Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Industrial Panettone

    The monoglyceride/water should be mixed first for the emulsion, before the other emulsion ingredients are added and mixed till homogeneous and with a mayonnaise consistency

    Note that you should also add 1 drop of orange essence per 1.27kg of the finished dough at the second stage.

    Recommended fermentation time for each of the sponges is 4h. After mixing stage 1 for 3 minutes at first speed, the dough should be left to ferment for a recommended time of 10-12h before the stage 2 ingredients are added. Not that the raisins and candied fruit should be added at the end of this mixing stage, hold a small amount of the softened butter back to facilitate this. After this a further 40 minutes fermentation in recommenced. Bench rest should be 50 minutes. Proof time will be 10-11h at 27°C.

  • 🖼️ xkcd #3215

  • Third Time's the Charm?

    I hope. Yesterday my partner and I learned that someone we've known for the last twenty years, since I came to this city, is struggling with her cancer. We learned last year that she had it, was going in for surgery and chemo. Yesterday we were told that she was going in for a third surgery, more chemo. That what they'd tried first wasn't working.

• Technology and Free Software

  • LLMs and integrated circuits

    Large Language Models (LLMs) come in for a lot of hate in some quarters. It's not hard to see why, if you're in line to lose your livelihood to one. In the IT industry, there are sound arguments that they de-skill engineers, and that we could end up in a situation where nobody actually knows how to program any more.

    I don't know whether we're right to be concerned. I know that I don't like LLMs, because I find them inelegant. Mine is an aesthetic objection, rather than a pragmatic one.

    It's common to hear LLMs' detractors referred to as "Luddites", as if they were hide-bound reactionaries, uselessly standing in the way of progress. I think a more apt comparison, however, is not with the mechanical textile looms of the 19th century, but with integrated circuits (ICs) in the 1970s.