As an American, I found the protein situation and the whole “Canadian” flour concept bizarre.
In the US, most high quality flours will state their protein percentage reasonably prominently on the label. It’s not particularly hard to buy commercial flour at a fairly wide range of protein levels - 13.5% and even higher protein flours are available and inexpensive. And (lucky for us?) they’re basically all farmed in the US.
But in Europe, the labels seem more interested in ash content and the milling technique, and, at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information. The last time I shopped for bread flour in Europe, I found a Canadian flour with sort of acceptable protein at a very high price, and I found a Croatian “Pizza” flour that was even better at a lower price.
Do not take American mass-produced sandwich bread as any kind of product that Europeans should wish they had :)
The irony that caught my eye in the article is that American mass-produced sandwich bread is depicted as this old-fashioned, slow production process. It takes far too long for the time-crunched futuristic British bakers. Who can wait 5 hours for yeast to ferment? The Chorleywood process comes to the rescue and whips and explodes the water-flour mixture into a foam that is baked seconds later. While those old-fashioned Americans are still waiting for their ancient traditional yeast to slowly do its thing.
At the same time, we have legions of new-age Rogan-adjacent food influencers on both sides of the Atlantic droning on about how American flour makes them bloated and tired (a line that Rogan himself repeats ad nauseam) while European flour avoids all of these problems.
There are so many things for which modern mass or mass-ish production methods can produce results as good or better than artisanal techniques. Nails, knives [0], textiles, etc are all examples as long as one is considering a modern example that is trying to be good.
But a halfway decent loaf of bread made using hundreds-of-years-old techniques (albeit probably with modern yeast [1] if it’s not sourdough) is just dramatically better than “modern” bread, even though the latter often contains highly engineered ingredients and is made with extreme precision.
[0] I know it’s kind of sad, but a well designed blade cut from a sheet of high quality steel and beveled appropriately is better than even a very, very well made Japanese knife made from the alloys that, for some reason, are still state of the art in Japan. I do imagine that a highly skilled artisan could produce an even better knife from modern steels, but this is a rarity and is very, very expensive.
[1] Actual modern yeast is dramatically better than your average supermarket yeast, in flavor, performance and convenience. In the US market, this means that you should use SAF, not Red Star. Good sourdough starter is still just an artisanal thing.
> "at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information."
I looked at some recently in the UK and the nutritional information is always per 100g and says e.g. 11.5g protein. Is there something wrong with that meaning 11.5% without any inference, or are continental European nutritional information boxes presented differently?
In the US, at least in larger sized bags, flour seems to be treated as an ingredient and there might not be a nutritional fact label. I admit that I didn’t look that carefully last time I was in a European grocery store.
I imagine that the 11.5g you’re looking at really does mean 11.5%.
Huh? Processed ingredients don't generally get a pass on nutritional labeling requirements in the US. A bag of flour in a grocery store should have a label.
I consider myself a decent amateur baker and I've never noticed a huge difference in bread flours. I buy from a local mill because they sell interesting grains and I want to support them. Otherwise I get King Arthur, or Bob's Red Mill if I need something a bit more specific. KA is particularly good because their recipes are usually reliable and they're designed around their flours. The selection of baking ingredients is usually much wider in the average US supermarket compared to the average European one in my experience.
I have no idea which keychain is in which, but the last time I migrated from one Apple laptop to another, I couldn't get the automated tool to work at all, so I restored a physical backup, went through the sign-in process, and passwords and passkeys migrated correctly.
Passwords and passkeys are in the iCloud keychain. You can technically save passwords in the login keychain (not sure about passkeys), but if you’re using the Passwords app it will be in the iCloud one.
IMO the most alarming thing currently going on with AI is the huge RL runs that give models some incentive to compete with each other and rather strong incentives to hack things, break rules and otherwise cheat. And the “cyber” initiatives are remarkably examples of doing most of this deliberately.
Of course, it’s the “frontier labs” doing almost all of this. No one is about to SFT a model that turns into Skynet on its own.
Clean room equipment is kind of the opposite of what was needed. Clean room equipment protects the room from the people.
What’s was needed was likely pretty basic PPE: P100 respirators along with outer clothing that would be kept out of people’s homes and showers when leaving the site. (PAPRs would have been even better, but they wouldn’t have been cheap or available in large numbers on short notice.) Unfortunately, if you watch modern construction workers, you’ll find that PPE is almost universally ignored when performing common but dangerous tasks like cutting concrete or lead-painted surfaces.
I've been well served by just using a P100 respirator when I'm doing anything dirty or dusty. There have been a few times that it's reduced exposure to something bad that I didn't know about, among them removing old shingles from my attic (asbestos composite material) or sanding paint that I had tested negative for lead (transparent varnish underneath had lead).
Weird. Wasn’t lead typically used as an opacifying agent?
In any case, if you test by taking a little scraping, you can only detect lead that you actually scraped. But if you test with X-ray fluorescence, you get an integrated density over a decent thickness.
Also, even if the P100 respirator protects you adequately while sanding, it provides no protection against future exposure to the dust that you create.
> NOTE: If low voltage power is unavailable and the windows are fully rolled up, the door windows may crack or shatter when you open the doors with the interior manual release handles.
> WARNING: When the doors or the area around the door struts of Cybercab are damaged, the preloaded springs for the doors can pop out when the door opens. Access the vehicle from the undamaged door when possible. If both doors are damaged, open the doors with caution. There is a lower chance of the springs popping out if the door does not fully open. Wear appropriate PPE. […]
I've been in quite a few cars with cool frameless windows. They mostly seem to have the property that the window could plausibly be damaged if one aggressively closes the door with the window all the way up (which the car's electronics will attempt to mitigate). But somehow the Cybercab might have the glass break when opening them! How?
(FWIW, early Tesla Model S cars have the windows done correctly. There is a single interior handle. As you pull it, first it actuates an electronic switch that rolls the window down slightly. Then, as you pull it a bit farther, it mechanically releases the door. If there's no power, then the door still opens, just without the window automatically rolling down a bit first. Maybe Tesla should copy their own previous design?)
The preload spring situation is just delightful. So is the upward-opening door. I hope no one ever rolls a Cybercab over and needs to exit.
> recirculate the water in the bath through a heat exchanger after you already filled it and got in
Huh. Is the heat exchanger located near the bathtub or in the EcoCute unit? And do you need to do anything complex to periodically sterilize the tub side of the pipes and the heat exchanger?
> To address this issue, after variable expansion is completed, any existing .git folder is removed from the directory before the git repository is initialized.
What happened to sandboxing the offending git invocation?
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