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Hmm. Maybe I'd make chilled barley tea with the toasted barley, and a simple chickpea salad with slices of bell pepper to accompany it -- or, alternatively, hummus with the bellpepper to dip in it. Would be good for hot weather.

If the weather's cold, maybe lentil and barley soup with the bellpepper added in as an extra ingredient along with any other veggies I have on hand that seem like they'd be good in a soup. (Edit: Maybe experiment with the Cajun "Holy Trinity" -- celery, bell pepper, onion -- as the base? I haven't tried that for lentil barley soup before, but might be interesting.)

non-text based problems

I don't know enough about the specifics of what you're doing to really give detailed suggestions, but I have been surprised by models like qwen3.5/3.6 giving reasonable results to questions about images -- like answering questions based on comparing a few images. For example:

• Which of these images were taken from the same place?
• Which of these images were taken in the AM and which in the PM?
• Is the third image more like the first or the second? Answer "1" or "2" only indicating which of the first two images it is most similar to.
• What sort of tags would you attach to these images? Provide a list of tags as JSON as the only response.

Those prompts actually worked for imagery from camera systems I have to deal with for my job -- which, frankly, shocked me. The AM/PM one in particular read timestamps in the image (i.e. did OCR automatically) and converted from a 24 hour clock to answer the question. I've implemented that in scripts with older computer vision tools (like tesseract) that needed a lot of hand holding; the fact that current models can just do it is sort of mind blowing to me...

The economy collapses and you get a revolution, mass emigration, and/or other major societal upheavals -- probably as soon as a lot of people start going hungry...

Broccoli cheddar soup, using the flour to make a roux + a cup of milk mixed with chicken broth. Ideally with some crackers to crumble on top... Probably would take me 20 minutes or so to make. Not sure on cost exactly -- maybe ballpark of $3 or so? I have everything on hand to make that right now, actually, except the crackers. (I suppose I could make crackers with the flour, but that's more trouble than I'd normally want to go to cooking just for myself.)

My limited understanding of "agentic AI" is that it's LLMs prompted by a script repeatedly in a loop. e.g. You give it an initial prompt, the LLM spits out a response indicating what it thinks it should do next (like run a program) and the script looks at the output of the LLM, does what is asked if it can, then feeds the results back in as the next prompt (or tells the LLM that it can't/won't do that if so programmed, I assume), until the LLM indicates to the script in one of its responses that the complex task is done -- or indefinitely if the prompt is the sort that will never terminate.

You can limit what the overall system is capable of by careful design of the control script -- just using LLMs to bridge the gaps for tasks that are hard/impossible to program traditionally. For controlling a robot, I'd guess that you'd want to have actions for things like taking a picture with a camera (or reading other sensors) that the LLM can analyze, repositioning arms, controlling motors, etc?

If I knew how to set up a robotic arm that could safely turn the pages of a traditional book, then combining it with a camera or flatbed scanner, a couple different vision models + traditional OCR (to sanity check each other), and wiring the whole thing up with a custom script to make really high-quality ebooks out of the books I own that no one has bothered to digitize would be neat... Maybe some day.

You might get more informed responses on db0 or another site; most of Lemmy is straight up AI-hostile. I have mixed feelings on it personally -- I really don't like the AI companies DDOSing the internet for profit while driving up the cost of electronics (etc), but writing off local AI tech entirely also seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater to me...

Tue 07 Apr 2026 11:25:59 AM EDT

There is a good chance that lemmy.sdf.org will return after much needed disk expansion. We ran out of space. Currently everything is preserved, we just need more disks in order to bring the site back online. Thank you for your patience.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/

Hmm. Yes. A community dedicated to Unix and Surrealism. That'd be quite a thing!

On a completely unrelated topic, it seems like the SDF lemmy needs more disks... 😏️

Huh. I hadn't heard of that before. I do know that keeping it in the fridge overnight changes the texture though (which can make it better for some dishes like fried rice and worse for others). Thanks for the tip!

Fried shiitake mushrooms with garlic, a splash of soy sauce, and lemon juice. I usually use garlic powder for convenience.

If you're ok with lacto-ovo vegetarian dishes, it goes good with a fried egg and rice as a quick and tasty meal. Sometimes I'll have some kimchi with it too if I'm in the mood and have some on hand. (Note: a lot of kimchi is not vegetarian -- it often includes fish/seafood ingredients. The store near me sells both a vegetarian and a non-vegetarian version though and despite not being a vegetarian I prefer the taste of the vegetarian one slightly more, so I usually get that if they have it. Check the ingredients/labels if you're unsure.)

The mushrooms are also a fantastic accompaniment to steak when you're doing non-vegetarian cooking. Fry them in the same pan after making a steak on the stove and you can get something that can, frankly, eclipse the steak...

Another vegetarian dish I make sometimes (particularly in the summer) is basically just a chickpea salad. I usually use canned chickpeas for that with raw sliced vegetables like tomato, cucumber, red bell pepper, etc. I add salt, lemon juice, and olive oil and eat it with some toasted pita bread. Sometimes I will add avocado, chopped shallots, chunks of cheese, and/or a hard boiled egg if I have them handy and am in the mood -- but it's pretty good even without any of those extras. With canned chickpeas, I've found that I don't like the version with firming agents added (usually calcium chloride, IIRC), so I always check the labels at the store and get ones without it.

A third vegetarian dish I like is a variant on spaghetti puttanesca. While I boil pasta, I prepare a sauce in a pan using canned tomatoes, olive oil, capers, kalamata-style black olives, salt, a pinch of msg, and cayenne pepper. Finish the pasta in the sauce. One of the things I really like about this dish is that all the ingredients are shelf-stable so you can keep them on hand and just make it whenever. (My version notably leaves out the anchovies from more common variants of the dish.)

I don't share your confidence in that; we live in the dumbest timeline, after all...