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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Which is ironic given that the previous commenter was extolling how scientific and precise baking is, and how you never have to deal with vague measurements.

    Baking - especially bread - is in fact incredibly fussy. It’s hugely dependent on factors like humidity and temperature, and just what mood the yeast is in that day.

    But if you are struggling with bread recipes that include vague measurements for salt, generally 5g of salt for every 250g of flour should be alright.

    Also avoid bread recipes that measure flour by volume (cups). Look for ones that measure by weight instead. Much more reliable.


  • The answer to “a pinch of salt” is that you “season to taste”. Literally, taste it, then add more if it needs more. Your pinch and my pinch will be different, because you and I will like different amounts of salt.

    And it’s actually nearly impossible to find “a pinch of salt” in a recipe these days. Most recipes will give you exact measures for herbs and spices.


  • Honestly OP, about ten years ago I sucked at cooking too. Then one day I just got excited about being a better cook, and that was enough to make me keep on trying until I did. Since then I’ve managed to help two other people who knew literally nothing about cooking get to the point where they can absolutely wow people with some of their dishes.

    It all comes down to this; learn one meal. That’s it. Just one thing that you can do well. Mac and cheese. Spaghetti bollognaise. Fried chicken. A grilled pork chop with green beans. Garlic bread. Just pick that one thing, and get good at it. Then you pick another thing. And another. And before you know it, you’ll not only have a catalogue of dishes that you can confidently cook, but also dish will have taught you techniques that you’ll find yourself reusing when you learn the next, and so the learning process itself becomes faster and easier. Eventually, you’ll look at a recipe and just immediately think “Oh, right, I know how to do all that. Easy.”

    But how do you get there? I find that recipes are a terrible way to learn to cook. Video content is much more helpful, because a video can break down technique for you. Binging With Babish is so popular because he’s exceptional at this; every video he tries to introduce at least one new technique to his audience. Ethan Chleblowski is also really good at getting into the how and why of cooking, as well as just the what. If you’re vegan or vegetarian Derek Sarno makes excellent content. For baking Ann Reardon’s How To Cook That is wonderful. Joshua Weissman is really fun. Kenji Lopez Alt is an absolute master of breaking down the science of cooking (and also just doling out fun and easy late night recipes). And despite the name and humorous tone, You Suck At Cooking really does offer good cooking ideas.

    Watch a whole lot of this content. Just bounce through videos until you land on a recipe that makes you go “Yeah, I want to try that.” Then, after you’ve had a few cracks at it, start looking up that meal on n YouTube and finding other videos about the same thing. Compare and try out different techniques. Look for where people agree and disagree an try everything until you find something that really works for you. If, try as you might, you just can’t seem to make a dish work, move on to a different one (but only after really giving it a few goes). Sometimes you have to come back to something later, once you have more of your basic technique down.

    Eventually, you will get good at one thing. And then another thing. And another. And as you do that, your confidence will grow exponentially. Soon enough, you’ll feel at home in the kitchen.


  • Also baking is heavily dependent on factors beyond many peoples control, such as the humidity and temperature in your home, or the quality of your oven. Cookies are fine, everyone should take a crack at them, but anything with yeast is a fussy little bitch that will fuck you over just for fun.










  • But I don’t think even that is the case, as they can essentially just “swap out” the video they’re streaming

    You’re forgetting that the “targeted” component of their ads (while mostly bullshit) is an essential part of their business model. To do what you’re suggesting they’d have to create and store thousands of different copies of each video, to account for all the different possible combinations of ads they’d want to serve to different customers.



  • Comparitively speaking, a lot less hype than their earlier models produced. Hardcore techies care about incremental improvements, but the average user does not. If you try to describe to the average user what is “new” about GPT-4, other than “It fucks up less”, you’ve basically got nothing.

    And it’s going to carry on like this. New models are going to get exponentially more expensive to train, while producing less and less consumer interest each time, because “Holy crap look at this brand new technology” will always be more exciting than “In our comparitive testing version 7 is 9.6% more accurate than version 6.”

    And for all the hype, the actual revenue just isn’t there. OpenAI are bleeding around $5-10bn (yes, with a b) per year. They’re currently trying to raise around $11bn in new funding just to keep the lights on. It costs far more to operate these models (even at the steeply discounted compute costs Microsoft are giving them) than anyone is actually willing to pay to use them. Corporate clients don’t find them reliable or adaptable enough to actually replace human employees, and regular consumers think they’re cool, but in a “nice to have” kind of way. They’re not essential enough a product to pay big money for, but they can only be run profitably by charging big money.


  • This is very well said.

    I think what people imagine will happen, if they’re thinking about the economic conundrum at all, is something rather like the Warframe economy. Players with real dollars to spare buy platinum (the premium currency), which they then either use to buy things directly from DE, or trade to other players in return for loot those players want to sell. Effectively, players flush with time grind on behalf of players flush with dollars. If there was a way to convert platinum back into dollars, it could be imagined that a player in a country with a weak currency might make a living from selling rare mods and prime parts.

    In practice the reason this doesn’t work is because DE would lose a huge amount of their income if players could cash out platinum. Any dollars put into the system for the purpose of buying things from other players would then leave the system when those players cash out. So there’s no incentive for DE to do this. There’s also the problem that you need to make a game that is actually worth putting real dollars into, and these crypto games are universally dogshit (ideal time to plug Jauwn’s YouTube channel, his crypto game reviews are hilarious and really highlight what utter trash the entire field is). So no one has any incentive to buy the tokens that the play-to-earn players are trying to sell. That’s a big part of why the price always instantly crashes.

    The only way to make cashing out work is to have players directly sell their tokens to other players, instead of the money coming out of the developer, but that means now the players are competing with the developer on price. Whatever price the dev sells the token for becomes the ceiling. And if course, every token sold by a player basically steals income from the developer. If the dev instead gives the token out for playing the game, then there’s no mechanism at all for the dev to make any money from the token, other than issuing large amounts to themselves and ultimately crashing the price by cashing out. None of these options work, and the model these games actually go with basically guarantees rug pulls as the only actual way for the developers to make any money.


  • Yup. Smart contracts aren’t even contracts, and they certainly aren’t smart.

    An algorithm is, by its nature, dumb. It does the thing it’s programmed to do, without any hesitation. It doesn’t stop to consider the situation or ask relevant questions. This is a terrible idea for a system that facilitates trades, because all someone has to do, to use the example you cited, is wash trade a newly minted token back and forth a few times to set a price, and then find a smart contract that’s happy to spew out some amount of a token you want, at the price you just set, like a busted slot machine.



  • Even with the critical slant of applies to the gameplay of these “games” this article still ultimately neglects to describe the biggest problem with the “play to earn” aspect, which is that it fundamentally doesn’t work.

    The article describes the notional highs and lows of these tokens, but overlooks the fact that trading volume is far more important than a hypothetical trade price.

    If one person buys one of these utterly useless tokens for 10 cents, that sets the price at 10 cents. But if I then try to cash out a thousand dollars of that same token, I’m probably not going to get a thousand dollars, because that requires there to be someone on the other side of great trade who thinks its actually worth putting a thousand dollars into this otherwise useless token.

    To make matters worse, crypto prices are generally set by crypto trades. What I mean by that is that the person who bought one token for ten cents, actually didn’t. They traded fifty BLOB tokens, notionally worth ten cents. What can you do with BLOB tokens? Nothing, they’re worthless, they were made for a game that doesn’t even exist anymore. The guy who owned those fifty BLOB tokens got them by trading a bunch of POOP tokens for them. Those are from a DAO that has since collapsed, they’re worthless too. He bought those POOP tokens with a fraction of a DOGE coin, which he got from selling an airdropped Bad Monkey NFT that he was lucky enough to get one time (and even luckier to sell before the rug pull).

    See the problem? It’s all people trading Monopoly dollars for Game of Life dollars and arguing over the exchange rate. At no point did a real US dollar enter this process. So when you try to sell your BLOB tokens for real US dollars, no one is buying. The notion that people in developing nations will make a lining playing these games is a complete fantasy.