Naw. There have been vegetarian sandwich patty options forever, years before fake meat. Like tofu burgers, TVP, bulgur wheat, and others.

I don't understand the point of "fake meat" burgers. Like, there are so many good recipes and ingredients out there that don't try to mimic meat and are still good and tasty. Look at Indian food, for instance. They sure found a way to make pulses and other humble ingredients tasty and delicious. Or the many Mediterranean dishes that just happen to be vegan or vegetarian, but are meatless because they simply were good enough like that.

I think fake meat wasn't really about "getting people to eat less meat", it was based on the expectation that the average person only wants to eat the same exact thing they ever did without ever widening their culinary horizons. The only problem is, that a person that's open enough to try fake meat is probably open minded enough to try new things in general, including foods that aren't served between two slices of bread.

The people that stubbornly refuse to vary their diets often won't try new stuff anyway

I wonder how much this is a result of Strix Halo. I had a fairly standard stipend for a work computer that I didn't end up using for a while so I recently cashed it in on the EVO-X2 and fuck me sideways: that thing is easily competitive with the mid-range znver5 EPYC machines I run substitors on. It mops the floor with any mere-mortal EC2 or GCE instance, like maybe some r1337.xxxxlarge.metal.metal or something has an edge, but the z1d.metal and the c6.2xlarge or whatever type stuff (fast cores, good NIC, table stakes), blows them away. And those things are 3-10K a month with heavy provisioned IOPS. This thing has real NVME and it cost 1800.

I haven't done much local inference on it, but various YouTubers are starting to call the DGX Spark overkill / overpriced next to Strix Halo. The catch of course is ROCm isn't there yet (they're seeming serious now though, matter of time).

Flawless CUDA on Apple gear would make it really tempting in a way that isn't true with Strix so cheap and good.

I love this app for bird sounds. I found ChatGPT is pretty accurate for pictures of birds or plants as well.