Salt meats the night before you cook them. Especially tougher cuts, but salt is good for all cuts.

Browning ground beef really means getting a sear on part of it, not just making it not pink. And split it into batches so that you don’t have all the water coming out and boiling the meat instead of searing it.

When baking, weigh ingredients. Most of cooking is art; baking is science.

Fi makes it pretty clear that use outside the US is meant to be temporary (unless you’re on military duty overseas). The person you replied to got a really long run and honestly has no cause for complaint.

And Wirecutter used to be good but they will occasionally point out how highly rated something is, and cross checking against falespot et al indicates a lot of fake reviews.

Some guy in the UK was allegedly convinced by his chatbot girlfriend to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. He just got sentenced a few months ago. Of course he’s been determined to be psychotic, but I could imagine people who would qualify as sane getting too deep and reading too much into what an AI is saying.

I’ve played with Bard a little, asking it for details in public-domain novels I’ve read, and 3/4 of the time it is just making shit up. But it’s great at solving quadratic equations.

SEO, people trying to game SEO in a hundred different ways, and garbage scammy websites with no clear purpose have pretty much ruined search results. I remember the ancient days of Google when search brought you maybe 3 or 4 pages of results. This is why AI has become necessary, to winnow through the garbage and give you direct, and hopefully correct, answers.

I’ve tried Soylent, Huel, and Jimmy Joy. Each has their own advantages and disadvantages. Soylent has a very smooth texture but not too many flavors, Huel and JJ have great flavor variety but a more grainy texture. Huel (and I think JJ now too) have hot meals which are pretty good and a nice change of pace from cold drinks.

I use them partly for convenience and partly because they have a good amount of fiber which I sometimes don’t get enough of. I don’t really have the self discipline or the willingness to eat the same thing 3x/day in order to put exactly X number of calories in me so I can lose weight.

I really prefer self-checkout too. There was an initial year or two when the machines were kinda buggy and did that “unexpected item in bagging area” a lot, but you work around it: just never put your shopping bag on the scale. I scan fast and efficiently, and start bagging my stuff while the payment card is doing its thing. And when I bag my own stuff I can be sure the bread is going to be on top.

The only things I run into trouble with these days: 1. when the backend database doesn’t have the right info, like some produce type is entirely missing, or the only option is for organic(=more $ and you know darn well you’re not going to select that one). 2. Some stores don’t use the barcode on the fruit labels, and you scan the label by accident or out of habit because the other store does use those barcodes. Both situations need a clerk to clear them, and that’s 90% of the delay.

I wish I knew why Target is limiting to 10 items. It’s pretty annoying. I suspect that theft is what’s driving retailers away from it, rather than customers hating it.

buggier than an ActiveX plugin running on IE5

💀

Well, everyone is in a hurry sometimes; sometimes you suddenly realize you need a certain piece of clothing clean asap. I could see a notification being useful to busy parents with teenagers with a lot of laundry to be done. I’ve heard of families that do multiple loads every day.

My washer has WiFi but I’m sure as hell not turning it on. It tells me how long the cycle will be a few minutes after it starts and I’ll just set a timer on my phone - though most of the time I don’t bother because I never have so many loads that time is important.

That’d be нет

And I wonder how do they define ‘credible’? Are they literally going to research a writer to determine if they’re capable of following through on their threats?

I’m going to keep it as long as I can. It’s not often that I use it, but it can’t be beat for quick one-off things where I need font formatting (Notepad can’t) like address labels or recipes. I use Libre Office for its spreadsheet, haven’t really tried the word processor, but I totally do not need a full fledged word processor for that stuff.

Every night ! I listen to a sleep podcast. I recently changed to a phone without a 3.5mm jack and was kinda scrambling to figure out an alternative. I had a splitter for power and headphones, but it didn’t work the way I thought it should: I was used to unplugging the headphones from the phone and that would automatically pause the audio, and plugging in would resume. For some reason (perhaps cheapness) the splitter reported the headphones as present whether or not headphones were actually connected. I ended up getting a BT dongle which has a pause button and I can just take it with when I step away from the phone.

Yes, that’s actually exactly what I ended up buying. It’s got a pause/play button, so I hit that and take the whole thing with me.

That means the charging cable also needs to be unplugged if I want to step away. Thanks for the info about it not being normal, I guess I just got a POS splitter.

I recently bought a phone that lacked a 3.5mm jack, so I bought a splitter with a USBC charging port and a headphone jack. The problem I encountered was that the splitter reported to the phone that headphones were connected even if they were not. I was used to unplugging the headphones and have playback automatically pause, and resume when the headphones were put back in. With the splitter I was no longer able to do that. I don’t know if I bought a cheap ass splitter or if that’s the normal behavior for these things.

Waiting in the self checkout is kind of frustrating that way. But in the manned checkout you’ll still get the customer who waits until the bill is totalled before taking out their wallet and digging through for cash or card, as if they somehow expected not to have to pay. I’m pretty efficient in self checkout e.g bagging stuff while the payment is processing.

There’s a restaurant in Florida that serves fruit bat. Not sure if it’s still around but it can be googled.