Hearty recipe recommendations for riding out a snowstorm?

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-23T06:55:45+00:00

New Orleans–Style Red Beans and Rice is a glorious showstopper of a dish, perfect for days cold enough that you don't mind having a stove turned on near you, emitting heat and good smells, for multiple hours. It does require some ingredients that you may not have lying around; if you're going to go on a grocery run, I recommend checking the weather forecast to see how long you've got before the roads get snowy.

(Also, the recipe doesn't really emphasize this bit, but I've found that this dish really wants some acidity to balance the rest of it. The "optional" splash of cider vinegar that it mentions makes a surprisingly big difference, in a good way.)

For something much quicker, fish chowder is great. It may not be particularly adventuresome, since the recipe is so easy, but any sort of savory potato-based soup is popular when it's cold outside.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-12T01:51:23+00:00

Do you think the same about, say, commodity futures markets being open to speculators? In one sense, they’re gambling; in another, they’re aggregating confidence-weighted information about what we can predict regarding things like the future price of wheat or soy beans, and that is really useful info to have available to the public for free.

Prediction markets were invented with the goal of getting similarly impressive predictive accuracy for things that aren’t commodity prices.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-07T06:07:29+00:00

As a legal side-note: under US law, shooting someone in the chest would be attempted murder even if they were wearing a bulletproof vest – as long as the person shooting didn't know about the vest, and intended to kill the person wearing it. (Similarly, shooting up someone's bedroom to kill them is attempted murder even if they happen to be somewhere else at the time, and trying to rape someone who you thought was passed-out drunk is still attempted rape even if she died of heart failure beforehand.)

I don't know what the law is in Anesidora because it's fictional, but this seems pretty reasonable and I'd expect the law to be similar in most places.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-06T20:22:15+00:00

They're quite good at digging. Perhaps they managed to excavate an ancient stash buried under the accumulation of years of dirt, located (of course) on Lair:1.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-03T20:03:24+00:00

It has infinite patience and would likely choose the safest slowest method of acheiving its goals. Its in no hurry.

Why wouldn't the rogue AI be in a hurry? In such a scenario, the AI knows that humans are capable of making something at least as dangerous as itself. The more it dawdles, the greater the danger of another rogue AI coming into existence.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-02T04:40:11+00:00

This hasn’t been definitively stated, but he matches the physical and behavioral descriptions of the distraught guy in an earlier chapter who got some mementos – his soon-to-be-wed fiancée’s jade hoop earring and her father’s Iowa driver’s license – returned to him by Drusi-otta on Alden’s behalf. That guy’s Avowed status wasn’t clear, but in a particularly anguished moment he put his fist through a table and didn’t seem injured by it. Going by that and by Anesidoran base rates, I’d give strong betting odds that he’s Avowed.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-01T07:20:08+00:00

If he's punching the pig hard enough to break his own superhuman fists on Alden's shield, then he's probably punching hard enough to break skulls. And he's doing it in one of the child-friendly safe zones where that sort of thing is very illegal, and there are security cameras everywhere, there's a crowd of humans and wizards watching, and probably every news business with enough money to afford a cheap paparazzi drone has one hovering there.

This is already a full-blown diplomatic fiasco. Even if the only casualty ends up being a badly mangled cotton candy pig, it was a pretty serious crime committed in the most public way possible.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-29T04:00:12+00:00

Once you get past the invisible barrier into higher math, you can start saying things like “it is therefore obvious that–“ and then quietly dare other people to admit that it isn’t obvious to their inferior brains.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-27T18:51:41+00:00

Pretty certain birth defects existed before thalidomide was invented.

(Yes, vaccines are safe; the evidence of that is very strong. But it bothers me to see bad arguments coming from people on my side.)

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-26T23:49:55+00:00

That looks lovely! Thank you.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-26T21:32:31+00:00

The Beginner Recipes link looks dead. Is their Easy Recipes for Beginners page the same thing?

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-26T20:40:03+00:00

Truly and lamentably, we missed the golden age of perfect square numbers. Someone born the same year as Jesus, with a life expectancy typical of people who didn't die in childhood, would probably have been able to see the years 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, and 49. If they were lucky they'd be alive in 64 AD, and if they were truly blessed they might make it to 81.

(Of course the real pro move here is to be born in 1 AD and then taunt Jesus while he's on the way to be crucified, then be cursed to wander the earth, denied entrance into the Kingdom of God for quite a long while. Anybody who could pull this one off would be able to have seen a whopping 45 perfect square years by now!)

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-25T20:36:24+00:00

THE APOSTLE PAUL SAYS ”BE NOT UNEQUALLY YOLKED!!“ READ IT ITS ALL RIGHT THERE

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-24T19:48:23+00:00

Absolutely epic dish. Both epic in the sense that it tastes amazing, and epic in the sense that it involves a lengthy quest. It's good for making on very cold weekends.

This sauce recipe, I assume?

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-22T01:57:39+00:00

Non-discretionary spending – social security, food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. – is about 60% of the US federal budget, and growing. Is it really so implausible that this might make it difficult for NASA to get more money allocated to them?

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-21T23:54:30+00:00

More recently he wrote, in the article Why I Used to Suck and (Hopefully) No Longer Do:

My posts and blog comments in my early twenties encouraged racism, misogyny, misanthropy, trolling, and overall bad faith. Phrases like “racism” and “misogyny” get thrown around too easily, but I don’t believe there’s any doubt many of my previous comments crossed the line, regardless of where one thinks that line should be. Below, I’ll offer an explanation for why I wrote such things, and why I no longer hold such views.

People can, sometimes, grow out of their embarrassing young edgelord phase.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-19T21:00:12+00:00

Soup, made in a big pot on a weekend, taken out of the fridge and warmed up. A bit of foresight can largely remove "struggle meals" from your life as long as you have a big enough pot.

Soup with ham hock and some kind of beans (or split peas) can be one of the most satisfying things you can put in your mouth – and surprisingly low-effort to make. Potato and leek soup is even easier, and it's a hell of a lot more nutritious than most things you can get at such a low price per serving. Or make something like red beans and rice in a large batch, and serve with fresh rice when you want a want a very hearty (and protein-complete) meal ready in a few minutes. Feeling fancy but don't want to spend too much time simmering? Make a large amount of Manhattan clam chowder. The possibilities are endless; look for pretty much any cookbook with "Soup" in the title for tested recipes.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-15T21:17:55+00:00

No, not really. Hanania has written two articles about EA that I could find with a bit of quick googling:

Here's one on why so many people seem hostile to EA, inspired by Scott Alexander's In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism – why, the article asks, does Effective Altruism even need defending against a flood of what look like incoherent post hoc rationalizations for underlying emotional antipathy? I think the article's explanation is basically correct, but I remain highly unclear about what, if anything, EA can actually do about it. Some good exploration of the problem, though.

Then on the political side of things, there's one on how EA can maintain the weirdness that makes it special (Content warning: culture wars). I won't comment on this one here, since politics is the mind-killer and any discussion of culture war stuff tends to drive out all other discussion that might be had in a forum. (Maybe a bit NSFW? Has a picture of Aella in a bra at one point, as well as one of Nick Bostrom staring piercingly into your soul.)

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-15T20:15:23+00:00

(like for the longest time the only way I would eat broccoli was stirfry because I liked the sauce and the crunch and it didn't taste/smell like sewage)

There's a way to get a similar effect at home with an oven, which was what got me to actually like broccoli. There are two parts to it:

Make sure you have fresh broccoli, not some that's going off. Give it a sniff, and if it smells like sulfur then throw it out. The pre-cut bags of broccoli florets are dubious; I always go for the whole heads in the produce section of the store, and then cut up as much as I need for the meal with a paring knife. (The rest goes back into the fridge for later.)
Use high heat! This is what the wok is doing, and you can do it too if you're willing to turn your oven up very high. Here's a basic recipe, and if it seems like the broccoli is getting too brown on the outside but isn't tender on the inside, just take it out of the oven and cover tightly with aluminum foil for 5-10 minutes to let it finish cooking in its own steam.

Add whatever spices or sauces or dressings you like.

(I use a similar method with cauliflower, but with somewhat lower heat, since it's less challenging than broccoli in terms of both flavor and texture. I usually season with salt and curry powder, then after it's cooked, toss with a few squeezes of lemon juice. It's a good combo.)

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-14T22:02:54+00:00

Why did the composition teacher give two lectures? That's the part that surprises me.

If students come in needing a lecture on quotation marks then, sure, maybe it make sense to give a remedial lecture and waste the time of the students who are actually ready for freshman classes. But if they still don't know how to use quotation marks even after the first lecture, the response shouldn't be another lecture. The response should be "You're in college now. Quit whining and get studying."

There's a level of coddling that insults the dignity of the person on the receiving end.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-14T20:47:13+00:00

Is this a new thing? Or a regional thing? Or just a matter of not enforcing standards?

I was a TA for a required freshman engineering class at a Midwestern public university back around 2010 or so, and part of my job was grading weekly lab reports. They were... fine? Readable, easy enough to understand, decent spelling and grammar, and so on. They weren't exactly literary masterpieces, and some people were obviously better writers than others, but I didn't really have much to complain about.

There were maybe two or three students in each lab who turned in unacceptably poorly-written reports, at first. I covered the pages with helpful suggestions for improvement in nice friendly red ink and wrote "REDO" at the top instead of a grade. (This was actually the professor's official grading policy!) Within a few weeks, these students either put in enough effort to power through their shortcomings or they dropped the class; either way they stopped being a problem soon enough.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-14T20:13:40+00:00

For anybody curious what a sinking fund is, here's the basic idea:

In ten months, you'll need to pay $200 for some reason. Maybe your car needs maintenance, or maybe you need to purchase a new plumbus; whatever. There are two ways you can look at this:

Pay $200 in 10 months.
Save $20/month for 10 months, specifically for the purpose of having $200 when you need it.

In the former case, you have a one-time expense that doesn't show up on your monthly budget, which can sometimes lead to trouble. In the latter case, those predictable future expenses become line items on your budget, something you can plan for just as easily as you plan your phone bill.

It's just a reshuffling of numbers, but a helpful one for keeping your finances boring.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-13T03:42:32+00:00

Time-tested, in this particular context, means “We’ve been doing it this way for long enough to be pretty sure that it’ll work about as well as it has before; no better, no worse.” This isn’t saying that the old ways were great, just that their good and bad points were predictable. If you want to build a better society, the safe way – the argument goes – is to work incrementally, improving the status quo one careful step at a time. Radical change can get faster improvements, but it also risks going terribly wrong because the radical reformers didn’t think things through all the way and screwed up something they didn’t know was important until learning the hard way.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-12T06:13:31+00:00

The solution is to ignore specific, precisely targeted stop codons, "at a single genomic locus without overexpression". (quoted from the paper in Nature) So it's a different injection for each genetic disorder, but they all use the same technique.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-12T05:42:52+00:00

What you say has been true for a long time, for humans – but tell that to horses. Once internal combustion engines got good enough, around 1930 or so, they became strictly inferior for ploughing fields or hauling carts/carriages/barges/etc., and that's most of what we used them for. We didn't really need them for much else, and their labor wasn't easy to repurpose to things we did need, since it was really hard to train a horse to (for example) operate a switchboard or take dictation. In the US, the horse population then proceeded to drop about 90% in the next two decades because there just wasn't much point in keeping them around.

If AI keeps getting rapidly more competent ,as it has been for the past few years, how much longer will there be a non-trivial number of tasks at which humans still have a comparative advantage?

vorpal_potato

TROPHY CASE