You need to have one to understand the unconditional loyalty, love, and the bond. You come to appreciate it even more once you lose them. Having a dog is the best and worst thing in the world. Just lost our fur baby a week ago...
A joke I read recently: "A fortune teller told me I was going to experience the most terrible heartbreak in twelve years time. This totally bummed me out, so I got a dog to cheer me up."
It's actually not that unconditional, and is something you have to work for. They will of course be happy that you come from work and show affection as they are social animals, but there are definitely different levels of affection even within a single household.
I've been doing something similar for breakfast, one cup of oatmeal + one cup of water and about two tablespoons of chia seeds, microwave for 2 minutes. Add a banana and some honey, top it with whole roasted almonds and some raspberries. It has been doing wonders for my digestion. I'll have to try to add olive oil as well.
My LDL was 150 last time I checked. I wonder what it is now since I've been doing this meal several times a week.
One of my most used appliances is a Tiger rice cooker with Porridge and timer function.
It's been used pretty much every day for 7+ years since I purchased it.
Every night I put 130g steel cut oats in, 400-420g of water, set it to cook for 45 mins and be ready for when I wake up in the morning. I'll then add 25g protein powder, sometimes a few berries or sprinkle with seeds/nuts. A nutritional power house.
I find steel cut oats more filling, a lot more substantial with ground oats more goopey. Steel cut oats are normally a hassle to cook but it's set and forget with the rice cooker. From what i've read I also believe the fact they sit soaking over night in water also is breaks down the starches which helps nutrient absorption.
Does wonders for digestion and satiety. Everything runs like clockwork with them. If I don't have them for a few days, things get irregular and a noticeable difference in satiety for the rest of the day where i end up snacking as feel hungry after meals.
I've been doing this for a very long time but I use rolled oats and plain water (I drain the water completely before eating).
I eat soaked oats every day and always have a fresh bowl or two soaking in the fridge. They are still fine to eat even if they've been soaking for more than 24h.
I like the fact that they are more concentrated in terms of calories/nutrients per 100g than cooked oats and also provide steadier energy. I often pair them with a protein drink (pea protein + rice protein), a drizzle of avocado/olive oil, and berries. Takes just a few minutes to prepare.
Regarding berries, those can be deep-frozen, and turn the oatmush into icy slush. Giving it an unexpected but nice texture. At the same time the aromas from the berries went into everything, but the milk didn't get thick like buttermilk. Like it can happen with too much citrus/orange/mandarine/clementine in milk. Of course one can vary and combine that with different yoghurts, kefir, kombucha, and so on.
Come thank me, once you've tried it. If cold stuff is your thing at all, which could be compensated with some nice green tea, or coffee, ofc.
Is there an added health or digestive benefit of fully soaking the oats, overnight or microwaved? Or is it just a matter of taste?
I just add some hot water and milk (indeed I'm not sure if what I have are plain or instant oats)
Plain oats is a pain in the ass to cook. It takes real long and requires constant vigilance. Instant oats just needs some boiling water and 30 seconds in the microwave.
I might be wrong, but I do think non-instant oats is more nutritious.
But to answer your question, it's a combo of laziness and taking care of future me. Nothing beats opening the fridge in the morning, groggy AF, and finding delish breakfast ready to go, and it's dirt easy to prepare with no pots to clean afterwards.
This works well for rolled oats but not for steel cut. Both types are much nicer cooked in a pot with stirring to bring out the creaminess (like risotto).
The overnight oats (rolled or steel cut) will cook much faster after they've soaked up liquid. If you're adding ingredients such as egg (two per 1/3 cup s.c. oats) this takes care of the raw elements as well.
I came up with a microwave steel cut oat method that worked well. Going from memory, I put the oats and hot water in a bowl in the microwave and set it for 45 seconds 100%, then 9 minutes at power level 2. One of those microwaves with "Cook 1" and "Cook 2" on it. The hot water I put in initially was basically boiling hot, you might need to do more time on cook 1 if you put in less hot water (at work we had one of those instant boiling water things).
Steel cut whole groats have really good nutrition. That tough brown skin is full of good stuff. I do mine in the pressure cooker for 20 mins with 1:1:3 oats:milk:water.
I also use a pressure cooker (instant pot) but it doesn't take nearly that long. 3 minutes on high, rest for 10 minutes, vent. I also use 1:3 oats:water and add a splash of half and half when I serve it. I'll usually do a batch of 1 cup oats, 3 cups water, two cut up apples, and a lot of cinnamon. That's four servings and I reheat the leftovers in a microwave with some additional water. I also like to add walnuts when I serve.
For steel-cut whole groats, the tough whole seeds cut in half width-ways? Mine would be crunchy and whole after just 3 mins. Even after 15 mins pressure they were a bit firm. Rolled I cook in 5 mins.
I'm using an instant pot. Maybe it develops more pressure? But 3 minutes high, rest for 10 minutes, vent, is just a bit on the al dente side. Cooked through, but slightly chewy.
Sometimes I sauté the dry oats in a pat of butter for a few minutes before adding the water and cooking. It gives them a nice nutty flavor.
Oat fiber. I've been taking 30g of oat fiber everyday for the past 3 years. Slugging it down in 8oz of warm water and 10g of nooch. Not only are my cholesterol levels fantastic after starting that regime, but very regular as well.
Not the poster, but I grew up eating oatmeal that you would slice. Toss a pot on the wood stove, done when you remembered to grab it. Milk and honey on soft slices of oatmeal. Honestly don’t eat oatmeal much today, but was confused the first time I had oatmeal away from him and it wasn’t at least like lumpy. I’m sure that pot had to be soaked for a half an hour every morning.
You can email prompts directly to your ThreadWise address and get instant AI-powered responses, essentially an always available co-worker. Another great feature is the ability to schedule recurring tasks and since the AI has web access, you can get things like:
Daily mortgage rates or airfare price monitoring
Weather and news summaries
Sport scores, jokes, quote of the day
Pull data from public APIs (and more)
So you can essentially use it as a personal newsletter, crafted to your taste.
The free tier will let you test this out for free! I am looking for some feedback/criticism, testing, and additional ideas and I am open for collaboration if you have experience with sales. Also open to hearing which scheduled tasks people would find most useful.
Why I built it: I noticed a trend online, as well as with family/friends, that people would like to have a quick access to AI in instances where they couldn't always install apps or use browser-based tools (such as in remote/low bandwidth environments). This is when it him me, email clients already have all the features needed to interact with an AI (text + attachments) and I quickly got to work.
Some of the advantages are also that since there are no new apps, or browser tabs needed, the tool is ideal for companies who don't have the bandwidth to setup full fledged AI solutions on their own. The companies can choose either between public LLMs (e.g. OpenAI) or host everything on-premise with locally run models, so no data ever leaves the premises.
If you want to get ahead of the curve, look into the Agent-to-Agent protocol Google just introduced. I'm currently using my own custom AI agent assistant to perform life tasks. If I could integrate a better tooling/agents into my own assistant system like your's that'd be awesome.
It's kind of like sure, I could manage my own emails, or I could offset this to someone who does it better. If you do it better and it's affordable, I'm in.
We are on that starship to the future right now and I love it.
I'm building something similar and related to the other comments below! It's not production ready but it will hopefully be in a couple of weeks. You guys can sign up for free and I will upgrade you to the premium tier manually (premium cannot be bought yet anyway) in exchange for some feedback:
This is a cool concept and I love the idea but the math on the money earned from the 3276 solar panel doesn't add up. The article says the farm owner makes about $20,000 a year from the solar farm.
I'm assuming that each solar panel is 2 by 1 meter, which would mean that it produces about 400 watts (20% efficiency at 1000 watts per sq meter coming from the sun). You can use this calculator to estimate how power you can produce at the given location for a given system size in kilowatts:
https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php
The system above is 1310400 watts or ~1,310 kW, which according to the calculator produces about 2 million kWh/year.
If he makes $20,000 that would mean that he gets paid only $0.01 per kW of power. And even if my assumption above about the size of each individual panel is off by a factor of 2 and they are only 1 sq meter in size (which I think they are not because the article states that the solar farm can power about 300 average households, which require the annual power output to be more than what I estimated above) that would make $0.02 per kW of power. How is it possible that the amount earned per kW is so low when the utility companies in Colorado charge about $0.14 per kW (effective rate)? And who is actually the customer here and where is the money coming from? I'm just curious to learn more.
~400W/panel @ 20% efficiency is pretty much spot on for my home rooftop solar panel specs, so your math checks out there.
$0.02/kW does seem a bit low. Looking at my bill, it looks like I got paid ~$0.03/kW last month in California where my retail price is $0.17/kW off-peak. Looking at the current price charts for electricity, they're also currently ~$0.03/kW, so the numbers do check out since we're supposed to be paid the current wholesale price.
Electricity just doesn't cost all that much to generate, most of the cost comes from transmission and storage.
Thanks for sharing this! That was the exact info I was looking for, didn't know the wholesale price was so low. But it does make sense that transmission and storage is what is inflating the retail price.
Here in Tasmania we can get between 0.08935 to 0.10 antipodean dineros per kWh for residential rooftop solar, with peak usage at around 0.35 and off-peak around the 0.17 antipodean diners per kWh. Max 10kW feed-in for residential, but you can have more installed to cover your own usage.
As far as I’m aware, commercial / industrial installations, and solar farms, get paid less per kWh.
Quick edit to fix a brain-fart, I doubt anyone read this prior anyways.
Here in BC Canada we don't get paid anything for feed-in, but we do get credit on our bill - so 1 kWh in during the day means I can use 1kWh at night without paying anything.
We have 6.8kW on the roof, and it looks like over 12 months it will cover our needs.
It means I'll never have a bill, and if I get too much credit (negative bill), I'll just get a used electric car. I'm not unhappy with that situation.
It’s not entirely different here, the feed-in is applied as a credit to your account. I suppose they’d have to pay out if pushed, I’m yet to know anyone who has received actual money though. I guess I’m about to find out, if my retailer ever fixes the issue with their billing system that’s preventing any of my solar data showing correctly / at all.
I have heard from a couple farmers that some venture energy corporation will pay a yearly fee to put panels on the farmland, which is probably the 20k/year he gets paid from a corporation like that. I doubt he's selling the power directly, nor was able to invest money for all those panels. He just get's a check every month. He also doesn't know the risks he's taking allowing that.
edit: I might be wrong on this, reading this on their site they have some significant donors.
"With additional funding from the Walton Family Foundation, the Cielo Foundation, and donations from a myriad of individual donors and businesses in 2023"
I think the 20k number is something of a throw-away, and not really explained.
For example, is that 20k gross revenue (check from utility) or net revenue (after deducting financing costs?) Is he getting free grid power at night as well? Is he using power on the farm itself?
It's a pity the article didn't go down this road a bit, but since it didn't, I guess the 20k number (described as an "estimate") is really just a measure of scale.
Indeed, one gets the impression that the finances part is possibly not the main focus of the farmer (much less the article.) The farming land is being used by non-profits and research groups, he's not actually farming the land himself.
But it sounds like this is just a small part of his farm (4 acres), so perhaps more of a pilot project and finding out how to best use the land, before rolling out on a bigger scale.
> If he makes $20,000 that would mean that he gets paid only $0.01 per kW of power. And even if my assumption above about the size of each
As others have mentioned the off peak daytime wholesale rate for electricity is often just a few cents per kWh. Let's say 3-4c/kWh.
The other few cents above your calculated rate of 1c/kWh likely go to pay off the principle and interest on the financing for the system, plus any profit for the company maintaining and servicing the system. If the farm owner paid for the capital costs and maintenance directly themselves, their share of the returns would probably be higher.
But they would probably prefer to focus on farming crops.
That isn't an issue with farming. It's the competitive pressures of the electricity market in the US. Most of the US is currently powered by natural gas, which is about five times less expensive in the US than in Europe. Colorado is a bit different, they still have 33% from coal (US wide coal is 16%). The quick and easy solution would be for electricity to be more like the rest of the world and more expensive. Europe will actually be much worse soon due to a price cap is expiring at the end of this month.
Or if they can act as a quasi-shell corporation for an agribusiness concern to cash in on tax breaks. And at that point, if the family makes any money at all, the parent corp will surely find a way to harvest that too.
There was a link here a few weeks ago about UK energy that said that only about 30% of the cost of energy is the cost to produce, the rest is the infrastructure and the costs to pay some suppliers to stay online in case they are needed.
Also the AI generated images that can't get the fingers right. Have you ever tried to look at your hands while lucid dreaming and try counting fingers? There are some really interesting parallels between the dreams and diffusion models.
On the other hand, psychedelics give you perceptions similar to even early deepdream genai images.
On LSD, I was swimming in my friend’s pool (for six hours…) amazed at all the patterns on his pool tiles underwater. I couldn’t get enough. Every tile had a different sophisticated pattern.
The next day I went back to his place (sober) and commented on how cool his pool tiles were. He had nfi what I was talking about.
I walk out to the pool and sure enough it’s just a grid of small featureless white tiles. Upon closer inspection they have a slight grain to them. I guess my brain was connecting the dots on the grain and creating patterns.
It was quite a trip to be so wrong about reality.
Not really related to your claim I guess but I haven’t thought of this story in 10 years and don’t want to delete it.
This may be a joke, but counting your fingers to lucid dream has been a thing for a lot longer than diffusion models.
That being said, your reality will influence your dreams if you're exposed to some things enough. I used to play minecraft on a really bad PC back in the day, and in my lucid dreams I used to encounter the same slow chunk loading as I saw in the game.
Playing Population One in VR did this to me. Whenever I hopped into a new game, I'd ask the other participants if they'd had particularly vivid dreams since getting VR, and more than half of folks said they had.
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