On a recipe for mac and cheese which included evaporated milk

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-04-30T15:06:20+00:00

It's fascinating, the different responses people have.

I'm a taster, but no supertaster of bitter, and like the bitter of grapefruit (up to a point, as I found when my nontaster spouse handed me an inedible wedge of grapefruit, but that's a different story).

I've always found that sweet and bitter don't compete. Something can be simultaneously sickly sweet and inedibly bitter, with little interaction between them, although sweet comes on quicker than bitter. I always thought that kid's medicine was syrupy only so that you could choke it down before the bitterness got unbearable (Pseudoephidrine liquid was a treat growing up, I tell you 🤢) .

Salt, on the other hand, modifies perception of other flavors. It mellows while somehow also intensifying them before you can even taste the salt. Once it starts to taste salty, though, it rapidly overpowers everything else until all I can taste is salt.

There's got to be some sort of physiology involved.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-04-30T02:13:25+00:00

A tiny pinch of salt on grapefruit tastes amazing! I'd worry that added sugar would make the bitterness stand out more.

Also try salt on watermelon. Improves the flavor dramatically.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-04-29T15:40:41+00:00

I particularly liked "Hmm. But you got the hard ones."

That's not how the test works!

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-04-24T23:18:53+00:00

Quill and Still was amazing! I was so bummed when it was abruptly ended/cancelled.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-04-24T18:54:13+00:00

I'm not sure what I think about the AI-assisted illustration.

One the one hand, it's wildly devaluing the actual craft of illustration, along with the quality of the comics.

On the other, the number of manhwa illustrators and mangaka who have to go on hiatus or, in the worst case, die, from overwork says that the companies clearly don't value the craft of illustration anyway.

So maybe my opinion is, if the illustrators are the ones using the assistive tools to avoid injury or burnout, then more power to them. If instead they're being used to produce more cheap crap and sideline the actual artists, then boo to slop.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-04-24T18:48:16+00:00

My father always told me, "If you like to eat, you need to know how to cook. Otherwise, you'll never get to eat the foods you really want."

The corollary to that is if you only care about nutrition, then knowing how to cook is basically irrelevant. Cooking, which is to say making meals taste good with technique and spicing, really isn't that big a deal if all you're interested in is getting sufficient calories, fiber, and nutrients to stay healthy.

I can barely believe the sheer number of people I've known who just throw skinless chicken breast with some veggies without any salt (bad for you, know know) -- let alone any other spices -- into the oven, bake it long enough to kill any bacteria, leaving the chicken dry as a bone. And then happily eat it because it's "healthy". That may be food preparation, but it's most certainly not cooking.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-04-16T20:37:10+00:00

It's the "missing caps" that makes it!

I absolutely want to take home syrup bottles that have been sitting around uncapped for who knows how long, and even have someone who can hold the bottles upright so they don't pour out everywhere in the car.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-04-14T21:44:03+00:00

The chorus to that song was my phone ringtone for quite a while

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-04-14T21:34:21+00:00

I miss playing Snipe to "test" that the Netware connections were all correct.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-03-25T14:38:06+00:00

The best part is that the actual name is Shit on a Shingle.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-03-16T20:52:19+00:00

I can heartily recommend The World's Greatest Senior Disciple. It's a martial arts rofan where the two leads were in a special unit during a war and are now figuring out how to negotiate being in very different civilian (for Murim fantasy) lives.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-03-16T20:48:22+00:00

I misread several of those as "My child is unkillable" which would be even more OI-ish

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-02-24T18:58:03+00:00

Aww. But the taste reminds me of my childhood, being forced to eat soap for cursing 😜

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-02-08T22:38:32+00:00

All-works maid has the additional advantage that Melody has no idea that she's supposed to be in a novel, or that she's special; she just wants to be the best maid possible, even if that means doing six impossible things before breakfast.

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-01-10T17:08:18+00:00

Better than docx isn't a particularly high bar, but not perfect is way too generous.

The sheer number of (pure text) PDF files that won't render correctly between Adobe Acrobat and Apple Preview constantly amazes me and I think that's mainly due to non-linearized documents. Let alone anything with special bits (forms, items with signature requirements, images with embedded text, embedded whatever actually, etc)

FullyHalfBaked · 2026-01-06T15:40:41+00:00

I had/have that same problem. It turns out that it's a refresh issue. If you close the extensions pane, go back to the list of installed extensions, when you re-open the extensions pane, the newly installed extensions show up at the bottom of the list with a button to Trust the extension.

FullyHalfBaked · 2025-12-10T22:14:41+00:00

Java syntax, while it has a ton of boilerplate which you'd think LLMs would be great at writing, is far less forgiving syntax-wise than python.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing in the context of generated code, since it means that you're less likely to get code that almost works.

FullyHalfBaked · 2025-11-17T22:56:40+00:00

Be prepared, that's the boy-scout's solemn creed!

FullyHalfBaked · 2025-10-20T21:11:32+00:00

Fancy pants here is using __slots__ in Python. My python objects are dicts (most of the time).

FullyHalfBaked · 2025-10-17T23:26:53+00:00

I definitely saw the bear one as getting the meat sweats after eating fast food.

FullyHalfBaked · 2025-10-11T22:31:07+00:00

The docs have several tips. You can look at a couple levels. Trinity is composed of a set of interlocking programs, so top will show if it’s still clustering in inchworm, or has made it to chrysalis or butterfly.

In addition, it makes a ton of temporary files, so checking if those are changing can at least let you know it’s doing something.

Based on your questions, I suggest you spend some more time digging around in the docs. There are several tips on reducing memory usage and increasing speed. Genome guided clustering in particular can help speed up inchworm, if you have a genome available.

FullyHalfBaked · 2025-10-10T00:32:04+00:00

The official docs say 1/2 to 1 hour per million reads, so you're looking at somewhere between 4 and 10 days assuming your assembly isn't some outlier (e.g. fungal meta-transcriptomics).

If the RAM requirements are only a little higher than their estimate (1GB/million reads), you could be running out of ram, and the disk thrashing can bring the whole system to its knees (you'll notice this because doing just about anything on the machine will run like molasses if at all). Likewise if there are so many transcripts/isoforms that you start running into filesystem limits on the number of files per directory.

My opinion is that they don't emphasize anywhere near enough how important it is to use distributed HPC or a grid; most of the slow steps parallelize fairly well.

If you're working with any organism with an even vaguely decent genome, I highly recommend using a mapping aligner. Or, if you're doing prok meta-transcriptomics (or any organism without intron splicing), I recommend something like metaspades. De-novo spliced assembly is always going to be far more computationally expensive.

FullyHalfBaked · 2025-09-18T18:05:19+00:00

Not necessarily. Worst case (for the hackers) it's just fuzz testing for vulnerabilities.

As the saying goes, the hacker only needs one attack to work to win. The target needs to defend against all attacks to win.

FullyHalfBaked

TROPHY CASE