Hara's Blob of randomness

how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem

what common file types are

some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)

how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private

how to understand terms of service (hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)

what a cookie actually is

internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl

basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)

common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)

as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on

vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)

how to not get a virus while pirating something

what a temporary email is and when to use one

red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)

an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous

a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps

a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)

I am a pretty competent cook, so don't worry about that bit. I just want to know if this dish sounds familiar, so someone can fill me in on the parts I don't remember. It's a chicken dish made with flat chicken cutlets. I think she used to hammer them a bit with a kitchen mallet, dredge them in flour, and pan fry them in a little butter so they would brown nicely. The sauce is the part I am a little lost about. She used white wine (probably chardonnay) and sour cream, that part I am sure of. There were canned peaches too, which were slightly browned and served on top. I'm sure there was something more to it than that, any thoughts? The flavor was tangy, not particularly sweet except for the peaches, and the sauce was opaque and kind of a beige color. Does this sound like a dish you are aware of? While her food was great, her dishes were usually pretty simple. It is likely that this is not something she invented herself, but it might be something that she simplified. Does anyone know what this is or what it is called so I can look it up and try and get it right? She used to serve it with grilled zucchini brushed with garlic butter. Thank you. Edit -- I am blown away with how helpful and kind you all have been. I have taken little hints from each of your posts and a lot of them have jogged my memory. I think some sort of composite from these suggestions will produce something close. I am going to try to make it when I have the chance, and I will update when I do. Thank you, reddit. <3

Update 6 days later:

My mom passed away a few years ago. I needed help trying to recreate a chicken recipe of hers that I have been craving, because I could only remember a few ingredients. You amazing people of r/recipes came through and gave me so many wonderful suggestions. With a mix of all your advice, I made it tonight. I was nervous as I was putting it together. I felt like there had to be something more to it, but I went with using just the ingredients I knew (as suggested by Ethril). I felt like there was something I was forgetting. Something about brown specks in the sauce. I went with it anyway, and figured I would know what to add at the end by taste. I took chicken cutlets and hammered them flat. Dredged in flour and sauteed in butter (high heat). I burned the butter a little. I remembered my mom saying that butter is the one thing that is ok to burn (as long as it is not smoking furiously) so I left it alone, and smiled at the memory. I was pleased to see the chicken brown to the color I remember. When I flipped the chicken I added the zucchini spears and browned those too. When the chicken was done (just a couple minutes) I set it aside and covered it in tinfoil to keep it warm, then turned the zucchini and browned the peaches in the same pan. It only took a few minutes to brown everything and when the zucchini and peaches were done I put them aside with the chicken. I deglazed the empty pan with chardonnay. My mom wasn't a big wine person, so I went with the cheapest they had. I suddenly remembered that sound the wine would make when it hit the hot pan, a huge hiss. Mom used to tell me to step back before she poured it in, because it would splash a little. I felt like I was nine years old again. I added three big dollops of sour cream and dissolved it in the hot wine. I didn't know what I was going to do next, this was all I had planned. Then I saw the little brown flecks come up. It was that burned butter! I just about cried. I tasted it, and suddenly in my mind I was standing in her kitchen as a kid watching her cook. This was it. It was that simple. I added a couple spoonfuls of the liquid from the canned peaches to take away a little of the wine's tartness, and the sauce was perfect. Just like she used to make. Keep in mind that I am no food stylist, but I assure you that this tasted 10x better than it looks: http://i.imgur.com/Qgk6u.jpg The whole thing took less than 20 minutes to make. And I fucking nailed it. Thank you so, so much reddit! You brought me back, and I love you. The smell is still lingering in the house.

Turns out, the lil’ ghost redwoods benefit their hosts by filtering toxins and acting as a sort of backup immune system.

It was there the 2nd time too, but not quite as strongly.

Even TALKING about it now makes me feel anxious.

Out in the Flat Places* there’s nowhere to goddam hide from the sky. It’s all nothingness from horizon to horizon, and that nothingness wants to grind you under its boot like an ant, I swear to god.

Donbas steppe

But, simultaneously (and that’s the crazy part), the sky triggers my threat response.

And I know friends from plains/field/steppe-country who find it stressful to have mountains “looming” over them (their words, never mine).

Them: comforting wide horizons, I could see any threat coming. Me: I am exposed, I will fall into the sky :(

Photo by Ansel Adams

When we first started dating, I'd usually only travel to see him in the Twin Cities, except one time, one of his coworkers was getting married up in North Dakota, so we made it into a road trip.

I fell asleep in the car like a true passenger princess and woke up to nothing but flatness, but not just any flatness, no. It had been raining, and the plains were filled with water, so for all intents and purposes, it was like waking up in the middle of the fucking ocean with nothing but too much sky above me and absolutely nothing around us but the endless stretch of water and the empty road in front of us.

When I tell you the primal fear that went through me. It was like falling upwards. It was like gravity just didn't exist, and there was no limit to how high my panic could rise. I had to do that stretch of the journey with my chair tipped back so I couldn't see the emptiness. Like a blinkered horse ready to bolt and break all my legs at once in a frenzied panic to escape the Nothingness.

All of North Dakota is the same elevation, so nothing stops the flood water. The interstate roads are built just high enough so you can still drive on them so it really looks like you are driving in the ocean when it happens. But not the normal ocean, a still, no waves, quiet ocean with random patches of trees sticking up.

content moderation for platforms like facebook and tiktok employs thousands of people, sometimes in the usa but more commonly in the global south (so they can be paid less) to sit at computers and view hundreds of flagged posts a day, including graphic violence and csem, for awful wages, under ridiculously stringent conditions. this results in many, many of the people who work in this field developing PTSD -- and of course they are not given adequate treatment of support, one article cites facebook giving its moderaties nine minutes of 'wellness time' for employees to recover if they see something traumatic.

here's some articles on the topic that can give you a good overview of what working conditions in this field are like, but warning, there's pretty graphic descriptions of violence, animal abuse, and child sexual abuse in these articles, as well as frank discussion of suicidal ideation:

Nearby, in a shopping mall, I meet a young woman who I'll call Maria. She's on her lunch break from an outsourcing firm, where she works on a team that moderates photos and videos for the cloud storage service of a major US technology company. Maria is a quality-assurance representative, which means her duties include double-checking the work of the dozens of agents on her team to make sure they catch everything. This requires her to view many videos that have been flagged by moderators “I get really affected by bestiality with children,” she says. “I have to stop. I have to stop for a moment and loosen up, maybe go to Starbucks and have a coffee.” She laughs at the absurd juxtaposition of a horrific sex crime and an overpriced latte.

For Carlos, a former TikTok moderator, it was a video of child sexual abuse that gave him nightmares. The video showed a girl of five or six years old, he said [...] It hit him particularly hard, he said, because he’s a father himself. He hit pause, went outside for a cigarette, then returned to the queue of videos a few minutes later.

Randy also left after about a year. Like Chloe, he had been traumatized by a video of a stabbing. The victim had been about his age, and he remembers hearing the man crying for his mother as he died. “Every day I see that,” Randy says, “I have a genuine fear over knives. I like cooking — getting back into the kitchen and being around the knives is really hard for me.”

This research used the same methodology as this paper on water use by ai models, that focused on gpt-3's water use. Gpt-3 used about 500ml for 10-50 medium-length responses, gpt-4 uses 519ml to generate one 100-word email:

Total water use depends on data center location as some (with cheaper electricity) use air-cooling over water-cooling

This is true

more on the environmental impact of ai:

Refreshing Citrus & Mint Mocktail – Quick and Healthy Drink

Indeed it is! The FCC controls how much of broadcasting has to cater to children and that includes how educational that programming has to be, and exactly how much and in what way you are allowed to advertise to kids. That's why for the entire 90s and up to the early 00s, kids shows had shorter commercial breaks, and ads that talked about a website had to say "ask your parents before going online", and those websites had to be non-commercial--i.e. they could not be shops, and could not have any way you could spend money or were encouraged to spend money. That's why Barbie.com was flash games, and O'Rielly LIFTING that ban is why Barbie.com now takes you directly to a storefront instead.

If you're mad about Saturday Morning Cartoons, dark patterns in ads targeted at children, online protections for kids, or wondering why educational children's shows aren't as much of a thing as they used to be, get mad at the FCC and the person in charge of it who is gutting the Children's Brodcasting Rules (sometimes called the Kid Vid Rules), because those rules control all of that!

While O'Rielly is responsible for gutting the rules in 2019, he was replaced in 2020 by Nathan Simington as head of the FCC, and Simington resigned in June of this year. The post remains vacant as of the time of this writing (August 31, 2025).

Look, ideas are a dime a dozen - they're everywhere, everyone's got them. We do not have a shortage of ideas. People absolutely contemplated the possibility of dinosaurs but alive today before the novel and then later the movie of Jurassic Park, people absolutely considered what if telephone but available everywhere before the first mobile phone - the hard part is and always was turning the idea into something that can actually happen, taking the steps from that simple abstract concept into something that can actually be created.

A story is so much more than just a vague outline - it is also characters, locations, plot beats, filler moments, structures and paragraphs; a movie takes scripts, actors, schedules, cameras, editing and so, so much more - and the amount of both technology, infrastructure, and work hours that all go into making our modern smartphones even work in the first place is nothing short of mind-boggling.