I was watching this video. The auto-translated subtitles are not great, but I followed along a bit.

We tried 15 types of Biryani

It made me realise that in the UK I have access to a very limited selection of biryani. From a supermarket it will look like this: https://www.iceland.co.uk/p/iceland-chicken-biryani-375g/87458.html. I'm missing so much knowledge about an enormous region that covers over a billion people.

I'd be really interested to hear about biryani, especially regional variations with different ingredients. What things are essential and often missed? What makes a biryani great?

I'd also love to hear more about delivery - those "handi" ceramic dum cooked to order pots look amazing. There's another video here of an "unboxing" - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Q5OA4XiGl34 , and the makers have a video here too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6nE1Nla3u0

The results are in, and Dispossessed was the clear favorite with many strong contenders. It looks like quite a few people are interested in participating.

There was a tie for third place so we will start with four books.

Edit
We will discuss Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell in early March,
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke in Mid April,
The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin in Late May
And Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir at the end of June.

We will discuss Project Hail Mary in early March
Cloud Atlas in mid April
The Dispossessed in late May
and Piranesi at the end of June

At that point I plan to hold a voting thread for fiction and a voting thread for nonfiction and discuss/vote on how frequently to read nonfiction. Please feel free to renominate your favorites that didn't get chosen.

I'm looking forward to this. Thanks for participating.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

I'm currently building an MVP for a startup, solo. We've got Postgres pulling triple duty as the go-to database for all normal relational data, a vector database with pgvector, and a job queue (With the magic of SELECT ... FROM "Jobs" WHERE ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED LIMIT 1). Every time I go out looking for solutions to problems it feels like the world really wants me to get a dedicated vector store or to use Redis as a job queue.

Back when I was a Rails developer a good majority of the ActiveJob implementers used Redis. Now that I'm doing NodeJS the go-to is Bull which can only serialize jobs to Redis. They back this with claims that I can scale to thousands of jobs per second! I have to assume this theoretical throughput benefit from using Redis is utilized by 0.01% of apps running Bull.

So I ended up implementing a very simple system. Bull wouldn't have been a good fit anyway as we have both Python and Typescript async workers, so a simple system that I fully understand is more useful at the moment. I'm curious who else shares my philosophy.

Edit: I'll try to remember to update everyone in a year with the real world consequences of my design choices.

I moved to a place with an "actual" winter just over a decade ago -- snow, freezing temperatures, etc. In the first couple of years, I got what felt like a genuinely solid winter. Lots of blisteringly cold days. Snow that fell in large amounts and stuck around for most of the season. I love winter, so this was great for me.

In recent years, however, the winters have been milder and milder. When we do get snow, it's only around for a bit because days above freezing are now frequent enough that it's able to melt between snowfalls. Also, the snowfalls themselves are more intermittent. This year specifically we've actually had more rain than snow. I don't remember getting rain in January when I first moved here.

It irks me a bit because the shift has been so stark and noticeable in such a short period of time. There's a part of me that thinks that it's not a big deal and maybe my first years here were unnaturally cold and snowy for the area, so what I'm seeing now is simply the other side of the mean, but then there's another part of me that feels like that's simply a comforting lie I can tell myself in the face of the obvious effects of climate change.

Is there anyone else here that feels like they're missing their winters?

Inspired by this amazing post and the subsequent discussion about the need for more queer joy:

What's a recent queer milestone you've reached/experienced in your life?

It can be something big, but it can also be something small but still meaningful. It can be an event (coming out!), a realization (oh so THAT'S who I am!), a feeling (dress go spinny!), a moment (holding hands!), a recognition (they used male pronouns!), or anything else that is distinctly queer and noteworthy.

Share what it is, what you think about it, and why it's meaningful.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Israel-Hamas war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

Please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

Final movie for January is Brad Bird's animated The Iron Giant from 1999.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Feel free to add any thoughts, opinions, reflections, analysis or whatever comments related to this film.

The schedule for February is:

• 5th: Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse
• 12th: The Aviator
• 19th: Batman Begins
• 26th: Gangs of New York