This has always been interesting for me, as I think I have aphantasia but also can vividly experience taste in the same manner as if I'm eating foods.
In other words, if I think about, say, spaghetti & meatballs, I can feel the exact sensation of the taste of the spaghetti & meatballs. I can even vary aspects of the dish without much effort (e.g. adding dusted parmesan, basil, the pasta is more/less al dente, etc). I use this all the time when cooking, as I 'think with my tongue' and pre-taste what I think a dish will taste like as I'm considering what ingredients to add or different techniques to follow.
I think my experience with visualizing taste is what some people can do in their minds eye with images & sounds, yet I can barely visualize any images in my head when I close my eyes. Frustrating, but gives me a bit of hope. In my younger years I did not have this virtual food tasting ability, but I think I slowly gained it by paying close attention to the experience of eating food I made in order to improve my cooking ability.
I wonder if I can pay similar attention to the world around me and develop image visualization abilities over time.
I am fascinated by the extent to which people can mentalize their different senses. I can visualize most of my primary senses. Sight would probably be my weakest one. I am definitely not aphantasic, but the images seem much more ephemeral than what other people experience. I can conjure up an image at will but if I focus too much it will become fuzzier.
Fuzzy isn't even the best word to use though. It's not fuzzy but lacking detail while at the same time my brain isn't comprehending that it is lacking detail. It is almost as if my brain can only focus on a few aspects of the picture at once with the most striking characteristics being rendered while the other parts are inferred or filled in with the most perfect placeholder - something that perfectly represents the idea of what is missing, but which it is not.
None of my other senses suffer from this. I can smell pumpkin pie or treated lumber on command. I can conjure music in my head all day (and often do without trying). I can metalize the feeling of cold or warmth. I too can taste spaghetti and meatballs. When I read that my mind immediately went to those cheap pre-made meatballs in the frozen section, my teeth cutting through those dense almost hard meatballs that are somehow so bland yet over spiced.
I also wonder how much of our differences are often our inability to communicate our experiences in a sufficient manner.
I’ve recently been caught up on noodling on the combinatorics of cooking food. I wonder if a structured recipe format would be helpful to explore the ‘solution space’ of any given dish.
For example, think of all the decisions required to specify a curry dish:
How do you cut/mash your garlic and ginger and onions? (If you even add all of those ingredients)
Do you use whole or ground spices? What about for each spice? Cardamom pods or ground cardamom?
Do you toast each spice?
How long do you cook your onions?
And so on. Eventually you get to an absolutely gigantic amount of options that all generate a somewhat similar dish, but with key sensory differences. They may all be ‘chicken tikka masala’ but I’d argue you’d have a very different eating experience across that decision spectrum.
I think this may also play (specifically for Indians) into the idea that moms is best. It’s probably because mom’s is universally unique and you crave that nostalgia.
I'm not confident in any recipe format that I've seen discussed in this thread.
Do any of the recipes you've seen online or elsewhere every bother to talk about what sort of kitchen is needed? Granted, 99% of the time it's just the standard western kitchen (stove/oven/fridge/mixer), but some recipes require less common appliances. A brick pizza oven, or maybe a sous vide machine.
The data might benefit from being in a different format than the file format itself... even that might need to be different than the presentation software. Do I want to be chained to the software, or does this need to be some open format like epub? How would I search through 500 recipes, or 500,000? Do I want to search through that many, do I want to keep that many or purge the not-so-great ones? Earlier in the thread, someone was complaining that they don't want the ingredient list and numbered list instructions at the top... so is this something like html plus optional stylesheets? God help me, xml and xslt?
Why are they giving me fixed ingredient quantities, rather than ratios and quantity-to-serving numbers?
Do recipes need to link up? If I'm making thousand island dressing or tartar sauce, should I be able to tap a hyperlink to a sweet pickle recipe? How would that even work if I had multiple sweet pickle recipes?
Interesting. Also allows for some fun ‘expansion’ in recipes. A leaf node may be ‘chicken stock’ but you could link to a recipe that boils down to that one ‘chicken stock’ node if you want to DIY it.
In a previous job I worked for a site doing natural language parsing on recipes.
We noticed one of our partner websites had an unusual number of unique ingredients. It turned out every ingredient was a link to another recipe to make that ingredient, along the lines of your idea.
However for some reason (presumably SEO) they took this to the extreme and everything was a recipe. Including apples.
The recipe for “apple” is
1. Take 1 Apple
2. Eat and enjoy
But since Apple is a prerequisite for this recipe, infinite looping is a risk in the kitchen now
They were but the cost of refurbishment was almost more than just building new boosters. Thats why SLS is currently using Shuttle Derived Boosters but not worrying with reuse.
Think of the word ‘reusable’ in this case as less a binary descriptor but more of a scale of reusability.
Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle. Also consider rapid reusability was a stretch goal when it was being designed, but we have come a loooong way since, spacex in particular has had it as a driving competitive differentiator for years now.
Another big difference is that NASA post Cold War was a skilled jobs program, with an incentive to do distributed, high overhead work to appease their bosses (congress), while SpaceX has the opposite.
> Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle.
Starship uses essentially the same ceramic heat shield tiles as the Space Shuttle, so the fact the Shuttle had so much trouble with refurbishment doesn't mean that SpaceX has solved these refurbishment issues with the Starship upper stage.
Though the Starship lower stage, which contains the most expensive engines, doesn't have this problem. Since it doesn't need a heat shield. So partial reusability should be pretty realistic.
Shuttle's tiles were each unique. Starship is mostly clad with identical hexagonal tiles which can be mass produced and eventually refurbished by machine. A robot already welds on the tile fittings.
More of an ignorant assumption. I asked ChatGPT now, and got this:
> In terms of shapes, the tiles were not uniform. In fact, there were over 17,000 different shapes used to fit specific areas of the shuttle's body. Each tile had to be individually manufactured and shaped to fit a precise location due to the complex curvature of the shuttle's surface. The unique shapes were necessary to ensure that every part of the shuttle received the proper protection against the extreme temperatures during re-entry.
Please don't cite LLMs for factual questions. They are prone to confabulation. Why not type the question "How many heat shield tiles did the Space Shuttle use?" into Google?
Since I mentioned I got the info from ChatGPT, people can decide for themselves how much they trust it.
Note that the question here is how many uniquely shaped tiles there was, not the total number.
This is interesting because if you have to manufacture and keep in stock 17,000 separate tile shapes, that will be vastly more expensive than SpaceX who, from what I hear, only uses a singe hex shaped tile everywhere.
The tiles are very similar; the attachment system is very different (a big part of why Shuttle's were a pain to maintain) and Starship's simple shape means most of the tiles are the same (the ridiculous number of SKUs was another factor in Shuttle TPS costs).
Personally, it’s wild to me to think that the ‘freedom’ to eat meat is ever in question. It’d take such a ridiculously over-the-top totalitarian move to make something like that happen. I just don’t see it as possible, it’d be like banning smartphones.
On the other hand, I do see a world where regulations increase the cost of meat (by making these factory farms do things which improve the livelihoods of the animals, but cost $). But..that’s not taking away freedom, that’s just any other tragedy of the commons regulation that prices in the negative externalities to the action that causes them. (Think: climate change emissions here, not morality)
I think Apple probably already knows what the 2nd or 3rd gen look like mostly now, anyway. They most likely don’t commit to a product line like Vision without a multi year roadmap in place, and have to make a cut line eventually to launch v1 which includes some obvious drawbacks they can improve.
Add on to that, I think they have more of a culture of looking past feedback to figure out the key new tech that’s available now and building towards that, rather than just responding to user feedback directly (though they clearly do that, too).
Yes - if it’s anything like the iPhone, the features of the second generation will be pretty much finalised by now, and they will be well into planning the third generation.
Yeah there should definitely be a better governance structure preventing employee access without a structural justification like a law enforcement request, customer service request, etc.
As an owner of a model Y, I’m beyond pissed off they’re so lackadaisical with this stuff, to the point where I may just buy a different car.
> to the point where I may just buy a different car.
I love this line of rhetoric. Seriously, I doubt that you will. If you consider all of the shenanigans that Tesla is known to do, you shouldn't have bought the car if you're concerned about privacy. Any car that has cameras on the car that looks at the interior of the car should not have been purchased in the first place. OF COURSE they will be looking at video when they shouldn't be. Has there ever been an example of a company that hasn't? Ring has done it. Roomba has done it. Open it to any data not just camera, and people like Uber have used that data for nefarious purposes.
Any device that sends back data to the home office is just too ripe for misuse. Then, when it comes out in examples like this that it has occured, there is 0 liability for the company involved. Maybe the company makes an example out of the employees in various ways up to dismissal, but the company just shrugs it off.
You can decouple the encryption and decryption keys such that the private key would never be present in any Tesla system at any point in time[1]. And you can introduce a ratchet such that compromising the Tesla car at time t0 would not enable the attacker to decrypt any encrypted data at t[n < 0].
Updating a car with a new key would fix both problems. Old recordings would be lost, of course, but customers hearing "I can't unlock that without your old key" may be necessary to re-establish trust.
Absolutely and that is why you can't use an HSM. Thankfully generating keys on device and storing them on the cloud account encrypted by a passcode works. As the keys are a predictable size you can encrypt them multiple times with different passcodes.
Varies based on how cheap your electricity is and expensive your gas is but my experience has been about $1000/yr in just gas savings according to my teslas calculations, we don’t commute with it tho, so it could pay off faster for commuters, but still on the order of years to break even.
A big difference is maintenance though. No oil changes, mechanical issues, etc. Just new tires when they’re worn out and occasional problems.
By selling soap for a loss for longer than the competitors can stomach. If you have 10 businesses making $100M/yr, you can lose $1B/yr on soap (by selling a $2 bar for $1) and get a ton of customers who buy your cheaper soap. Eventually, other basic soap sellers will either need to match your prices and take their own losses to match, or hold steady hoping you'll fold.
Eventually, they are either sold to Amazon or fold, and Amazon can increase the price to $2.20/bar and mint another $100M/year for the next industry to attack with $1.1B. Rinse & repeat and eventually the customer is charged some percentage more for the same product once the competition is kowtowed.
That is surely a vast simplification. By sheer operating scale Amazon can ship items at a cost far lower than any brand new “soap company” could. There’s no way you could be competitive on such a low priced item.
And still countless competitors do exist. They must find some other ways to compete, because your point is valid. It's almost like the human ingenuity knows no bounds...
In other words, if I think about, say, spaghetti & meatballs, I can feel the exact sensation of the taste of the spaghetti & meatballs. I can even vary aspects of the dish without much effort (e.g. adding dusted parmesan, basil, the pasta is more/less al dente, etc). I use this all the time when cooking, as I 'think with my tongue' and pre-taste what I think a dish will taste like as I'm considering what ingredients to add or different techniques to follow.
I think my experience with visualizing taste is what some people can do in their minds eye with images & sounds, yet I can barely visualize any images in my head when I close my eyes. Frustrating, but gives me a bit of hope. In my younger years I did not have this virtual food tasting ability, but I think I slowly gained it by paying close attention to the experience of eating food I made in order to improve my cooking ability.
I wonder if I can pay similar attention to the world around me and develop image visualization abilities over time.