> I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy.

He may have missed the point.

AI-generated code does not seem to have parsimony, for one. Generating code is cheap, so there's no drive to condense it. LLMs are not yet good at formulating abstractions to make code smaller, leading to code bloat. It's the same phenomenon that appears when humans modify code they only partially understand by adding special cases to general code.

There are complaints about "elegance", but it's more useful to talk about parsimony. Code bloat is measurable. Elegance is hard to assess.

Agreed. With steak, the main point is to let the quality of the meat speak for itself. Too much input from the cook and you just get in the way of this.

Now it's steak, tomorrow it can be pasta, next year it can be watermelon kimchi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDBNVO7K0kA this is a really good little episode from PBS

It is a great analogy, as the vast majority of software tasks are CRUD or glue logic. At this point, relatively narrowly-defined tasks are a solved problem with frontier models. It is only more advanced tasks with broad scope and large context that frontier models have more limited results.

I'm more of a coffee nerd than a steak aficionado but I've often made the comparison between those two. In both cases, the enthusiast considers their skill in making coffee/cooking steak to be a differentiator and they immerse themselves deeply into the process, skills, and tools. But for both coffee beans and steak the most important factor for a good end product is starting with high quality inputs. In other words, most of the work is being done by the farmers, the processors, and the quality of the raw stock (the cow or the coffee plant). Your job at the very end of that long value adding chain is to not ruin the hard work that others have put into it.

I'm not sure if this analogy holds up in the AI software metaphor that the author of the blog post is making.

All metaphors break at some point.

However, your example actually proves the point.

How many people who want a good steak know how to identify a high quality cut? Do they even know where to buy a high quality cut? What the different cuts are and whether they want rump, sirloin or fillet? How many kitchens have a meat thermometer? How many home cooks know how to use it and what the right temperature should be? How many home cooks know about reverse searing? Or timing? Or resting? Or seasoning?

Is it all learnable? Sure. But even something as simple as steak has nuance that needs to be learned, equipment deployed to go from "pretty good" to "great", experimentation and trial and error.

Steak is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.

Building an app is the simplest thing to choose to get started. It's also the hardest to get right.

So, honestly, the whole metaphor stands up pretty well for me, specifically because of your response.

Agreed. I'm an avid cook. Sous vide circulators are cheap now, and so are meat thermometers. Doing a steak well is one of the easiest cooking tasks, to the extent that I won't bother paying top dollar in a restaurant because it's so easy to do restaurant quality at home. I could teach someone to cook a restaurant quality steak in a couple hours and a few practice runs.

I also don't think the analogy will age well.

It might take more than 10 years, but robots will almost certainly master cooking single pieces of meat.

It's substantially harder to reach self driving than it is to cook a "good" steak.

Sure, for probably quite a long time you'll be able to find someone who can cook a way better steak than the best robot, especially because taste is extremely subjective...

You can debate the horizon and the extent, but changes ARE coming.

Change is the only thing you can count on besides death.

I was just curious asked chatgpt:

How can I make a really great steak myself? What to look out for, what to do. Give me detailed instructions.

I got a really good answer (including - cut, temperature and reverse searing), so I probably won't even need understanding. (Oh - and yes, I can cook - the answer mirrors what I already know).

Yes, it was a very, very poor analogy, because cooking a steak is a well known and well documented thing where LLMS produce good output. They fail when you get off the beaten path and try to do something that's not "mainstream".

Slight disagree, as many will heat their pan too high and burn the steak before it cooks through. Or maybe that was just me when I first learned how to cook steak the right way. ("Medium"/"medium-high" doesn't necessarily correlate to the position of the knob on the burner or whether the pan feels medium/medium-high)

I was going to say the same thing. 2.5m per side+rotation plus another 2.5 plus or minus 20s depending on heat

But I actually got something out of this -- which is that maybe before now, humans had to soak up the complexity of where value was made in software. And you saw this in the highest and best paid engineers in science and platform teams and basically that you had to invest in brains where you thought the value in your product was.

Without humans managing complexity, you have no idea where you should be investing once the product grows out of the concept stage

I like a good steak but setting off the fire alarms (plural) is a big risk when I cook them in my apartment :-). Scorching hot cast iron pan plus meat means some smoke is unavoidable. And that's the proper way to do it.

The problem with many business leaders is that they don't necessarily understand the businesses they lead very well. That's common for CEOs running a tech company without a tech background. There's a long history of business leaders with MBAs throwing away the baby with the bathwater when they get a bit too enthusiastic cutting cost. It's why Boeing is such a mess. It's why Intel is no longer considered a leader in innovative chips. The likes of Nvidia and Apple are running circles around them. It's why IBM is now a consulting company that hasn't really produced any tech product worth mentioning this century. The only time they are in the news is when they do another layoff round to make share holders happy. They are incapable of innovating because the people that did that have long since left.

In the hands of somebody competent, you can do great things with AI. But if you can't tell good from bad technically, you won't know that you are creating a big stinky mess until it's far too late.

On a positive note, there will be plenty of work for competent techies to come in and straighten things out on a freelance or consultant basis (I'm available for that sort of thing but not cheap). With the help of AI of course. No need to go back to doing things manually. I think a lot of companies will realize they need help in the next years to speed things up, to improve quality, etc. They'll be very opinionated about what they want and used to getting what they want quickly.

Soon we will be complaining about wanting just ONE post not related to the mother of all market crashes.

Why is that a problem?

I love a good medium-rare prime steak, but I also used to live near a restaurant called Best Steak House, which was anything but. However, they delivered a passable steak/steak sandwich that was worth what you paid for it. And considering that they were in business for decades, probably most people felt the same way.

A great steak is an occasional luxury; a "just edible" one is an everyday meal.

There is a lot of truth here, but it clearly isn't a welcome one.

From my own perspective I can look back on decades of software I've written (some including code generation far before LLMs), and marvel at the quality and creativity, and lack thereof, from one piece to another.

I never meant to create awful software, but I did (and still sometimes do). With LMM code generation (vs bespoke tooling, T4, XSLT, and the like) the game of chance is part of the fun, harnessing a powerful tool that wants to run out of control on a whim.

Looking back on a couple years of LLM assisted work I see the same mix as the decades before: some great (when I managed to keep the beast restrained) some awful (when I didn't, knowingly or not).

I don't see how things are much different with this tool than others as far as my work product goes. There is a bit more of it, but the excess isn't great stuff (that quantity remains roughly consistent over the years).

I can go out today and pay $50 for a thick cut ribeye at Ruth's Chris that has been visually inspected for marbling then hard seared in a special high temp over to temp by someone who knows wtf they're doing. I can also go to Denny's and pay $20 for a t-bone cooked to within shouting distance of what I asked for on the same griddle they use for the pancakes that doesn't get the sear I'm looking for.

Point being, you're absolutely right that the goal for a company selling a product is to be barely satisfactory but they don't actually get to decide what's satisfactory.

The thesis is covering the flat scenarios mostly. I think the scenario where the job is done so poorly that the steak has to be thrown away needs to be included as well. At times the pans would get damaged. And eventually the business is in debt and needs to be closed

It's a level of badly written that makes me think it could be a human, or it might just be an LLM that writes differently from a typical ChatGPT article.

It is slop though, either way.

> There's nothing sacred about human-written code

I suspect that there is a lifetime of knowledge and experience wrapped up in that statement and I agree wholeheartedly.

I love writing software and I've been doing it for decades. But I never forget that at the end, there's someone who's paid for it, and needs it to do a job that can't/won't be done manually. And that's why it exists. Not to satisfy my desire to express myself in code, not to allow me to create some golden tower of perfect architecture, but to do a job. Most likely a boring job in the service of increased profitability for some company.

And in the end, the only thing that matters to the customer is if it does that job well enough to be useful. I think -- hell, I know -- that many developers deliberately ignore this critical point.

I was going to say something similar. In particular, I do a lot of prototyping, AI has allowed me to make prototypes an order of magnitude faster with substantially higher quality. Different types of software engineering have very different goals and standards. AI does cook the perfect medium rare steak every time, but it's able to actually cook steaks in the time it used to take me to like microwave a burrito.

> All you want is to not be hungry.

This.

Programers are high end chef's whos products are expensive.

LLM / AI tooling is going to do a much better job of delivering on the promise of AppleScript, vb script, IFTT, and every failed drag and drop coding tool that got sold to businesses over the years.

There are going to be gains in large software, from professionals - but the real gains are going to come from all the software that CAN get created that never was before.

There is an XKCD comic "Is It Worth the Time?" (link: https://xkcd.com/1205/ )- a matrix of the cost benefit of automating something. LLM's / AI tooling, generating traditional code, makes the answer "yes" in almost every case now.

AI is the new rick-roll

At least in my experience, the 'software' people are VPs/management who push and push with short term thinking.

> To build good software with AI, you still have to understand software.

> You need to know what you’re actually asking for, how to judge what comes back, and when the machine is just confidently serving you charcoal.

It's surprising to me this even needs to be written down. Like, obviously still use your brain and think about what the computer is doing. Did you guys think that LLMs were magic?

Article aside, I generally always use the "we" pronoun at work when writing prose. Saying "I" feels too adversarial when talking about negative effects, or too self-aggrandizing when talking about positive effects. For example: "We discovered a bug shipped at the end of the merge window, so we will restart validation with the rollback applied." I think in school they say the business-safe way to write is instead with the passive voice but I just can't do it.

"We all could have done more.": said by every politician. Which is easier: writing good code, or winning a political battle over crappy code? I mean, if you're not capable of coding, and creating an appropriate architecture for the the domain: which course of action gives you the most control over risk management? So yeah most fights about software are about politics and crappy code.

Saying this to set expectations based on having a business license since 1984.

The author didn't say "we (all software engineers)", so the only person including you in his class is you.

It will be a push and pull and I'm curious where we'll be in a couple of years.

I can fly at 100mph if I let AI run loose and with a bit of steering I can get it to output what I'm looking for and generally pass verification and tests.

If I care about the code though, and I want to keep it maintainable, the amount of time and tokens I need to spend correcting and iterating on the output quickly eats through much of the initial time I saved, to the point where I'm unsure if I'm actually saving much time at the end of the process.

With hobby projects I lean on quality more, and the async nature of AI also makes this much easier to make progress without needing my full attention to do so.

In the corporate world, there's both the pressure to accelerate with AI, but also maintain code and product quality. The dials of one way or the other are more obvious now, but I don't believe it's possible to do both with the current models and harnesses without exponential cost.

What is interesting though, is I'm now leaning towards faster models rather than smarter ones.

Intelligence lets me bite off larger chunks of work at once, and trust the model to behave without having to watch it intensely, but doesn't seem to drive down the number of iterations required to hit my desired quality.

Faster models means the iterations I'll have to go through regardless will complete much faster and gets me closer to a proper flow state. Models will keep improving, but maybe we're getting near "smart enough" and the race will pivot to performance > intelligence.

Cross-platform widget engines (Tk, GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, etc…) long predate Electron and have always been robust, stable, well documented, and easy to use. It's not creating a single application for multiple native desktop environments that was difficult, it's writing a single application as both a web interface and a native desktop environment on any platform that's difficult.

Because CSS is constantly changing, inconsistently implemented, and difficult to use, it can't easily be targeted by widget engines (although Qt has tried, and maybe others) and web browsers already exist, so webview environments like Electron are the quickest way to get a cross-platform installable application that can also be hosted on a web server. I wouldn't really call it native though.

> We built Electron because writing UIs using native desktop frameworks is tough.

No, we built Electron because there are a huge number of people who are too lazy to learn anything outside of HTML/etc for creating a UI. It's not actually hard to make a UI using the native desktop frameworks.

>We built Electron because writing UIs using native desktop frameworks is tough. Is it still tough? Surely LLMs make it easier to use and so we will end up with faster and more native feeling applications.

We built Electron because web devs were a dime a dozen. It was an economic decision, not a technical one.

You would think so. But it seems all that everyone is obsessed with is increasing the velocity of enshitification in the hopes of becoming the next papa Elon

Don’t forget the moment where you realize that instead of cooking a steak the agent went for its own invented requirements and spent all your quota preparing everything to make the perfect ramen from scratch (or at least that’s what it tells you, when you ask it to double check what has been done it comes back and tell you it lied and in fact mixed the flour with the soup without making the noodles, with a small note telling you to not forget to prepare the noodles when you go to production)

Interesting, the NYT had a tip on flipping every 90s, but it was with a cast-iron pan and not a "cold sear". That was too smokey for our weak kitchen exhaust, so it was the last time I tried flipping multiple times.

But Lam Lam's cold sear video doesn't seem to make that much smoke on a non-stick, so I'll give this a shot again.

(Personally the reverse sear has been my idiotproof go-to.)

Thanks!

I don't know if I agree with the take I've written below, but I think you can make the analogy work:

It has been argued, even in the before-AI-times, that most professional software is just gluing together open source tools and libraries. Your job isn't to write software, it's to set up redis and postgres and a programming language and a react frontend or whatever in a way that lets them do what they're there to do. Most modern programming is just configuration of pre-existing tools. It doesn't really matter how good your code is as long as it isn't terrible, Real Programmers already did 95% of the necessary work before you decided to build your little app.

I'd say that using a manual espresso machine and getting good tasting coffee from light roasted beans is vastly harder than making a good steak.

My point is that steak is very, very, very far from the hardest to get right. I'm not going to contest your argument about how hard it is to get right, I'm going to argue that innumerable other dishes are vastly harder. Because the quality ingredients are harder to find, because they involve far more steps, each of which is harder to judge, because often good recipes or instructions simply don't exist, etc. etc. etc. Every single difficulty that you imagine exists to make a truly great steak exists 100 fold for other dishes.

In my opinion, steak has gotten the reputation that it has because it's so easy to get top tier restaurant quality at home (relative to cooking more generally). It is easy enough that, with a little care, almost any one can master it if they decide to, and therefore lots of people try and end up caring, and discussing, and sharing tips, etc.

There are a whole host of dishes where true mastery, to restaurant level, is borderline impossible for a home chef, and so most people never even try.

I don't disagree that reliably getting the last 5% of quality out of a steak is non-trivial, but the idea that, relative to the entire world of cooking, it's particularly difficult is laughably incorrect.

>All metaphors break at some point.

The map is never the terrain.

All software to an extent is a model map of some real world phenomena. The limitations of which can actually be advantageous, a good example is why games with poor graphics can be so immersive.

This is a whole lot of nothing.

Sure there are a few things that knowledge and skill can do to make a steak better or worse. But the entire range from worst to best is just tiny. The best steak in the world is not a steak moon shot, it's just barely any different from what anyone can do after barely any instruction.

It's a tiny thing to become about as good as it's possible to get.

How many analogies age more than 10 years anyways? They are contextual. It will be a while before a robot flips steaks cheaper (and better) than a human line cook.

Funny I tried the same and it advised a using searing/smoking hot pan. Which is poor advice unless you enjoy the bitter acrid taste of burnt meat. The Maillard reaction doesn’t require those sorts of temperatures (under 180C is hot enough) - especially as the surface of the steak will dry from the oven phase of the reverse sear. “You were right to pull me up on that…”

Maybe. It depends what you count as part of cooking the steak.

I need to go to the market, find the steak I want, and purchase it, get it home, and put it in the fridge.

Then when I want to cook it I need to find it in the fridge, unwrap it, season it, and let it come up to room temp.

That's all before you get to the actual cooking.

The self driving car already does everything.

I compare this to doing my first smoke (was gifted a smoker).

AI gave me the cut, the temp, the timing, the things to watch out for.

Chicken's the best to try first, can't mess that up.

After goodness knows how many hours..

Pretty inedible leathery chicken..

"Oh my bad! I gave you the timings for a different meat"

AI has proved several times they can prove some complex math things that humans have been trying for decades so solve. They have not failed and have clearly done complex things humans cannot. Since humans have not done it before you cannot call it on the beaten path.

The problem is that not everyone can afford/wants to spend on a high quality cut. A good cook can make a cheap cut of meat taste great. There's no single right way of cooking a steak and that can include spices/herbs/marinades/oils/etc.

instead of complaining about what's here, why not go add what you feel is missing?

Ramen may still be somewhat of a novelty where I live, and I would not call it cheap. Though now that I put that into words, a decent burger anywhere is about the same price..

Pangram says 100% AI, for what it's worth.

That’s what the entire economy does by design. You make the lowest common denominator people will still pay for.

HN has also covered steak cooking before:

Show HN: I Derived a Steak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691840

To get a perfect steak with nice X-shaped sear marks on both sides:

1. Turn grill on all the way. Close lid. Wait for grill's gauge to reach >400 F (>200C).

2. Put steak on grill. Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.

3. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.

4. Flip steak over, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.

5. Rotate steak 90 degrees, placing on a fresh section of the grill (not where it just was). Close lid. Wait 2 minutes.

It's been 8 minutes of grilling. Steak is about done. Stab it with a meat thermometer into the middle part, it should read 350 F (or 176 C) to be medium done (pink in middle).

Tips:

a) Optional but recommended: rub steak with olive oil and steak seasoning on both sides, including the edge.

b) If steak is thicker: add a little more time. If thinner, use less time.

c) If steak is frozen (buy good cheap steaks and freeze to last a long time): add a little time.

d) To cheat, put a little dab of butter on top for the last segment of each side.

e) Leave the steak out for 15-20 minutes to get to room temp before making it.

f) Let it sit on a plate for 8 minutes before serving. It's still cooking, and the juices settle in. You can "tent" foil over it if you want.

g) Don't cut the steak. "Fast" and accurate meat thermometers are cheap now.

This is for grilling. The stove, broiler, and cast iron skillet instructions are different.

I just want to point out this is not a royal "we". It's a regular "we". Royal "we" is when you say "we" but mean a singular person, yourself. Here, the author does actually mean multiple people beyond themselves - like you pointed out, they claim to speak for all software engineers.

Idk, OpenAI themselves released some weird Electron app to replace their native version of ChatGPT on mac https://www.siliconreport.com/openais-chatgpt-mac-update-shi...

A software engineer user with taste, yes.

Have you ever been really deep in a thread with an agent on a technical deep dive? The trade-offs conversations would not make sense to someone that is not able to decode the real decisions they’re making.

You can dumb down the agent, but the reason domain language matters is because of the precision of the word sometimes - not to be a gatekeeper.

Anyway - user with taste that understands all the elements of their decisions would be my modifier :)

Coffee is a good metaphor here too, because bad technique can ruin a good steak just as surely as good coffee. "knows how to use a meat thermometer and reverse sear" describes like 10% of the population or less, same with coffee - there are people who use a bad grinder and a not-regularly-cleaned Mr. Coffee with good beans and get gas station coffee, and there are people out there making solidly B+ class coffee using costco beans, a no name burr grinder, and a french press.

Edit for people who've never had good coffee:

"I don't like coffee. Can James Hoffmann change that?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo

I think a certain restaurant chain might have something to say about this

To achieve the best outcomes, I agree.

But even a cheap steak can be decent if it's cooked properly. And an expensive prime cut can be ruined by cooking it improperly.

Go to costco, buy prime filet. Put it in a ziplock in a sous vide at 130 for an hour. Drop it in corn oil at 425 for 30 seconds. Add some butter and salt.

That simple process, suggested by Nathan Myhrvold (former MSFT cto) in the modernist cuisine, produces a filet better than most restaurants.

I've made steak probably 100 times in the past decade (sometimes with a sous vide) and I don't think I've ever made one I would say is great. Certainly not as good as what I can get at a good restaurant.

I think what my home steaks are really missing is the crust from salamander broiler. I don't have anything at home that can exceed 1000 F / 550 C.

> It's substantially harder to reach self driving than it is to cook a "good" steak.

Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.

Ramen restaurants are definitely not cheap in the US. I hear they are in Japan, though.

> and I would not call it cheap

It is compared to the cost of making an authentic ramen broth at home at the scale of feeding 2-4 people. Pho has a similar property. I've made homemade pho broth once and it was very hard work, fairly costly, and it resulted in something that was pretty good, but not comparable in quality or price to something I could have bought in a restaurant down the street. (admittedly typically also cheaper that ramen)

one person can only change so much

There's a floor on quality for producing a good steak. Below that floor you'll be better served preparing the meat another way entirely.

Ironic, considering the content.

This place is nerd central (which I guess explains why I'm here).

350º internal temp for medium done?

Maybe you forgot to include the glue on your pizza as well.

MANAGER VOICE: Can we get AI to do this for us? /s

That was such a weird move for them to make. If you have AIs that are good at building software, then use them to build great software! Instead they choose lowest-common denominator solutions that are okay everywhere but not great anywhere.

the wicked we

Long ago I added an instruction to my global AGENTS.md that every time the agent asks me something, make it multiple choice that ranks the top options, give a quick trade-off summary of each one, recommend one, and justify it.

Over the last year, I've noticed that the recommended option for technical questions has become one that is always sufficient to the point that I'm once again in a tastemaker position, not in the "here's a better idea btw" position.

And if that's true, then my participation in the intermediate steps isn't strictly necessary to get a well reasoned position that's only directionally wrong.

But the point is that no matter how well you cook the steak you're not creating quality, you're just getting the most out of what you have. The cow and the farmer created that quality. I believe we lose sight of that because so much of the value chain is not visible to us and we hyper fixate on the fun part, becoming a better barista/chef.

Sizzler?

There's so much written about how to cook a steak well, and I've tried a lot of exotic techniques (I have gas and charcoal grills, tried cooking straight on a chimney starter, have gas torches inside and outside). Most of what really matters, and it's that it's dry, the pan is heavy and hot, you use enough oil to get good heat transfer.

If you get those parts right (and control the inside temp via sous vide or reverse sear) most of the other stuff is pretty marginal in how much it helps. Even all of the extra herbs, and butter basting and everything -- relatively insignificant compared to just getting the salt-level right.

I worry what that says about our lives as a whole. The government will make our lives the lowest common denominator that we are willing to endure.

And people seek out the highest quality product they can pay the lease for

No, that is exactly GP's complaint. Their whole point is that OP has written things like "we throw everything at a model and hope it gives us what we imagined, without ever having to understand how any of it actually works" when the honest statement would be "I throw everything at a model and hope it gives me what I imagined, without ever having to understand how any of it actually works".

I know people who can cook a lot of food pretty well, but don't understand why they can't use a laser thermometer to check their meat.

Knowing really is half the battle.

Perhaps I'm crazy, but I truly can't taste much of a difference between "good" coffee and "bad" coffee.

I can certainly tell the difference between a good steak and a bad one.

I bet the same analogy can be applied to cooking a cucumber.

Any steak can be delicious with a butter bath and then hit it with that A1 :).

Yes. It is about learning all of these things. Knowing what kind of cut you have, and how to treat it to best effect.

A very tough gristly cut can be improved by tenderizing. Going low-and-slow/sous vide to melt the connective tissue. Even grinding it up to make a hamburger steak / loco moco.

Once you know all of those things, choosing the right approach and executing it is not that hard. The steps themselves are simple.

It's this story all over again:

https://engineerine.com/10000-dollar-chalk-mark/

Reminds me of recipes like brining a turkey in Dr Pepper... sure it may taste fine, but I'd rather not eat food prepared in plastic bags with processed oil.

> Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.

Sure, we will completely ignore Waymo and move goal posts...

couldn't you trivially get a kitchen torch or use your oven's broiler

That "simple process" requires equipment most people don't own or know how to operate, an oil most people don't keep in their cupboards, and is suggested in a book most people haven't heard of by a tech CTO they would not recognise the name of.

Honestly this is like the Dropbox comment all over again. Everyone is missing the point, it's glorious. :)

Most people cooking steaks don't care about the optimal way to cook steaks, or want to find out.

Most people building software today don't care about the optimal way to build software, or want to find out.

That's TFA. That's the point. That's what we're discussing. :D

Salamander broiler would be incredible to have at home. We get decent results from using a cast iron pan thats as hot as we can get it. At most we can sear 2 steaks as it tends to cool off pretty quick even under high heat. Got any better alternatives that a home cook could use?

Not always. There are diminishing returns at the top end of the quality spectrum. I tend to go with the cheaper item even if I can technically afford the more expensive one if their quality is close enough.

Yes I understand the complaint. It's just that "royal we" means something else.

If you cook enough you can tell by feel

It’s about experience. If you’re not into classical music, or jazz, or metal, it all sounds the same - how could anybody tell the difference? Only when you put in the work to listen to it a lot, different works, and actually pay attention, you will notice how your sense and understanding develops over time. Suddenly you’re able to make out differences, recognise patterns and repeated segments and structure where before there was none.

Or pick dancing: when you start out, you’re entirely occupied with placing your feet in the right spots at the right time. As you practice, your mind gets freed up and you’re able to make deliberate alterations, embellishments, larger figures. That seems impossible at the start.

I thought that too, honestly, before I had truly great coffee. I honestly didn't like coffee at all, and then a coworker brought in some coffee he'd roasted and prepared himself and it was lifechangingly good. I also made myself incredibly sick with the enormous amount of caffeine, it's been very rare that I've had to go home from work in the middle of the day but that was one.

For a moment I thought it is hitting with AI.

Believe me, there's a huge spectrum, from the sweet aroma of freshly ground Brazilian beans to straight up cat piss coffee sold in supermarkets.

This story is AI slop

Why don’t you skip the meat and just make a butter and A1 soup :)

Pickling a cucumber sure has a lot of resemblance - a great cucumber is good fresh and great pickled, but a bad pickling brine can ruin even a great cucumber.

[delayed]

Reverse sear over sous vide -- moisture is the enemy of crust.

Cheap knock off a Big Green Egg with hardwood charcoal can get to 650°F or so pretty quick, and does an amazing job of finishing up after a reverse sear.

How are you still blaming this on “the government”? Is your thesis that the business world would be delivering high quality products and experiences if only those damned bureaucrats would get out of the way? What possible evidence do you have left for that hypothesis at this point?

EDIT: this was a misread on my part, retracted, carry on.

What I've really gotten out of this is that I'd like to learn how to use a (proper) meat thermometer when I make steaks.

Ok, using a laser thermometer for food is hilarious. Thanks for this xD

That likely means that you've only had "bad" coffee. You're one of today's lucky 10,000 - go treat yourself to a decent cup of coffee it tastes completely different. The difference between a good steak and a bad steak is actually a good comparison.

You'll start to taste the difference once you get that one really-well-made pourover at a place that _lives_ for the love of coffee.

There are some coffee beans that have crazy taste profiles when properly extracted with the right water. I had one that tastes literally like a peach and another that tasted like a really nice tea.

Or maybe not. Different strokes!

> hit it with that A1

Sir, I regret to inform you that you are going straight to hell.

Then don't go to a good restaurant. Sous vide is extremely common, and oils of various types are used liberally.

I've tried a blowtorch and a barbecue, but they're not as good as cast iron. Best results from just spending $15 on a second cast iron.

Corn oil is cheap and available at costco. A sous vide is a fancy french name for a $150 device from target that keeps water at a specific temperature...

This "simple process" is much, much simpler than most meals one cooks at home. It's not much harder than microwaving something.

You are missing the point. With a small change in the way you do something, the really good thing can be made.

Is it moving the goalposts to ask Waymo to demonstrate a drive across America and not in well mapped cities with only lower speeds? How did we define "self driving"?

A blow torch might be worth trying. I'd think it's still not as good as a hot broiler because it's heating a relatively small area.

They have digital thermometers now that will map out the temperature curve and even predicted when the meat will reach core temp. You really don't need to use them many times before you internalize the behavior.

Since this is HN, here's the maximum technology option: https://combustion.inc/

They have a thermometer with multiple sensors in it that finds the core temperature of the food you're cooking automatically, and predicts the rise in temperature over time. So the alarm goes off when it's time to pull and rest, which is absolutely amazing.

It is reasonable for measuring cooking environment. Like say pizza oven. Just have to be aware of things like right emissivity.

for a caramel or some sauces it's legit

It's not wrong for all food, surface temperature measurement has its place, you just have to understand it is surface measurement.

Here's an obligatory Tom Scott + James Hoffmann episode:

I don't like coffee. Can James Hoffmann change that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo

I use it to spot check the temp of my cast iron pan all the time.

Or perhaps they've only had good coffee, so they should try some instant coffee past its use-by date to compare.

Sometimes it's a matter of not having taste for it. If you give me multiple bottles of alcohol drinks, I might be able to distinguish them, but I have no clue at all which ones are supposed to be good. To me it's all just alcohol. Same with coffee - but not the same for steak.

Yeah, that's (one of the reasons) why eating out frequently is unhealthy.

Are you just heating the bare cast iron to crazy hot temperatures and then putting the steak in?

I've thought about trying that, but I'd need to first strip the seasoning off the pan to avoid all kinds of nasty flavors. The second pan makes sense...

I feel like I am better off with cast iron or stainless steel compared to slightly bigger torch. Stainless steel allowing some deglazing for sauce. Torch is still too small area and burns more so sears.

I read corn oil while I expect 3 star Michelin steak. What are we talking about oO

He is saying "if we apply (or are applying) the same business mentality to government, we will get literally the worst government we are willing to tolerate based on money"

It's not blaming. It's an explanation for probably why things can go wrong.

He isn't blaming the software problem on the government. He is saying that if we apply this reasoning to everything in our lives, then we have a race to the bottom in other facets, of which one is government.

So I can taste differences, but they simply don't matter enough for me. My areopressed coffee with nice fresh locally roasted beans does taste different from a mcdonalds pot. Less harsh, less chemically flavored. But for me those differences don't really matter. They are close enough that I can enjoy both.

But I would say I know I'm also weird in that food temp really doesn't bother me all that much. I enjoy my coffee even as it goes from hot to cold.

A steak for me can be more easily messed up. But then I've not tried instant coffee so maybe I've just never tasted the bottom of the barrel for coffee.

ah, more of an HP person I take it?

Sous vide are even cheaper now, $30 for a basic one, provided you've got a stock pot or something large enough to set it in.

No True Scotsman only drives in the city. All True Scotsmen drive across the entire U.S. of A.

Waymo has completed 20 MILLION autonomous rides, 6.5m last quarter alone...

At what point does it get to say it can self-drive? When there's not a single non-self-driven car left on the road?

Gotcha, ok - I’m misreading it. Thank you.

Yep, I see it now. Thank you.

Yeah Mcdonalds is, at this point, acceptably C-grade coffee. You have to go to something like a cafe bustelo in distilled water to get the full contrast.

Really, I get it, even bad pizza is still pizza.

Everyone knows steak is better well-done with ketchup.

You need something to vacuum seal the food. Is that included in the $30?

>drive across the entire U.S. of A.

I'm still working on collecting the drive to all states badge. I've only accomplished half. I calculated my total driving since getting a license recently and its approx. ~360k miles or around 17k miles a year.

If Waymo can eventually handle rural life in the US I'd be seriously impressed.

It's not going to for a long time because the cost/benefit isn't there...

Even if Waymo's healthy growth rate continues, it won't make up 5% of the entire US rideshare market until 2030.

That's still several years away from ever even thinking about rural areas.