Can't a spatula be just untreated wood? Or some very light oiling just to reduce the absorption of food. And then solve the problem by disposing of them fairly often. They make a lot of heat in the fireplace since they've absorbed so much fat...
Readit NewsGravityloss commented on Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons alinpanaitiu.com/blog/dev... · Posted by u/alin23
Gravityloss commented on The Whole App is a Blob drobinin.com/posts/the-wh... · Posted by u/valzevul
You could try the opposite angle with German - watch movies and shows in German, no subtitles. Maybe start with something aimed at children. Sprinkle in some Dutch to mix it up. It can be useful in real-world situations, depending on region.
or have subtitles in German at first. Also helps if you repeat some catch phrases aloud. Especially fun if you're watching together with someone.
One cool effect is that your vocabulary can be heavily concentrated on what you're watching. Like police procedures. (in Alte they speak very clear German, can recommend.)
Gravityloss commented on The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America (1963) calteches.library.caltech... · Posted by u/rramadass
Read this from HN in 2011, was interesting. But I take Feynman's conclusions with the grain of salt, and most comments here are near conspiracy theories. Here's why.
Education in the older epoch that his informers mention, was much smaller in scale. Brazil's illiteracy was at ~65% in 1930, at just <50% by 1960, if I remember correctly. So both common schools and secondary education (college/university) were expanding at the time. And that's the reason.
If you expand education, quality inevitably drops. The lower social strata that are reached by education won't get as good teachers as earlier. You may be able to write good schoolbooks, like mathematicians in the USSR did, but there's still last mile problem, the teacher. Most teachers are not bright enthusiasts, often times they're underpaid and burnt out after ages of teaching. The few enthusiasts and visionaries, are exceptions -- at least this is what I read from one recent study -- and their recipies aren't reproducible.
From what I've read, better universities usually have less students per teacher. This way a teacher can engage better and actually care what the student does. This requires more money poured in the system and less corruption.
(For non-Western countries, money shouldn't be a big problem, they're spending smaller share of GDP on education. But modern beliefs tell that everything should be "efficient", and governments don't want to spend more, instead they insist they need to "digitize" education, and then somehow it will make breakthroughs.)
But also, if you want to play god and pour money from the education ministry into schools or colleges/unis, these streams may actually never reach the file and rank teachers.
Last note: elite school/uni material won't work in lower level ones. I taught in the university where some graduation projects were published in journals for young researchers, and teachers were publishing in not top ranking, but high ranking serious ones. Some courses included work on good older papers (in English, a foreign language).
There, you could easily dismiss students who just want a grade and a degree as noise.
But take a city further from the capitals -- even in good college students will struggle and not able to process it. Not because further on the periphery people are dumber -- simply because most brightest students went to the best unis in the capitals.
In the elites, it's easy to argue to shrink education to keep only the bright guys, like in the XIX century. Well, it doesn't work this way -- you need to educate lots of people to find more bright ones.
So, who, what and how will teach those less bright guys? A big open question to me.
There have always existed levels, some better functioning mechanisms than others.
I think it varies a lot from even year to year. For the same course, some teacher might be really optimistic and produces little explanations and tests with very hard problems, while next year there's a teacher who is very good at explaining issues and the tests are a bit less "gotcha" like. Even a single teaching assistant or a friend explaining some key concept in a way it clicks for the student can make a huge difference.
Or maybe you have different formal levels, ie university, technical school, so on, these vary by country and don't have full 1:1 mapping to each other. These also evolve over time.
Or inside one university, you have various levels. Some departments might be small and really hard to get to, either via exams, or proof of previous study ability like high grades. And there then you can expect more from the students.
So one big issue is to get the people sorted into the right places. Also if a person's performance or preference changes over time, they should be able to switch.
Gravityloss commented on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight karpathy.bearblog.dev/aut... · Posted by u/__rito__
something like correctness^2 x novel information content rank?
Actually now thinking about it, incorrect information has negative value so the metric should probably reflect that.
Gravityloss commented on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight karpathy.bearblog.dev/aut... · Posted by u/__rito__
"Boring but right" generally means that this prediction is already priced in to our current understanding of the world though. Anyone can reliably predict "the sun will rise tomorrow", but I'm not giving them high marks for that.
something like correctness^2 x novel information content rank?
Gravityloss commented on Cassette tapes are making a comeback? theconversation.com/casse... · Posted by u/devonnull
Tapes stretch. Tone and tempo changes. You can't easily play along the track anymore. Tapes also break. Some players mess up the tape too, destroying precious cassettes. These were actual practical problems way back.
Gravityloss commented on Applets are officially gone, but Java in the browser is better frequal.com/java/AppletsG... · Posted by u/pjmlp
Exactly.
Java was so buggy and had so many security issues about 20 years ago that my local authorities gave a security advisory to not install it at all in end user/home computers. That finally forced the hand of some banks to stop using it for online banking apps.
Flash also had a long run of security issues.
In the 2000s, my bank was acquired by some bigger bank from another country. Their long standing, well working and fast banking application was replaced with a very dysfunctional Java applet thing. I was using Linux at the time and IIRC it either worked barely, or then not at all. I phoned the bank, and they told about a secret alternate 'mobile' url, that had a proper working service. I used that for a while before ultimately switching to another bank. The bank sent apology letters to customers and waived some fees also as they saw many of them leave. It made me really wake up that to the fact if the company can do these visible level blunders, what else is going on there, and also, how the customer is in such a vulnerable position.
On the other hand, NASA in the past had some really great Java applets to play with some technical concept and get updated diagrams, animations and graphs etc.
Gravityloss commented on BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive evclinic.eu/2025/12/04/20... · Posted by u/mikelabatt
Different times indeed.
The Swedish government created this informational video in 1964 on how to properly dispose of your trash when at sea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t03saJVFkv4. Apparently the trick is to make the trash sink rather than float.
You can also see in the video how much clearer the water was then. Very sad.
Gravityloss commented on BMW PHEV: Safety fuse replacement is extremely expensive evclinic.eu/2025/12/04/20... · Posted by u/mikelabatt
It’s funny how I extrapolate car design sessions in my head based on software design sessions.
I sold my bmw after 15 years of multiple bmws because their design is so poor for maintenance. I had cooling system problems that required hours of labor to get to just to replace a plastic part that cost $5 where an aluminum one would cost $7.
It seems to me that bmw was designing for best case scenarios where everything goes perfectly. And since it’s supposed to go perfectly who cares if it’s $5000 to fix because it will “never break.”
Reminds me of Rube Goldberg software designs where 9 things have to happen in sequence for success.
The idea of rubust design that assumes everything breaks and you can still operate is one I value. I look for car companies (and everything I suppose) following this principle.
Porsche had a research program about a very reliable car in the 70s. It has some odd technical choices from today's perspective. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/when-porsch...
One would assume taxi companies etc would be willing to pay for cars that have high uptime and reliability. But I think they drive mostly the same stuff as regular people. At least one would assume they could get beefier suspension and transmission and high displacement downtuned engines.
In general new cars are still vastly better than old ones. 90:s cars rusted from everywhere after ~8 years while most cars nowadays have zinc coating and more plastic and are still mostly fine after 15 years.
Ex-farmhands had time to move into new jobs created by the Industrial Revolution, and it took decades. People also moved into knowledge work. What happens when AI takes all those jobs in far less time, with no other industries to offer employment?
If AI makes a few people trillionaires while hollowing out the middle class, how do we keep the lights on?