November 13, 2024 - 3:53am
Poor harvest?
Has there been a poor harvest this year? I have two Panasonic Bread Makers, & I am having to unplug them with an hour remaining, because they have not risen sufficiently. I wait an hour, then bake for 51 minutes. I always used to leave them alone for the full 4 hours, & get a perfect loaf. I have tried flour from several sources, always with the same poor result. I use a vitamin "C" tablet, to aid rising.
I have been baking my own bread for more than 20 years..
Share
poor quality? Maybe?
The possibilities include:
Is it a lot cooler now in the room where your BM's are located?
Panasonics (even older models) are pretty unique in that they change their programs' timing and "rise" temperatures based on ambient temps. In their service docs, they call it "Process Judgement". Usually the changes are relatively benign, but a couple times (during a really hot spell) the change was significant and I did not like the result.
Also, what is the ratio of Vit C to flour you are using?
Test the yeast in a little warm sugar water. Leave for 10-15 minutes and see if it foams up well.
Old stocks or outdated raw materials can affect the rise. If you've tried different types of flour and the result doesn't change, it might be the yeast that's the issue.
This kind of generic 'AI' advice does tend to kill good conversation!
Funny how the bots are so chatty but never show us their bakes - maybe every new TFL member needs to contribute an introductory bake and be able to answer real questions about it!
Lance
Lance, you used a tool that gave a likelihood of a comment being AI generated, what was it?
For the comment above the are only 30 words, so not enough to go on usually.
And also, the people operating these AI bots do sometimes vary things by not always using the bot for a comment, so it does make detection more difficult. Which is why I like your show us your bake idea.
Still not sure what is in it for them to go about doing AI posts on this forum, but it really does retard good natural conversation in comment threads unfortunately.
-Jon
The tool is here Jon: https://gptzero.me
I can't claim credit - I think it was TomP that originally posted it.
I think there are currently three regular bot posters on here, pretty easy to spot them; but like you, I'm not sure why they bother.
Lance
I don't remember seeing that page. A while ago I have asked ChatGPT whether it assessed that various quotes could have been written by itself. The results weren't very precise - it said that a few passages of mine could have been bot-written.
Since it's so easy now to get these LLMs to generate imagery, even requiring pictures of bakes might not be enough.
TomP
I could easily see recipes and photos posted that were not original. There are so many breads out on the internet that we wouldn't know they were plagiarized.
Why does a bot bother? That's a great philosophical question.
Late last year, I published a short story called The Disambiguation that I hoped would seem at least plausibly machine written. But I didn't fool the AI tool you have linked to: it came up 99% likely to have been written by a human.
Why do I bother?
🤣
Rob
One thing I've noticed is that the bots never create original posts - they only do replies.
Lance
Oh, they do start new threads... I've reported a number of them. To Floyd's great credit, once reported they are removed quite quickly...
Do consider that a fair number of non-native English speakers use translation tools, including AI, to do the writing for them, which often results in stilted and slightly unnatural sounding text. Posts that read like they were written by AI don't necessarily indicate that there isn't a human behind it trying to participate in the conversation. If there are accounts that are super suspect, pass them my way, but confronting every new account that doesn't write like a native English speaker is unhelpful.
Fair comment Floyd, but it is the content of the replies that make me (and I believe others also) suspicious.
Lance
I report some posts that don't end up getting removed. It's probably a good thing that some of them are getting the benefit of the doubt. It is odd to read a comment that seems a little suspicious, doesn't add anything to the discussion, yet does not have a product link.
Yep. I'm keeping an eye on them too.
How about, at a minimum, new members are required to fill in most/all of the "More information" account section. That might slow down or turn away the bots/spammers.
Unless you are using fancy, local farm, single source ingredients it is very unlikely. Mills are experts at maintaining baking quality of their flours regardless of the quality of the incoming grain.
maybe so, but I have had a number of bags of high quality major brand flour go bad long before the 'use-by' dates. Perhaps the problems lie in variations in storage by distributors, warehousers & retailers.
Rob