Stuff I See Around The old Interweb

Guys guys guys guys guys guys

Aaaaaaaaaa

I am feeling so fucking emotional about the fact that not only did this guy read a huge chunk of my essay, but he spent so much time backing up what I said with video clips and photos.

I cut down the video so that Tumblr would actually post it — it's almost 25m long — but please go watch the whole thing and let him know I sent you. It's a REALLY good video.

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

It’s like the way I often cook for myself nowadays, and not just curries. “Chuck it in, mix it up and let it do its thing” works for chilli, goulash, tajine, eintopf - in fact most stew-ish dishes whatever their nationality. They’re meant to be low-maintenance, that’s the whole point.

Much practice means I’ve got the knack of knowing what / how much spices / seasonings work with what meat, fish, chicken, veg, pulses…

Put crushed caraway seeds in goulash, a chunk of plain chocolate or sprinkle of cocoa in chilli, a big pinch of cinnamon and a dash of lemon juice in chicken with tomatoes… That kind of thing.

Then there was the time I made a “we’re-out-of-tamarind?” fake-out for a green lentil & brown basmati khichri. The fake involved HP sauce, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar and crossed fingers, and worked far better than expected - but then HP sauce has tamarind in it already and IMO thanks to the Raj there’s some much older Indian relish in its ancestry.

Don’t worry about forgetting salt: add it later - that’s what ”taste and adjust seasoning” means - and if you know the people at table salt their food before they try it anyway (as so many do) don’t bother. Not enough salt is easy to fix, too much salt is there for keeps.

Cultural diff means I’m okay with beef, also pork.

AFAIK pork mostly belongs in Keralan and Goan cuisine, especially pork vindaloo, though proper vindaloo is far more subtle than the Brit curry-house standard. I read somewhere years ago that the old Imperial Mughals were at ease with wild boar, treating it as clean “game” not unclean “pork”, but don’t quote me. Lamb, mutton and goat also really go well with Indian spicing.

Lentils, chickpeas, beans etc. (dhal - it’s a class of lentil dishes, but AFAIK also just means “pulses”) didn’t get mentioned, but you can sub them for meat in anything, so long as you cook them properly.

If you do add cubed meat or paneer (pressed curd cheese), then depending on proportions of ingredients that lentil-rice khichri from earlier becomes a sort of dhansak, biryani or pilau. For this sort of cooking the names don’t matter, the tastes do, and the tastes are good.

Dried lentils and dried split peas will cook in a masala (spiced veg base) in about 1 - 1½ hours without advance work; just add a bit more water for them to absorb. Chickpeas / kidney beans need soaked overnight to get them cooking-ready; do lots, drain, divide into recipe amounts, bag and freeze. If you use tinned; drain and rinse them to get rid of excess salt / sugar in the packing water.

The finished food freezes fine (ah, alliteration!) and if your takeaway delivers in those little plastic containers with snap-on lids, stop chucking them out because you’ve got portion-size freezer boxes right there.

Use one for the main and another for the starch (rice, couscous, pasta, noodles, mashed spuds, pommes dauphinoise*, whatever): defrost and nuke one of each and you have a light meal for two or a solid meal for one.

(*NB, must do something about my Firefox spellchecker: “pommies diaphanous” isn’t a side dish I recognise, but conjures up some very odd mental images…)

I seen people say they got Black Fatigue…and I think my community destroyed too many bridges.

Thoughts? I just…not feeling great for being a black guy.

While the focus is often on transportation and energy generation, about one third to one fourth of global carbon emissions come from our food systems. This means that making these systems more efficient, such as by reducing wasting energy on food that never makes it to market, is a big deal--as well as an important economic factors for farmers.

In regions where grid electricity is unreliable or inaccessibly expensive, the lack of access to reliable refrigeration greatly increases the risk that harvested food will spoil before it can reach market. Farmers also have less agency in when and where to sell their food when they have to rush to sell it before it spoils.