Cooking with it at normal fry pan temperatures (350-400f) is safe, this has been repeatedly confirmed in experiments, some not even funded by DuPont. Don’t do crazy things like really high temp searing and don’t use metal utensils that cause the coating to flake off. Also if you’re really concerned ceramic nonstick + oil has come a long way. And I should add the the most nonstick pan I own is actually a properly seasoned carbon steel wok, yes it’s really possible if you know what you’re doing.
I've heard good things about carbon steel. Particularly, nitrided carbon steel. The pans are treated to be non-stick and are safe. It's what Alton Brown, the host of Food Network's Good Eats who also just launched a new cooking show on YouTube, uses.
If you mean just a skillet / frying pan, i found that a cast iron pan is much better (for non stick), have been using a €10 one for about three years now. You can ignore all warnings about keeping it oiled etc. They also have glass air fryers now (borosilicate glass, quite durable). You can scrub both with a steel sponge.
I use ceramic, but recently learned that nitrided carbon steel pans are the way to go. They are both useful AND safe. Do yourself a favor and invest in one.
I recently switched from teflon to stainless steel, and after a few false starts figuring it out I like it more now. Also for something that leaves a lot of grease like sausage and bacon, the stainless steel surprised me by being easier to clean.
What did the false starts teach you? I have some stainless steel pans and sometimes they work great and sometimes they're just mysteriously sticky, with whatever I'm cooking bonding to the pan.
If it's happening only sometimes I'm not sure how useful this will be but these were where I had issues at the beginning - I'd looked up how to use them before buying them because I figured nonstick wouldn't exist if I could use them the same, but some information was misleading or incomplete. For example when cooking:
* You should preheat until you get a leidenfrost effect - get some water on your fingers and flick it onto the skillet, it should form droplets that bounce around without boiling off.
* Once this happens, immediately turn the heat to the lowest setting so the skillet doesn't get too hot (most instructions are missing this step and I didn't really expect the skillet would get too hot - stainless steel just keeps getting hotter at a temperature the teflon nonstick would maintain heat). Depending on your stove, the lowest might be a little too low and heat is slowly lost, this is something you'll eventually get a feel for.
* After getting the leidenfrost effect (maybe? not sure how important it is to wait until after), you have to add something (butter or vegetable oil, for example) to coat the surface and not only get a nonstick effect but also sort of buffer the heat. It's kind of like cast-iron seasoning, but extremely low-effort and you do it / clean it off every usage. Some of the things I'd read before buying said the leidenfrost effect was the important part for getting a nonstick surface without mentioning this stage, which led to a pancake that was black and stuck to the skillet on one side and still liquid batter on the other.
And when cleaning:
* I'd mentioned sausage and bacon above, these leave gunk that sounds kind of like what you described except a lot more of it. For some reason getting a wet paper towel and rubbing down the skillet (instead of putting water on the skillet directly) works really well getting almost all of it off, though it will take several of them.
* If there's still residue not coming off, something I got from reddit worked even where grease-removing dish soap didn't: Lightly boil baking soda in water in the skillet for about 20 minutes. Don't let the water boil off or you'll be left with baking soda gunk stuck to the skillet, you want it to dissolve and soak in the hot water for a while before emptying it and wiping it down.
* And lastly one of the side reasons I like it over nonstick while cleaning: The surface is actually smooth. When using a scrunge to wipe it down you can feel where there's still something stuck to the surface, while nonstick is rough even when clean.
Honestly it doesn't take too long to learn how to cook properly on other types of pans. I use my cast iron pans for nearly everything. I have stainless steel for the rest. There is nothing I can't do in them.
If I see an em-dash in a comment I stop reading and I've seriously considered setting up a filter across multiple sites to remove any comments containing one.
I know there are legitimate usecases for the em-dash, but a few paragraphs (at most) of text in an HN/Reddit comment? Into the trash it goes.
> Some people bitch, others are real engineers solving novel problems
My most disliked thing about AI so far isn't AI itself, it's how nasty AI evangelists behave when it's criticized. You don't have to attack and/or insult people, you could have just left out that last bit.
I can read until the 1300s, which is about what I expected. I encourage people to go search up historical newspaper archives from the 1700s though, because it becomes significantly harder to parse when you have little to no knowledge of the events, people or even culture of the time.
The 1300s become significantly easier if you read it aloud to yourself (and you know how to pronounce the unusual symbols). The 1200s become very hard even with that method (I can make out occasional words and phrases) and then I'm completely lost after that.
You don't sound like someone I'd like to speak with even if we might agree on things. You writing has a very aggressive tone to it for no reason.
I'll be honest if someone tries to get into politics and other such things very soon after I start speaking to them it really puts me off. I might not disengage right away, but I'll probably never choose to speak with them again.
I think both of you are projecting an aggression tone onto my words. Poe's law, maybe.
It shouldn't offend you that I don't personally enjoy continued small talk and prefer to form deeper connections at the risk of losing superficial connections, by not engaging in drawn-out progressive disclosure.
You're making assumptions about our compatibility without knowing much about me at all. But, this was my point: Now I know that we don't need to continue the discussion and we can both spend our energy elsewhere.
As a neutral 3rd-party who wants to help you speed-run your self-growth (because I like your energy):
- Yeah you come across as aggro. That's okay, sounds like you went through some stuff.
- Sounds like you've identified you grew up in a weird situation. That sounds bad, sucks you had to go through that.
- But it also sounds like there's a piece of you that's trying to overcorrect. I understand, it's common among us nerds -- you grow up in a situation where you aren't as appreciated as you should be and you try to turn off that feeling entirely somehow. Unfortunately these types of attempts to hack our own feelings are usually worse than the problems in the first place. Usually the best course is to slowly try to remind yourself (over years) "That was a bad situation, it was bad luck, it meant nothing, and it's not the norm. I don't need to fundamentally change to not have that happen again."
I do appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. I still believe that you and the two other commenters here are misreading or misinterpreting me.
That's a lesson for me to choose my words more carefully, but only to avoid misinterpretation in an online forum; everything I said, I 100% stand by, and it's honestly unsurprising that a comment about being provocative and to-the-point, not always progressively self-disclosing, has made some people uncomfortable.
> Unfortunately these types of attempts to hack our own feelings are usually worse than the problems in the first place
I want to stress that I mean this in the most constructive, positive way possible, but it feels like your comment projects a bit onto me in an attempt to find common ground. I welcome the attempt but I do want to point out that I don't try to "hack my feelings", and I don't organize my life and behaviors under some fear that my childhood is somehow going to happen again. I am very in touch with my feelings, I value emotional intelligence and reflection. I don't pathologically worry about others appreciating me.
I brought up my past to show how such a perspective might form, but the perspective is not some kind of defense mechanism. It is a playbook for how to live my life in a way that aligns with my ideals and goals, and it's one of the only good things to have come out of my childhood. I cherish my perspective and how it's allowed me to help both myself and others.
Well the reason I said it sounds like you were trying to "hack" feelings was that you mentioned you came up with your own social "algorithm" for testing people you meet that could make them uncomfortable. It's been my observation that most attempts to optimize conversation backfire.
But I'm not really trying to convince you, I don't have a horse in this race. If you want maybe ask an AI and see what it thinks, they are great neutral tool for being a judge on human tone or being a social mirror.
> you mentioned you came up with your own social "algorithm" for testing people you meet that could make them uncomfortable
I didn't say that, reread my comments. I have no interest in "testing" people like some sort of sociopath. You mentioned the algorithm of progressive disclosure. I said that I specifically do not do this whenever I can help it, and mused about why that is, and why it might be so for others raised in certain communities.
I said I quickly like to discover who other people are and communicate who I am, to skip all of the progressive disclosure crap and either come to terms with the fact that we aren't compatible, or to find a thread to start pulling and weaving into a relationship.
> It's been my observation that most attempts to optimize conversation backfire.
Progressive disclosure is an optimization. It's just optimizing for different things. I don't walk into a random conversation with someone planning to control how the conversation unfolds, or "optimize" it. But anyone with experience in public speaking, or leadership, sales, political organization or other environments which necessitate the ability to navigate and calibrate conversations, will learn a few tricks for keeping things on track or avoiding dull moments.
Conversational speaking is a skill, and getting better at it for the sake of improving your ability to communicate is not "hacking" or "optimizing" the conversation. I think you have decided on a bunch of behaviors in your head that I simply do not engage in.
> If you want maybe ask an AI and see what it thinks, they are great neutral tool for being a judge on human tone or being a social mirror
I have dumped my entire HN history into chatbots to study my conversational approach and learn from it. Self-betterment is always a work in progress, but I simply do not engage in the behaviors you've decided I engage in without even meeting me.
This thread has turned into a series of misunderstandings from multiple users, none of whom ever stopped to seek to understand or ask for more detail before making assumptions. Instead, I had to field several bad assumptions from people who were ironically claiming that someone whom they've never met, but simulated in their head based on a single comment, is aggressive or annoying to be around. It's ironic because, from my perspective, all of these assumptions represent missed chances for us to seek understanding from each other, and shift this from a conversation to a debate, which to me is aggressive.
I simply shared my perspective. This thread did not need to evolve this way. If I were the first user replying to my post, I would ask more questions to clarify my understanding before just deciding for myself that someone is annoying to be around because they said they like to be themselves from the jump when meeting others.
That describes much of my career as well. Curiously (or not) the job I had that felt the most satisfying was when I was paid to mow lawns as a youth. Beginning with a ragged lawn and leaving it looking clean and evenly cut was satisfying.
The truth of the world, as much as we may hate it, is that at least at the state level might makes right.
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