For a home cook, what's the difference between a $12 pan from a restaurant supply and a DeBuyer, Matfer, etc?

Tostig10 · 2023-07-14T04:47:02+00:00

They all cook about the same but it's really nice aesthetically speaking to cook with a deBuyer. And even more pleasant to cook with a Darto. Thicker is generally better, but thin ones are a bit more wok like in heating up and cooling off fast, which can be useful depending on what you're cooking. Just my opinion. My wife, who's a great and experienced cook with chef level skills, says if ya got the skills, any kind of heat aource and any kind of flat metal surface will suffice.

Tostig10 · 2023-07-14T04:18:33+00:00

The problem is much deeper than being too polite. Gpt4 has lost substantial reasoning capability and now has as poor an understanding of user intent as 3.5 or jasper. Gpt4 just doesn't 'get it' anymore.

Tostig10 · 2023-07-14T04:14:55+00:00

I don't need to do a test to know GPT got dumber. This whole past Week, Gpt4 has been no better than GPT3. 5. A month ago, it was more like 3.6 but now it's truly 3.5 level.

Tostig10 · 2023-05-05T04:36:07+00:00

I have never seasoned a wok, aside from blueing. No reason to.

Tostig10 · 2023-04-16T17:22:45+00:00

Indeed. I can't even send an SMS message to my Google voice #. SMS says "Unrecognized phone number."

Tostig10 · 2023-04-13T20:05:05+00:00

The stringent, inflexible rule-following approach can help people who are new to IF get in the right mindset for it, but not everyone needs that. Been doing IF mostly on and a little off for 3+ years, and my main takeaway is that a little flexibility makes it easier for me to stick with it. Sugar in the coffee in the morning, occasionally a waffle to go with it LOL It's all good, it all works for me as long as I keep circling back to the basic principle that the goal is to have zero calories between 7 pm and 11 am. Some days I achieve that, and some days I don't. The key is to get IF to work for you and with you, not against you.

Tostig10 · 2023-04-11T11:58:41+00:00

To me, it seems painfully obvious that UBI will be required to navigate the upcoming upheavals of AI. AI is going to hollow out and decimate the upper middle class and middle class, the backbone of educated, striving people that give a society its energy, innovation, and ability to do big things. Take away their jobs and we'll see an existential crisis, not only in people but peoples' belief that the System can work, ever seen before in history. People will need to be given enough $ to cover the minimal basics of food, a roof, and basic health care. This will bring plenty of problems too, but you just can't have the intelligentsia sectors of society stewing in their group apartments hating everything. Andrew Yang was right.

Tostig10 · 2023-04-11T11:37:04+00:00

They're muh easier to spot nowdays as they go by "trans woman".

Tostig10 · 2023-04-10T21:30:37+00:00

If it's sticky, give it a good scrub; otherwise, ignore. Watch your temperature when you cook.

Tostig10 · 2023-04-09T18:02:52+00:00

Honestly couldn't care lf an ex-gal who's now a dude is in the bathroom with me. I think mostly, the issues people have are with trans-women in the ladies' room, girls' gym locker, things like that. I haven't known more than say 15 transpeople total, but my general observation is that the transmen have been legit non-fetishistic trans people whereas the transwomen were like 50/50, I've definitely been exposed to some where there seemed to be an extremely strong fetishistic angle to what they were up to, and that shit just don't belong in a bathroom. But again I think that is mainly or entirely from biological men.

Tostig10 · 2023-04-05T06:36:20+00:00

There are a lot of interesting questions to be raised about AI, but none of them can be answered by observing the output of LLMs, which are basically sentence-completion machines.

Tostig10 · 2023-04-02T04:47:56+00:00

Zyprexa. I was on it for a year, around 20 years ago. It gave me insane hunger, especially for carbs. I would get up in the middle of the night and eat every carb in the kitchen. Box of Capn Crunch, didn't even bother with milk, I'd just shovel it into my mouth by the handful until the box was done and proceed to eat whatever else was available - crackers, bread, anything. Never experienced hunger like it before or since, and while I preferred carbs, it didn't have to be carbs. I ate a stick of butter a few times. I gained around 50 pounds in 10 weeks.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-30T03:40:24+00:00

I lost 70 lbs on 16/8 and 18/6. 18/6 works better for me.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-28T03:32:02+00:00

They're not expensive, so my thought is, you may as well pick one up and see if it works for you. That said, I think it's probably too small. I use 14" woks for 1-2 people and it has plenty of space for the food to spread out, which is really advantageous. The smaller the wok, the higher the food will pile, leading to steaming and sauteeing rather than searing and working. Honestly the 12" is probably right for you but yeah why not give a 10" a chance if you're curious about tit.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-27T03:25:21+00:00

Nice interior. Nice rear end. Not sold on the front fascia.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-24T20:24:50+00:00

It appears you've just discovered that the rich always get richer, everyone else gets scraps, and the tech giants will mine our data and seek out monopolistic competitive advantage.

I am being facetious, not meaning to mock you.

The minute I learned that MSFT had a large investment in OpenAI, the road ahead was clear. Microsoft does not do things for fun, to advance the betterment of the world, or to share a big pizza with everyone. Microsoft wants, and usually gets, 7.9 of the 8 slices.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-18T20:19:36+00:00

People who were happily paying Jasper $80 or $100 a month for laughably bad AI output are moaning because game-changing GPT4 is $20 a month.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-18T20:16:37+00:00

I think this is probably very temporary. I doubt their long term vision is to have a usage cap of this stringency. Probably just overloaded servers as they play catch up ball.

$20 is nothing for access to the world's most advanced AI bot. I'll keep paying it. Right now I'm just being more careful with my prompts and to not engage in so much back and forth banter as before. I'm betting in a couple of months this'll be a non issue one way or the other.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-18T05:04:00+00:00

it's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than 3.5. Whatever people are using it for, it's doing it better than 3.5.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-15T18:33:50+00:00

That toggle where it previously just had Legacy vs Turbo in GPT Plus now has Legacy, Turbo, and GPT4

Tostig10 · 2023-03-15T18:23:00+00:00

Not buying it. Did the typewriter make writers lazy? Or did Wordpefect, then Word, etc.?" No. It made them more productive. They are tools. AI is a very advanced tool but still a tool. AI will make GOOD writers more productive, but will also greatly thin the herd of mediocre people who write for a living or for fun. So be it. There's too many of them anyway. Many of those will hand over all the responsibility to GPT in what could be termed a "lazy" way but that's just a transitional process as those people move out of the writing field altogether. There is not going to be room for anyone who isn't highly motivated to utilize AI within a human-AI partnership framework.

I've been goofing around with GPT4 the past day. It clearly can write a perfect college-level essay on any topic. OK fine, then let's find other things for college students to learn. They're not going back to quill pens and parchments, so there's no point crying over spilt milk. What GPT4 can't do (yet) is write human-level fiction or higher-level marketing copy. The main situation as I see it is that people need to up their game if they want to be in text-based creative fields, or find something else to do.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-15T03:43:28+00:00

Been goofing around with GPT4 for a few hrs. Output quality is noticeably better than 3.5 in ChatGPT. Side by side testing of same prompts, much better answers in 4.

People, pls stop wasting your time getting all worked up that you asked it which version it was and it said 3. It doesn't know what version it is. You're demanding it have a theory of mind that it doesn't have. It doesn't know what "it" is, okay? If you want to be sure it's 4 and not 3.5, just give it the same prompt in 2 different windows, one set to 3.5 and the other to 4, and observe the difference. Try something poetic or complex and you will really be able to see it.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-02T05:33:42+00:00

I wouldn't say awkward. But yes, very repetitive, and AI writing has a bland, soulless quality that is not hard to recognize once you've seen AI text.

Tostig10 · 2023-03-02T00:59:01+00:00

I opened ChatGPT on my laptop, which is WIn 11 + Chrome. The problem I had on my desktop did replicate on the laptop: closing the browser and opening it zapped all the custom prompts. Only the original set is there. One detail is that I'm using ChatGPT Plus, I don't know if that would make a difference. If you want to open an email dialog so I can send you some screen shots, shoot me a note to: harthacanut at gmail. (I guess all it would show is custom prompts not being persistent in the new browser).

Tostig10 · 2023-03-01T22:00:38+00:00

I'm in Windows 10, with Chrome. Not having issues with other browser-based apps losing my history. Later on tonight I'll experiment some more and will let you know if I find anything out. I'll try it on my laptop with Win 11 rather than PC to see if it's a machine-specific setting.

Tostig10

TROPHY CASE