I go into the shop, I walk up to the counter, and I say "Can I have a 1/2" drive T50 Torx bit please", and the person behind the counter says "Yes of course" and we go over to the small expensive tools cabinet and get one out.
I don't go into the shop and wander about until I find something that looks like it, then stand there pointing things going "THAT!" until someone figures out what I mean.
And now I have a T50 Torx bit that I can stick on a ratchet with a long extension and get the passenger seat out of the Range Rover so I can retrieve my daughter's favourite necklace from where it's gotten entangled with the wiring to the gearbox and suspension ECUs in a place where I can see it with a dentist's mirror but can't actually get a grabber onto to fish it out, worse luck.
So that's my afternoon sorted then. Because we're not just hacking on computers round here.
On the other hand, if you went and browsed the visual interface, you might discover you could purchase a 1/2” drive to 1/4” hex adapter, thereby opening up the possibility of using the entire set of impact driver bits you already own.
It isn't hard to make your own hot sauce to your own tastes. I grow my own chillis, lacto ferment them with shop bought pineapple and add mango and vinegar. Tastes far better than most shop bought sauces IMHO.
There is a place for simple hot sauces, because you don't want to add additional flavours. Sometimes all you want is straight up chilis.
More complex hot sauces might include dried shrimp, fermented soy, lemon grass, dried mushrooms, but those flavours might not be desirable in some dishes. And some dishes require specific hot sauces because they are an integral part of the flavour profile (Mapo tofu, Tom Yum).
I would just like to interject for a moment. Mapo tofu does not use 'hot sauce' as understood in the common parlance. It uses doubanjiang, a very specific fermented paste of chilis and broad beans. It is not saucy; it's very thick like gochujang. I take issue with calling doubanjiang hot sauce and I really don't want anyone to try to make mapo tofu with normal hot sauce.
> I don't know why people like Sriracha anyway. It just tastes of "hot" and vinegar.
Nope, also of garlic.
"I don't like $PopularThing" is always a boring take. Other people clearly like it if it's popular.
It is known since ancient times, De gustibus non est disputandum (1): Tastes differ, so it's pointless to dispute matters of taste as if there's a correct answer.
> "I don't like $PopularThing" is always a boring take. Other people clearly like it if it's popular.
So because something is popular, saying you don't like it is somehow incorrect?
Do you also like McDonalds? It's popular, so you should like it, right? You should think that McDonalds is good, high-quality food, because it's popular, get it?
Except it's not. It's objectively terrible food. Sugary greasy insipid crap, and these days it's not even cheap or quick.
I feel like Rooster Sriracha is the McDonalds of hot sauces.
> It is known since ancient times, De gustibus non est disputandum (1): Tastes differ, so it's pointless to dispute matters of taste
For reference, de gustibus non est disputandum translates as "tastes shouldn't be discussed". Don't be confused by the etymological relationship to dispute.
I’ve never really been a fan of it as a direct condiment so I’m inclined to agree.
I think the first time I tried it was about 15 years ago. Out to lunch at a bahn mi spot with coworkers and all the guys were drenching their sandwiches in the stuff. I think in that context it’s overpowering and awful and ruins a good sandwich. Preferentially, I love the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha as a condiment for a lettuce wrap or a sandwich.
Where I feel red sriracha is a staple item is making sauces and marinades. Whenever I’m making vaguely Thai peanut sauces at home for a pad Thai or a satay it’s the #2 ingredient after the peanut butter itself and often at a 1:1 ratio. Combined with all the other ingredients it mellows out the harsh flavors and makes a wonderful layered sauce.
They have a spicy ketchup product that I liked, tho it has disappeared from my local stores. At the time I first noticed it at the store it was the hottest one that also matched the thick consistency I expect from ketchup.
Ketchup only being made from tomatoes is a comparatively recent thing.
In the UK in the 1500s or so the most common condiment was mushroom ketchup, which you pretty much have to make from scratch these days and that's a bit of a pity. You cook the mushrooms off with mace, nutmeg, ginger, pepper, maybe some tamarind (that's the stuff that gives Worcester sauce its sour flavour - it's got the same thing in it as sorrel which I guess you could also use but that's better for like a pesto), brown sugar, and some red wine, and just keep going until it reduces down into a thick sticky paste.
It's quite a strong flavour, probably a bit full on for the average American palate, although I know people over there who make it and apparently enjoy it.
Tomato ketchup is like a cross between a pickle and a jam, where (at least in theory) the sugar and vinegar act as preservatives and the pectin from the tomatoes makes it set up into a sticky jelly.
People also made walnut ketchup, which is difficult to do where I am because you need green unripe walnuts and there aren't a lot of walnut trees here. If you live near a walnut grower see if you can get a bag of unripe ones and have a go at it. The unripe walnut juice will stain the hell out of everything it comes near - it'll stain Pyrex, ffs - but it's good stuff that goes nicely with a bit of venison.
There wasn't any computing involved. The video was recorded as a sampled analogue signal, with pits of varying length setting the "output voltage".
If you look at a Constant Angular Velocity disc you can actually see "spokes" radiating out from the centre, with two broad ones 180° apart. The narrow spokes are the horizontal sync pulses occuring every 0.576° - the disc rotates at 25 revs per second and each concentric track is one complete frame. The broader spokes are of course the vertical sync pulses and colour burst occurring every 1/50th of a second.
If you're in the US or Japan, these numbers are 30 revs per second, 0.686° and 1/60th of a second, because of the lower resolution video standard, but it doesn't look like Laserdisc was much of a "thing" in those countries.
Here in the UK, in the 1980s all the schools took part in a thing called "The Domesday Project" [1] - the name is a reference to The Domesday Book, a survey of England and Wales carried out in the 11th century by William the Conqueror.
The Domesday Discs were CAV Laserdiscs that were played in a special player with a SCSI interface, attached to a BBC Micro computer. Because each concentric track was a complete frame it was possible to get perfect still frame video by just keeping the head still, so you could look at photos of places all around the UK and read a bit of information about them genlocked over the top.
First, modern LLMs are not "a huge table of phrases". They are neural networks with billions of learned parameters that generate tokens by computing probability distributions over vocabulary given prior context. There is no lookup table of stored sentences.
Second, Eliza-style bots used explicit scripted pattern matching rules. LLMs instead learn statistical representations from large corpora and can generalize to produce novel sequences that were never present in the training data.
Kent Pitman's Lisp Eliza from MIT-AI's ITS History Project (sites.google.com):
Third, while "pattern matching" is sometimes used informally, it’s misleading technically. Transformers perform high-dimensional vector computations and attention over context to model relationships between tokens. That’s very different from rule-based pattern matching.
You can certainly debate whether LLMs "think", but describing them as "Eliza with a big phrase table" is not an accurate description of how they work.
You have the resources available at your fingertips to learn what the truth is, how LLMs actually work. You could start with Wikipedia, or read Steven Wolfram's article, or simply ask an LLM to explain how it works to you. It's quite good at that, while an Eliza bot certainly can't explain to you how it works, or even write code.
> Therac-25 is a great case study for software engineers too, recommend reading the Wikipedia article for anyone who hasn't, it's not too long.
I re-read the original paper every few months, more frequently if I'm working on Safety-of-Life-Critical equipment. Which, given my day job, means I'm re-reading it every couple of weeks at most.
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