ages

Since then I’ve gotten a few proper ones and they all work about the same because they’re pretty simple. My anova works well but I also have a Chinese no name one that was $13 and works about as well. A bit harder to use as the controls are weird, it feels cheap, and it can’t do huge tubs of water like the anova can but that’s not common to utilize.

Whatever you buy make sure it’s somewhat easy to clean (generally you should still clean and dry it throughly after each use, especially so if you ever have a failure where the bath gets contaminated obviously) and look into how the stick mounts to whatever you plan to use as a vessel for the bath. I generally just use stockpots or whatever for shorter cooks but I also have the plastic tubs as well and some options don’t clip on to everything well, apparently

LG sucks in many ways. I have a cx as well. I rooted it and blocked updates and all lg services, which helps a lot

If you update it though lg automatically and silently opts you in to data sharing without your explicit consent, which is bullshit and disgusting, but you can turn this of by unchecking a box in settings, which is easy enough. Although given how they handled it I don’t necessarily trust them to honor the opt out and thus traffic from the tv has to be to whitelisted servers (I don’t use any webos apps aside from ad free youtube app)

That said imo compared to all the other smart tv options webos is one of the best options. Especially if it’s rooted (though rooting it is becoming much more difficult these days). Then you can install adfree youtube with sponsorblock, permanently block updates, etc.

Android tv is absolute garbage and loaded with more ads than anything. But at least android doesn’t break when you use adblocking; my old Roku tv doesn’t allow you to set custom dns servers and when you set an ad blocking dns server at a router level the TVs apps break. Android still works although googles ad game is so strong that even blocking all their ad networks still allows some ads somehow, even deleting caches. I’m pretty sure android tv just has ads installed in it

Of course the best thing to do is never ever ever connect your smart tv to the internet at all and buy a secondary device to utilize for watching media. I recommend ugoos devices. I use the am6b+ but they have other/newer devices that may fit your use case better. Stripped down android with 0 ads but can still run all streaming apps/dolby vision licensed and you can flash them with Coreelec so they natively boot to kodi

Except people aren’t necessarily going back to piracy en masse

Torrent sites are dwindling, even the big ones have sad membership numbers compared to 10yrs ago

A large amount of internet users access the internet via devices that are openly hostile to or outright disallow anything that would enable piracy. The devices are then connected to an internet that is further hostile and aims to steer you away from anything deemed unsavory

Phones and tablets are cumbersome and unintuitive to navigate. In the case of apple torrent clients are not allowed to be listed on their app store and sideloading is involved and kind of a pain. Chromebooks and windows 11 are better obviously but less utilized then you’d think

But that leads to the second point, which is kind of angry old man yells at cloud, but people are just less tech inclined now. It makes sense because modern tech is designed to oppress the user whereas tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was more to empower them. They don’t bother to figure out how to install applications, use the file explorer, change settings, etc. the very basic steps needed to pirate shit (you obviously don’t need to be a super hacker). They don’t need to. The command prompt or a terminal is something that makes them think you’re hacking shit

They download applications like steam and then their browser auto opens the installer, then steam handles installing games and mods from that point on. They are safeguarded against having to deal with the icky filesystem and their hand is held every step of the way. Or they just download stuff from the official MS app store and even more hand holding. It’s okay because they’re only gonna install 5 streaming apps anyway and then use the browser to visit the 6 approved websites that google or bing search sends you to for basically any query.

And that’s only if they actually have a proper computer. If they have a tablet or phone they either are pushed extremely heavily towards the above scenario, or in the case of apple they simply have no other option

10 years from now the internet will just be 2-3 social media sites, a few shopping conglomerates, wikis, and streaming sites. The devices used to access will no longer let you access the filesystem directly, apps will be unable to be installed if they aren’t code signed by apple or google or ms or whoever, sealed in epoxy, and draconian drm everywhere. 40 years from now your grandchildren will think you’re weird for complaining about how you used to have autonomy and authority over your devices once you owned them and they’ll remind you it’s time to pay another $400 bezobucks to rent the google chrome ar internet hub for another month because you’re not allowed to own it and it’s a federal crime to take it apart

A school district spends $180,000 (hyperbole, I don’t know actual numbers) of taxpayer money deploying this system between the actual hardware costs, maintenance costs to install the hardware, it costs to implement it into their network, and probably an ongoing contact with this dummy’s company. Maybe only for support but with the way things are now I’m sure they built this app to phone home to their servers (introducing a huge potential security risk over simply running it locally on the schools existing network infrastructure in a docker or something), calling it “cloud based”, and charging the district 1k/month to run the devices the district now owns and should be able to operate without the company. The company then talks about how they’ll back up records and safeguard data so you don’t have to worry about that (that it dept you pay is pointless!)

Three months after deployment it turns out the sensors can be tripped by many things not related to vaping, maybe increases in heat, mouthwash breath, etc. the false positives are due to a hardware flaw and cannot be fixed with a patch. Feel free to upgrade to sensor version 2.0, now with improved accuracy! (read: the problem still exists but isn’t as bad). Only another 40k to buy the new hardware, rip out the old hardware (which is now worthless), install the new stuff, and configure the software for everything (again, maintenance and IT costs)

9 months after deployment the company is doing poorly because their product is stupid and only a few idiots actually bought it (way to go idiot). There’s concerns because they sent a new Eula that outlines data sharing policies. They are potentially finding ways to harvest the data they agreed to safely store to try and create a new revenue stream to right their sinking ship. District counsel says fighting the Eula change will be expensive and there’s not much precedent for it, plus they state they will anonymize data before sharing so it’s not a ferpa violation, technically. It feels scummy but you can’t do anything about it. You also don’t really trust them to only sell anonymized data but you can’t prove they aren’t crossing that line so whatever, I guess

15 months after deployment they get hacked because they’ve run out of vc cash, never could get an actual profit stream going (turns out they’re spending 750,000/yr on salaries for 5 people and they’re all kitted out with sick work computers for what is basically coding a web app, but I digress). security of their servers was one of the budgetary constraints they chose to make to right the ship (but had to keep the $1800 office chairs and the 15-20k/mo rent loft they use as an office in a hcol area). The contract says this may happen and they’re not responsible unless there’s gross negligence on their part, which you can’t prove, and that they do some bare minimum reactionary shit after the fact to mitigate damage. So they’re legally blameless and now you get to notify your community their children’s data was leaked to god knows who, whoops

22 months after the fact they go out of business officially. You get a form email about the company’s journey and the difficult decision they had to make to stop fucking around on a dumb project that sucks because no dumbass vc will give them fun bucks anymore to keep playing tech bro billionaire. All the sensors stop working because they require a connection to the servers, which they shut off immediately without a sunset period. You’re reminded every day when you log in to the schools admin panel and get 350 “sensor not connected” error messages and your students bitch about the “sensor not connected: server not available” error pop up showing up on their classroom console. It takes IT a few days to remove their shit from the network and that costs you even more money in wasting your IT staff time when they should be fixing the broken computers in the computer lab or whatever.

Now your school has a bunch of weird boxes on the wall. Sometimes people ask you about them and you go “oh those don’t do anything” and remember that they cost taxpayers in your community tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars and wasted hundreds of hours of your supports staffs time that they could’ve been using to improve the school

But then you scroll on instagram and see there’s this new thing that will detect when kids are bullying each other. You just have to put a camera in each classroom. It’s okay, it won’t record. It will just use the power of AI and machine learning. You’re sold right there and the cycle starts again

I wanted to very badly but then life happened and now I have a whole other career!

I still cook a lot though and I have a lot of weird powders and additives and machinery for stuff. I have a whole ass refrigerated centrifuge that can spin 3 liters at a time so I can isolate my own pea and soy protein in quantity! It weighs like 350 pounds and it’s from the 80s but fuck it, it’s super cool and I was able to get it for $25 from a lab I interned at. I can’t make soy leghemoglobin at home though at there’s no commercial supplier I’ve found so far so I have to still buy impossible or beyond meat if I want it, bummer

Hopefully there will be more food nerds on lemmy. I am only an amateur food nerd, there are way better ones out there

Imo impossible meat is superior to beyond although nutritionally it’s a mixed bag. It introduces a decent amount of carbs (9g per 4oz) and has over 5x the sodium of beef. But it also has a bit of fiber and a either comparable or more vitamin/mineral content than beef. Protein is comparable to 80% ground with 20% less caloric content

Beyond is similar.

They’re both basically vegetable proteins with binders and fats and some flavorings. The big game changer flavoring is leghemoglobin which both use. It’s a protein isolated from soy that is very similar to certain enzymes from bovine muscle. Impossible got the fda to approve it in 2019 and it was challenged; there are some concerns on whether it is safe to eat. I’m not super well read on the issue but from what I’ve perused the issue is one of a lack of long term testing and not of any direct concern.

The textural difference between the two is because beyond uses isolated pea protein, which gives it a texture that’s a bit chunkier and imo more sausage like, and impossible uses soy protein, which imo is more like a cheap burger patty you’d get at McDonald’s.

The fats are typical fats like coconut oil or sunflower oil to recreate the fatty part of beef and this is the current weakness of the products imo. Coconut oil is used because it tends to stay solidified at room temp so when you’re making patties it feels like there are chunks of beef fat. In practice this is weird because they are far too hard and aren’t dispersed enough throughout the product; I believe this is why these fake meats tend to stick to the pan much easier than actual burgers cooked in a skillet.

The binders are big scary words like methylcellulose which is also a source of fiber and can be used as a laxative so people latch onto that and freak out. But it’s only used as a binder to help it hold everything together here so it’s like a tiny amount that just provides a bit of fiber that you probably desperately need if you’re having burgers for dinner. Fun fact: Certain preparations of methylcellulose (a4c) turn into gels when heated so you can use them to make hot ice cream! It’s pretty weird to eat, like a normal ice cream base that solidifies when you put it into boiling water

The other ingredients are stuff like beet juice for coloring

Final fun fact: technically impossible meat is not vegan because animal testing was done during its development.

Thanks for reading my unprompted essay on the composition of modern vegan meat substitutes. This was brought to you by my failed interest in becoming a food scientist. Also you may note I don’t really discuss how they compare to meat and that’s because I don’t eat meat which by law I am required to mention in all posts about food