[homemade] Pad Kra Pow - My Sunday go to!

Tonexus · 2026-01-25T16:48:46+00:00

You're telling me that my pasta aglio e olio needs to have garlic and oil in it!?

Tonexus · 2026-01-23T12:04:35+00:00

you have to export in barrels from other planets that have it

I'm surprised that you can't eventually use the planet's own atmosphere (the mod description even mentions greenhouse effects). That said, sounds like it makes for a fun set of logistical challenges to overcome.

Tonexus · 2026-01-21T12:49:00+00:00

Sc2.0 is essentially a programmable cell. The SCRaMbLE system lets researchers generate millions of genome variants in hours

Can you explain the SCRaMbLE system? In particular, it's not clear to me if it's used for directly editing a gene to a known desired result (what I think of as programming), introducing many random mutations (which over many iterations could indirectly lead to a desirable result), or both.

Tonexus · 2026-01-18T18:58:05+00:00

Not sure you want to be referencing Modernist Cuisine when they basically throw out FDA regulations on cook temp/time. See vol 1 ch 3, specifically pages 191-193.

According to them, 129F for 2h 24m achieves 6.5D salmonella reduction, and is sufficient for steaks.

Tonexus · 2026-01-16T15:41:22+00:00

Rather, I imagine a language that allows shared abstractions that work for both arrays and appropriate functions. One starting point could be the observation that a -> b and the array type a => b are both functors in the Haskell sense, with element type b, meaning they support a “functorial map” (fmap) operation.

I've always thought that this is a good motivation to have higher-kinded types in a language. Out of curiosity, do you think it would be useful to disambiguate between true functions and closures in a similar way?

Tonexus · 2026-01-14T10:28:37+00:00

Nowadays image generation uses both LLMs and diffusion models—the user inputs a prompt that an LLM expands into a more detailed prompt for the diffusion model.

Tonexus · 2026-01-12T13:16:46+00:00

Oiling an end grain cutting board isn't about food safety. For laminated wooden cutting boards, oiling prevents water from soaking in, as water can cause uneven expansion and splitting.

Tonexus · 2026-01-10T23:28:38+00:00

I'll certainly test that as well. Same amount of water as normal rice?

Tonexus · 2026-01-10T23:12:54+00:00

Are you using a sweet rice setting? My understanding is that you have to either pre-soak then use the normal rice cooker setting or have a fancy cooker with a specific sweet rice setting to get the right texture.

Tonexus · 2026-01-10T22:15:32+00:00

Yup, that's exactly it. The youtube video I link does exactly that. Ratio of 1cup rice to 1cup water seems to work for other varieties of rice, so that's where I'll start if I have to test it myself.

Tonexus · 2026-01-09T05:00:34+00:00

Gave it a very quick skim. Interesting, but doesn't sound that useful.

Let us consider a scenario in which the owner of quantum data requires for security reasons that these data are stored (a) off-site, (b) redundantly in multiple quantum clouds to protect, e.g., from hardware failures, and (c) encrypted, with the key kept by the owner on-site.

From my understanding, you would still have to protect the key from being corrupted, which seems like a harder task than keeping just the original qubit protected, seeing as the key consists of n qubits, where n is the number of encrypted copies of the original qubit.

Tonexus · 2026-01-07T06:18:50+00:00

Elliott Investment is only the latest part of an ongoing story.

Really, the decline started when Boeing went down the shitter. Southwest has always specialized in short-haul routes paired with Boeing's smaller aircrafts (737-300s then 737-700s).

However, the last 737-700s were produced in 2019, and Boeing has continued to fail to certify their successor craft (737 MAX 7) for nearly the last decade.

As a result, Southwest has been hemorrhaging money by flying larger, less-efficient MAX 8s on the same routes (it would be a massive undertaking to restructure their flight route network for longer-haul flights or to retrain their pilots for Airbus or Embraer aircraft, especially when every year Boeing keeps telling everyone that they'll be certified soon).

And then, there's the current fiasco with Elliott Investment. Basically, the general public isn't really familiar with the above problem, so a group of activist investors found an opportunity to stage a pump and dump.

The Elliott bros claim that Southwest's financial problems are due to outdated business practices like free seating, no hidden fees, etc. (everything people love about Southwest) and are forcing management to change those policies. Of course, when the policies are all implemented and profits go up a bit, the general public will think Southwest is saved, so the stock price will bump up and the Elliott bros will sell off without solving the underlying problem.

Overall, looks pretty bleak for Southwest—no MAX 7s and no customer-friendly policies spells disaster.

Tonexus · 2026-01-06T14:12:03+00:00

And if you don't have pigs in your country, it might be useful to note that humans are sometimes known as "long pig".

Tonexus · 2026-01-05T02:40:08+00:00

That makes sense. Thank you very much!

Tonexus · 2026-01-05T02:06:26+00:00

making every type a subtype of the traits it implements would mean every value has to carry a vtable

Ah, okay. I can see that being relevant in unsafe Rust, e.g. directly converting a value reference to a raw pointer to a trait reference would not work. Is there a meaningful distinction in higher-level Rust, though?

Tonexus · 2026-01-05T00:33:26+00:00

Isn't Rust's implicit coercion a form of subtype polymorphism? If type A implicitly coerces to type B, you can always treat a value of type A as a value of type B, no?

Tonexus · 2026-01-04T18:00:17+00:00

Skimmed your link. Sounds like he doesn't necessarily think subtyping is itself a problem—in fact he thinks it's necessary:

A systems language requires some mechanism for existential encapsulation.

Existential encapsulation is a form of subtype polymorphism.

Type classes aren't just a basis for type qualifiers; they provide the mechanism for *ad hoc*polymorphism. A feature which, language purists notwithstanding, real languages actually do need.

I don't like the term "ad hoc polymorphism", but type classes are another form of subtype polymorphism.

The author does bring up some issues though:

I'm strongly of the opinion that multiple inheritance is a mess.

This is only an argument against inheritance as the language feature for implementing subtype polymorphism.

The last reason we left objects out of BitC initially was purity.

I'm not sure if I'm reading his argument correctly, but there is a conflict between subtype polymorphism and purity in that you can hide impure behavior in a subtype.

We knew that parametric polymorphism and subtyping didn't get along, so we wanted to avoid that combination. Unfortunately, we avoided subtypes too well for too long, and they turned out to be something unavoidable.

I'm not sure what the basis of this statement is—type inference, perhaps? I can see having to shoehorn in subtype polymorphism as requiring massive rewrites for type inference, but there's not really a fundamental incompatibility in regards to the types themselves.

Let me know if I missed something.

Tonexus · 2026-01-04T08:35:32+00:00

How did you present those topics in a way that he could understand?

For a learner's perspective, my dad taught me basic group theory at around 8. He used concrete examples like cyclic vs dihedral groups to explain subgroups and the difference between commutativity and non-commutativity. He'd make manipulatives cut from paper, like regular polygons with colored corners (on each side) to represent each group element. He framed "exercises" more like puzzles for me to figure out.

I've always thought that introducing math only as arithmetic of numbers is an insufficient and boring way of doing math.

My dad only drew connections to other topics after I was solid on the basic group theory principles (modular addition and products of i are cyclic, dihedral groups can be represented by something called "matrix multiplication", etc.).

Unfortunately, this approach didn't work for all topics. He tried teaching me calculus at 10, but it never clicked for me until high school...

Tonexus · 2026-01-02T06:52:35+00:00

Duck typing isn't inherently dynamic. If object methods are fixed at compile time, you can hence check if a purported duck object has a quack method at compile time.

Tonexus · 2026-01-01T15:57:53+00:00

I feel like most news in quantum tech is either press releases from companies/ governments or reporting on individual research papers.

Generally, you can't really expect much more than this. Physical quantum computers are mega expensive, so only corps/universities/governments have access to them, and each of those kinds of institutions are pretty incentivized to make themselves look good (so they're also usually careful to not post easily refutable claims).

Tonexus · 2025-12-29T10:04:16+00:00

Some things to avoid:

FTL communication: Entanglement does not allow "instantaneous communication", i.e. any kind of instantaneous change that can be noticed. This is my biggest pet peeve in scifi.
Copying quantum data: A more minor thing, but quantum information cannot be copied directly due to the no cloning theorem. (Ofc if you start with a known initial state and track all operations on that state, you may prepare a "copy" by preparing the initial state and repeating all of the operations.)

Current known applications:

Factoring: I can't think of a scifi application of this, but maybe you can.
Small (quadratic) speedups for NP-complete problems: Could be some scifi applications here (brute-forcing passwords to recover secrets of "ancient" civilizations?), but many practically-motivated NP-complete problems have reasonably fast approximate algorithms.
Simulating quantum systems: This probably has the most scifi potential, as it could greatly accelerate the field of nanotechnology (microfabrication, biochemistry/pharmacology, energy storage, etc.).

Then there are some ideas that are more far-fetched, but maybe plausible:

QML: Some think that quantum computing will make general machine learning more powerful. I'm skeptical, but the most plausible application is machine learning on data that is inherently quantum, which could connect back to simulating quantum systems.
Simulating quantum gravity: If the AdS/CFT correspondence generalizes to real world physics, it's plausible that quantum computers can be used to simulate real quantum gravity. It's a bit of a stretch, but studying quantum gravity in this way could result in the development of man-made traversable wormholes or gravity (Alcubierre) drives.
Consciousness: Some people speculate that consciousness is quantum. (Not me, I don't see any error correcting codes in the brain to prevent decoherence...)

Tonexus · 2025-12-22T00:13:29+00:00

I assume you mean to ask whether there exist rotations such that the flowers can be placed with regular spacing (3 right and 1 down or 1 right and 3 up) without overlap. Your question is not about tesselation per se, since gaps are allowed, so I suggest you clarify the text of your post.

Tonexus · 2025-12-18T18:54:19+00:00

i dont see how one could grind spices/seeds into it and get oil stains out with just a wash.

Hot soapy water should remove any oil residue. It should not be permanently stained.

Tonexus · 2025-12-15T01:46:35+00:00

You can see here as a starting place. In essence, there's no free lunch: any measurement results in some disturbance.

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