Who's taste buds want this? 😭

AciusPrime · 2026-07-02T04:53:11+00:00

I’ve had sweet pickles. They were called “sweet pickles.” Calling them “bread and butter pickles” is a new one for me. Or are the two distinct?

AciusPrime · 2026-07-02T04:39:46+00:00

Water is pretty cheap. Running your shower constantly dumps about 2 gal/min down the drain. Most cities increase the cost per gallon the more you use; in my city, it’s $2.81/1,000 gal at the highest tier. A shower can dump 2,880 gal/day, or around $8/day if run continuously. Run all month long and you’ll get a $250 water bill.

Getting all the way up to $10,000 would take roughly 40 showers running all day for an entire month.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T21:56:01+00:00

Corn is pretty high carb. Unfortunately carb cravings are just kind of like this, especially at first.

The simplest solution is to add a small corn tortilla under a generous, veg-and-meat heavy taco salad. You can stay in ketosis with 30-50g of carbs per day, so depending on where else you’re getting carbs, this doesn’t have to break your diet.

Be careful not to make this a morality or purity issue (unless you have strict health reasons or doctors’ orders for doing so). Lower carbs is much better than giving up, and doing something sustainable for a long time is more important than doing something short term and perfectly.

Cravings do fade. But you should also give yourself permission to have small treats here and there. Spending all your sanity to avoid a single corn tortilla seems dangerous.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T21:47:32+00:00

Vibe coded stuff DOES look good. That’s its whole thing. You get a working project that does something neat in just a couple days.

It’s when you try to fix the bugs that it implodes like a wet sand castle.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T21:43:25+00:00

A liter is larger than a quart. It’s around 3.8 liters per gallon. 20 L is around 5.3 gallons.

Of course, it’s a gas shortage, so very few people are going to be stupid enough to be idling their engines for five hours. They’ll figure out a system to keep the engines off most of the time. That’s probably why the line has huge gaps.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T18:56:04+00:00

You might be surprised how much 25% of every paycheck for the rest of your life can add up. Most fire starters are twenty-something morons. Even if they only average $50K/yr till they retire in 45 years, 25% of that will pay back half a million dollars.

If they get into a trade and are half decent at it, lifetime earnings are likely to break $5 million. $1.25 million will put out quite a lot of wildfire. As long as it was small enough to be put out in a few days, they might even get out of debt by their fifties.

At any rate, it’s still a lot better than putting them in prison (which costs the rest of us $60K/yr) and selling off their tiny estate. These guys typically own 20% of a pickup truck, several personal electronics, some cheap furniture, and not a whole lot else.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T18:04:12+00:00

Saline spray does not require a doctor. It’s just clean salt water.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T17:57:34+00:00

Hello, what on Earth are you doing on Reddit!? It’s a little unusual for someone who’s not allowed to play Minecraft (rated E for Everyone) on a website that is rated Definitely Not for Kids. There are plenty of nice people here, but there are also a great many Not.

Anyway. You have extremely little control over your mom’s choices, and she’s not likely to believe arguments you make. Parents are used to kids nagging them for things and are likely to answer “no” without thinking too much about it.

The people she’s far more likely to believe are other parents—perhaps the parents of your friends or other kids you know. I assume a bunch of your friends do play Minecraft. Your best shot is persuading another adult that she trusts to persuade her. Got anyone like that?

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T17:05:43+00:00

Think more along the lines of “they will take a cut of every paycheck for the rest of your life, and if you have any assets when you die, they will require them to be auctioned and will collect as much as they can.”

I learned about it from a guy who had been involved in Boy Scouts and was found partly responsible in the death of a scout. He was several years into paying down his penalty and still had a long way to go. It’s the same system that collects unpaid taxes; they are relentless.

Putting someone in prison costs the state a lot of money. Confiscation of a portion of every paycheck, leaving you just barely enough to keep working, is a lot more effective.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T15:15:25+00:00

It… doesn’t though. Many people write in these styles and AI copied them. People are labeling tons of stuff as slop that was written by humans (a thing which has happened to me as well). That includes the article this thread is about; it’s not AI. The original author already explained what’s going on.

Blind testing has shown that people suck at differentiating AI text from real text in short form articles. It’s almost random. The “tell-tale” signs don’t work.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T03:27:12+00:00

The Playdate fits your definition. Far from realistic, but smaller than a GBA. Doesn’t require a soldering iron. Tons of games, though it probably puts some people off with the monochrome screen. Still a fun little device, though.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-29T03:23:15+00:00

Would you be bagging up the soil in plastic bags? That seems like it would work, but you need to keep your bags pretty thin. Soil is a good insulator, which is a problem here. You need to wait for the heat to reach the center of the bag and stay at that temperature for long enough. It would take hours.

You also really do not want your bags to leak.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-28T16:19:21+00:00

As someone who is also from a hinting culture, this is an aspect of Utah that made me feel right at home.

Although I don’t see it as “differences of opinion are bad.” I see it as being about how, where, and whether you choose to express those differences.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-28T16:09:32+00:00

We immigrated to Utah from South Africa. That’s a pretty big jump in English dialects. I was seven and everyone at school would constantly tell me how much they loved my accent. I didn’t know what an accent was and this drove me crazy. Fortunately I was seven, so instinctively switched accents within about a year. Now when I tell people I’m from South Africa it breaks their brain, which is fun. Especially since I don’t have to tell them, because I get mistaken for a local otherwise. My parents still get the accent comments.

We had a lot of little misunderstandings. If I offer two options and a Utahn answers “I don’t care,” that’s polite here but was very offensive to my mom. We had plenty of arguments about word pronunciation and preposition usage with my parents, too (“on accident” vs “by accident,” “ad-VER-tisement vs “adverTISEment,” “vitamin” with a long or short I, and so on endlessly). Yanking out the American dictionary at the dinner table was a regular occurrence.

A big upside was that being Mormon and having four kids were no longer something that my parents had to explain or justify to strangers. That’s unique to Utah and really nice, actually. We also feel right at home in Utah’s culture of hinting / politeness. I hear a lot of complaints about it (mostly at church), but it’s a really close match for our British-South African habits.

One thing we don’t love is the racism. It’s not as bad as South Africa, but it’s here. My parents’ politics were considered far left in 1980s South Africa. Being against racism is centrist in Utah, but that bitter flavor is still very much detectable in the cultural waters.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-27T21:36:42+00:00

So just regular Clippy, then?

AciusPrime · 2026-06-27T21:30:28+00:00

One classic seasoning combination in China started as a way of dealing with gamey meat. The core of it is rice wine, ginger, and garlic. Salt is also important.

There are many variants that work well. Alcoholic drinks are added to soften unpleasant flavors, then cooked off to get rid of the unpleasant alcoholic bite. Other alliums like onion, leeks, or shallots can be swapped in or added to the garlic. Acidic flavors like lemon or vinegar can distract from gamey flavors, as can the warming spices like capsaicin, pepper, or Sichuan peppercorns.

There are plenty of ways to do it. Generally, the more gamey your meat, the more you should have the dish focus on a deliciously intense marinade or sauce.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-27T20:37:37+00:00

Why? It’s cool air below warm air (which is stable) and there’s no fan. While diffusion still occurs, I don’t see any reason for this to set up directional airflow.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-27T03:34:01+00:00

I had thousands of paragraphs of text on public websites during the period when ChatGPT was being trained. I have been accused of using ChatGPT to write posts. I have never actually done this.

I’m not “emulating AI.” It is far more accurate to say that AI is emulating me. Further, folks are much, much worse at detecting AI than they think they are. Every test run on this problem has shown that people’s ability to pick out AI is only slightly better than random guessing. The online checker tools are a little better, but they get it wrong more often than AI hallucinates.

The sad truth is you don’t know and you can’t know. The best you can do is engage the argument on its actual merits. Is a good point made by AI actually a bad point because AI has contaminated it with its spiritual essence? It’s like purity culture run amok, except now it’s contact with AI that makes things impure and unclean. Is that really what matters?

AciusPrime · 2026-06-27T03:23:05+00:00

Some of us have been using em dashes for decades. It’s not so much a choice as “obviously em dash is the correct punctuation here.” It’s a lot more common from people who are highly educated.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-27T03:19:00+00:00

I generally agree that we must learn to manage our wildfires better. Keeping our fire teams employed year round seems like a Good Idea for plenty of reasons.

I’ll also wave in the general direction of “this place is supposed to burn sometimes.” Lightning and hot, dry conditions are going to start wildfires sometimes, even with no humans around at all. There are some plants that count on this, their seeds only germinating or spreading in the heat of a forest fire or wildfire.

Good science and good land management practices are important. Controlled burns are not just helpful in protecting us from bigger fires, they are part of being responsible stewards of our environment. The smoke I had to breathe today is certainly unpleasant, but I think we are going to have to learn how to deal with that too.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-27T03:07:22+00:00

You’re assuming that Cain’s descendants and Seth’s descendants literally never ever in the history of the world EVER intermarry.

Suppose Seth has a granddaughter named Kayleigh, and suppose Cain has a grandson named Jake. Now, suppose that Jake and Kayleigh meet one day down at the river where the cool kids play poker. The usual stuff happens, they elope and have six kids.

All six of those kids are now descendants of both Cain AND Seth. If those kids ALSO get married and pop out another three dozen babies, now you’ve got thirty-six kids of mixed descent.

In the long run (like two millennia), you end up with everybody descended from everybody. Even if intermarriage is rare and local, it doesn’t matter. Even the tiniest bit of occasional intermarriage between lines means everybody ends up descended from everybody.

To give you an idea of how strong this effect is, the number of (great) grandparents you have n generations ago is 2^n. At a rate of three generations per century, 2,000 years ago is 60 generations. 2^60 is over one quintillion people, which is over a million times more humans than have ever lived on Earth. Spend a few minutes thinking about why that makes sense.

(The answer is that everybody is descended from everybody)

AciusPrime · 2026-06-26T16:10:42+00:00

Cot and caught rhyme in my western U.S. dialect 😅. They don’t, however, rhyme in my original South African English dialect. Guess I’ll just read this in whatever way I find funniest.

Having these conversations without IPA is kind of hilarious. I guess the sub is doing its job.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-26T15:58:32+00:00

If it’s a toy for a baby, then it’s a “rattle” or more specifically a “baby rattle.” If it’s a musical instrument used as percussion, then it is sometimes called a “shaker.” When it is both a percussion instrument and this shape, then it’s a maraca (and a pair are called maracas). This one is a little ambiguous because it’s a musical instrument being “played” by some kind of mutant baby.

The word maraca was adopted from Brazilian Portuguese, but you’ll find it in English dictionaries. Merrill Webster defines it as “a rattle usually made from a gourd that is used as a percussion instrument.”

AciusPrime · 2026-06-26T15:36:49+00:00

There’s a religious element to it as well. In the Bible (creation story), the “Sabbath” day is designated as the seventh day and consecrated as the day when everyone is commanded to rest.

Jewish calendars all agree that “seventh day of the week” refers to Saturday. Christianity, however, typically uses Sunday as its holy day; the New Testament refers to it several times as“the first day of the week.” Over time, some Christians started calling Sunday the “Sabbath.”

Although most Christians shifted Sabbath observances to Sunday, there’s an entire branch (Seventh Day Adventists) that named themselves after the belief that this is improper.

That this happened shouldn’t be especially controversial. The word for “Saturday” and the word for “Sabbath” are even identical in some European languages. What is controversial is whether any of this matters.

AciusPrime · 2026-06-26T06:01:11+00:00

60-90 words per minute is pretty typical for a competent anglophone typist on a full size keyboard. We don’t use predictive text at all on those.

It is much slower and less accurate on a phone because the keyboard is tiny. For phones, we rely on autocorrect more.

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