Turkish Coffee? Since the 16th Century, It's in the Water | Hacker News Reader

Turkish Coffee? Since the 16th Century, It's in the Water

specialprojects.sprudge.com

30 pointsspeckx18 comments

The second edition of Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood's Water for Coffee came out v recently, and afaik it talks about good quality natural water a lot more than the diy reconstituted/resalted ro water approach discussed in the first book. I wonder if it influenced the messaging in this article.

One of the few benefits of monarchy is the development of haute cuisine, since the monarchs don't want to eat like the hoi polloi. This culinary tradition eventually escapes the palace and percolates through society.

As a Turk, I can say that the truly wonderful thing is brewing very finely ground coffee with its grounds.

my friend's mother would make it for us, and I would secretly top it up with water and dilute the grounds until I ate/drank them down.

Not only did this illicit reactions of disgust, but it prevented them from doing a coffee reading of my future as my cup was always clean by the end.

So had you not done the herecy of diluting the coffee grounds, you might have been foretold your future of being replaced by LLM tokens

That's everybody's future, so I would have been pretty unimpressed if that's all she could come up with

Hey, people at AI companies are grinding, it's just more modern and l33t grinding.

its also a visually very appealing thing if its done properly -- ie in a heated sand.

Monarchic customs are always a great source for optimized procedures and best practices, because in these places marginal costs don't matter, people get assigned to particular knowledge areas and the assumption is that quality does matter.

next time just post the prompt

To me it reads like it was written by a non-native English speaker, in a way that most AI slop doesn't. Maybe an LLM was used to translate?

Edit: looked into it and the first paragraph doesn't exhibit any LLM "tells" to me, so I'd rather read it in full or research about the source than judge it. Leaving the rest of my comment because it is my opinion on the argument of using LLMs to rewrite text.

I don't know if this was done here.

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I haven't read TFA, and this explanation comes up again and again, but I'd rather read broken English (or German), than the "enhanced" version.

Considering that LLM rewriting using non-specialized tools is more often than not far from preserving intent and meaning of any input, I'd say I think this applies even more for non-native speakers.

You wouldn't say "maybe the author is not a physician, so they might have used an LLM to fill in the Latin terms and medication doses" or "not a scientist, used ChatGPT to do the statistics using my notebook of empirical data" either.

Language has value and simple language or slightly wrong grammar is preferable to a verbose and glossy distortion of the input.

Sorry if this doesn't apply, since I didn't click the link.

And yeah I'm sure my comment is verbose and partially wrong in my English, but well.

Totally agree, my point was that I didn't get the impression that the article was LLM-generated, for that reason. The commenter I was replying to seemed to think the article was obviously LLM-generated, so LLM-aided translation was one possible explanation, but I don't have any particular reason to believe that's what the author actually did.

I've read the first paragraph rather than skimming it now, and it does show LLM tells, and not so few as to appear accidental...

> water everywhere was not only a necessity but also a marker of status, a matter of discipline, and often an aesthetic pursuit. That’s why, when you look closely at the story of coffee in the Ottoman world, you don’t find only roasted seeds, copper cezves, and foaming cups—you also encounter an unexpectedly refined culture of water. Even today, as specialty coffee digs into water hardness, alkalinity, and pH, it’s tempting to think that some of our “scientific instincts” are, in a way, echoes of the same land. water everywhere was not only a necessity but also a marker of status, a matter of discipline, and often an aesthetic pursuit. That’s why, when you look closely at the story of coffee in the Ottoman world, you don’t find only roasted seeds, copper cezves, and foaming cups—you also encounter an unexpectedly refined culture of water. Even today, as specialty coffee digs into water hardness, alkalinity, and pH, it’s tempting to think that some of our “scientific instincts” are, in a way, echoes of the same land.

but yeah I still didn't read it all or the think about the source, the website is unknown to me though.

But.. it is not AI? What is giving you that impression?

the sultan's coffee water was basically the original hardware spec, modern baristas are just running a high res update on an old ottoman algorithm that treated water as the source code. gumussuyu proves specialty coffee isnot new, just a re.run of a centuries old protocol.

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