I’ve done this once after seeing it in a Chinese recipe for chicken thighs, with Shaoxing wine. Apparently the alcohol does wonders to bring the flavour out of onions.

I think that either flaked corn or corn flakes could work really well for this. The process behind farinha de milho* is different from both (the maize is hulled, soaked, ground while wet, and dried over low fire), but as long as it’s something pre-cooked it should be fine. And as I mentioned in another comment, people make farofa even out of rolled oats.

*even in Portuguese alone the name is a bit messy, as it’s shared with the maize meal used for polenta. Most people specify the later as “fubá”, I’m used to specify the former as “farinha biju” (biju is the flakes).

They probably could, indeed - but you’d need multiple different applications, each for one use case. In the meantime a LLM offers you a tool that won’t hit all the nails, or screw all the screws, but does both decently enough in the lack of both a hammer and a screwdriver.

It’s a great analogy though - Linux users aren’t deemed profitable by the A³ companies, just like offal is unjustly* deemed yucky by your typical person.

*I do love offal though. And writing this comment made me crave for chicken livers with garlic and rosemary over sourdough bread. Damn.

The backlash to this is going to be fun.

In some cases it’s already happening - since the bubble forces AI-invested corporations to shove it down everywhere. Cue to Microsoft Recall, and the outrage against it.

It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don’t reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do.

It is not completely useless but it’s oversold as fuck. Like selling you a bicycle with the claim that you can go to the Moon with it, plus a “trust me = be gullible, eventually bikes will reach Mars!” A bike is still useful, even if they’re building a scam around it.

Here’s three practical examples:

1. I use ChatGPT as a translation aid. Mostly to list potential translations for a specific word, or as conjugation/declension table. Also as a second layer of spell-proofing. I can’t use it to translate full texts without it shitting its own virtual pants - it inserts extraneous info, repeats sentences, removes key details from the text, butcher the tone, etc.
2. I was looking for papers concerning a very specific topic, and got a huge pile (~150) of them. Too much text to read on my own. So I used the titles to pre-select a few of them into a “must check” pile, then asked Gemini to provide me three paragraphs summaries for the rest. A few of them were useful; without Gemini I’d probably have missed them.
3. [Note: reported use.] I’ve seen programmers claiming that they do something similar to #1, with code instead. Basically asking Copilot how a function works, or to write extremely simple code (if you ask it to generate complex code it starts lying/assuming/making up non-existent libraries).

None of those activities is underlyingly useless; but they have some common grounds - they don’t require you to trust the output of the bot at all. It’s either things that you wouldn’t use otherwise (#2) or things that you can reliably say “yup, that’s bullshit” (#1, #3).

I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.

Amen.

Indie games might not be flashy, but they’re often made with love and concern about giving you a fun experience. They also lack all those abusive DRM and intrusive anti-cheat systems that A³ games often have.

It’s interesting how interconnected those points are.

Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.

Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on “our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it” and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.

Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?

I’m predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.

I don’t see this as an unpopular opinion, but I do agree with it - at least here (Brazil) Twitter was evolving into a containment cage for nutjobs and morons, until it was blocked. (And it’s damn easy to find who’s who in the Bluesky diaspora, as the nutjobs/morons miss Twitter while the saner people are glad to see it locally gone.)

Kansas: if they doubled down on it then it’s hard to claim that it was unintended. Now I agree with you, the humiliation becomes part of the policy - be it due to negligence or actively pursuing it.

And perhaps a better framework to decide if something is fascist or not could be to ditch the concepts of “intention” and “thought” (as blackbox concepts) and focus instead on:

• the action itself - preventing people from exerting their own agency needlessly
• the effect - humiliation
• the responsibility of the one taking action - an able-minded person in power can’t evade it (unlike, say, the 2yo punching you)

This is also useful to judge what the mod is doing - if it’s just a bad week it’s kind of understandable, but if she’s consistently doing it the actions do lean into fascism, because they stop being simply erratic “people are people, they do stupid shit” and become a policy.

I do not understand this at all.

From the fascists’ PoV it’s all about a glorious past that was “stolen” from them. Mussolini for example would babble a lot about Roman Empire times, i.e. times when Italy was the centre of Europe+MENA.

Sometimes this “past” is outright invented though. It doesn’t need to be factual, from the fascists’ PoV, as long as people believe it.

[Sorry for the late reply! Kind of off-topic, but finally I can actually read texts in a decent computer screen. I had some computer problems through those two weeks.]

This is the sort of thing that I love reading on the internet.

From a conlanger perspective I feel like the time reference could be split into four, to account time travel. For example: let’s say that both of us travelled to 3100, I remained there and you came back to 2024. Then you write me a letter, that I’m going to read as soon as we arrive in 3100, telling me about your experiences. You could use:

• your current date as reference - 3100 comes after 2024, so it’s future
• your personal experiences - you already experienced it, so it’s past
• my current date as reference - as I’m in 3100, it’s present
• my personal experiences - as I’m watching you experience it, it’s present

Any given language could pick any of those references to model their tense around, or many of them, or even none (plenty languages IRL lack grammatical tense). If only doing things from the PoV of the speaker (you), that means 6~9 tenses for what most languages have 2 (past and non-past) or 3 (past, present, future).

It is - the carb in it is typically fried yucca meal or maize meal*, but I’ve seen people doing it with breadcrumbs and even rolled oats. There’s a lot of freedom for the fillings too, although farofas made as side dish for meats tend to be simpler than the ones intended a as full meal.

Just as an example here’s my breakfast farofa. It’s enough for two people.

• a hard sausage, diced small
• 3 eggs, whisked with some salt and black pepper
• half onion, diced small
• a handful of maize meal (the amount is eyeballed)
• hot pepper sauce, veg oil, salt

1. Brown the sausage on a non-stick large pan or wok, using a bit of veg oil. Reserve some if you want.
2. Add onion, turn the fire to low, and let them cook until transparent.
3. Add whisked eggs. Scramble them with a silicone spatula; they’ll stick to the other fillings but that’s OK.
4. Add maize meal, salt, hot pepper sauce, and a bit more of veg oil if necessary. Mix it constantly. When the meal darkens just a bit, turn the fire off but keep mixing it (as the pan heat might otherwise burn it). Transfer to two bowls and, if you reserved some sausage, add it as “garnish”.

Now thinking, the salt here is also a nice example of using the same ingredient twice. You need to season the eggs and the meal separately.

*I’ll provide a pic because I don’t know how to call this type of cornmeal in English. It isn’t the same as polenta:

Adding the same ingredient twice, for two different roles. A few examples:

• Tomato sauce: a single tomato, diced small, to add near the end, to improve the texture.
• Curry: half of the onion gets grated and goes in the roux, with a bit of baking soda (so it melts down). The other half is diced larger, and gets added near the end as a plain veg. As a result I get a thicker and tastier curry.
• Farofa: whatever filling I’m adding (pork rinds, bacon, banana, scrambled eggs…), I reserve some bits to add near the end as garnish. It’s both more pleasing to look and it allows people to pick a bit more of the filling if they so desire.
• Breaded anything: seasoning goes both in the marinade and the flour / breadcrumbs.

I always got this feeling that LMDE will eventually become Mint’s main distro, with the Ubuntu-based version slowly fading away.

About Kansas: I’m not sure but I feel like the humiliation is accidental, and yet the motivation resembles fascism in its own way - preventing the individual from choosing under the assumption that they’ll cause themself harm. As in, “if we let them buy steak they’ll wreck their budgets” style.

(It’s a discourse associated with authoritarianism, but authoritarianism is one of fascism’s “legs” anyway.)

In the case of the vegan mod: I’m really not sure if her bot complaining about “jerks” fits well with fascism. The humiliation that fascists complain about is not just about “wah, you were mean to me, I feel humiliated”; it’s more like “you’re humiliating me to drag me down from my rightful position”. To make it fascist she’d need to insert that into a context, like “if vegans weren’t so humiliated they’d be ruling the world/Lemmy!” or something like this.

And even irl regimes don’t always meet all the criteria - with only Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy having done so. “

Note that the criteria work more like a ladder than like a checklist. As in, to fulfill a criterion you need to fulfill the preceding ones. At most we could claim that she reached the third step (arrival to power), but her ability to exercise it is clearly handicapped (as in, the vegan community is clearly not buying her shit).

you definitely have read far deeper than I on this topic:-).

To be honest I didn’t. I’m actually defending my view but I’m aware that it might be completely wrong. I like discussing this stuff with you though.

Embrace the paradox: «è un schifo ale lubię to».

There was a time that people prefixed my nickname with “Wiki-”, because apparently I stand out for knowing a bit about everything. I don’t quite agree with it but hey, at least it’s something nice.

My accent (when speaking Portuguese) also stands out, apparently. Outside my city people are quick to identify where I’m from; and yet in my own city people often ask me where I’m from.

ignore this reply for a moment

Don’t worry, mate. Take your time!

“Authoritarian” does sound more accurate, and I do agree with you that it’s a bit too forceful.

On fascism, Robert Paxton has IMO a good definition. The key points are, basically

• Strength through unity and uniformity.
• Outsiders = enemies be damned. We only care about ourselves.
• Blame outsiders for our situation.
• You can’t choose things by yourself, trust a strong leader to do it for you.
• Violence is OK to use as long as it targets our enemies.

A lot of those points go completely orthogonal to both the bot+bot author, and the vegan comm mod (if she’s using that bot; I don’t know, it might be something she coded herself).

I also don’t see it as coming from the mod of the vegan community, even if I outright ridicule her actions as being shitty for the community, the Fediverse as a whole, and herself.

Also, for me it is not just the improper technique […]

I fully agree that it is spammy as fuck, over what would be remotely reasonable. And IMO Lemmy devs should be doing something to make modlogs easier to filter and audit.

(Your analogy with the salesman calls is perfect - the act itself wouldn’t be a big deal, if it wasn’t consistently obstrusive. I just want to dinner!)

I cannot block those modlog entries… right? (do you know?)

I don’t think that you can. And… yes, it leaves a sour taste in your mouth, it’s like someone from a shop telling you “YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!”. Even if you never entered the shop, and even if you don’t plan to do so.

It’s also a really shitty moderative practice. The whole idea of moderating is to stop people from ruining each other’s experience; and yet that’s exactly what they’re doing. (Perhaps I’m biased because I tend to issue a lot of warnings, but barely any ban. Still.)

Thus, these qualify as “attacks” under those circumstances - do they not?

I think so.

You know, the ban here was enlightening for me, about certain people from my social circles. Four examples:

1. Resumed Twitter shitposting in Bluesky. Different URL. No mention of Twitter.
2. Cheering Twitter being gone, as they were only using it due to their contacts, but felt like shit for doing it. Criticising how Moraes did it, but not the goal itself.
3. LARPs as against fascism but screeches nonstop in Bluesky about Twitter being gone, as they think that the world revolves around their own convenience.
4. Left microblogging altogether.

But I digress (as this has barely anything to do with the OP). Those people like Musk are bound to “creatively reinterpret” the words: in one situation orange is yellow, in another it’s red, both, neither. Sometimes it isn’t “ackshyually” related to red or yellow, it’s “inverted blue”. And suckers fall for it. That’s what Musk is doing with fascism.

I remember. And how much shit the community flung towards them. And their rep is still stained with it, as it should be.