Working on ʻŌlelo Honua, a free and open-source internationalization (i18n) tool that uses AI to translate app content. Now building a CLI so it can integrate seamlessly with tools like Shopify and other platforms. The goal is to make localization effortless for developers without relying on expensive translation services.
The umami flavor of cheese, especially hard cheeses, is incredibly under appreciated. And I'll never understand the popularity of pre-shredded cheese...
Umami is a lot more present that people recognize. I've built up an intuition for this over the years, and also sort of trained my tongue.
What we call umami is a subjective experience that has an underlying molecular cause, but it's complicated: more than one molecule contributes to the sensation, different foods have different molecules, many people can't recognize it on its own, etc.
The most easily recognized umami tastes seem to come from hydrolyzed soy protein and yeast extracts- both are added to tons of food. The canonical example is Doritos, which are a masterpiece of modern food industrial optimization. Doritos are mostly corn, but they also add whey (cheese derived umami), MSG (molecular, isolated glutamate in salt form), buttermilk (multiple flavors including umami), romano cheese (more umami!), tomato powder (umami), inositate (umami). It's basically an umami bomb.
From what I can tell, the best umami flavors come from a combination of several different molecules combined with some salt. the combination seems to potentiate the flavor significantly. You can also saturate out your receptors- if you drink a highly concentrated broth, you'll see there's some upper limit to the amount of umami you can taste and after that, additional aminos are just wasted.
> I'll never understand the popularity of pre-shredded cheese...
If spending too much time in eve online taught me anything, it's that convenience is worth money. People are inherently lazy, and there's plenty of ways to exploit that.
The next level of pre-grated cheese is frozen pizza, for example.
Its not laziness, its just a matter of priority. Like playing eve online, or doing nothing.
But really, there is what feels like an ever increasing list of 'stuff to do, things to attend', and preparing food (and sleep) are obvious time sinks to reduce, and of course people are willing and increasingly able to pay.
A recent survey (forget the link, sorry), listed time spend on food preparation / cooking nowadays as averaging out on just 28 minutes daily. Around 1980, this was still around 2.5 hours. I believe context is UK.
I easily spend 3 hours daily, because especially with a little kid I just think it is important to do, but I do also feel the weight of it.
Me either, but a relative who worked in processed foods told me the reason it exists isn't just lazy consumers, it's made from the oddly-shaped (by supermarket standards) offcuts that they can't sell otherwise.
The cost of browsers not having extremely-basic things that they either started to implement then abandoned in a nigh-useless state (login, frames) or never even tried to have but really, really should have once it was clear "web apps" were here to stay (datasource-backed lists and tables, table sorting without more custom JS than a sort function, drag-n-drop) is truly enormous. Who knows how many millions of person-hours.
> "Passenger planes with speed beyond Mach four" and "superconductive magnetic levitation railways at 500 km/h" probably seemed like reasonable extrapolations of current trends at the time.
"The Shanghai maglev is the world's first commercial high-speed maglev and has a maximum cruising speed of 300 km/h (186 mph). Prior to May 2021 the cruising speed was 431 km/h (268 mph)..."
That is right around 500 KM/H. I think we are technologically capable of this if a government really _wanted_.
500 kph is too much, but 250+ kph high speed trains surely proliferated nicely since then, at least in the Old World.
Even Uzbekistan and Morocco now operate high speed trains, and a high speed connection of the Baltics into the rest of Europe is being built.
(It is a bit weird that the New World as a whole is so bearish on HSR. For example, a Trans-Canadian high speed rail would connect all the major metropolises in a single line, as most of the Canadian population lives close to the US border. At the very least, a Toronto - Ottawa - Montréal - Québec line would make a lot of sense. Further west the terrain might just be too unforgiving.)
The terrain is sort of difficult in the Canadian Shield, but it gets easy in the prairies, and then very difficult as you head west into the Rockies. I think the bigger problem going north and west of the Quebec City/Toronto corridor is the sparse population.
With a single line, you would also need to choose between serving Edmonton (like the CN mainline) or Calgary (like the CP mainline). VIA rail currently skips Calgary even though it's the bigger/faster growing city.
Really, you need at least 3 lines because you also have to go both north and south of Lake Huron. And that's not even getting into Atlantic Canada.
Looking at the Canadian population density map [0], the Windsor-to-Québec line seems to be hitting the sweet spot for having enough people, and the total distance of about 1000 km between both ends would fit into the pattern as well.
Edmonton and Calgary would require two lines, yes, and quite long ones. These may be already too far away.
Population density maps alone will always lead you astray when it comes to building things like HSR if you don't also map in the terrain. It's not super challenging to build light frame buildings and asphalt roads on steep grades, marshes, curvy river valleys, frozen tundra, or even cliff faces. It's much harder to build train tracks, factories, skyscrapers, and other heavy buildings in such places.
A lot of people can live in a place it's where it's difficult to build traditional rail, let alone HSR. Also places where HSR might work can be filled with people and existing construction which you can't always just uproot for rail.
Some countries that built extensive HSR networks (Italy, Spain, Japan) have a lot of challenging terrain.
If you travel, say, from Rome to Florence by Frecciarossa, the line goes through six galleries of total length of some 40 km.
Human settlements are a bigger challenge. People don't like to be uprooted, and small communities along the way don't benefit from HSRs, so they have an incentive to oppose them.
That accident happened long ago, on a testing track, due to bad signalling/communications, leading to maintenance equipment still on the tracks, and the maglev running into that.
Run the electric trains on green energy. It’s 2025. I was told 10 years ago renewables were ready and cheaper than fossil fuels. What’s taking so long?
In the meantime, those really inefficient gas guzzling cars still rule.
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