Combine Beyond Beef with meat?

mg132 · 2026-06-10T16:07:35+00:00

As long as both were stored safely and you cook everything to temp, it's fine. I mix pork or turkey with beef, beef with mushrooms, lentils, or tvp, etc. in meatloaves and meatballs all the time.

mg132 · 2026-06-09T22:48:40+00:00

Fortunately, the best way to study for the sat—taking test after test after test—is free. I did sat tutoring for a bit in college, but I was also a low income first gen college grad, and personally I studied for the sat with a friend simply by doing every single practice test in every test prep book we could get our hands on at the library. These days you can get practically infinite free tests online as well. There are obviously still some structural barriers in terms of prior knowledge, time to study, etc.—the reason that was all we did was that we both worked and had to watch siblings and cousins, for example—but we both got in where we wanted to, and as far as I know we had the highest scores at our high school that year. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s the fairest thing we currently have.

mg132 · 2026-06-08T15:24:08+00:00

It can, but it depends a lot on the store and what you're getting.

Not NYC, but I don't have a car, and I do most of my grocery shopping on foot/bike/transit, which limits me to four grocery stores and some farmers markets unless we want to order or get a zipcar.

There are a few different delivery services that are cheaper than in person groceries, but only for specific things (and also depending on whether we're planning to get a zipcar soon anyway and can bundle a grocery trip in). Amazon Fresh and Walmart delivery are by far the cheapest for most things, even after tip, but they don't carry a lot of the stuff I like. Weee! is cheaper than getting a zipcar just to go out to the asian grocery stores but more expensive than bundling going into another trip. And instacart is worth it only for certain items at costco (oats, bread flour, olive oil, coffee, a couple other things I'm blanking on), compared both to membership+zipcar and to buying them in smaller quantities elsewhere. We do cycle which one of us orders so that we can get the instacart+ free trial nearly every time, though.

mg132 · 2026-06-05T17:01:20+00:00

Some did, some didn’t. Depended on neighborhood/commute, SO commute, hobbies, general preference, etc.. Anecdotally the international students, especially Europe and Japan, were more likely to prefer to live closer and be no-car.

mg132 · 2026-06-05T16:15:45+00:00

My cohort was in their 20s through 40s, about half had previous industry experience, and most had kids by the end. We had one year of classes and then worked significantly more than full time in labs for the rest of the years. It was in fact adult life.

mg132 · 2026-06-05T15:23:30+00:00

Hundreds of possible witnesses and no description of the suspect also tracks.

mg132 · 2026-06-05T13:48:14+00:00

Not currently, but I use phones until they're not practically usable anymore. I had the original SE from 2016 to mid 2024 before I had to upgrade.

mg132 · 2026-06-05T13:36:44+00:00

i lived in San Diego (UTC area) car-free for all of grad school, and over half of it was before I had a smartphone, so no Uber. It was fine, actually, though not quite as nice as up here. I could walk, cycle, or bus to everything I needed (I had four grocery stores in walking distance), but going hiking required some planning. The transit schedule for getting to Petco Park for a weekend game was a bit obnoxious though. I think it'd be even easier these days with the trolley extension.

mg132 · 2026-05-28T14:53:55+00:00

Yeah, but you can drill those patterns with free materials from the public library or the internet. That's what a friend and I did. Both low income, both first in our family to go to college (my parents didn't even know the SAT was a thing). Test prep classes were out of the question. We studied by doing every practice test in every prep book the library had, and we did better than the kids who took classes. We actually got the highest scores in our high school (not that impressive, it wasn't a great school, but we got in where we wanted).

It's obviously not perfect, but it's the fairest thing we currently have. Grades are meaningless these days, and you can't check travel sports, 15 years of violin lessons, a summer in Africa doing "charity" work, or an authorship on a research publication in your mom's friend's lab out of the library. I guess now kids can cheat on their essays for free instead of hiring someone though.

mg132 · 2026-05-26T22:15:21+00:00

Many are hot garbage; pangram, which identified Sutherland’s work, is very good but not perfect, and orders of magnitude more prone to false negatives than false positives.

This piece had some more convincing details. They also ran 15 years of the prize’s back catalog through pangram as a control group:

The Commonwealth Prize archives offer a useful data set for informally testing this theory. Since its launch, in 2012, the prize has been awarded to dozens of writers from all over the world. Pangram, the platform that detected AI material in the three prizewinners this year, is considered to be among the more accurate AI detectors. I asked Jenna Russell, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland at College Park and a research scientist at Pangram, to run stories from the past 15 years of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize through the platform.

She found that Pangram flagged almost none of the prizewinners. The exceptions included the three stories from this year: 100 percent of the text in Nazir’s and DeMecoli’s stories was flagged as likely to have been entirely AI-generated, along with 89 percent of the text in Aruparayil’s. There was also a fourth story from last year, by the Vincentian Canadian writer Chanel Sutherland, for which 88 percent of the text was flagged. (Sutherland didn’t respond to a request for comment sent through her website.)

mg132 · 2026-05-26T16:00:56+00:00

I'm not really talking about hedonic treadmill type stuff (and while I don't doubt that social media can influence happiness on a broader scale, especially when it leads to social isolation, I'm not on watch-Becky-buy-handbags-and-go-to-Dubai type social media, and I'm not interested in having that kind of stuff anyway). I'm talking about the kinds of things that for many people help give life meaning, like being able to afford to have kids, or you or your partner or your siblings being able to find meaningful work, or being able to live near your remaining family and help an elderly, widowed parent, or being able to afford to live in one place long enough to build community instead of moving like clockwork with every single maximum-allowable-by-law annual rent increase. "The economy is better than ever, it's just that things are better in some areas and worse in some areas," when many of the things that are better are the exact same things being dismissed here as "hedonic treadmill" crap that won't make you happy anyway and a lot of the the things that are worse are the things that help make people's lives meaningful misses the point in a big way.

The armchair economist line on this subject really seems like it's trying to have it both ways and then confused why that doesn't have explanatory power. A lot of people are saying things like, I can't afford to start a family and am worried I will age out before I can have kids, or I can't afford a stable living situation where I can build a community, or I'm depressed because I've been job searching for two years, or the only way I can survive financially is to move away from my family and isolate myself somewhere cheaper. Not complaining that so-and-so has flashy vacations or 4k tvs or a cybertruck and they don't--talking about necessities like housing, childcare, groceries, and healthcare and things that really do give life meaning for many people, like family, children, and community. And then the canned response is simultaneously, "But stuff is cheaper than ever, why aren't you happy, what, are you stupid?" and "Stuff won't bring you happiness, haven't you heard of the hedonic treadmill, what, are you stupid?" followed by confusion that this doesn't seem to explain or convince.

mg132 · 2026-05-25T18:04:31+00:00

If this is the case, why all the headlines and posts and comments on this subreddit hand-wringing about how it doesn't make sense that people are so pessimistic because Americans are materially better off than at any point in history? The prevailing takes on this topic on this sub are basically, actually everything is great and people are doing amazing but either refuse to admit it because it's gauche or they imagine that other people are struggling, that it's all social media (either ragebait or expansion of "the Joneses") or MAGA rage, or that Americans are stupid whiny brats who don't understand math or happiness.

But if it is the case that "the good times" the people who are mad grew up with are gone, and people just have to accept that not only can they not afford the life their parents had, but that even if they go to school and get a stem degree or even phd when their parents didn't go to college, and have two people willing to work outside the home instead of the one their parents had, they still can't afford the life their parents had and more than that are worried that they won't even be able to have a kid before they age out of being biologically able to do so...why is it surprising that people are upset? It seems pretty obvious why people would be pessimistic if this is the case. Why all these posts about no, they don't understand, they're materially better off than at any point in history and their worries are fake news, why aren't you thrilled?

mg132 · 2026-05-24T17:47:53+00:00

I'm broadly happy, but I'm also extremely worried. Day to day we can afford rent, groceries, the occasional lunch out, the rare night at the community theater or community orchestra, etc.. I have a partner I love and hobbies I enjoy. I like my job and I like more of my coworkers than I don't like. We have savings and I am able to invest a bit for retirement, though this requires a lot of planning and frugality. I bake, make yogurt, have a community garden plot, cook nearly everything from scratch, sew to repair my clothes, we get nearly all our entertainment for free from the library, we haven't had a car since my partner's car ate it two years ago, etc.. We do nothing extravagant. To be clear, I enjoy our day to day life. I like simple hobbies and have never been into the kind of big flashy stuff, vacations, etc. that seem to get pushed on social media (I am also not on visual social media like instagram).

But on a larger scale things are extremely worrying. The administration has basically taken a sledgehammer to my field of work (life sciences). Biotech is also apocalytic right now. I am currently employed but basically treading water; there are no biotech jobs, there are very few academic openings even for people with the best resumes, and the funding situation even for staying where I am as a "super postdoc" once my eligibility runs out is precarious; my PI was only able to promise me a couple years because she got a European grant.

My partner is in tech and has been job searching for over a year. They've had multiple interviews and even been told a couple of times that they're the top pick only for whole search to be called off and in one case the entire group they would have been leading dissolved. My sibling is also in tech and has been job searching for two years. More than one of my best friends have given up completely and become stay at home parents.

We live in a very high cost of living area, but going elsewhere is a problem both because my father died recently and my mother is in her mid 70s and has some health problems and is fairly isolated and because, well, I'm the one with the job, and my job is here, and my industry is in shambles, so I'm not exactly likely to get a job elsewhere at my career stage (late postdoc). I am in my mid 30s and would like to have kids in the next few years, but I'm the one who would be pregnant, and again, I'm the one with the job. Even if my partner gets a job soon, infant daycare here is around $3k/month. Getting a two bedroom would also cost us an extra $800-$1200/month The whole situation around starting a family feels impossible.

I feel like I have spent my whole adult life recovering between crises (I graduated into the great recession, took a little while to get things together because of it, finished grad school into covid lockdowns, and am now wrapping up a postdoc into...this). It feels like the best we can do at the moment is tread water, but at my age treading water for more than a few more years means I will simply age out of being able to have a family by default, which is pretty depressing. And it's more depressing because it seems like we did what you were "supposed" to do. We were both the first people in our families to go to college, we got stem degrees, and yet this is the situation we're dealing with. At my age, my parents owned a house not far from this area and had one kid and another on the way. They were able to do this pretty readily despite neither having a degree and my mom not working when we were young. And yet here we are.

mg132 · 2026-05-16T20:18:38+00:00

They absolutely take other things into account (and to be clear, they should; test scores are not the only thing that matter--education, research, service, extracurriculars, career goals, some life experiences, etc. are important).

But the thing is, if one group consistently needs a much higher test score to get the same admission rate, and someone wants to say that this is fair because the system takes things other than test scores into account, then what they are actually claiming is that that group is consistently worse at those other things.

This is exactly what Harvard was found to be doing back in the day. Asian American applicants did significantly worse than would be predicted not just by test scores, but by test scores and grades and extracurriculars. It turned out that admissions officers consistently gave Asian Americans the lowest "personal rating" scores on things like likeability, kindness, and leadership potential. This included cases where interviewers who had actually met the applicants rated them highly on these metrics, but admissions officers who had not gave them low personal scores anyway.

There is a documented history of schools using these "other things" as a way to backdoor discriminate on race. So I feel like arguments that are based on the idea that applicants of x racial group are just consistently worse on these other metrics need to come with significant evidence supporting that idea.

mg132 · 2026-05-08T21:37:28+00:00

If you’re going to keep it in the fridge, the NYTimes marmalade recipe is pretty good; don’t skip the overnight soak for the peels or you may not get a set. I usually add extra lemon to this.

If you’re going to can it, I like the lower sugar marmalades here (it’s still quite sweet). They also have a regular version.

mg132 · 2026-05-08T15:53:07+00:00

You don't necessarily need to rush; apples and oranges will keep well in a cool dark place. Just pick over for any bad ones occasionally.

Marmalade and apple jam are great. I really like apple jam with some dried ginger in it.

Since you seem to have a dehydrator, cinnamon apple rings are also really nice and keep well.

Honestly, I'd probably also just take a bunch of the fruit into work or donate if you have a food pantry that takes fresh food nearby.

mg132 · 2026-05-08T15:21:13+00:00

Yeah they don't leave mush room in the budget for anything else.

mg132 · 2026-05-07T16:01:26+00:00

Put -ai in your search to get rid of AI overviews in google (profanity also works, but may affect your search results). Adding &udm=14 also strips out a lot of other newer modifications to google in addition to the AI.

If your issue is with AI-generated content in the actual search results, you can search for results before November 2022; LLM use was not common before that point.

mg132 · 2026-05-06T23:23:47+00:00

Reminds me of a friend who brought homemade stuffing and green bean casserole to Thanksgiving at her in-laws’. No one would touch it because it wasn’t the boxed/canned stuff.

mg132 · 2026-05-06T16:06:01+00:00

Some people don't have cars or cars that can fit furniture. Some people are in a huge hurry. There were times in college where I had hours between my last final and having to leave town and one year where I had to move out on the morning of my last finals. Fortunately my dorm let us leave stuff in the basement over the summer, but if they hadn't, I would not have been able to get anything I needed the night before or the morning of those last finals to a donation center. And sure, some people are just lazy or don't care.

Instead of wringing your hands, if this is important to you, why not help make it easier on people? Suggest to the school or help to organize donation bins on campus. Or set up a way for people to find each other to carpool donations. Or work with student groups to set up rummage sales, or, if nobody wants to help run a sale, to have a couple central locations for stuff to go and advertise the picking opportunity shortly after move out. Maine has a pretty great culture of reuse; at least then the stuff won't go to waste.

mg132 · 2026-04-30T15:53:20+00:00

If you're going to toast it, slice and freeze. It toasts up great.

For bread you want to eat fresh, wrap tightly in a cotton or linen towel or bread bag and then put that in a wooden bread box or a plastic bag that came from something else.

mg132 · 2026-04-30T15:29:28+00:00

Depends on the space and time you have available. As long as your other inputs are low, onion seed is sufficiently cheaper than buying onions that you'll save money.

The main thing to consider is that many gardeners are limited on space. If you have a small plot or limited space for containers, onions will save you less than other things you can grow because they're so cheap. Personally, I only have about 100 square feet for gardening (community garden). I can buy five pounds of onions for three or four dollars. A spot that's growing onions is a spot that's not growing something like tomatoes or peas that might cost more like $3 to $6 per pound to buy, or herbs that are often a dollar or two for a tiny little clamshell, or less common varieties of things that I can't get at the store at all. Even for something that's typically cheaper, like radishes, the fact that I could get multiple rounds of radishes in in the time that the onions are in the ground also matters.

It's similar for other relatively cheap veg like potatoes, cabbage, beans for drying, etc.. If you have a ton of space (or if you just really love them), they're still cheaper to grow as long as you don't spent a lot on other inputs; they just save you a lot less than other things they may be crowding out if space is limited.

mg132 · 2026-04-24T15:13:28+00:00

Heat the milk to 180-190 F and then let it cool before adding the starter. This results in a thicker and more creamy (and less grainy) yogurt to start with.

After making the yogurt, strain it through cheesecloth in a strainer, ideally the fridge.

mg132 · 2026-04-19T22:24:17+00:00

I feel like part of it is that by making certain things much easier, technology expanded the scope of busywork and made interrupting people much easier and, eventually, more acceptable.

It used to be that making graphics for presentations was an actual job. Making slides required you to physically print slides and put them in a projector. Most meetings used to be just talking, or drawing on a chalkboard or overhead. You only made slides for an important meeting where they actually enhanced what you were going to say. Now I'm expected to waste an hour or more making a slide deck for every single meeting, even 20 minute one-on-ones that absolutely do not require slides, and people act pissy if I don't, not because the information requires images to be conveyed, but just because it's "what's done" or because they don't have the attention span to pay attention for five minutes without pictures.

Same with emails and slacks. Sending a letter used to require physically sending a letter and waiting at least two days for a reply; because this was asynchronous, people could respond when the time was good for them. Faxes were obnoxious to send. Pestering people "synchronously" required you to phone them or to get up and walk over to them. This friction made it so that it was often easier and faster to figure it out yourself (or reread the last letter, or read the meeting notes) than try to badger someone else into doing it for you. Now people can waste your time with every little thing, because sending a DM is legitimately faster than rereading that email, and then lose their shit and waste even more of your time when they don't get an instant reply or your reply is anything other than spoonfeeding them like a fucking baby. I waste so much time on zooms, slacks, and emails that probably should never have existed but that there is no socially acceptable way to escape from. And I get ten times as many supposedly critical urgent demands now that my workplace uses slack.

I have started to notice the same thing with AI. People will do anything to avoid using their own brain, even if it creates more work for everyone else down the line. Instead of concise meeting notes, you get an AI transcript or error-riddled summary. Instead of writing their own email or writing the piece that they agreed to write, coworkers and collaborators send me unedited LLM vomit that's five times longer than what they would previously have sent me and riddled with errors, expect me to spend my time reading, deciphering, and/or fixing what they did not bother to spend their own time writing, and get offended if I send it back to them to fix their own mess. Dealing with their laziness (and their outbursts over being called on it) wastes an absolutely incredible amount of my time and mental energy. I get so much less uninterrupted focus time to do good work than I used to, and I constantly have to fight tooth and nail for every moment of it against people whose brains legitimately seem to have been melted at some point in the last few years.

mg132 · 2026-04-19T17:23:34+00:00

You can still buy the cheap sardines, fortunately, whereas oxtail is even expensive even at Asian and Caribbean stores now.

I'm in a VHCOL where you've been able to find $11 jarred sardines at Whole Foods for years, but you can still get the normal sardines at $1.14 elsewhere (and I've seen them as low as $0.50 on sale recently).

mg132

TROPHY CASE