I’ve done this once after seeing it in a Chinese recipe for chicken thighs, with Shaoxing wine. Apparently the alcohol does wonders to bring the flavour out of onions.

I think that either flaked corn or corn flakes could work really well for this. The process behind farinha de milho* is different from both (the maize is hulled, soaked, ground while wet, and dried over low fire), but as long as it’s something pre-cooked it should be fine. And as I mentioned in another comment, people make farofa even out of rolled oats.

*even in Portuguese alone the name is a bit messy, as it’s shared with the maize meal used for polenta. Most people specify the later as “fubá”, I’m used to specify the former as “farinha biju” (biju is the flakes).

They probably could, indeed - but you’d need multiple different applications, each for one use case. In the meantime a LLM offers you a tool that won’t hit all the nails, or screw all the screws, but does both decently enough in the lack of both a hammer and a screwdriver.

It’s a great analogy though - Linux users aren’t deemed profitable by the A³ companies, just like offal is unjustly* deemed yucky by your typical person.

*I do love offal though. And writing this comment made me crave for chicken livers with garlic and rosemary over sourdough bread. Damn.

The backlash to this is going to be fun.

In some cases it’s already happening - since the bubble forces AI-invested corporations to shove it down everywhere. Cue to Microsoft Recall, and the outrage against it.

It has virtually no non-fraud real world applications that don’t reflect the underlying uselessness of the activity it can do.

It is not completely useless but it’s oversold as fuck. Like selling you a bicycle with the claim that you can go to the Moon with it, plus a “trust me = be gullible, eventually bikes will reach Mars!” A bike is still useful, even if they’re building a scam around it.

Here’s three practical examples:

1. I use ChatGPT as a translation aid. Mostly to list potential translations for a specific word, or as conjugation/declension table. Also as a second layer of spell-proofing. I can’t use it to translate full texts without it shitting its own virtual pants - it inserts extraneous info, repeats sentences, removes key details from the text, butcher the tone, etc.
2. I was looking for papers concerning a very specific topic, and got a huge pile (~150) of them. Too much text to read on my own. So I used the titles to pre-select a few of them into a “must check” pile, then asked Gemini to provide me three paragraphs summaries for the rest. A few of them were useful; without Gemini I’d probably have missed them.
3. [Note: reported use.] I’ve seen programmers claiming that they do something similar to #1, with code instead. Basically asking Copilot how a function works, or to write extremely simple code (if you ask it to generate complex code it starts lying/assuming/making up non-existent libraries).

None of those activities is underlyingly useless; but they have some common grounds - they don’t require you to trust the output of the bot at all. It’s either things that you wouldn’t use otherwise (#2) or things that you can reliably say “yup, that’s bullshit” (#1, #3).

I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.

Amen.

Indie games might not be flashy, but they’re often made with love and concern about giving you a fun experience. They also lack all those abusive DRM and intrusive anti-cheat systems that A³ games often have.

It’s interesting how interconnected those points are.

Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.

Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on “our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it” and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.

Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?

I’m predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.

I don’t see this as an unpopular opinion, but I do agree with it - at least here (Brazil) Twitter was evolving into a containment cage for nutjobs and morons, until it was blocked. (And it’s damn easy to find who’s who in the Bluesky diaspora, as the nutjobs/morons miss Twitter while the saner people are glad to see it locally gone.)

It is - the carb in it is typically fried yucca meal or maize meal*, but I’ve seen people doing it with breadcrumbs and even rolled oats. There’s a lot of freedom for the fillings too, although farofas made as side dish for meats tend to be simpler than the ones intended a as full meal.

Just as an example here’s my breakfast farofa. It’s enough for two people.

• a hard sausage, diced small
• 3 eggs, whisked with some salt and black pepper
• half onion, diced small
• a handful of maize meal (the amount is eyeballed)
• hot pepper sauce, veg oil, salt

1. Brown the sausage on a non-stick large pan or wok, using a bit of veg oil. Reserve some if you want.
2. Add onion, turn the fire to low, and let them cook until transparent.
3. Add whisked eggs. Scramble them with a silicone spatula; they’ll stick to the other fillings but that’s OK.
4. Add maize meal, salt, hot pepper sauce, and a bit more of veg oil if necessary. Mix it constantly. When the meal darkens just a bit, turn the fire off but keep mixing it (as the pan heat might otherwise burn it). Transfer to two bowls and, if you reserved some sausage, add it as “garnish”.

Now thinking, the salt here is also a nice example of using the same ingredient twice. You need to season the eggs and the meal separately.

*I’ll provide a pic because I don’t know how to call this type of cornmeal in English. It isn’t the same as polenta:

Adding the same ingredient twice, for two different roles. A few examples:

• Tomato sauce: a single tomato, diced small, to add near the end, to improve the texture.
• Curry: half of the onion gets grated and goes in the roux, with a bit of baking soda (so it melts down). The other half is diced larger, and gets added near the end as a plain veg. As a result I get a thicker and tastier curry.
• Farofa: whatever filling I’m adding (pork rinds, bacon, banana, scrambled eggs…), I reserve some bits to add near the end as garnish. It’s both more pleasing to look and it allows people to pick a bit more of the filling if they so desire.
• Breaded anything: seasoning goes both in the marinade and the flour / breadcrumbs.

I always got this feeling that LMDE will eventually become Mint’s main distro, with the Ubuntu-based version slowly fading away.

Embrace the paradox: «è un schifo ale lubię to».

You know, the ban here was enlightening for me, about certain people from my social circles. Four examples:

1. Resumed Twitter shitposting in Bluesky. Different URL. No mention of Twitter.
2. Cheering Twitter being gone, as they were only using it due to their contacts, but felt like shit for doing it. Criticising how Moraes did it, but not the goal itself.
3. LARPs as against fascism but screeches nonstop in Bluesky about Twitter being gone, as they think that the world revolves around their own convenience.
4. Left microblogging altogether.

But I digress (as this has barely anything to do with the OP). Those people like Musk are bound to “creatively reinterpret” the words: in one situation orange is yellow, in another it’s red, both, neither. Sometimes it isn’t “ackshyually” related to red or yellow, it’s “inverted blue”. And suckers fall for it. That’s what Musk is doing with fascism.

I remember. And how much shit the community flung towards them. And their rep is still stained with it, as it should be.

The text says “several”, but it mentions only four components (gdebi, apturl, aptdaemon and mintcommon-aptdaemon) merged into two (captain, aptkit). It doesn’t look like much, and typically the Mint project is responsible to not claim to maintain more than it can maintain¹.

In special, I remember gdebi being broken for quite a while², so this hints that Mint’s goal is to get properly maintained replacements.

1. As shown by Cinnamon. I personally don’t like it, but it is well maintained, even being a huge project.
2. If I recall correctly, the issue was with the associated gdebi-gtk frontend; you’d open a package with it, then click “install”, then the program exits because it’s looking for sudo instead of pkexec. I’m almost certain that it was fixed by now, but it does show general lack of maintainance.

It conveys “I have such a disdain for that thing that I’m asterisking its name like it was a slur or swear word”.

I’m not a big fan either, even if you can find some secondary roles for that (as keeping someone from finding it, like ilinamorato exemplified). It distracts the reader from what is being said to the author’s personal opinion about what is being said.

That includes me. Or at least my geospoofed location for the sake of google search (when I need to use it - I’d rather use DDG but… meh), so Google stops trying to sell me local shit.

My prediction is different: I think that, in the long term, banning targetted ads will have almost no impact on the viability of ad-supported services, or the amount of ads per page.

Advertisement is an arms race; everyone needs to use the most efficient technique available, not just to increase their sales but to prevent them from decreasing - as your competitor using that technique will get the sales instead.

But once a certain technique is banned, you aren’t the only one who can’t use it; your competitors can’t either.

And the price of the ad slot is intrinsically tied to that. When targetted ads were introduced, advertisers became less willing to pay for non-targetted ads; decreased demand led to lower prices, and thus lower revenue to people offering those ad slots on their pages, forcing those people to offer ad slots with targetted advertisement instead. Banning targetted ads will simply revert this process, placing the market value of non-targetted ad slots back where it used to be.

No one is forced to use our advertising technologies – they choose to use them because they’re effective.

Like an antlion saying “ants aren’t forced to fall into my trap! They choose to!”.

Google’s advertisement monopoly is directly associated with its other monopolies: browser monopoly, search, mobile OS, video sharing. It can use each of those monopolies to change the rules of the game ever slightly, to prevent competitors from entering or remaining into the market.

Of course they do. Beans, no poop challenge, ???, profit!!! repeat as needed.

(…we need more memes!)