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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • I’m a little skeptical about gas stoves causing or contributing to all these deaths, but I believe in science so if well written papers like the one OP linked are peer reviewed and published then I’m willing to accept their conclusions.

    That being said, I’m a very avid home cook (with years of experience in commercial kitchens) and I’ve made many good faith attempts to find a way to cook on the stove top that doesn’t use gas, and unfortunately none of them come even close to what I can do with gas.

    Regular electric elements are garbage, and it doesn’t matter what kind of cooking vessel you use, but I think almost everyone agrees here.

    Induction is very interesting, and can heat a ferrous vessel quicker than a normal stove burner (but not nearly as fast as my outdoor wok equipment can). Unfortunately it is pulsed heating, and uses a rather course gradient, so techniques which require very fine tuned and consistent heat aren’t easily replicated.

    I’ll admit that have a lot of money invested in non-ferrous cooking vessels (copper, not a copper plate in the bottom, legit 3mm thick copper walled pans) and they are incompatible with induction, so any switch to induction will require buying new cookware. I’m in a tiny niche, so I also admit my trouble with induction shouldn’t discourage others from switching.

    Gas is wonderful for getting precisely the results I need with sauces, when you turn it down it follows a smooth and predictable gradient, and works perfectly with high quality copper cookware which is superior to anything else on the market (unless of course you use induction, or care about price).

    Yes, I have some cast iron and carbon steel, which work with induction, but they don’t lose heat as fast as other materials, which is required for some techniques. They’re great for some things, but terrible at others, so they don’t solve my problem.

    I run a hefty hood that exhausts outside, and I don’t have kids in the house, so in the near term I’m not really worried about people in my home getting sick from whatever combusting natural gas throws off.

    But like the meat alternative (or lab grown meat) effort, I’m genuinely interested in an alternative to what I already use, but only if it performs at least as well as my current solution. And unfortunately nothing currently on the market comes even close.



  • How do I plan for job instability? By interviewing at many places continuously. By keeping my job skills and interviewing skills sharp, while interviewing continuously. By keeping my eye on the market and my value, by interviewing continuously, and evaluating the incoming offers.

    It’s not easy, but it’s pretty straightforward. I picked a job sector with lots of opportunities and upward mobility, but also tons of instability. I picked a place to live which gives me physical proximity to those opportunities. I work smart and stay agile. All of that without a college degree.

    Stuff is expensive and we don’t always have everything we want, but we’re secure enough to have everything we need, with a healthy risk management plan.

    I do live in a major city in the US, so I have more local opportunities than someone in a small town. But I’d argue that my decision to live near where there are job opportunities was part of my planning process.


  • I mean, yeah, I plan for that. If you’re a wage earner like me, you should know you’re employed at the will of some company, and they don’t give a shit about you.

    I plan for this by interviewing for other jobs at least once a month. I turn down offers every few months. I keep my skills sharp and my eyes open, and change employment when it makes sense.

    The longest I’ve been at one company is 7 years, but it’s not unusual for me to change companies after 18-24 months.

    I don’t plan to get laid off, but it happens a lot in my industry, and I roll with it. It is planned out, risk management, or whatever you want to call it.





  • I see a lot of references to Ubuntu being filled with ads or scaring people into buying their services, but I’ve been daily driving it for over 15 years on personal desktops and servers and never noticed that. What have I missed?

    I never saw the Amazon ad stuff, I hear it was a referral link?

    Last I checked Ubuntu Pro is free for personal use on up to 5 machines.

    I use apt to manage all my packages and upgrades, including dist-upgrade, maybe that’s why I’ve never noticed snap? Why does snap suck?









  • I’m pretty sure I didn’t mess with systemd, though that would probably be the right way to handle it.

    I was able to update a runtime config so if any storage wasn’t available it just halted the service. Then I created a short script I’d invoke manually which decrypted the luks drives and brought the dependent services up. I also added monitoring to alert me when the drives weren’t available for whatever reason.


  • I use separate disks for data storage and my OS. That way a headless system can boot and all the services like SSH can become available, and I can decrypt the data drives remotely.

    When there’s an unexpected reboot I can still get into my system and decrypt remotely which is nice. I can also move the data storage disks to another system without too much hassle.

    I did have to make sure some services were fault tolerant if an encrypted volume was unavailable when the OS booted. An example of this might be torrenting software, I needed to make sure the temporary storage was on an encrypted volume. The software had a sane fault mode when the final storage location was unavailable, but freaked out for some reason when the temp storage was missing.

    Once set up the whole thing is pretty easy to manage.