You're still only talking about a 3% difference. Outside the margin of error for a properly-controlled test - which I don't think this is - to be sure. But small enough that if I went into the BIOS of your PC while you weren't looking and down-clocked the RAM to achieve the same effect you wouldn't notice unless you ran a benchmark.
That's far from the only number that looks weird. If this site is legit - a point I'm not conceding - it could be that these numbers are the average of some large number of systems, and the tests are not properly controlled for any of the other factors that might affect performance. Amount of memory, memory speed, single vs dual channel, overclocking, CPU cooler, even ambient temperature could all be having an impact on the score, and certain types of CPU could be more likely to be biased in a particular direction.
It's also possible for some of the CPUs that their sample size is really small - so one or two overclocked or hotboxed systems could completely throw off the result.
This is a good piece, but I want to quibble with some of the conclusions.
> The whole thing was a case of the old saying: “When the paddy wagon pulls up to the house of ill repute, it doesn’t matter what you are doing. Everybody goes to jail.”
How does this apply? Sounds like the opposite - those who had not engaged in the illegal practices were unaffected.
> Once the SEC decided that most technology company stock option procedures were not as desired, the jail sentences were handed out arbitrarily.
That's just not how it works, at least not for white-collar defendants who can afford a proper defence.
There's also something to be said about this story being followed immediately by a pitch to sign up for a16z's crypto newsletter....
> How does this apply? Sounds like the opposite - those who had not engaged in the illegal practices were unaffected.
I can see your point but I think on careful reading of the author's interpretation of events that old adage does (kind of) fit. The author is asserting that, while he doesn't know the details of other things that may have happened at the CFO's prior company, he believes in regard to dating stock options specifically, the CFO (Michelle) did not intend to break the law or know that she broke the law.
He's basing this on both his personal experience of Michelle's high integrity and honesty and the fact experienced investors who'd known her for a long time all had the same opinion. There's also the context that hundreds of other companies ran afoul of the same interpretation issue of that complex directive. It's hard to imagine all those finance teams, accountants and auditors were knowingly breaking that law and risking prosecution.
So, he's using this event as a cautionary tale of which the moral is "While you may have no intention of breaking the law, it can creep in in subtle ways without you knowing. Therefore, implement conservative governance practices and stick to them." Unfortunately, the actual event he's citing isn't an ideal instance to illustrate his point because Michelle did get caught up in the broader enforcement action. There's another missing bit of context he didn't share (or that may have been cut in editing). Having worked adjacent to the finance dept in a very large publicly-held tech company, I know that once the SEC and/or IRS come in to look at something, they tend to look at everything (or a lot of things) while they are there.
The company I was at also had some exposure on the options dating issue but no one was prosecuted or went to jail (the company probably just paid some fines). Having worked there for a decade and knowing the CEO and key execs very well, I'm confident there was zero intent or knowledge that they'd done anything wrong. This company had a culture that was almost manic about 'never skating even close to the edge' on any ethical or legal issue - and it wasn't just lip service - I saw it in action many times.
So, the author probably feels similarly that Michelle wasn't ethically in the wrong regarding options dating specifically but once the 'paddy wagon' arrived to investigate that, a full audit uncovered other unrelated things which she also may not have been aware were wrong and it added up to enough to file charges. There's also a general feeling in public corporation finance circles that the regulatory environment is so complex and often unclear that literally every large public corp is always in violation of something - despite their best efforts not to be. Usually this just resulted in fines when caught in a random audit but in the past decade congress has added personal criminal liability to an increasing number of these policies. Some hardening of certain penalties was justified to punish egregious instances of intentional fraud (ie Enron, Elizabeth Holmes) but, IMHO, it kept going and got excessive, ultimately going too far in some cases fueled by 'tough on corporations' political grandstanding. Now it's more possible than ever for founders, CEOs and corporate officers who have no intention of breaking the law to end up getting prosecuted if they aren't very careful, hence the cautionary tale.
> he believes in regard to dating stock options specifically, the CFO (Michelle) did not intend to break the law or know that she broke the law.
I do not doubt that she did not intend to break the law. But it sounds like she did not exercise sufficient due diligence, just assuming it was okay because PWC said so and no-one in law enforcement had noticed, yet.
> Therefore, implement conservative governance practices and stick to them." Unfortunately, the actual event he's citing isn't an ideal instance to illustrate...
I think it's a great illustration - the author's company was unaffected, because their governance practices successfully prevented them from engaging in illegal behaviour! Thats great for the company, its investors, its board, etc.
> IMHO, it kept going and got excessive, ultimately going too far in some cases fueled by 'tough on corporations' political grandstanding.
Can you cite some specific laws that you think are too easy to run afoul of by accident? Some laws specifically cite intent as a requirement for them to have been violated, but many do not, and that's never seen as a problem for laws that affect non-white-collar defendants.
> it sounds like she did not exercise sufficient due diligence, just assuming it was okay because PWC said so
Agreed. There was a time when having a big five certified accounting firm explicitly sign off on a practice was generally considered sufficient due diligence. That's no longer always true.
> I think it's a great illustration
I meant Michelle's prior company but wasn't clear enough. What made the prior company not a great example was being a mix of not ethically guilty on the options dating but (probably) also doing some other stuff that was worse (going beyond 'not careful' to sloppy and maybe actually shady).
> Can you cite some specific laws that you think are too easy to run afoul of by accident?
Not off the top of my head. I'm not in finance. My understanding of this is from some "shop talk over beers" type conversations I had a few years ago with senior finance execs and the chief legal officer of a large publicly-held tech company. Among this group the consensus was that some better regs had been needed but that the pendulum was swinging too far the other direction to the extent it was starting to make some parts of their jobs combinatorially complex to stay in compliance. To be clear, I never got the sense they felt the chances were high that ethically innocent finance people could be prosecuted over honest mistakes but more like it was going from as rare as being struck by lightning to being something real to worry about.
Hetzner has been an established player in Europe for a long time. It seems plausible that they have enough customers who use small amounts of bandwidth to subsidise the heavier users.
Considering switching costs, if they enter the US market with better pricing than established players, it stands to reason that the customers that would be most enticed to move will be the heavier users.
Europe is also a lot smaller network wise.
Hetzner only have to get their traffic to Frankfurt to get connected to practically the whole of Europe. For the US, Ashburn N.Virginia is good but it's still only a single coast.
The 5 year clock should start from the last time a consumer purchased the product new, though. I can't find anything concrete but some poking around on wayback machine indicates it was likely discontinued late 2018. Which probably still means they are in the clear in this instance even if you assume it takes a year for the inventory in the channel to sell through.
> The 5 year clock should start from the last time a consumer purchased the product new...
Obvious problem - how could the manufacturer determine (let alone control) when, literally, that happened? They might tell when their major distributors and online retailers ran out of stock...but small distributors and bottom-feeding resellers and mom-and-pop retail? Impossible.
On-package labeling ("Software security updates for this thingie will be available until at least Dec. 31, 2029; also check our web site at https://support...") would be the only fool-proofish method.
I think on-package labelling is a good approach. You could also make the retailer liable for a lack of updates - just as they typically already are with defective products in most jurisdictions.
Yeah, this isn’t that different than the food “best by date” requirements, and in most cases (despite popular belief) the likely consequences of eating old packaged food is not even getting sick, just staleness. Arguably, having exploitable electronics that are “expired” is a greater danger.
The manufacturer can't control or even predict purchase dates, so that leaves potentially unbounded support lifetimes. I'd be comfortable with the 10-year timer starting from date of last manufacturer though
If this works like a warranty, the manufacturer can stop 10 years after selling to the shop. The shop is the one providing the warranty to the user. The shop can oblige their warranty by replacing with a (more recent) equivalent model, even from another manufacturer.
> With the Mac, Apple told everyone "we're moving to ARM and that's final."
In ~mid 2020, when macs were all-but-confirmed to be moving to Apple-designed chips, but before we had any software details, some commentators speculated that they thought Apple wouldn't build a compatibility layer at all this time around.
IIRC, primarily they theorised that Apple would take the view that applications would be ported quickly enough there wouldn't be a need for one. I will try and dig some of them up but searching old videos and podcasts is painful.
ATP FM 383 - Demand paged outrage - https://atp.fm/383 starting around 1:12:20
Marco Arment: "if there is a compatibility layer, I wouldn't actually expect one, it'd be too slow and too crappy".... "anything related to x86 I think is not supported at all".
Casey Liss: (talking about a compatibility layer) "...I want it to be there, but I don't think it'll be there, especially since Apple seems to be on their high horse about how mighty and powerful they are these days"
Siracusa goes the other way - predicting that there will be a compatibility layer, mostly based on there being one the last two times. Then, incorrectly in my view, predicts it'll be worse than their previous attempts.
I'm sure I remember other commentators from around the time saying similar things, but I can't find them.
I thought the point of deploying to the cloud using higher level services was so that I could worry about my app and stop worrying about the minutia of managing load balancers or database servers.
Instead of interesting technical challenges I now get to worry about the minutia of Amazon's billing system. Neat! Where do I sign?
As with all things, you are trading away old problems for new ones. The question becomes: are the new problems easier for you to solve than the old ones?
There are parts of AWS that feel like magic and parts that cause me to bang my head against the wall, overall I like it more than it annoys me so I use AWS but it’s not a silver bullet and not all workloads make sense on AWS.
Wood is not dishwasher safe, metal will damage the cookware's non-stick coating, which may be worse than the plastic I'm trying to avoid. I guess that leaves silicone.
My carbon steel pans are essentially non-stick and a fraction of the weight of my cast iron ones. They're cheaper than their stainless All-Clad counterparts. They're a pleasure to cook with.
Sure, you can get a cheap non-stick pan that may or may not give you cancer, but why? I'm in my 40s and since I can remember thought it made no sense to cook with plastic anything. My parents still cook with the same wooden spoons my dad brought back from Algeria before I was born. The pans will last multiple lifetimes. The same can't be said for their plastic and non-stick counterparts.
I spent some time fiddling with seasoning, etc. but at this point I just cook like normal, use a bit more oil with eggs (still not much), and keep steel wool handy. Some people decry steel wool but for me it works great and the pan is a delight.
The problem temperature is 260°C which can easily be avoided by not heating an empty pan (oil/liquids will distribute the heat more evenly) and you'd be unlikely to want to cook at that kind of temperature.
Teflon is not very thermally conductive, so the bottom contacting the metal substrate may be at a significantly higher temperature than the top. Chemistry reactions have activation energies, and you can generally always trade temperature for time. If it happens in a minute at 260 C, it will still happen at 200 C, just slower.
> If it happens in a minute at 260 C, it will still happen at 200 C, just slower.
I don't think that's particularly accurate unless you're considering the action of individual atoms. e.g. Water is considered to boil at 100°C but there will be some water evaporating at lower temperatures but this is a different process that only occurs at the surface. I don't think it's accurate to say that water is "slowly boiling" at low temperatures unless you're reducing atmospheric pressure.
The result is the same though. The water leaves the container and enters the atmosphere as vapor. You can call the former "decomposition", and the latter "leaching", but you are eating the degradation products either way.
Because of the way toxicity works happening slower is quite relevant. Similarly if you drink a bottle of vodka slowly enough you will have no significant health effects but if you drink it in 2 minutes then it’s not going to be great.
Different poisons have different accumulation characteristics. The relevant part here is that perfluorocarbons are fairly persistent in your body. Your body needs a few hours or a day to process the vodka, but the PFAS in your blood takes months/years to leave your body.
Wood is technically not dishwasher safe, but I have wooden spoons that I’ve inherited from my grandma and they still hold up despite being in the dishwasher regularly.
Sincere question - my mom always told me to never put wooden utensils in the dishwasher, but I never got a great answer as to why. I put my wooden spatulas in there. My question is, is it just because it's destructive to the wood? Or is there something else that I should be concerned about?
Within the last 20+ years one of about 5 wooden spoons in our household has cracked even though they're always cleaned in the dishwasher. I don't see the problem.
It really depends on the wood used. Some should absolutely, under no circumstance, be expose to a hot + wet environment. Some, you can put in the dishwasher and they are fine. I do use a lot of wooden cooking utensil and most of them go in the dishwasher. But I do have some nicer wooden spoon that are made from a more precious wood that I would always wash by hand.
Another thing is that a loot of wooden utensil are made in several piece stick together with glue. A lot of cutting board are made that way for example (especially the cheap ones). Most glue are not very dishwasher safe. It might be fine for a few wash, and then you end up with pieces of a cutting board.
What is your opinion on food-grade mineral oil for helping with wood that is starting to get dry (and dramatically extending the useful lifespan)? I've been told that it's fine, but who knows these days.
No clue honestly. I usually use something like sunflower oil to maintain wooden utensil. This is what Opinel recommend for their knife, although it is more for the metal locking mechanism.
Just to echo this comment. I don't put my wood cutting boards in the dishwasher because they dry out and crack. Wood utensils have been fine in the dishwasher. They seem much less prone to cracking than cutting boards and, when they do crack, I just throw them out and replace them with cheap new ones. I see wood utensils as a wear-item.
A lot of wood is dishwasher safe. But you should ask / check before hand. If it is made a several pieces glued together, it will probably not be.
For cookware with PTFE non-stick coating, it is basically the only solution, with silicone, but I personally don't like silicone utensil.
In any case, I also started to avoid PTFE coated cookware, because no matter how well you treat them, the coating will eventually get damaged (and PTFE is supposedly not very good for you). Now I just use stainless steel for anything that is not too sticky, and carbon steel for everything that need a bit of a non-stick surface to be cooked properly.
They are not too hard to maintain and they don't get damaged like PTFE non-stick pan.
Maybe, but they're so easy to clean without a dishwasher. And even easier to clean later if you rinse them off immediately after cooking so stuff doesn't stick.
After you have finished cooking and have transferred the food to the plates or serving dishes or wherever (and your cookware is still hot!), add some cooking wine or tomato juice (anything that is a bit acidic) and deglaze the cookware. You can use the result or discard it, but the end result is cookware that is far, far easier to clean.
Some other options include getting a spouse that will do it for you, or to use the dishwasher and just accept that you will have to replace things more frequently.
> Some other options include getting a spouse that will do it for you
Listen to yourself man. Get a spouse because you can't personally wash cookware by hand? If you make decisions in your own life how you're suggesting I should then I shudder to think what a horror show it must be.
Use a carbon steel or cast iron pan and learn how to season properly. They are very nonstick if you cook correctly in them, and their surface is incredibly durable (I use metal spatulas and I primarily cook on carbon steel and a cast iron griddle.) you can also incorporate stainless steel pots, although stainless pans are not nonstick and very hard to use for beginners.
A properly seasoned cast iron pan can be non-stick but the temperature has to be right, you need shortening, and you can't just put any amount of food in it at any temperature.
Stainless is can do the job too, but temperature and shortening is even more important. There's a much tighter window of temperature that it works at. You do the "water drop test" to determine that it's ready. See youtube for an infinity of videos on how to check the stainless is at right temperature!
I've given up on non-stick pans. They're semi-disposable because the don't last very long and you don't want to use them at high temperatures. All it takes is a little bit of skill to never have to use non-stick teflon pans.
I use cast iron for everything I possibly can, but there is one use case I still need non-stick pans for: frying eggs. The only way to get them to not stick in even the best seasoned cast iron pan is copious amounts of oil, which seems like it's probably worse than a few molecules of PTFE derivates.
I've been frying eggs in my cast iron every morning for years, works like a charm! I use a small slice of butter and it's nonstick. The eggs don't freely slide around like they would in a non-stick pan, but after frying on one side for a moment I can easily move them with a metal spatula.
My trick though is that I have a cast iron only for eggs... if I cook other stuff in it the smooth buttery coating gets lost and the eggs start sticking again. After a few days of eggs-only it becomes nonstick again.
I did actually polish this one, and to be fair it works mostly OK in that I'm not scraping the eggs off with a metal spatula, but it still sticks enough to be annoying, and for a teflon pot to be a measurably superior solution.
I haven't played much with preheating though, I'll have to try that - thanks for the suggestion :-)
I think you will be surprised how well stainless works when it has thin layer of fresh oil and preheated to the right temperature such that it passes the "dancing drop" test.
Really? I fry eggs in a cast iron pan almost every day, with just a little cooking spray or wipe of oil (like, put a little oil in, wipe it out with a paper towel, painting the whole surface with oil in the process). I mean, it's not no oil, but it's far from copious amounts.
I'm with Kenji Lopez-Alt on this one. No matter how nonstick your cast iron or carbon steel pan is, it's not as nonstick as Teflon, which is so nonstick that we had to come up with new methods to get it to bond to surfaces. Carbon steel pans are great, but they simply are not a replacement for nonstick.
a cast iron or "stainless" steel pan will get some gruff from cooking since its nonstick. It regularly goes to the dishwasher, some stuff won't get cleaned. Mostly oil burn stains it seems ("stainless" hardly!) .
Is that completely safe/expected ?
We obviously diddn't get that with the nonstick pans. We got rid of that stuff for a reason, now i'm not sure what is worse: nonstick pan surface OR hard-stuck burnt oil on a stainless steel pan. Thoughts?
Not the person you're replying to, but here's my $0.02. We have a couple stainless frying pans that we've had for a long time, and I've never been much a fan of them. I find they stick pretty bad no matter what procedures you use. Our main pan is a 12" cast iron that I smoothed out the bottom cool surface with a flapper wheel on an angle grinder. It's been used thousands of times over at least a decade and never gives me any trouble. I usually clean it with a stainless steel scrubber and hot water, and then either wipe it clean with a paper towel, or just put it on a burner on low to dry out. I'm not afraid to use soap if needed, but I find it rarely is. We also cook anything in it, including tomato sauce or whatever, and have never had a problem related to that. I find that most of the conventional wisdom around cast iron is just a bunch of voodoo. Just use it and don't worry about it. Beyond the cast iron, we have some ceramic coated cast iron dutch ovens/pots (including a real Le Crueset and a couple knock offs) and stainless steel pots. I'm real happy with our setup. No teflon, no grief, lots of thermal mass for even cooking. I don't feel like we've had to make a tradeoff. With the right equipment, it's really all upside from my point of view.
Not a cooking enthusiast but you should not put cast iron in the dishwasher. Heat some water in the pan, add a tiny drop of soap and use a spatula to scrape off any residue. Once dry add some oil (otherwise it will rust)
I have never been able to figure out stainless steel on the other hand. Apparently the trick is getting to the right temperature but I have never gotten it to work.
On the health side, Teflon pans used to be considered totally safe until they were not. Now they are considered safe again as they no longer use PFOA. Burnt oil and iron oxide might not be ideal either but at least it isn't novel to humans as it has been used for thousands of years. Unfortunately, difficult to get hard science on such subjects as it would have extremely large studies conducted over large periods of time to overcome the noise. In any case there are probably far more impactful decisions in life than which kind of pan to use.
A weak acid (tomato paste, dilute vinegar, ...) will help with burned-on stuff, but the real trick is just good, hard scrubbing with an abrasive (steel wool or similar).
Stainless, when used properly, won't have hard-stuck burnt oil on it. They clean up nicely by just boiling some water in it and then a light scrub-- no need for dishwasher.
Worst case-- you've gone too high in temperature for too long and you need some bon-ami.
And Barkeeper's Friend makes it easy to polish up stainless if you like it to look fresh. I find it's mostly cosmetic, but I still do it a few times a year.
Just gonna throw this out that as a long time seasoned cookware junkie:
There isn't really any clear data on what exactly the seasoning on our pans is, and what by-products are also formed. It seems somehow no one has done an academic deep dive on cast iron. Heating oils to the point of polymerization is very likely to have byproducts.
Now for the conspiratorial part, it seems likely that large manufacturers (Lodge) have done the research internally, but they haven't released anything along the lines of "We have research backing the safety of our pans!".
In some ways I really would not be surprised if it comes out that the seasoning process creates all manner of nasty byproducts.
I could be wrong but I thought it was well known and studied that the seasoned part of oil in cast iron were types of trans fats. Not great for you in any amount but also probably very tiny amounts are actually consumed.
Personally I make a lot of pressure cooker stews and things with more liquid which is less hassle and less chance of burning. If it needs to be seared in the outside then that can be done quickly without needing to cook the whole thing (pan or oven)
isn't it more that silicone absorbs lipids and soaps? so you are tasting the dishwasher or last meal. I bake silicone cookware in the oven on broil, as it removes absorbed food. Fair warning, this is a terrible idea if the cookware isn't 100% silicone.
The only unsafe thing I've ever experienced with wood in the dishwasher is a fire risk from a spoon getting blown off the top rack onto the heating element at the bottom.
We have a read-heavy zpool with some data that's used as part of our build process, on which we see a roughly 8x savings with dedup - and because of this ZFS dedup makes it economically viable for us to store the pool on NVMe rather than spinning rust.
reply