America is like the beta version of liberal democracy that launched far too soon with a constitution full of bugs and the developers decided to make it nearly impossible to patch.

I’m not as anti AI as a lot of people here but trusting it with very important things is asking for trouble. It still randomly hallucinates and gives you bad info. Not as often as it used to but still not good enough to trust with your child’s health.

ChatGPT has taken my bread to the next level and helped me diagnose electronics problems way faster than I have figured out on my own, which is awesome. But it has also given me a blueberry muffin recipe with no wet ingredients and calculated bread hydration 10% too low. I can easily imagine a scenario where some tired parent asks it for a Motrin dose for an infant and gets a wildly wrong answer and injures their child.

Don’t worry about getting banned. They’ll just backlist the card you used and close your account. Easy enough to get around. Send them your video and demand they refund you while you’re on the phone with them. Use the word chargeback liberally. You’ll either get refunded quickly or fuck them, make them get dinged with a chargeback.

It’s almost certainly Oracle but there’s a slight possibility this is correct

What are good Google alternatives that don’t rely on Google or Bing?

Amazon seems to randomly start subscriptions. And then you think you’re crazy and did something stupid but I’m pretty sure they’re just evil. I have been subscribed to Audible multiple times and I have never listened to an audiobook in my life.

E-reader is a much better experience for reading text but tablets are better for comics. There’s very limited color e-ink options and they’re very expensive with pretty washed out colors.

Dude do it. I dealt with chronic pain for way too long and just accepted it as hopeless. I had tried stretches and exercises on my own with no luck so I wrote physical therapy off as pointless.

Eventually I gave in and 6 weeks in to physical therapy my pain is like 80% gone. I started noticing improvements after a week.

The problem with non-generic frozen pizza is they cost like a dollar less than a real pizza. Some of the fancier ones cost even more than a pizza from the place right next to the grocery store. Maybe I’m just blessed living in the pizza sphere but even the best frozen pizza is fucking disgusting next to even mediocre real pizza.

And if you do, welcome to having an anxiety disorder

deleted by creator

For sure. That’s like saying a Ferrari is faster than a Honda Civic. But you don’t need a Ferrari to get to work.

If you aren’t getting good bread from your bread machine, you’re definitely doing something wrong. Bread machines are pretty simple and peaked in the 90s for the most part. I have one of the cheapest ones on the market from the 90s and the bread that comes out of my kitchen blows away everything at the grocery store for a fraction of the price. I make sandwich breads, pizza dough, English muffin dough, pretty much anything and it’s all good.

I think the big thing people get wrong is not weighing their ingredients. You just can’t make consistently good bread with volumetric measurements. The hydration of the dough (ratio of flour and water) is very important and a cup of flour can vary a lot.

There’s also a ton of very low quality recipes out there. Even the book that came with my bread maker is pretty terrible. If you don’t want to get in to the science of it, just stick to King Arthur recipes. There’s a ton of bread maker specific ones and they often have modifications for bread makers in the other recipes.

Ingredients matter a lot as well. Besides the fact that higher quality ingredients produce higher quality food, flour isn’t interchangeable. So if you’re using regular cheap all purpose flour instead of bread flour, the amount of water it absorbs is different and you’ll get bad results. You can get decent enough white bread from cheap AP flour but you need a lot less water. It will be basically wonder bread though, nothing mind blowing.

In terms of effort, I guess this is subjective. But I just started some whole wheat bread and it took about 5 minutes to weigh the water, salt, yeast, whole wheat flour, bread flour, and gluten. The cycle takes a few hours and my baby will have bread for lunch for the rest of the week. And it doesn’t contain any sugar or brominated flour like every whole wheat bread at the grocery store. Also with a decent loaf of bread is pushing 8-9 dollars at the store, this saves a lot of money. This loaf cost less than a dollar even using high quality flour.

deleted by creator

The Zojirushi bread machines are very nice but you don’t need one if you want to make excellent breads and jams. For the most part, the technology in bread makers peaked in the 90s and I’ve never seen a thrift store that didn’t have an entire aisle of them dirt cheap.

I have a late 90s Breadman I paid 20 bucks for years ago (which is expensive but it was new in box) and it’s paid for itself many times over. It makes great sandwich bread and I use it to make all kinds of doughs for other bread products. I make a nice Italian loaf, English muffins, pizza dough, etc.

It paid for itself the first month I had it. Never really felt the need to upgrade.

I like Budgie. It looks nice, lightweight, and doesn’t get in the way. There’s a few missing features but I like that it’s a smaller community project.

There’s so much irony in this comment it cured my anemia

You’re not the intended audience

Similar age, noticing the same. It never used to matter. Although I also used to have jobs where I was on my feet all day so I’m not sure what is aging and what is living a sedentary life. I usually have a handful of almonds in the afternoon and that’s fine. Also avoiding afternoon coffee seems to help.

But I’ve started walking for a half hour before work and after a couple weeks, I feel like I have more energy in general.

This feels like an ice 9 situation