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I see another comment like this one, so here I will respond to both. I've known quite a lot of rich people, all vastly richer than ourselves. As for us, we are so rich we don't think we can financially justify spending more on cars than my 23 yo pickup and my wife's 8 yo Prius. Our house in an astoundingly banal suburb is worth ~$300K. We can't afford to retire to a cool US city. I find it hilarious that SWEs posting on HN think paying $8 for a loaf of great bread means you are "rich".

As for those rich people, they generally have atrocious taste. They will drop big bucks on high priced wine, or more generally, restaurants. They stay at resorts on vacation and fly business class. We do go to Paris, and stay in a cheap AirBnB out in the 19th, and we fly steerage. We make most of our meals in the AirBnB, and... wait for it... eat food out of artisan vendors. I don't think we've ever spent more than $150 for a restaurant meal in the EU and most of the time it is less than $50. Those rich people we know would never ever spend the time to go to a great bakery. Why would they? That would take time mingling with the plebes, and who cares? Bread is bread. Impossible to play the status game on that.

The problem with the economics of artisan products is that the number of people, income immaterial, who would go out of their way to spend more on an apex product is, economically speaking, a set of measure zero. Low bid rules our world. This is the reason that at scale corporate chains produce the shit that they do, because that shit industrial product is lower cost and nearly everyone prefers that.

We don't, but we don't matter.

Fuck the rich. But they're not the problem here.

edit: improve accuracy

Yes. Precisely so. As it happens, we've been friends with a "3am baker" for decades. We do not envy her life, but we do intensely enjoy her taste. Delighted to pay double for it.

"...baker who gets up at 3 am..."

But those 3am bakers are being exterminated by at scale corporate chains, no? Generalizes to just about anything that could reasonably be described using "artisanal". Social atomization inexorably spreads, and after thinking about it pretty hard for many years of travel putting eyeballs on "artisanal" processes I don't see any possibility of any other outcome. So we enjoy what is left.

"suboptimal" => optimal

I'm getting the distinct impression that handwriting human language may be beyond the basic capabilities of the Modern Human.

Seems to be memory and basic cognitive difficulties such as "sorting" whatever that means when actually buying the stuff in the store. I've been buying stuff in stores constantly for 50 years and I'm very fast, without aid.

But boy howdy these devices sound like just the tool for people with actual cognitive difficulties; we should make definitely sure that they have them. Might be a problem though on the data entry side.

edit: improve accuracy

We keep a postit list next to the breadmaker and write stuff down when we need to get something. Then when it is time to go shopping, we simply peel off the list and away we go.

I am getting disgusted by people who need to have that screen in their hand, all waking hours.

Yeah, this just happened, a month ago, with the 120 yo farm land my inlaws have owned. Consolidated into the farm next door.

I don't know what to think. They (the inlaws) were all absentee landlords. The previous generations all lived in the area, most on the plots.

I think I spent a dollar, maybe two, at the flea market, on our second hand mechanical ice cream maker. The social benefits of having the various kids, always including the guests', working it, trading off until the beautiful result happened, makes me intensely glad we weren't being judged by having some of these oh so awesome technological miracles expected.

Yeah, I don't envy your knowledge or experience.

We've made homemade ice cream dozens of times over 50 years... and the way I think about the delicious result is that it's like... soft serve ice cream. I think I prefer the texture of "scooped hard ice scream" but homemade with just cream, eggs, sugar, and whatever for the flavorings is just an outstanding tasty thing to eat.

I've never tasted industrial soft serve, maybe something else is going on?

Thinking back we always made it with a hand cranked machine[1], cooled by lots of salt on bagged ice cubes, maybe the current generation of electric home machines makes a different texture.

[1] A strong argument for keeping kids around.

I guess I don't really understand this argument in an age of near-overnight shipping. I am not a farmer, but I have maintained EOL equipment like refrigerators, fancy stoves, a MB 240D, chainsaws in a small mountain town (ie, far from parts sources). I tend to have the next obvious replacement parts on the shelf already. So for instance I have brake pads for a 2001 Toyota Tundra on the shelf.

Though I am not a farmer I have spent time with the spouse's family out in W Minnesota and all of them were farmers. I did not get the impression that they were useless around a wrench, welding rig, or electrical circuits.

An argument I could buy about Deere's brand loyalty is that (I know nothing about this beyond farmer hearsay) the current generation of farmers seems to really like the GPS automation. Grandpa can go a lot more years these days, is the point. I'd be curious about the accuracy of that anecdata.

I want to thank you for your service. It is courageous and principled people like yourself that supplies enough eyeballs on chromium that incentivizes bigcorp adtech to keep things slightly less worse.

Truing a wheel is something that for 100 years avid cyclists (riding multiple times per week) could do with nothing but a single $3 truing wrench. If you were very poor like me in college you did it by pushing the rim brakes to one side or another and then truing against the rim hitting the pad. We used to do this on the trail, ride mates amiably sitting by why the whacked wheel gets put into "enough" true.

Nowadays of course I have the whole kit, the Park truing stand, various truing wrenchs... and that's it. Oh right I use painter's tape to mark problematical spokes. I've built three sets of fabulous wheels that take a lot of abuse but let me still set personal records at (say) TdT.

Now we get to the flame wars. I've been endurance cycling 50 years, since I was 14 or so. I completely understand the arguments for disc brakes for tandems and touring setups. What the disc brake people are not telling you is that the hand fatigue problem was solved by $40 Avid Single Digit rim brakes 25 years ago. I have a set on my mt bike that are truly single digit sufficient for most rough descents up to say 3000' and maybe an hour. Probably you need to do some exercises if you're doing those and having fatigue. I have been at Moab doing an insane gonzo abusive descent and noticing that hmm might be having safety issues soon with my forearms, and hmm, I need to get this descent done... but that was before the Avid brakes. My 20 yo Specialized frame FrankenBike with Avid SD brakes is not being replaced in I guess forever because it is gonzo abusive ready and it just works.

Edit: Oh if anyone has a nice set of used Avid SD brakes I'd really like to replace the way too sensitive Paul sidepull brakes on my gravel bike. I put the dumbest pads possible on them and they're still too sensitive. I'd happily trade if I could fully refurb the functionality of the Avid brakeset.

I've been cooking community dinners for nearly 50 years, including, for most of that, for vegetarians/pescatarians/vegans. I even was camp cook on 4 week-long raft trips.

It never fails: someone wants a fake turkey, or fake bacon, or fake burgers, or whatever. Unwrap the plastic, heat it up, it sez on the label it's vegan. Also you omnivores are killing the world.

So I now refuse absolutely to cook for vegetarians/vegans. I always did make somebody else buy the fake industrial vegan meat substitutes, and amazingly, I caught friction for that. My wife and I are chemical engineers who have been inside quite a few food processing plants and we refuse to touch the output of those. I will eat potato chips every once in a while but nothing vegan at all. I want my vices honest.

I don't think I understand... You are explicitly saying supported subtitle/language streams are... not important?

Yeah, as I endure into old age I think I prefer a stronger narrative arc which AtD has vs. the layered cacaphony of GR. I was doing a lot of er "mind altering additives" at the time when I was reading GR with a fresh young brain. Might be a young person's book. Highly recommended for young people! It's anchored in WWII which might seem like eroded history but hmm it seems our history decides to recycle itself.

Why would I care what the "built-in players on Mac, iOS, and Windows" support? I don't use those. But I do have a very rich media environment.

So neither comment "responding" to my comment actually responds to my query, which is about MakeMKV -> HandBrake and subtitles/language tracks. My very tentative assertion seems to be unfortunately true.

I'm going to have to add that I'm not missing any life happiness by not using the "built-in players on Mac, iOS, and Windows", and my library is better than I can stream. You'll need to kill public libraries to degrade the lives of people like me. I'm quite certain that you've got funding to do that, soul crushing media bigcorp lickspittle tools. Yer basically destructive nanite greymatter digestors at this point.

"... you can remux from mkv to mp4 very easily with ffmpeg directly."

According to the HandBrake docs (ISTR) mp4 can't handle multiple languages and subtitle sets, so the conversion mkv->mp4 is (potentially) lossy. I'm no expert, just trying to keep the language/subtitle sets I want, maybe I've missed something here. What I do so far is HB encode to Matroska, not MPEG-4. Then I don't lose any of the ones I want. Also I have noticed sometimes MakeMKV is not entirely inclusive in its defaults and I have to add extra languages/subtitles.

That's interesting. I never had a problem ploughing through Pynchon, and as I mentioned I bounced off Ulysses in my early 20s. I am right now in the last pages of my 1st reread of Gravity's Rainbow. I have to say I prefer Joyce now. And I think I liked my recent read of Against the Day over GR, an unexpected development.

Gotta say though, GR is still awesome. Fearless.

I was scrolling down the comments thinking, huh, what if I just kind of threw it out there that Ulysses is my favorite book, by far. What would happen? Bunch of young'uns dumping on me?

Well bring it on. It is in fact, not particularly close that Ulysses is my favorite book.

It hadn't occurred to me though to just reread chapters as they appeal, I'm heading out to reread the calvacade one. Then there is that pub with the dog... And the newsrooom... what a great day, thanks!

I started Ulysses when I was in my early twenties, stalled, and then picked it up again and finished it straight off 35 years later. Same copy! Pissed off I didn't push it through way back when.

Check the link people. AI is fucking up the world.

Thank you very much for telling us about this. Most of my cooking of Cajun and Creole cuisine for the last 30 years or so have come from the gumbopages.com. But the internets are ephemeral, and I need something like this to survive the cuisinapacolypse. $70 for Hardcover – December 1, 2004. Worth it?

This is exactly what we do too. I even have a hobby of collapsing Julia Child (and now David Chang) recipes into something... manageable in say 2 hrs? I did the David Chang wings and yeah the Super Bowl party was destroyed by them (omfg never had wings like this) but good lawd they took a lot of effort, spread over multiple days.

"A few decades ago there was a more popular genre of cookbook: a huge 200p book"

"Joy of Cooking" ©1975 is 915 pages. "The New Book of Middle Eastern Food" ©2000 is 513 pages. "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone" ©1997 is 742 pages. "The River Cottage Meat Book" ©2007 is 543 pages. "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" ©2001 (40th Anniversary Edition) is ~720 pages, but this is just the first volume; the 2nd which is similar in length is an extension, true, but also illuminates uncovered areas in V1 like charcuterie.

I've got many more fat cookbooks, of which quite a few spend a 100 pages or more on basic techniques for the culinary area they illuminate.

I am not sure I would trust the parent commenter's accuracy on well, anything, really, if the data they cite are so disconnected from reality.

In this comment, I am a common-lisp noob, no competency at all. I have used and written a lot of sw in a lot of languages over 40 years though.

Keeping in mind the concepts of per-user and per-project installations, I have done the following experiments:

1) Quicklisp only. Not beating on Zach but we're getting close to a year w/o updates, so something like cl-transducers needs to be installed from upstream. Upshot is, other than the lack of updates, adding packages works perfectly. But I am curious how to delete a package. Installation is per-user, although stuffing packages into the asdf visible directories give some customization ability. (I think?)

2) The whole shebang: ros + ros-quicklisp + qlot. I spent a few weeks with this combo, digging around the code and installation structure, and... I have no idea how to manage this thing down the road. Seems to work, but there's a lot of assumptions about per-project vs per-user package installation. AFAICT, ros packaging means per-project quicklisp, which is fine, but no versioning. So then add qlot. Now we have versioning, which is great, but how do ros installed quicklisp packages interact with qlot? Especially since qlot add is a thing.

3) In order to simplify the system (ahem) I decided to follow the hints in the qlot installation section and simply install qlot with no quicklisp or ros on a clean system (ahem). I also reinstalled sly from clean and found out that I had to install sly-quicklisp in order for it to work. That was yesterday and I'm still scratching my head about what kind of a beast I am working with. What part is quicklisp and what part is qlot? I am also working a lot closer to asdf, experimenting at each step. Learning a lot, but, I'm not really getting a lot of happiness out of wading through at the source code level all these overlapping packaging systems (ahem). If I persevere I suspect I'll know a lot about the current state-of-the-art of lisp library packaging.

I am right now contemplating clearing the deck once again and doing the 2) ros + ros-quicklisp + qlot again, because it seem to work fairly smoothly and provides the opportunity for per-project versioning. I'll have to defer the understanding part into the future, though.

I have a hardback first ed. of and can strongly recommend "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone". I see there is a second edition. I would be wary. Even Fuschia Dunlop modifies favorites in succeeding editions, and I hate that.

We're not even slightly vegetarian, except in the Anthony Bourdain way, likely paraphrasing: "If you could cook vegetarian like this, fucking hippies, I'd eat vegetarian every day." Yup.

The thing about competent vegetarian dishes is that they are a pleasure to eat. But it is hard to get a pure "American" vegetarian cuisine from individual cooks that isn't hmm, dreary. The thing about Madison is her recipes are not dreary. I often consult her soups and stews recipes for instance to understand how she is flavoring these w/o meat (and especially, meat stocks).

Yeah I was a hard no on the new edition (my first copy, 1979, was a going-to-college gift from my truly wonderful parents-as-cooks). The reason being was when it came out multiple people noticed that the truly exquisite JoC brownie recipe was now mediocre. Why would they do that?

This feature of very long lived cookbooks with inconstant author lists needs to be better understood.

Again this is all just bullshit. I'm being lectured on cooking by somebody who claims it's impossible to document proper cooking techniques.

"But, do professional chefs use cookbooks? -- I know the answer to this one. No, they don't."

Professional musicians don't use scores when performing (mostly). So what? Are you a professional chef? No, you are not. You are an abject beginner and like a beginner you need a whole shelf full of scores.

"There's no instruction that can explain what thickness of the dough do you need to make it work, because that's contingent on the hydration of the dough, the temperature of the oven / pan you use to bake it etc."

Hilarious. Secret sauce indeed. Here's an author who has documented these techniques quite explicitly, and famously so: Paula Wolfert.

All those words you wrote (did you write them?) and you proved to yourself that cooking is magic, can't be documented, books are useless, yadda yadda.

And uh, this is the one that's really "cool": convection ovens don't work on anything but stews, sez the person who "don't really make stews". Oven roasted eggplant slices beg to differ! How about cookies? How about a fucking frozen pizza? Convection broil works pretty good on a lot of things, sez this person, who has cooked a lot of things on convection broil. My wife the family baker is laughing at the convection baking comments you made.

Can't yall trolls try a little harder and make it interesting?

Did you know that worldwide there are academic culinary historians?

So, before I get any more trolls, my wife and I started out as chemical engineers. Do you realize (this is for the trolls) how heavily documented all commercial food processes are? Commercial food processing plants are just chemical plants, which is what we trained to do.

This is just flat out false. Temperature for instance is absolutely essential to the proper cooking of meats to anything but "well done". Or hey, just set the burner to high and rip out a hollandaise sauce. And the ingredients part... LLMs really need to up their game.

At this point I think I'm being trolled... and so badly, too. Can't you try a little harder and make it fun?

I'm going to have to hard disagree with this take. I do agree that probably a large majority the cookbooks that you can currently walk into a bookstore and buy are garbage. But in the comments here are excellent suggestions for proven, classic cookbooks, and you will be a better cook, possibly even a great one, if you absorb them.

The stuff written here: "* Measuring ingredients..." is completely unrecognizable to me. For instance, ovens do have hotspots but a solid convection function pretty much eliminates that as an issue.

Also, I think there is some confusion about what it means to measure. What competent recipes try to do is balance the need to indicate how much is going to be made ("serves 4-6") and then, this is the key: within that constraint they tell you the ratios of the ingredients. Which is obvious, isn't it? Except I've seen people get annoyed when they don't honor the ratios.

Ruhlmann wrote a book about this: "Ratio". His book "Charcuterie" is terrific if you really want to learn how to make tasty stuff.

In the editor, make sure to M-x org-mode. Lots of dated annotations, and a lot of results, in my many recipe files.

YES! This is the way. And to these, which I have too, add Fucshia Dunlop for Chinese, Debora Madison for general vegetarian, Maya Kaimal for truly exquisite Southern Indian, and pre-1980 Joy of Cooking for general wisdom (I have 3 copies).

I've got another 100 or so that I dip into from time to time. Often I like to see a second opinion, or even a third.

Absorb a healthy chunk of these and now you're prepared, as my parent commenters point out, to attack the internet. A lot of garbage recipes out there.