mattmaroon

Oh! I thought it was Jim Obama, the owner of Obama Chevrolet of Sheboygan!

Oh sure but I meant in their case they might be their own biggest customer. Companies shuffle money from one pocket to another often for tax/financial reasons.

Yeah I don’t blame them. They didn’t create the meme but once it happened, any responsible leader would start doing secondary offerings to raise money. I sure would. If morons want to keep investing in the stock of a company that has no other chance of survival, great. Now they’ve got $9 billion on hand and they’ve had time to find a niche, right-size, and the interest on the cash pile is great too.

Unfortunately that support doesn’t seem to extend to making the process take less than decades and cost less than gazillions due to overregulation so there’s no incentive to build.

I think they make most of their money off searches with intent (“vehicle detailing near me”) and things for which they still send you somewhere. The kind of searches that an LLM can just answer probably largely just sent you to Wikipedia or somewhere nobody was paying much for anyway.

It’s possible AI will do a better job of capturing ad dollars by better serving intentional searchers.

Or deals with their own/third party LLMs?

When I went through YC in 2007 a founder whose name you know drunkenly told me at a party that Google Docs and Macbooks would have Microsoft out of business by 2012. Someone here told me in 2018 I was nuts to buy a gas-powered car because in less time than you would drive a car for, everyone will have switched to electric and there will be no gas stations left.

The impending deaths of most things are greatly exaggerated.

It does seem like the petrodollar is coming to an end. Even if we wanted to keep killing/abducting the leader of every tiny oil nation shortly after the decide to sell oil in another currency (like we did to Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela), bigger ones we can’t just do that to practically are going to start.

The writing is on the wall. It might take decades, but it’ll end.

Can’t be sure it isn’t others. This a very large app, so it may just be the one that gets noticed the most.

Meh. These sorts of restrictions are a problem with cell phones because you have two choices.

For this application, you can just get a raspberry pi for about the same price. And they’re not even taking it away from ones that I already had it. They just aren’t selling the ability anymore so you know it when you bought it.

You’d think Republicans would become pro-trans-men at least then.

None of those are examples of violating a court order, in fact the first is an example of following one. The second happened when he was out of office. The third is ongoing.

I definitely did not say he doesn’t get ruled against by the courts.

“All” might be a stretch but the idea that they just do what they want regardless of what the courts say is just incorrect propaganda. And continuing to find creative ways to defy court orders is something every administration does. And my opinion of the administration is low also, I just don’t like the propaganda and have never understood why we need to make up things about them when there’s so much to dislike that isn’t fictional.

The US, or any nation state?

While true, most people don’t (and won’t ever) know how to use it. But enough will to keep Wikipedia updated I suppose.

I’m not sure, but they do sell some pre-hydrated gums and usually call them “perfected”. They are largely buying in commercial quantities and re-packaging for restaurant-scale use with their gums because a lot of the bigger ingredient companies that make the best products won’t sell in smaller than 50 lb (or sometimes even much larger) increments.

Pre-hydrated gums are usually just hydrated and then spray dried ones.

Depends what I’m bottling and if it needs to be shelf stable. There’s actually just as much work in the packaging of a beverage as the product sometimes.

Yeah, that would be my guess. Crystal Pepsi tastes noticeably different than regular, and caramel color is used in such small qtys that it is considered borderline flavorless.

If you look at popular grapefruit sodas Fresca is clear, but Squirt is cloudy because Fresca uses water soluble flavors and Squirt uses oils. (Squirt is the better product by far IMO because a lot of the grapefruit flavor is from the oil in the peel.)

It’s always possible the geniuses at the flavor houses Pepsi buys from have some magic I don’t know about though. But I’ve never heard of any way to make emulsified oils clear, since they refract light differently.

It would violate equal protection.

I did mention all of that. When the same topic came up a few days ago.

That’s a good question and it probably depends on the ingredient. Most of what we call flavors are a mix of volatile aromatic compounds. Some of those are fat soluble. Some water soluble.

Alcohol is great for extracting as it can pull out both.

The flavor extracted depends on what you’re extracting with and even the concentration.

So really, you’d have to buy it and try. I’ve only ever made root beer a couple times for my own experimentation with oil.

Nature’s Flavors is awesome though and you might ask them.

Several reasons. Texture and freeze-thaw stability are the main reasons. The latter being an issue for home use mainly.

Your freezer’s self-defrost works by getting a little warm and then cold again. That causes ice crystals to melt and re-freeze, which is the opposite of what you want. Gums help with that and that’s why it’s in most of the ones you see at the grocery store.

They also can be used to give body to things that don’t have as much protein, like sorbets.

Ha yeah. That whole thing is kind of crazy.

Oh! I knew they sold it for art but not why.

Methanol will certainly make you go blind if you consume it at too high a ratio, it just isn’t a risk when distilling because you can’t feasibly make that happen on accident and it would be hard to even do it on purpose. I think that’s what parent likely meant.

Also “Angel’s share” isn’t what you throw away, it’s what evaporates from the barrel when you age. What you throw away are the foreshots and parts of the heads and tails

Yeah column stills exist for home use but they’re not very popular. They’re big and expensive and strip flavor. It’s probably because Home distilling, like home brewing, is largely focused on the craft side rather than trying to get drunk cheaply.

If you’re trying to get drunk cheaply, and without tasting liquor, you cannot beat the product and efficiency of a column still.

But I want my whiskey or apple brandy to have the characteristics of the mash I distill it from. A column still would reduce that.

So most home distilling is a pot still for sure.

Thank you for finding these! I remembered they existed but not where

Small scale: modernist pantry. Commercial scale: Ingredion’s TIC gums. Their pre-hydrated gum arabic is great.

Well after software I wanted a life that involved a lot less computer usage and a lot more being on my feet. So now I sell beverages via a few food trucks and also syrups people can use to make draft sodas/mocktails. We make everything ourselves because we’re all-natural everything, with the lone exception of Coke products because you just can’t get people to drink anything else.

I basically went from no real knowledge to being able to develop commercial-scale beverages and walk them through all phases of production.

The money’s not as good as software (but decent) and being active rather than sedentary with most of my time has done wonders for my health and mood. Man was not meant to sit in one place for long hours daily and I’m just not a gym rat no matter how many times I tried so I just reengineered my life.