[HN Gopher] Turkish Coffee? Since the 16th Century, It's in the ...
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Turkish Coffee? Since the 16th Century, It's in the Water
Author : speckx
Score : 23 points
Date : 2026-03-17 15:41 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (specialprojects.sprudge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (specialprojects.sprudge.com)
| hsynkrkye wrote:
| As a Turk, I can say that the truly wonderful thing is brewing
| very finely ground coffee with its grounds.
| tetris11 wrote:
| 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.
| vladgur wrote:
| 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
| tetris11 wrote:
| That's everybody's future, so I would have been pretty
| unimpressed if that's all she could come up with
| vladgur wrote:
| its also a visually very appealing thing if its done properly
| -- ie in a heated sand.
| esafak wrote:
| 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.
| croisillon wrote:
| next time just post the prompt
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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?
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| 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.
|
| =====
|
| 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.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| 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...
|
| :D
|
| > 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.
| Foskya wrote:
| But.. it is not AI? What is giving you that impression?
| boomskats wrote:
| 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.
| KaifKhan wrote:
| 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.
| bgnn wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| zwaps wrote:
| 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.
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