problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
It's just not typical for pad thai. Pad thai uses Thai chili flakes, which are dried chilies that have been roasted for a more smoky flavour and pounded into flakes. Fresh chill is just a bit too sharp and won't mesh so well with the overall flavour profile of the dish.
That being said, it's really not the worst thing you could do to the dish if you can't find flakes and I wouldn't point it out had he not made so many mistakes.
This has nothing to do with wellness, but as a Southeast Asian, I need to urgently talk about all the war crimes Adam Ragusea committed against pad thai in this video:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=puHSU9ZaZPY
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too much sugar in recipe
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advocates using worcestershire sauce in pad thai
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puts soy sauce in pad thai
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puts ketchup in pad thai
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puts ginger in pad thai
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snaps rice noodles in half
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boils rice noodles instead of soaking in warm water
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uses what looks like extra virgin olive oil to cook everything
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no tofu
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puts green onions and cilantro in the dish (the only herb that goes into pad thai is garlic chives)
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uses fresh chili instead of dried chili flakes
Every step is wrong. Every step. This is the first time I've come across a recipe of his I actually know something about and he fucks up everywhere.
I can't believe a certain orange-shirted YouTuber hasn't reviewed this yet, honestly.
This kind of shit is prime fodder for someone like hoe_math to respond to. Men who make up the bulk of an actual representative sample, to her, are Not People.
Thanks! Xi'an features in two or three of my itineraries - I've heard good things about it from most everyone, so I'll try to prioritise the plans which pass through the city.
A nitpick, but after having done some really deep digging I would actually say China has the richest historical sites of all of Asia, even if much of it is terribly marketed to international tourists (the Cultural Revolution was bad, but there's so much history in China that it's impossible to Thanos-snap most of it away in a relatively short period, and other countries in Asia have also had somewhat analogous periods of cultural destruction like the Meiji Restoration).
I'll definitely agree that most of the really big Tier-1s like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are historical deserts, but that's in part because these cities got big relatively recently; they're nowhere near the core of historical Chinese civilisation. Shanghai was a small agricultural community for most of Chinese history and only really came into its own in the 1930s, and Shenzhen barely even existed until 1979. Most megacities in China are relatively history-poor, but that's in part because there wasn't that much history there to protect in the first place - the cities that are global hubs in China today are, for the most part, not the cities that were historically important. OTOH many of the older cities like Beijing, Chengde, Xi'an, Suzhou, Luoyang etc seem to have way more historical sites than your modal Asian city, not less. And Pingyao looks insane. I do plan to incorporate a lot of areas outside of the cities into my itinerary though.
Weather doesn't really matter that much to me, though -20 is pushing it a little bit and I'm mostly going to China to see history and culture (Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces are very attractive in that regard). I've heard of the Harbin Ice Festival before; have you gone yourself and would you recommend it?
So I'm planning a trip to China this December. It's a gigantic place with a lot of history and I find myself a bit paralysed with indecision as to where I should go, I've drawn up about five or six different plans in multiple different parts of the country and can't choose between them.
I'm not sure how many people on this forum have actually visited China at all (there's at least one I guess), but anybody here have any recommendations to share? Any parts of the country in particular stand out to you?
For example half the world drives on the right and half the world drives on the left, but the moral fundamentals beneath which side of the road you personally decide to drive on are universal regardless. You choose depending on whether you want to safely reach your destination or create chaos and accidents around you.
There are baseline universal evolved principles of morality, but there's variation in the relative importance people place on any given moral precept and the specifics are far less universal than you seem to think (lying and deception in isolation is universally considered bad, but pretty much everybody considers this forgivable under certain circumstances and their ideas for when it is justified differ). Oftentimes there are tradeoffs between different moral principles (e.g. prioritising the individual's freedom vs. ensuring that a society is stable and ordered) and different people have different ideas of which moral precept should be prioritised.
To offer up a particularly extreme example that relates to driving I visited Vietnam in April and honestly that entire culture's take on how to drive was very close to "create chaos and accidents around you". The road was absolute anarchy, and the amount of aggressiveness Vietnamese drivers (particularly car drivers) exhibited was beyond anything else I'd ever seen. It is just normal and accepted that drivers will not stop around pedestrian crossings even when pedestrians are crossing. I am not exaggerating when I say there were times I thought I was going to die crossing the road. Vietnamese are just built different, IMO.
BTW are you the one who wrote summaries of your travels to different countries in the CW thread a while back? Really enjoyed that post. I remember you got a lot of shit for your less-than-positive review of Japan - the internet seems to have a penchant for hyping it up and treating it as this unassailable paragon of human development but actually after having heard the anecdotes of a family member who traveled to Japan last year and looking at their photos I'm inclined to agree with you (it's a cliche that Japan has been in the 90s ever since the 70s, but it's also true). I think I share your opinion of France as kind of depressing too in many places - even Paris was shockingly polluted and chaotic, and lacked much of the charm it's so famous for.
Your sense of suspicion at all these competing narratives reminds me of my own experiences, though perhaps my upbringing was even more atypical. I grew up in Malaysia and came into contact with many parts of the culture there, but was raised by parents who'd spent time in Britain and who homeschooled me in a very different environment than most other people would ever experience. I knew people who were staunchly Christian and prayed often to the Lord, de facto Taoists who actively made offerings to spirits and arranged their homes in line with feng shui geomantic principles, staunch atheists that somehow still clung to hints of superstition here and there, and so on. When I was sixteen, I moved to Australia (where I now live) and interacted with yet another cultural milieu.
A consequence of this strange muddled background is that I notice I don't really feel kinship with any way of thinking and virtually never identify with any major group or subculture, so there's this persistent tendency for me to feel like an alien wherever I go. I travel for fun a lot and come into contact with a lot of people from different cultural backgrounds, and it often seems like the way they mentally structure and interpret the world are completely incongruent with each other.
Anyway, reality (at least from our perspective) isn't so much an elephant as it is a Necker cube. There are two possible 3d interpretations of this cube, but we can't see both views at once since the interpretations are so diametrically opposed to each other that it's impossible to maintain both orientations in our minds at once. Yes, there is the problem of the Elephant, where different people come across different information about the world and draw different conclusions about it on that basis, but even when everyone agrees on the fundamental factual points of contention there is inevitably going to be subjectivity in how one puts them together and fits them into an internal narrative of the world.
Oftentimes we don't have direct access to seemingly simple things like cause and effect (insert quote about how all science is actually just correlation here) and even the same data points can lead to wildly different understandings of the world depending on the system interpreting them. At this point we can model quantum phenomena very well but what it actually implies is untestable and completely beyond us. So much of what we know about reality lies on the surface of a black box. We don't and perhaps will never have direct access to many aspects of how things work, and until that happens I suspect it will be like the Necker cube: analysing a 3d object through the lens of a 2d plane, and debating how it's actually oriented. There is a capital-T Truth out there, but whether that's accessible to us or not is another question.
That's before we can even get into things like moral outlook, which... well that's a crapshoot. Hume's is-ought problem still remains intractable today. I seriously doubt an AGI would be able to synthesise many aspects of worldview together as a result; there will always be big Unknowns (in more domains than people think, IMO) where all we can do is gesticulate at an answer.
Well, I've lived in both equatorial Malaysia and subtropical/temperate Australia. Despite growing up around the equator I could never stand the heat and mugginess; my preference is 15-18C, clear skies with some clouds, light breeze. The shoulder seasons in Australia are actually ideal for this.
Personally, I enjoy climates where it doesn't rain often either. Rain is annoying, it stops up infrastructure and makes everything slushy. Petrichor smells like shit too.
Okay are you conducting some sort of social experiment where you gradually push the limits of what is considered acceptable in the Fun Thread before people start objecting en masse? Because if you were, I'd believe it. The topics of these legal cases have escalated dramatically week after week.
This is way more off-putting than anything in the CW thread IMO.
I'm in a similar position of being glad that he's here providing a differing viewpoint, but come on, a couple of days?
Really, I'm not. Progressives like these actively drag down the standard of discourse in this forum with their shit-flinging (this applies to other people of varying political stripes too, but the OP here seems to be one of the worst and most prolific offenders in this forum as of late).
I'm willing to engage with other left of centre people who participate here and even say I appreciate their participation in spite of our ideological differences, but this ain't it. It's such obvious bait that it barely even warrants attention from me - I basically look at a post of his, roll my eyes and move on. Even Darwin wasn't this consistently terrible, in spite of his penchant for doubling down on transparently incorrect statements. This on the other hand is an utterly vapid waste of time, there's barely even anything to counter: it's badly-written fanfiction that builds up to the ultimate reveal of "A MAGA said something ick, checkmate rightists".
I need to rant about timesheets. I have lost so much sleep because of them, and they have done a great job in completely destroying my self esteem and imposing an unnecessary amount of mental load.
For those of you not in the know, here's a rundown of how internal budgeting in public accounting usually works: A fixed fee is quoted on the engagement letter to the client, which is ostensibly supposed to be based on the amount of time the job took during previous years. As a public accountant you have an internal hourly rate, and when you fill out your timesheet the hours you've taken on a job get multiplied by that rate. The resulting amount is called a WIP, and that is compared against the bill to see if the job was over or under budget. The percentage of hours spent that are actually billed is called "realisation".
In theory it's just meant to be a measure of the actual amount of time it takes to perform the task so people know if they're pricing properly, and if there is out-of-scope work the additional billing will be estimated based on the extra time recorded in the timesheet. In practice? It gets used as a measure of individual efficiency and will impact judgements of employee performance - which doesn't make much sense considering that employees do not get paid overtime in public accounting but are getting punished for booking their overtime because opportunity cost. To make this even more comically sadistic, you're expected to book a specific number of hours per week, and there's also yet another metric that gets used to evaluate employees: utilisation, which is the percentage of time that you actually spent doing productive work - so you can't book a lot of your work hours to admin and get away with it. The budgets, along with the utilisation requirements, often results in there being an incentive to work huge amounts of overtime and book only the normal hours (eating hours) so both realisation and utilisation can look peachy. Often these targets get put on the managers and that pressure trickles down to employees.
A new employee that doesn't really play the timesheet game will often end up with sizeable writeoffs on many of their jobs. I have a mere 1.5 years of experience in tax proper (note most tax accountants did not, in fact, study a whole lot of tax and are usually picking it all up on the job), and I can say the work that reaches you can be highly heterogenous. There's a lot of self-learning involved and a lot of time spent just doing that. In addition, you are also juggling a lot of clients and handling a good amount of client communications to the point you are expected to hound them repeatedly to respond to requests for information or to sign the tax returns you've provided them like idiot children, which means you're being split between many different tasks and you lose a lot of time because this task-switching imposes a serious mental load.
If you're confused on a technical topic you're expected to ask questions, but people are often busy enough that the answer you get is never very helpful. If you half-ass jobs due to the lack of guidance you receive, you'll receive snarky review points in your workpaper, and if you attempt to make your jobs highly technically accurate (something I did), that takes time and requires a large amount of unpaid overtime from you - but you will get penalised for it if you actually record it. Another aspect that makes this even worse is that tax and accounting software used in many firms is hilariously finicky and takes a while to sort out, which inflates actual time spent even further - but higher-ups tend to be distanced enough from such preparation that they underestimate how much time troubleshooting it actually takes. Oh also sometimes you can be within budget but underutilised through no fault of your own because the firm just does not have enough work at a certain point in the year, and be criticised for not doing enough.
In other words, timekeeping in many public accounting firms is a lose/lose/lose situation. Charge your hours and go over budget? Managers complain about blowing the budget and being inefficient. Charge your hours and come in under budget? Managers complain that your utilisation has gone to shit. Charge inaccurate hours to make sure you don't come off as inefficient or underutilised? Well the number is all fake anyway, so why track hours in the first place? Timekeeping ends up being a pointless part of the job, a metric that can be optimised for greatest manager and partner satisfaction, but provides zero actual value. You're not supposed to eat time, but you're supposed to come in under budget and if you don't you will be called in and given review points. Great. I had a complaint just yesterday which included the fact that my total productive hours were higher than expected for the year and I was blowing budgets on jobs - which means the obvious solution is not to book any of these hours spent doing work. In my view it shouldn't matter as long as you bill enough per month - the actual billings don't change regardless of what you decide to put on the timesheet, and neither does your pay, but they treat their ridiculous metrics as Divinely Ordained Truth. Nobody will acknowledge how stupid this entire system is, and will expect you to play along.
God the culture sucks. Maybe I have a bad attitude, but I've long stopped caring about how accurate anything on my timesheet is. I'm seriously considering updating my resume, applying for a couple of jobs - in industry, not public - and handing in my two weeks notice as soon as I have another offer.
Crystal Society by Raelifin/Max Harms is one of the only ones with an interesting concept that has come out of an actual EY or EY-adjacent community, though the quality drops off hugely after the first half of the first book to be honest. Its first half is extremely good though - its POV character is an amoral unaligned AI attempting to break out of an AI-box, and it's very gripping. I did DNF the book regardless since quality decreases steadily after the AI achieves its escape.
For general hard sci-fi that actually fits the ratfic category, I would recommend Peter Watts - Blindsight (probably my favourite book ever with my favourite aliens ever) and Greg Egan - Permutation City as good recommendations that won't fail you. Maybe check out some of their short stories as well - I really like Peter Watts' The Island, as well as Greg Egan's Reasons To Be Cheerful.
problem_redditor
14d ago
No worries, I imagined that would probably be the case - it is just a forum after all and I'm not a super consistent poster, especially not lately. Mostly I just come up with a very long essay-style post every now and then on a hobbyhorse of mine, and then I drop out. Just got curious and thought I might ask.
I'd say that summary of my preferences is largely accurate, though it's not a long or obscure web novel actually. It's a piece of fiction I think most people here are familiar with.
problem_redditor
14d ago
Perhaps I'm not prominent enough on this forum for you to have formulated a model of my preferences and/or personality, but now I have the inexplicable urge to ask you what you think my favourite novel is and see how close you actually get.
I'm in the same boat - ratfic in the sci-fi genre is where my interest lies, the fantasy-oriented stuff generally fails to grab me. There are many engineering problems and hypothetical situations to confront in sci-fi, and instead of being able to invent up your own magic systems capable of being conveniently rules-lawyered you have to stick to the constraints of the real world. The ones that systematise their own human relationships through the lens of game theory are particularly strong IMO.
Oddly enough a minority of rationalist fiction seems to tackle sci-fi. I get it, I'm trying to write such fiction myself and can attest to the fact that becoming proficient at a large number of scientific fields to the point where one can write a fully fledged story is very difficult, but I honestly thought more people would've tried. Most of the hard sci-fi writers who have been successful in this endeavour aren't strictly part of the ratsphere.
To be honest you should probably stop, then, and this isn't meant in an antagonistic way; rather it's an acknowledgement of the practical futility of such an exercise. The idea that you ever end up changing anything by participating in forums like this one is laughable. Even if you somehow do manage to convert everyone here to your point of view the overall effect of such a thing would be hilariously tiny, tantamount to a drop in the bucket. You would have spent countless hours to ultimately achieve nothing.
People participate here because they feel like they get something out of it aside from trying to right the political ship, something this forum explicitly isn't meant for. They feel like hashing things out with other people who share their ethos of discourse helps them clarify and sharpen their own thought, even if there is no agreement between the parties (yes you can cherry-pick comments that aren’t high effort, the fact remains the standard of discourse here is far above average). If you don't get that out of it, then I genuinely think it would be better if you left.
In most cases I definitely would not have enjoyed them as much, no. Even I would say it would likely have taken away from the product - I do agree with you that AI art for the most part isn't inspiring to me, and there's a lot of noticeable artifacting in AI generations. Used as is, it's very immersion-breaking.
However, I'm not so sure it's likely to stay that way, and even in its current incarnation I can see very many use-cases for it. As an example there are many highly pixelated/low fidelity/dithered indie games which rely on the style precisely because of its simplicity, and it's not that difficult to selectively crop and edit AI image outputs in such a way where it's not recognisable as AI. You're still going to need to do a lot of work to make it look good and fit within the game's intended aesthetic, for sure, but it cuts down on time significantly when you're comparing against doing it by hand. Producing novel textures for 3d models are yet another possible situation where it could be quite helpful, I imagine. Its output usually isn't good enough to just use verbatim, but it can help speed up the process of game development and that's where I think its true utility lies at the moment.
There are tons of great games that already exist sure, there aren't necessarily tons of great games that align with a given person's preferences (and no, you don't have to be really into hentai to feel this way). I say this as someone who is not very interested in a large portion of the much-heralded games out there - there's an extreme deficit of games I would personally want to play. Everything that comes out of the AAA sphere may as well be slop as far as I'm concerned, since the approach that most large studios take when they construct games is basically diametrically opposed to mine. The increased output stemming from the democratisation of game development may well have resulted in an increase in low-effort content and a decrease in the average quality of games released, but the larger amount of content overall and the greater amount of indie games that are a product of one person's idiosyncratic vision has resulted in me finding far more games I enjoy. Arguably 100% of my favourite games only exist because of this process of democratisation, and I can't help but feel the same about the usage of AI tools to speed game production up and democratise it even further. I do not care at all about how the art was made; I only care about its ability to convey the intent of the developer behind it.
I once attempted to make a game on my own due to being unable to find anything I personally thought was interesting - making the art and animation was one of the most time-consuming parts for me since it is not my speciality, and I eventually had to resort to using preexisting photos and assets which I put through a heavy dithering effect and intense colour-grading in order to shorten development time. It would have been so much easier if I had done so in an era where AI tools were available to me. There's a shit ton of games made by inexperienced/time-poor developers with interesting ideas but where the stock assets are very visible; perhaps the existence of generative AI will reduce their incidence and encourage further creation.
I'm not too concerned about being drowned in low quality games; if one would prefer to avoid encountering slop entirely, there are many mechanisms that facilitate content curation and their importance and prominence will only increase as time goes on. It's not as if people are being forced to scroll through every shitty game that's been spewed out by an unknown developer in order to find something they like, that's a caricature that doesn't reflect the reality of how most people discover content; they typically find games through curation mechanisms like forums, review sites or recommendations by friends. Pointing to all the low quality content and wringing one's hands about the unimaginable horrors of All The Slop falls flat to me, since even in an overcrowded environment you can still effectively limit the scope of your search to a subset of media that's most likely to appeal to you.
Sure, and the reason why AI generation in specific is a unique violation of the social ritual is because of an innate, knee-jerk ick people get with AI that they don't with most anything else. It's not down to some evaluation of output quality or even effort invested. There's a distinct reason why the "moat" has been arbitrarily established here and at no other point.
problem_redditor
19d ago
the distinction I'm making is between repurposing existing art (signing a premade card) and outsourcing it to a computer (someone else signs the card for you). I don't think these are directly analagous.
I would agree signing a premade card and someone else signing the card for you is not the same, and that the former is preferable. I don't believe this analogy, however, is appropriate for the situation of repurposing existing art vs outsourcing it to a computer.
In the former case, there is more effort involved in signing the card than there is in getting somebody else to sign it for you, and in addition signing a card yourself is indeed more personalised and you have more control over the output. In the latter case involving AI, it's not clear there is more effort invested when one takes preexisting art as opposed to prompt engineering so a generative model can spit out the correct output, and it's also not clear that the person taking preexisting art has exercised more personal control over the output than the AI-user. If anything, it's the opposite since the AI artist has a more fine-tuned set of controls over the output.
It’s like the difference sending a thoughtful thank you note and signing a card and having someone else sign the card for you.
I don't think that's an adequate comparison - in a context where people often straight-up use preexisting art for album covers, it's more like the difference between copying a stock message from the internet for a thank-you card and having someone else compose the message for you. I don't think it requires autism to believe they're both pretty much equivalent.
Don't have time to write a long post on it now, but interestingly enough there's a lot of legal scholarly analysis on the topic suggesting that generative AI by itself probably would be considered transformative use as per the current state of copyright law.
However, this is a cover for an artist's album, not someone claiming to be a graphic artist, and given that artists often downright steal shit for their album covers - this one painting is the cover to more than 60 different metal bands' albums - it's not the perceived lack of effort involved here that has generated the apoplectic reaction. Furthermore, in music circles where obvious sampling is de facto considered par for the course and a valid form of expression (even when it toes close to outright plagiarism in a way that almost all AI art does not), the usage of AI is still frowned upon hugely.
The idea that generative models might be able to Chinese Room their way into producing artistic output seems to existentially disturb and enrage people, and it's quite clear that people are not evaluating this in a nuanced or remotely objective way by making evaluations that the output has been arrived at through low-effort means. People are run by vibes and this is no exception.
These types of oddly existential/cosmic horror-laced memes are basically 90% of the videos on burialgoods' channel. Pretty sure he has actually done a voiceover of the processed ham meme at one point.
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