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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • If you have the features, learn how the timer system of your appliances works. My family has never figured them out and screws stuff up regularly because of inattention. I'm disabled and I know better than to trust myself. I set timers to start and stop stuff that is cooking in the oven. If I want something hot at a special time, I just set a delay timer that turns on my settings and then has a stop timer. If there is absolutely any doubt that a dish in the oven may leak, I place a pan on another lower rack to catch absolutely anything that might potentially leak. I tend to cook 2 weeks worth of food at one time in the oven and just arrange all the stuff so that the potential leaks are onto other safe stuff.

    I also do not bother with recipes. Most ovens have terrible temperature controllers, so times and settings are largely useless in reality. My secret is to start with boring but edible food. In reality, you likely do not eat some great variety of foods. Fundamentally it is the same 2-4 meats (sorry vegans), bread, and some veggies. So I started by filling a large glass casserole pan with green beans, broccoli, and cauliflower, a second pan I fill with corn on the cob, a third I do a bed of sliced onion and a meat on top with seasoning, and I finally have a covered glass bowl for cooking two cups of rice. I eat this steamed rice for 2 days before making homemade fried rice. Well made fried rice will easily last the remainder of 2 weeks. The meal is mostly rice, with some veggies and a few ounces of meat. This is my only full meal each day. I cook that on whatever my oven calls 450° F for 1 h 20m. It does not require any oil or anything else. While it is edible like this, the last trick is to make a sauce with half a jar of mayo, about a quarter of the jar filled with the best teriyaki sauce you can find, and a small amount of sriracha sauce to taste. This sauce can be further improved slightly with any small amounts of savory sauces from pickling or fermentation or in more simple terms, the juices from a jar of whole olives, peppers, old alcohol, left over pan glazing stock, etc., or like Worcestershire or soy sauce if you have trouble with these abstractions.

    Form a boring baseline of food, then start tuning this baseline to make it better over time. If you limit yourself to this kind of repetition, you’ll eat much more consistently healthy, but also you’ll really learn how to cook using abstracted information and a deeper understanding of your available tools.

    I do this with everything. I occasionally make some cookies that just go in the oven. The whole preheating your oven thing is just an attempt to make recipes transferable. The controls on your oven are likely way off and the control algorithm or temperature switches are extremely inconsistent. People do not make these appliance purchases in general while shopping for these features. Therefore these corners are cut in most hardware. I just ate the same cookies enough to know exactly how long they cook for with my favorite properties. I cook them for 22 minutes at 475° F from a cold start. I can put that on a start and end timer and have hot cookies any time I want. If there is a high probability that I will not be present or available when they are done, 20 minutes at 450 will produce good results if they remain in the oven as it cools down.

    Using the timers means you can never forget something in a way that is catastrophic. I don’t recommended running an oven unsupervised, but you can take precautions to enable failsafes like pan under pan setups.


  • I’m well aware. Child Services is a criminal organisation that should be loathed by everyone. Every agent there is incentivised through commission to exploit the parties involved. They are worse than the police in atrocities and terrorism.

    Forcing someone to use an OS, platform, or app is placing something like Google or Amazon into a position as your judge/cop entering your home. It is more like forcing you to house them and their thousands of stalker business partners to collect data to manipulate and exploit you. It may sound very tin foil hat at first. I understand that people do not keep up with digital progress and change. Think about how often the internet is your primary source of information. There are only 2 web crawlers Google’s and Microsoft’s. There are no others that are relevant or useful any more. All search engines query one of these two databases either directly or through their API. This is the major massive information bottleneck of concern. If you follow so far, here is the kicker, your search results are not deterministic. Two people searching for the exact same thing on two different devices at the same time, will get different results. The information you see is biased and cherry picked. This is why the data has been collected. That data is a fundamental part of your person. It is bought and sold to manipulate you in the present age. This is a coup against democracy. Back in the first 3 years of primary school you should have learned the 3 pillars of democracy: Legislative, Judicial, and the free Press for a well informed public. There are 6 entities in control of all news media and all are owned by billionaires with anti democratic agendas. The internet is the last refuge of real democracy of any kind. This is the fundamental reason it matters and why free software matters. This is actually the front line of the fight to have any form of free information and democratic right of autonomy. The moment this last refuge is snuffed out, the entire house of cards will fall and the neo dark ages will truly begin. This mirrors the history of feudalism 1:1. Anyone asking you to trust them on this level is looking to enslave you. That is the endgame of this issue. The goal is not to make you a slave in name. The goal is to alter the meaning of the word citizen to cause the term to be functionally interchangeable.











  • All or nothing perspectives with AI and zealous hate. It’s helped me through my toughest year yet of physical disability and social isolation. It has improved my Python, CPP, and writing bash scripts. I’ve used it with cooking ideas, and finding products. It has helped me discover an entire science fiction universe of my own creation and helps me explore subtle nuances. It has helped me gain a much better understanding of the variety of human functional thought and psychology, especially in ways where other people may not understand my abstractive thoughts and connections across different spaces. It has also shown me why I get frustrated at people with different functional thought. The bad attitudes and emotional perspectives suck and can be depressing here. That is my biggest pet peeve this year. I’ve responded to it the most, and I’ve disconnected from here to go do other things the most from people with a bad attitude on AI.




  • I’m a better person with Adderall. I feel more like myself, like I escape a frustrating fog. I’ve been on it for ~14 years. It doesn’t seem to have the same effects on everyone.

    Everything in life is ultimately brain chemistry and addictions. Most of the drugs in our chemistry soup are the substances the human body synthesises on its own. Biology is a funny thing. It can handle immense complexity, but can struggle with precision.

    If you have the self awareness to seek out and optimise your brain or body chemistry where it might be lacking, I’d argue that you are the better person than someone that suffers through the deficiencies of their natural biology.

    However, humans have a very difficult time assessing their own brain chemistry objectively without biases. It is both harmful and unsafe to self diagnose or self medicate without the assistance of someone that is trained to objectively asses your situation and needs.




  • A lot of it is from use too.

    My left and right hands have different sensitivities from playing guitar all my life. Auto body work also forces a person to dial in touch at a very atypical level, especially for a painter like myself. I’ve trained a few apprentices and even those with an initially poor sense of touch eventually dial in the skill. There is a level of imperfections in the final finishing steps where it is impossible to see the issue in oblique view due to the matte finish of primer/sealers. This is well after blocking and guide coats are no longer helpful. At this stage, there are still many imperfections that will create obvious errors after clear coat because the distorted reflections that may be present in the final gloss. These errors can be very color dependant. They can manifest in the way metallics settle within the color coat making the issue visible here as well. The worst color for reflective errors is black. With some whites a painter can get away with nearly any minor error at this stage without consequences as long as there is enough orange peel present in the factory finish.

    Anyway, there are two tricks to finding late stage errors in the primer. The easy way is to use a wax and grease remover solvent wiped liberally across the panel. This will temporarily create a clear coat like gloss that will show exactly what the final reflective properties will be like after clear is applied. This is always the final test before you shoot anything. However, doing this a whole bunch of times just because you can’t feel the issues is very amateur noob territory. Any skilled painter learns how to touch a panel in a sweeping feel using the center pad of each finger tip and sliding a hand along the surface in a way that one can feel even the most subtle of errors. I can feel the reflection–no joke.

    A painter spends a ton of time wet sanding by hand too. This leads to sanding off most of the outer skin on your hands. In fact, when I was really busy and working 12-14 hour days, I had to quit when my fingers started to bleed. They actually bleed the pattern of your fingerprints when you sand through them with a fine grit over time. The thin skin and heat sensitivity it creates helps to dial in the skill.

    That is my long bla bla bla about why, in my experience, anyone can dial in their sensitivity and awareness as a skill. When I worked on heavy equipment or in the machine shop, I had tough callused hands; with auto body thin soft and sensitive, and after all my crashes and battles with cars on a bicycle, like a seriously scared up brawler.




  • I don’t find myself making spontaneous buying decisions for frivolous nonsense in my life in general when I stick around here. All of my purchases are due to my needs and research only.

    Physical disability with social isolation gives one a potential ability to more deterministically decipher where and how interactions influence them. I have less inputs and influences and tend to remember what was suggested or peripheral to my intentions. I got into a lot of stuff over the last 10 years that, when I look back, I really don’t know why I did them. I know my surface reasoning, but like, why was I following those people and spaces in the first place–that kind of meta logic perplexed me. When I quit YouTube and switched to newpipe/reddit, those random tangents were drastically reduced. When I quit reddit they went away entirely. It is entirely speculation, and probably borderline paranoia, but I probably only bought stuff on AliEx because it seemed like everyone on YT was buying from there. I can’t say it was all bad or unwanted or anything like that. I can say I got stuff I didn’t need or use.

    I still explore new interests and projects I feel like trying when I see them here, but I have yet to feel influenced in a way that hints at manipulative intentions.

    I’ve seen people try with disingenuous arguments that have 5-10 upvotes instantaneously. I’ve seen posts that have supporting corpo replies seconds after posting or where a typical type of comment for Lemmy gets a large scale negative response quickly that is obviously not genuine or typical behavior. Unlike reddit, these seem so blatantly obvious here that I block the posters and commenter immediately. Blocking here is rather effective and blocking a lot of users makes for a pretty pleasant experience unlike anything I ever had on reddit. This is my only outlets to contact other humans and I feel rather balanced with it and self care. That is more than I can say about reddit.