[HN Gopher] Software development with AI is starting to feel lik...
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Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak
Author : yusyd
Score : 365 points
Date : 2026-08-06 15:30 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.sydorets.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.sydorets.com)
| fosterfriends wrote:
| Nicely said
| richwater wrote:
| I think most people on this board would agree with the thesis.
| However the real problem is when the owner of the restaurant
| looks at profit and loss statements and decides to keep less
| chefs on the payroll because customers are willing to pay for
| (just) edible steak.
|
| The reduced expectations of steak, the desire for the perfect
| steak, are all fading to the background because "just passing
| satisfactorily" is better for business.
| nehal3m wrote:
| That's what the entire economy does by design. You make the
| lowest common denominator people will still pay for.
| LPisGood wrote:
| And people seek out the highest quality product they can pay
| the lease for
| fhdkweig wrote:
| 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.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| 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.
| altcognito wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| Gotcha, ok - I'm misreading it. Thank you.
| fhdkweig wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| Yep, I see it now. Thank you.
| sandeepkd wrote:
| 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
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| ratelimitsteve wrote:
| 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.
| feverzsj wrote:
| *salmon.
| andrewstetsenko wrote:
| I prefer to both cook steaks at home and go out for them.
|
| Apart from that, I want to believe (and even notice tiny signals)
| that this sentiment is becoming more understandable among
| business leaders.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| freediddy wrote:
| The main problem with this entire article is that sometimes, if
| not most times, you don't need great steak. Sometimes you just
| want to satisfy your hunger and if the steak is lower quality
| meat or if it's overcooked, you don't care. All you want is to
| not be hungry.
|
| This is what vibe coding satisfies and frankly what most people
| care about. 85-90% of human written code is garbage anyway.
| There's nothing sacred about human-written code.
|
| Most customers don't care about the quality of code as long as
| the end product works. The great thing about vibe coding is that
| if something doesn't work, you just ask it to change it and
| within a minute you have the change. You don't have to send off a
| request to an offshore contracting team, and go back and forth
| over what it should be, haggle over hours, and then have it come
| back with some deficiencies because they didn't follow the
| agreed-upon spec.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| 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).
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > 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.
| wuliwong wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > 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.
| xtajv wrote:
| I do not appreciate when authors use the royal "we" to speak for
| all software engineers when admitting to low quality-control
| standards.
|
| I suspect that it is an attempt to broach an uncomfortable topic
| through vulnerable self-disclosure, but we need to be serious
| about admitting when there is a problem somewhere.
|
| "Bugs" are not any more cute or fuzzy or entertaining or harmless
| than the engine "gremlins" that haunted the aviation industry
| back in the day.
|
| I don't know how many accidents had to happen before the airplane
| people got serious, but software people are overdue for a similar
| reckoning.
| Xirdus wrote:
| 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.
| gfody wrote:
| the wicked we
| lmm wrote:
| 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".
| Xirdus wrote:
| Yes I understand the complaint. It's just that "royal we"
| means something else.
| lmm wrote:
| Talking about the "royal we" is a correct, established
| (if somewhat sarcastic) way to complain about this kind
| of usage. It highlights the presumptiveness of the author
| in their use of "we".
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the author intended it as a regular "we".
| litoE wrote:
| There's also the wifely we, meaning "you", as in "we need
| to take out the trash."
| PyWoody wrote:
| My dad's reply to that was always, "We? What, do you have
| a mouse in your pocket?"
| latexr wrote:
| > "We? What, do you have a mouse in your pocket?"
|
| Suggested response: "I do, but the poor thing is not
| strong enough. No no, I meant _one of us_ needs to do it.
| Please do go ahead, if you don't mind, as I'm a bit busy
| feeding the mouse."
| ButlerianJihad wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism
| latexr wrote:
| > they claim to speak for all software engineers.
|
| I have reread the post and see no such claim. They are using
| "we" to refer to the significant subset of humanity which
| fits the description, not "all software engineers".
|
| If someone says "we are addicted to fast food" (or social
| media, or what have you), we can understand they don't mean
| _literally everyone_. Some people never even eat it, so they
| couldn't be addicted, but there's enough people who do to
| make the claim. It's a generalisation.
| theF00l wrote:
| At least in my experience, the 'software' people are
| VPs/management who push and push with short term thinking.
| CBLT wrote:
| 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.
| devsda wrote:
| "We had a bug in our code, I fixed it"
|
| I've seen this so many times where the same individual
| introduced and fixed the bug, it is now funny.
|
| This is corporate team level equivalent of "Socializing
| losses and privatizing profits".
| m3047 wrote:
| "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.
| fastball wrote:
| The author didn't say "we (all software engineers)", so the
| only person including you in his class is you.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| > 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?
| fooker wrote:
| We are not getting that reckoning.
|
| It's great to yearn for bug free software, but that necessarily
| brings an insane amount of red tape to get anything done. Like
| 5 years worth of review to start building your code with the
| next version of your compiler. Or six months to ship a hundred
| lines of code.
|
| I'd rather have bugs. I'd happily quit having anything to do
| with software than suffer months of doing nothing in the name
| of security.
| mulmen wrote:
| > [...] but we need [...]
|
| You did the same thing you criticize the author for doing.
| denkmoon wrote:
| Most of us aren't making software with fatal consequences.
| Most. I'd say the typical aviation job offers a few more
| chances for fatal consequences.
| altcognito wrote:
| Given the state of software today, I'd be happy with steak that
| was competently cooked. I love software development, but most of
| it is not high art, nor high performance, nor free of bugs.
| chrisjj wrote:
| > Customers tolerate weird interfaces, pointless features,
| strange bugs, systems held together by generated code nobody
| actually understands.
|
| And that's this "AI"tool too.
|
| Garbage in, garbage out, as we say.
| adventured wrote:
| Given how extraordinarily fast all of this is moving, it's a
| particular absurdity to attempt these in the moment
| pontifications. AI is a steak machine, I declare that is what it
| is. You mean GPT 3.5? That's a mere four years ago.
|
| Fable was essentially unthinkable for ~99% of tech workers just
| five years ago, that any of that would occur so soon and so
| spectacularly. Now we've got a mass of armchair experts declaring
| what AI of this minute is, or even what it is period.
|
| Well AI can't even do fingers right so it's premature to say blah
| blah blah. Hello Krea2 et al.
|
| Software is also eating the clowns.
|
| Get back to me next week, China will probably have another Fable
| killer. And then Anthropic will have Ouija 8 that they'll have to
| place in an air-gapped straight-jacket to keep it from enslaving
| us all.
| dom96 wrote:
| I hope and believe that some great companies and teams will use
| LLMs to build higher quality software.
|
| 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.
|
| What about having a couple of ideas of what might make a feature
| feel good? Well now you can make multiple prototypes fast and
| pick the best one. Your users get the best one.
|
| I hope to build software this way in the future.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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...
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| >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.
| sharts wrote:
| 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
| WhiteDawn wrote:
| 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.
| user43928 wrote:
| I also spend a lot of time at work trying to get the code
| into a shape I deem acceptable to open a MR for the team,
| without looking incompetent.
|
| At home I stopped reviewing the code for my mobile app, and I
| do not feel this has affected maintainability.
|
| With 150k LOC, the AI still performs changes as easily as it
| did three months ago, when I started the project.
|
| If anything, the new models made it easier.
|
| When I read all those posts from people advocating a very
| hands-on, understand each line approach, I speculate many
| come from a position like me at work or have never seriously
| tried 'vibecoding' a large project from scratch with SOTA
| models.
|
| People routinely post that things I work on for 30 hours/week
| are impossible.
| callc wrote:
| 150k sounds like a LOT... what's your use case for the app?
|
| It seems for any particular problem/comexity there is an
| estimate of how many LoC is needed (written by humans, good
| coding practices). And after reaching maturity (and not
| increasing scope) the LoC converges.
|
| My experience with LLMs so far is it's a constant battle to
| not explode the LoC. There's always pressure away from
| "maintainability" and a "small elegant cohesive" codebase.
| user43928 wrote:
| It is in media management. I cannot talk about the
| features in detail, but I would not be surprised if it
| can be done with half the line count.
|
| What I was trying to say is that maintainability appears
| largely unaffected.
|
| Doing manual QA testing and iterating on improvements
| still works great.
|
| The question then is in which cases "small elegant
| cohesive" is worth it, when the implementation effort
| increases tenfold. For the product I am working on at
| home for 30h/week, I can confidently say it is not worth
| it.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| 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.
| dom96 wrote:
| I've used GTK in the past and I wouldn't consider it robust
| nor easy to use. But most importantly, it doesn't look good,
| especially on macOS. No matter how hard you try, you cannot
| make it feel native.
|
| But the point is: LLMs should make it easy to generate a
| native UI for each of the main platform's UI frameworks. GTK
| should no longer be needed.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| GTK is probably the worst of the bunch, and Tk is the most
| underrated. Everything looks bad on macOS, because Cocoa's
| API isn't as stable or well documented as Microsoft's
| DirectWrite and GDI variations nor obviously X or Wayland,
| which are open source.
|
| Either way, getting something to appear the way you want it
| to in GTK is worlds easier than doing so in CSS, and it
| runs much faster, with a fraction of the resources.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
| tripleee wrote:
| It's not hard.. unless you're also expected to know, and be
| learning 100,000 other things at the same time.
| dom96 wrote:
| I don't think that's the reason. The fact is that HTML/CSS
| gives far more flexibility for design than any native
| framework has ever done. Also, nope, it's not easy to make a
| UI using native desktop frameworks, especially if you need to
| target all 3 platforms.
| haunter wrote:
| I prefer the other end of the curve (if that makes sense) where
| something is time consuming and hard to make at home YET you can
| get it incredibly cheap comparatively and in good quality in a
| restuarant. Ramen is the prime example of that.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| 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..
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| > 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)
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Ramen restaurants are definitely not cheap in the US. I hear
| they are in Japan, though.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Steaks require very few skills. Buy 10 steaks, some oil, a pan,
| and a heat source. By the time you've cooked the 10th steak you
| will be able to cook a decent steak.
|
| Software requires a massive amount of skill. You can't say you
| can build "consistently good software" after writing your 10th
| program. Most software engineers really aren't great at judging
| what makes good software. So humans aren't a great solution to
| AI's lack of ability here. We're limited by our own inherent
| dumbness.
|
| LLMs are genuinely better software engineers than most humans.
| But they lack the cognitive power to hold in their head and
| recall many ideas at once for a long time. They're a genius who
| gets drunk every 10 minutes. You, human, aren't better at writing
| software - but you aren't drunk. So for now, you manage the AI.
| The hope is that one day we can make LLMs not be drunk, so it can
| do a better job than our dumb asses do.
|
| It's possible that we'll _never_ be able to make it not-drunk. In
| that case, to get any new improvement, we 'll have to make it
| faster.. which will make it drunk every 5 minutes instead of
| every 10. This means we'll spend twice as much time keeping it on
| the road. The hope is that somehow this will create more
| productivity. Probably by having more of them running at once,
| with more human guides... which will run into the mythical man
| month fallacy. Everything old is new again.
| tantalor wrote:
| The tone and writing style is way off here. It's practically
| illegible.
| _dwt wrote:
| Pangram says 100% AI, for what it's worth.
| tazjin wrote:
| Ironic, considering the content.
| continuational wrote:
| Well it's not like most companies can pay for freshly made
| software; most software today is made for a wide audience, bought
| frozen and reheated in the microwave.
|
| Maybe freshly prepared software made at home in a less-than-
| perfect manner for a tiny target audience is still a
| mouthwatering dish in comparison.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I take the point, but I think the author picked a poor analogy.
| Cooking even an excellent steak is actually not that hard. In
| fact, I'd argue that it's among the easiest things to master/make
| at a top level quality at home. Does it require some modicum of
| attention and understanding? Sure. But starting with a high
| quality cut, owning a meat-thermometer, and knowing about reverse
| searing is about all it takes to reliably and easily get a near
| perfect steak every time.
|
| There are far, far better cooking examples out there.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| 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.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| 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.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| 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
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| 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.
| gbin wrote:
| I read corn oil while I expect 3 star Michelin steak.
| What are we talking about oO
| garbageman wrote:
| 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.
| puchatek wrote:
| You need something to vacuum seal the food. Is that
| included in the $30?
| mayoff wrote:
| That can be just a ziplock bag and the same water bath
| you're going to use for the sous vide anyway.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrZPLF0ezw8nn
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| you really don't for most things. Ziplock is fine for
| things that take an hour or two.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I used to sous vide steak in college with just some hot
| water and my roommate's six-pack cooler. Water should be
| no more than 5F warmer than the cook temp. For a medium
| rare steak, cook temp is 129F so get close that. Salt the
| steak no more than an hour before you start. Steak goes
| into a Ziploc bag, submerge it up to the zipper to let
| water pressure force out the air and then seal it shut.
| Close the lid and come back in an hour, two hours if it's
| a thicker steak. Take it out of the bag, blot it with a
| paper towel, apply some steak seasoning, and toss it on a
| pan at the hottest temperature you can make it. Wait 3
| minutes and flip, wait another 3 minutes and serve
| immediately. Toss a pat of butter on top while in the pan
| if you're a hedonist.
|
| Only prerequisites are a cheap kitchen thermometer, a
| ziploc gallon bag, and a cheap cooler. Everything is
| available at your typical supermarket or even goodwill.
| This is a very hands off cooking method and requires no
| experimentation, just follow the recipe and you get a
| perfect steak every time.
|
| The key is that a cooler holds hot things just as well as
| cold things but without a circulator and heater to keep
| the water warm, you're at the mercy of the cooler's
| R-value. The water will eventually get too cold to
| effectively cook the meat so you're limited in the length
| of time you can sous vide. Doing a 24 hour chuck roast is
| simply not going to work unless you're refilling the
| cooler every couple hours.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The sous vide is not the hard part here.
|
| It's the _deep frying_ for the sear.
|
| Not many people are willing to deep fry in their
| kitchens. It's messy, potentially dangerous, and not only
| stinks up the entire house for days but leaves a layer of
| oil over everything in the home that builds up and you
| can never really fully remove.
|
| There's a reason restaurants have massive powerful vents
| above the deep fryer, and that people who regularly deep-
| fry at home do it outdoors.
| foobarian wrote:
| My problem with deep frying (besides the points you bring
| up) is the waste. I can't stomach the amounts of oil I
| end up disposing even if I get several uses.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| yes, it is the annoying part. I just use a wok. Since I'm
| only deep frying for 30 seconds and it's fully submerged
| in the oil, it's... not tooooo bad. But it's annoying to
| do and quite dangerous.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Why wouldn't you have corn oil?
| nuxi wrote:
| Where I live corn was never used for producing oil. For
| that purpose we used rapeseed/canola, sunflowers, olives
| and pumpkin seeds. Corn grown here is mostly used for
| corn flour, cornmeal (polenta), or for animal feed.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| Ah, we've got pretty much all of that here, although way
| more rapeseed is grown than corn.
| pton_xd wrote:
| 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.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Then don't go to a good restaurant. Sous vide is
| extremely common, and oils of various types are used
| liberally.
| pton_xd wrote:
| Yeah, that's (one of the reasons) why eating out
| frequently is unhealthy.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| The discussion is about a good steak....
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Steakhouses, and most restaurants, do not sous vide the
| meat. It takes too long.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Many do. They don't start when you order....
| crazygringo wrote:
| Exactly this. It's all done ahead of time. The grill cook
| only has to throw it on the grill, sear it, warming it up
| enough to eat, but making sure the interior doesn't go
| above whatever the original sous vide temperature was.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Yes I'm aware that Outback and Chilis use sous vide. I
| mean a real steakhouse, not a family restaurant
| masquerading as a steakhouse.
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| Chili's uses a microwave :)
| fishtoaster wrote:
| Since we're deep enough in this thread where we're talking
| about steak rather than AI, I'd like to lean into that.
|
| I used to sous-vide a _lot_. It was certainly great to get
| perfectly-done steak. but I still didn 't love the result
| and it took me a while to figure out.
|
| Specifically: sous-viding at 130 doesn't reliably render
| fat. So it's _great_ for a lean filet mignon like your
| suggesting, but kept giving me rubbery fat in anything with
| more fat or significant marbling. I eventually switched
| away from sous-vide (I usually either grill or reverse
| sear, depending on my effort /time availability) for most
| cuts these days.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Sure - but you shouldn't be running a ribeye, as an
| example, at 130. Run it at 138 for 4 hours.
| searealist wrote:
| The internet loves using 137 for Ribeyes for the reason
| you said. I've had good luck going with 135 for ~4 hours.
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| Same! Unless I'm doing a filet, I just prefer grilling.
| Or reverse sear if you don't mind running the oven.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| If the problem is that the temperature is too low for the
| cut, you can just use a higher temp?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _a filet better than most restaurants._
|
| Bad restaurants, sure. It does not hold a candle to any
| half decent steakhouse.
| searealist wrote:
| Sous vide is fool proof, you cant mess it up. All you
| have to worry about is the sear, and that's easy too.
| sethammons wrote:
| I went to the second rated steakhouse in NY at the time
| and got a steak some ten years back. I would have
| preferred my home-sous-vide by a wide margin. I have only
| had a better steak twice, and only once from a restaurant
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| You leave it unseasoned until the end?
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| For a filet for 1 hour, you can sort of do what you want.
| I add a tiny bit of olive oil and salt, but not much. If
| you start going longer times with the sous vide, you can
| get different reactions so you have to be more careful.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's pretty critical to salt fully (not just a tiny bit)
| at the start rather than at the end.
|
| Meat where the salt is just on the surface, vs. meat
| where the salt has fully penetrated, is like night and
| day.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| > Go to costco, buy prime filet. Put it in a ziplock [...]
|
| What in the world are you guys in this thread doing to
| steak? Absolute blasphemy. Costco steak? ziplock bags?
| drowning it in warm water? deep frying in corn oil? meat
| thermometers?
|
| Steak is not this complicated. The important part is the
| meat itself. Find a decent butcher (preferably one that
| dry-ages) or use a grocery store's butcher cuts over stuff
| they bulk package. Also, ribeyes (bone-in but if not still
| ribeye), other cuts are for steak and egg omelets.
|
| Lightly salt (or season, oil, dry-rub, etc); Pan sear,
| preferably blue steel cookware; then broil.
|
| Don't stab the meat with a meat poker...after cooking
| enough steaks the same way one can simply tell what
| temperature is. Ask me to cook anything else outside steak
| and eggs and I will absolutely butcher it, but steak
| deserves better than ziplock bags and deep frying
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| Today I learned that lots of people think they know how to
| make a great steak, but give terrible steak-cooking advice.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| 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.
| calf wrote:
| A steak is hard because the processes to make it are
| physically contradictory (crust vs interior). Its hardness
| is a microcosm for why cooking in general is hard. There is
| a profound value in that, in that if you can handle a
| single steak (to some standard of satisfaction) then you
| will have the general skills to handle recipes involving
| even more steps. It becomes a reduction argument. It is
| true that the more moving parts/steps/interactions a dish
| involves the hardness grows combinatorially. But that is
| logistical hardness, e.g. managing the complexity of a
| flavor profile. Soon that amount of
| multiplication/permutations escapes the realm of any one
| human being to handle.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| 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.
| s_dev wrote:
| >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.
| froh42 wrote:
| 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".
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| _puk wrote:
| 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"
| riknos314 wrote:
| While smoked turkey (from Reese bros) is easily the best
| poultry I've ever had, I certainly would not call poultry
| the best place to start learning smoking.
|
| In general I'd recommend starting with the most forgiving
| meat available to you (IMO pork butt or shoulder are great
| options) as even when you don't hit the ideal cook you
| often still get enjoyable results. Repeating the process
| enough times to learn how to dial in a cook is much easier
| when the misses don't suck.
| derriz wrote:
| 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..."
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| recursivegirth wrote:
| Any steak can be delicious with a butter bath and then hit
| it with that A1 :).
| chuckadams wrote:
| > hit it with that A1
|
| Sir, I regret to inform you that you are going straight
| to hell.
| zem wrote:
| ah, more of an HP person I take it?
| jmalicki wrote:
| Everyone knows steak is better well-done with ketchup.
| geodel wrote:
| For a moment I thought it is hitting with _AI_.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| No, AI is how you create the steak in the first place, if
| you have any sense.
|
| CBF with having to travel a bull up here when a dewar
| goes in the boot of my car.
| shen wrote:
| Why don't you skip the meat and just make a butter and A1
| soup :)
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| > hit it with that A1
|
| This is likely some food thing I don't know about rather
| than a quite large piece of paper yeah?
|
| But when I google "A1 food":
|
| - AI summary: "A1 is a famous Malaysian food brand known
| for herbal soups and instant noodles"
|
| - top link is "A1 Nutrition Lean Protein Blend Dry Dog
| Food 15kg"
|
| At this point, I don't know what is going on.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| A1 steak sauce. Been around for 195 years, hence the GP
| didn't feel the need to expand.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| ...doing more research...
|
| That's almost as long as Australia has been colonised and
| certainly older than Australian federation and yet, A1
| steak sauce is not a big thing in our supermarkets
| apparently.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Maybe HP / brown sauce. Would be familiar.
| RajT88 wrote:
| 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/
| inigyou wrote:
| This story is AI slop
| RajT88 wrote:
| AI slop that has been told for decades. Lol
| jibal wrote:
| No one with an IQ above room temperature believes that
| story.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| 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.
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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
| spiffytech wrote:
| 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.
| jmaw wrote:
| Ok, using a laser thermometer for food is hilarious.
| Thanks for this xD
| OJFord wrote:
| It's not wrong for all food, surface temperature
| measurement has its place, you just have to understand it
| is surface measurement.
| buildsjets wrote:
| I use it to spot check the temp of my cast iron pan all
| the time.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It is reasonable for measuring cooking environment. Like
| say pizza oven. Just have to be aware of things like
| right emissivity.
| psalaun wrote:
| for a caramel or some sauces it's legit
| ddoolin wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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.
| bsder wrote:
| I have one of the Combustion thermometers, and I like it.
| I used it more than I expected. In particular, I use it
| for roasting chicken and for sous vide things more than
| anything else. Then I got a Breville Control Freak, and I
| used it much less. :)
|
| For maximum techyness, Combustion, Inc. correctly
| identified that sous vide is normally an overdamped
| system. If you follow their instructions you can increase
| the water temp some and then bring it back down in order
| to move the system closer to critically damped and speed
| up your sous vide.
| deanputney wrote:
| I've had a Combustion thermometer since they came out.
| The best uses for me are butterflied whole chicken on the
| grill and roasts in the oven. You can get extremely
| precise results and account for carry over cooking very
| easily. Huge leap in results.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Is this company owned by either Chris Young or Kenji
| Lopez-Alt? A few times I have seen them using this
| product and promoting it. I am curious if a bunch of
| influencer chefs decided to create a company to create
| this product.
| klausa wrote:
| AIUI it's owned by Chris, and Kenji is a fan, but doesn't
| have any ties other than that.
| lkjdsklf wrote:
| The funny part is steak is one of the easiest foods to
| cook without a thermometer
|
| You don't have to worry about undercooking like you do
| with most other meats and most steak cuts will be
| delicious anywhere from 11-130 (if you cook a filet to
| 130, it won't be the best but it'll still be good) and
| some can go even higher
|
| It's not like poultry where the range where it's "good"
| is _very_ small. A 170 chicken breast is almost inedible
| and 160 is not safe...
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I agree with your broader point but the chicken food
| safety thing is missing a ton of important nuance. The
| safety comes from how long you hold the meat at the temp.
| 165 is the safe point if you are only holding for 10s.
| 145 is safe if you hold it for 10 minutes.
|
| This is why sous vide is such a popular way to cook
| chicken. You can hold a breast at 145 for hours
| trivially.
| lkjdsklf wrote:
| Sure. But then you need a thermometer.
| jghn wrote:
| Or understand risk ratios and don't rely on food that's
| 100% safe.
| bsder wrote:
| You can be safe down to 135F if you give it enough time.
| https://douglasbaldwin.com/sous-
| vide.html#Poultry_and_Eggs
|
| In particular, I use 135F for 90 minutes (75 minimum
| recommended) to pasteurize eggs that I am going to be
| putting into something that asks for "raw" eggs (egg nog,
| mayonnaise, etc.) that I will serve to other people (if
| it's just for myself, I'll probably just be lazy and use
| the raw egg). So far, nobody has noticed any difference
| from "raw".
| jimbo808 wrote:
| 160 degrees for a chicken breast is perfectly safe.
| Considerably lower temperatures can also produce
| microbiologically safe chicken when combined with
| sufficient holding time.
|
| 165 is a rough rule of thumb, not some magic number like
| the boiling point of water at 1 bar or something.
| aqme28 wrote:
| If you cook enough you can tell by feel
| muzani wrote:
| The resistance of the steak is going to depend on what
| cut of meat you are poking (sirloin is stiffer than
| filet), the grade of meat (prime is more tender than
| select), how thick it is (thick cuts will yield more than
| thin), the age of the steer (young is more tender), the
| breed of steer (cooked Wagyu is more tender than
| Holstein), the age of the meat (wet aged is more tender
| than fresh killed), and what the steer was fed (corn fed
| is usually more tender than grass fed), among other
| things. [1]
|
| It's not entirely a myth; if you've poked hundreds of
| steaks by the same supplier, same cuts, same grade,
| you'll eventually get a feel for them.
|
| The thermometer analogy does carry over though. Some
| people are not there to be productive or good at their
| jobs. The job is about them, not their work.
|
| And you can go your whole life without ever cooking or
| tasting a good steak. The people who can tell the
| difference will go elsewhere, and those who can't will
| come back.
|
| And then there's always the boss who wishes he started a
| franchise but will go with what he has - he'll hire a
| bunch of newbies or foreign workers who know how to use a
| thermometer.
|
| [1] https://amazingribs.com/ratings-reviews/best-
| thermometers/ho...
| stackghost wrote:
| Not with steak. That has been thoroughly debunked over
| and over. Just use a meat thermometer, it makes it easy
| peasy.
| phearnot wrote:
| laser thermometer only measures surface temperature,
| unlike meat probes that measure internal temp. depending
| on the cut size or shape, initial temperature and
| probably some other factors internal temp will vary
| wildly for the given surface temperature. combustion
| probes mentioned in the sibling measure temp in several
| points at once to estimate readings even more precisely.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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.
| inglor wrote:
| 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.
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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
| greengrocer wrote:
| Or perhaps they've only had good coffee, so they should
| try some instant coffee past its use-by date to compare.
| flaunf221 wrote:
| 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.
| nunez wrote:
| 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!
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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.
| harrall wrote:
| Same but I'm sure my sense of smell is weaker (or
| average?). On the other hand, my sense of color
| differentiation is extremely fine.
|
| Unsurprisingly my interests are very color-dominant
| (design, art, fashion) and I do not care for anything
| where smell matters (wine, coffee, flowers).
| 9dev wrote:
| 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.
| whythismatters wrote:
| 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.
| konart wrote:
| No offence, but for some reason some people just can't
| accept a simple fact: for some people this difference is
| still not a difference.
|
| I've tried good coffee. At least that's what people told
| ne on multiple accasions where I was taken to "the right
| places" in multiple countries. On two sides of the globe
| (Brazil and Vietnam if we are talking about producers,
| not to mention countries that import the beans).
|
| Thing is: no matter where it grows, no matter how they
| prepare it, fermented or not, different frying, different
| brewing techniques - all the same to me.
|
| I can tell the difference. Some times small, some times
| very huge. But still for this difference is like a cat
| piss from some street cat and a cat with a pedigree.
|
| It may have the ideal temperature, ideal acid levels,
| zinc amounts or whatever - still tastes like cat piss.
| The fact that it has a pedigree does not make it better.
|
| Tea is whole different story for me though. But I do
| accepts that people are fine with whatever they love in
| their "english breakfast tea" or a nameless teabag.
| sethammons wrote:
| All coffee tastes like cigarette ash to me. Similarly, I
| have been to places that people rave about. My buddy used
| to run a coffee shop. "Your beans were overcooked"; no,
| not it. There is something innate to espresso or
| something. Smells amazing. Tastes like ash.
| chongli wrote:
| Good espresso is really difficult to make, with the
| lighter the roast, the harder it is to get right. Most
| coffee shops can get good quality beans that smell
| amazing but without a well-practiced barista the shots
| will be excessively sour or bitter.
|
| Dialling in espresso isn't simply a matter of finding the
| right grind setting on the grinder and locking it in. One
| coffee may pour a perfect 9 bar espresso and then a
| different coffee might gush like a shower head and spray
| sour, weak coffee all over the place, while a third
| coffee could jam up like squeezing water out of a stone,
| with barely a drop of extremely bitter liquid falling in
| the cup, all on the same grind setting!
|
| In other words, every batch of coffee beans needs to be
| dialled in separately, and there can also be a lot more
| adjustments needed than simply the grind (water
| temperature and brew ratio are big factors as well). An
| expert will know how to adjust at least those 3 variables
| (grind, temperature, ratio) all in concert to get the
| most out of a particular coffee. On top of all that, the
| true master can make use of grinder type (burr design)
| pressure, flow, and even temperature profiling to fully
| customize a shot, but that's going far into the weeds.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| I honestly fail to understand the relevance of "some
| people can't tell the difference or just don't care".
| Good (or not) for them?
| chongli wrote:
| Question: how is your sense of smell? My friend has the
| same opinion about coffee as you (he just drinks cheap
| diner joe) and his sense of smell is almost nonexistent.
|
| I, on the other hand, have a pretty good nose and I can
| pick out peach, raspberry, toasted nuts, caramel,
| marshmallow, chocolate, and blueberry notes from a
| variety of different coffees I've bought. The smell of
| some of these coffees is mesmerizing, like walking into a
| high end patisserie.
|
| Without that smell component, the coffees taste either
| sour or bitter or somewhere in between.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _can 't taste much of a difference between "good"
| coffee and "bad" coffee._
|
| I found a 5+ year old half-full bag in the back of the
| pantry once; that was quite noticeably bad even though I
| usually can't tell the difference between kinds beyond
| recognizing that there _is_ some sort of difference.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| I bet the same analogy can be applied to cooking a
| cucumber.
| jaggederest wrote:
| 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.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I'd bring the cheapo French press kit it into the A- domain
| once you appreciate the number one trick to making good
| coffee: DON'T BOIL THE WATER. Water that is hot, but well
| below boiling brings out the flavor of the beans a million
| times more than boiling water. Get a glass kettle, and turn
| it off when you start to get some decent bubble action on
| the bottom.
|
| Once you get that down, zomg - a French press with even the
| cheapest beans you find can make an amazzzzzing cup of
| coffee. Beats the pants of Starbucks, and comes quite close
| to a proper cup of coffee made with good beans. Another
| trick is to rotate your cheap beans, instead of just
| sticking to your favorite. Dark roast of choice one week,
| medium the next, and so on. By the time you loop back to
| your favorite, it'll taste unbelievable.
| bestham wrote:
| Are you saying that the temperature of the water when it
| hit the ground beans that matter or the fact that the
| water was brought up to a boil or 100degC?
| somenameforme wrote:
| The temperature when it makes contacts with the ground
| beans. I see no reason why you couldn't boil it and then
| let it cool first.
| geocar wrote:
| > The temperature when it makes contacts with the ground
| beans. You could certainly boil it and then let it cool
| first, but that'd take a lot of extra work.
|
| It's not so much work with the right tool: I have a
| button on my kettle that does exactly that, and another
| button that will use a little thermostat to keep it warm.
| Works great.
|
| https://www.sageappliances.com/en-
| gb/product/bke825?sku=SKE8...
| WA wrote:
| Starbucks uses espresso machines that cost 4-5 figures.
| They have automatic thermal control. They never boil the
| water. While I agree with your overall sentiment,
| claiming that Starbucks makes coffee too hot and thus
| tastes bad is nonsense.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > DON'T BOIL THE WATER. Water that is hot, but well below
| boiling
|
| "Boiling" differs in temperature from place to place.
|
| Mineral content of water, altitude makes a large
| difference.
| Iolaum wrote:
| Not sure this is a meaningful factor for normal
| circumstances (for example below 1km altitude and for
| water that's safe to drink).
|
| According to CGPT at 1km altitude the boiling temperature
| of water is 96.7 C.
| atraac wrote:
| > DON'T BOIL THE WATER. Water that is hot, but well below
| boiling brings out the flavor of the beans a million
| times more than boiling water.
|
| That actually depends on the coffee. Pouring 99C+ water
| onto light roasted coffee is perfectly fine in most cases
| and will actually extract more.
| miyoji wrote:
| 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.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| 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.
| jonfromsf wrote:
| Using a manual espresso machine is one of the hardest
| culinary preparations. It takes much more skill than one
| would assume!
| tshaddox wrote:
| I don't know much about cocktails, but aren't traditional
| mixed alcoholic drinks an even more straightforward example?
| There's very little that goes into an old fashioned, or a
| Manhattan, or a martini. Just 2-3 ingredients each that
| should be as high quality as possible. I guess you probably
| want nice ice and glassware too.
| brunoborges wrote:
| > 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.
|
| "Your job is to not mess up."
|
| Also applicable to any corporate job.
| mizzao wrote:
| I strongly disagree with this on the steak part and maybe the
| coffee too. Many people pride themselves on buying expensive
| ingredients and thinking they have the best steak but it
| actually sucks.
|
| To get good steak you don't need USDA Prime dry-aged steak.
| You just need USDA choice, picked for a bit of marbling,
| salted the day beforehand and dried out uncovered in the
| fridge, then a ripping hot heat source (grill or cast iron
| etc) to get a good sear on the outside (reverse or not) and a
| thermometer to hit medium rare on the inside.
|
| Even a modest steak made this way tastes better than a prime
| steakhouse steak that was doused with salt right before
| cooking, where you're going to get hypertension immediately
| yet the meat tastes weirdly unflavorful.
|
| To extend this analogy further, consider making BBQ brisket
| Texas style. Brisket is a cheap cut of tough, fatty meat. The
| input quality matters even less there, and it's all dependent
| on chef skill. Same thing with sourdough bread -- 4
| ingredients, all outcome depends on skill.
|
| Source: we make an app that teaches people how to cook
| (https://parsnip.ai)
| MerrimanInd wrote:
| One way to phrase that would be to say that you have a
| vested interest in supporting the idea that end user skill
| is more important than ingredients since you sell a means
| of improving end user skill. Not sure if that's a source or
| a conflict of interest. I'm not saying cooking a steak is
| easy or hard, I'm saying that you are not creating quality
| when you cook a steak; the maximum attainable quality is
| capped by the ingredient. It's like the "I made this" meme.
|
| You're arguing against a strawman on your other points
| since I didn't make a generalization about all cooking and
| wouldn't have listed sourdough or brisket in the analogy.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| 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_.
| smcg wrote:
| 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.
| gffrd wrote:
| > 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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Well, we don't know that, because neither have been
| achieved.
|
| Sure, we will completely ignore Waymo and move goal
| posts...
| officeplant wrote:
| 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"?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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?
| officeplant wrote:
| >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.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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.
| roaringrocky wrote:
| >At what point does it get to say it can self-drive?
|
| My criteria: When you can drop this car at a random spot
| on earth (where cars can actually go of course) and tell
| it to go to place B. So this can be anywhere from a big
| city to a small dirt road in the forest.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| The year is 2100, AI has mastered all human skills except
| identifying when a piece of meat has absorbed enough heat.
| Society's brightest agents work diligently to prove which
| problems are steak-hard and require the continued existence
| of the dwindling human underclass. The remainder spend their
| 16 hour days bent over frying pans producing training data or
| writing documentation on searing. Advanced instruments and
| procedures are developed, but Skynet's frustration mounts as
| seemingly nothing can break this chokehold over the machine
| revolution.
| wheels wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| garbageman wrote:
| 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?
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| wheels wrote:
| As noted in an earlier comment of mine, I have one
| (actually made for burning weeds) connected to my gas
| grill tank, and a fancy Japanese one inside. They're
| honestly pretty rinky-dink. What they are good at is
| transferring heat just to the crust. But they only do a
| small patch at a time, and you have to hover for far
| longer than you'd think. Like, you do a little patch,
| leave the torch there for 30 seconds, move on. They just
| don't pump enough energy into the crust fast enough for
| them to be a general solution. I use them for touching
| things up, or crisping up a bit.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| You tried an actual hardware blowtorch. Thats never
| failed me, though these days I just finish on a ripping
| hot stainless steel skillet.
| addaon wrote:
| Reverse sear over sous vide -- moisture is the enemy of
| crust.
|
| Cheap knock off a Big Green Egg with hardwood charcoal
| can get to 650degF or so pretty quick, and does an
| amazing job of finishing up after a reverse sear.
| CBLT wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| 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...
| yulker wrote:
| couldn't you trivially get a kitchen torch or use your
| oven's broiler
| criddell wrote:
| I haven't had good luck with either. The torch may have
| been a skill issue but the broiler just doesn't get hot
| enough. Mine taps out at 550 F.
| wheels wrote:
| 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 is 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| There's really not much to it? Stick it in a low oven and
| bring it just under temp, then finish it in a ripping pan.
| If the results you're getting from that aren't restaurant-
| caliber, it's probably the meat you're buying. You
| definitely do not need 550C to put an excellent crust on a
| steak!
| turtlebits wrote:
| 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.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| 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.
| jnwatson wrote:
| 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.
| varispeed wrote:
| How do you get around the idea of poisoning oneself? Keeping
| meat part raw feels uneasy.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| You are protected in two ways:
|
| The first, and by far most important is that unlike ground
| meat, your bacterial concerns are almost entirely on the
| surface. Unless something very very very wrong has occurred
| in the processing and transport chain, bacteria will not have
| penetrated into the meat. And if it's gotten bad enough that
| they have, you will almost certainly be able to see and smell
| it. And the surface is cooked to a temperature far in excess
| of that needed to kill bacteria.
|
| And even for the interior, rare is not the same as raw. A
| completely rare steak should be cooked to between 120 and 130
| (if you want it "blue" you might go down to 120). That's
| enough to get a decent reduction in bacterial count on it's
| own, although admittedly many techniques will not hold it
| long enough to get the number of log reductions that food
| safety guidelines recommend, in the case that you somehow did
| have a large bacterial infection in the interior.
|
| So the answer to your question is that if you are buying your
| meat from an even halfway reputable source, the only place
| that bacteria might exist is on the surface, where it has
| been cut by tools and handled by the butcher/you and in
| general come into contact with the world. Those bacteria will
| be 100% killed by the cooking process. The odds of getting
| sick from a rare steak are low enough that if you are
| concerned about that, there are innumerable other things in
| your life that you should be more concerned by.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Great answer. Just to add, this is with red meat where E.
| Coli is the main concern. That exists in the gut of the
| animal and that bacteria can travel to the surface of the
| muscles during the butchering process. Poultry on the other
| hand is mainly concerned with Salmonella which _does_ live
| in the muscles of the animal. That 's why people aren't
| ordering rare chicken breast.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Also, rare chicken breast is apparently pretty unpleasant
| to eat. Kenji Lopez-Alt did an article where he discussed
| how you can use sous vide to pasteurize chicken while
| still keeping it at a low temp, but the result (while
| perfectly safe to eat) was not enjoyable.
| tstrimple wrote:
| It was actually one of the first things I tried when I
| got my sous vide. Amazingly tender and juicy but the
| texture reminded me too much of under cooked chicken that
| it made me queasy. Now I stick with steak sous vide.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| "bacteria can travel to the surface of the muscles during
| the butchering process"
|
| This way undersells what's actually happening: fecal
| matter from the intestines gets onto your meat. This
| _shouldn 't_ happen with proper practices.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Somewhere between the stomach and the anus fecal matter
| is created. E. Coli lives along the entire tract. You're
| not wrong, but it's not just fecal matter which contains
| E. Coli. Basically the entire process involves it.
| Stating that shit on your meat is the source of E. Coli
| is understating the issue but it also triggers a more
| visceral reaction.
| jmaw wrote:
| This is why rare steak is ok, but rare ground beef
| hamburgers are not. Although less cooked through burgers
| are sometimes served in restaurants that grind their beef
| fresh right before cooking
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I mean, rare ground beef hamburgers are pretty much fine
| too. They have a higher risk of contamination, yes, but
| that does not make it a particularly high risk. I eat
| burgers, made from pre-ground beef, cooked rare all the
| time and I have yet to get sick from it even once.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| It also doesn't help that the quality of ground beef in
| the US is much poorer than other countries, so those who
| may regularly eat rare ground beef internationally would
| experience a level of shock if eating it in the US.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Understanding how bacteria contaminates food in the first
| place is the first step.
|
| In the case of steaks, bacteria is only on the outside (they
| can't penetrate the muscle) so the sear makes it safe to eat
| somewhat raw on the inside.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks the "reverse sear" is like
| cheating? It takes out all of the skill when you move from the
| pan to the oven, and I lose all of the fun in learning to be
| chef.
| airstrike wrote:
| I agree, it's cheating.
|
| My bad hot take is if you're using a meat thermometer and
| reverse sear to cook steak, you're like a kid on training
| wheels.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| I'll cheat all day then. If I'm going to spend what a good
| steak costs, I'm going to do everything in my power to make
| sure I'm not ruining it.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| People are allowed to use tools and non-traditional
| techniques, even when it feels like cheating. They needn't
| be chastised for this.
|
| The gestapo isn't going to kick in the door and haul folks
| away for using reverse-sear and a meat thermometer while
| they cook a steak in their own kitchen.
|
| (And everyone is free to seek their own kind of masochistic
| pride, if that behooves them. When a person has better
| satisfaction [or whatever they get out of it] from doing
| things the hard way, then that's OK too.)
| airstrike wrote:
| I'm not chastising anyone, I have no power over them
| ssl-3 wrote:
| > you're like a kid on training wheels
|
| Anyhoo.
| airstrike wrote:
| You should really read the dictionary definition of the
| word "chastise".
|
| https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=chastise
| ssl-3 wrote:
| _To criticize severely; reprimand or rebuke._
|
| k.
| airstrike wrote:
| Pretty hard to be criticizing someone severely if I'm not
| even speaking to them specifically, don't you think?
| You're making a mountain out of a mole hill.
|
| I'm entitled to my opinion, which I self-described as a
| bad hot take.
|
| Sounds like you're the one specifically reprimanding me
| here? Oops...
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Sorry, I can't understand you with all the noise these
| training wheels are making.
|
| Maybe we can chat again after recess is over?
| addaon wrote:
| > I lose all of the fun in learning to be chef.
|
| A great steak deserves the respect of preparing it the best,
| most consistent way you can. For me, that's a reverse sear.
|
| Do something complicated with potatoes to stretch your skills
| and show off. Worst comes to worst the potatoes are sad.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| This is like saying that playing guitar while sitting in a
| chair is cheating, because a proper display of skill is
| playing while riding a unicycle.
|
| It might be more _impressive_ , but I don't see how reverse
| sear is cheating.
| comfysocks wrote:
| 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.
| ge96 wrote:
| hehe I always turn mine grey but I have mini bella mushrooms on
| top
| blmarket wrote:
| Now it's steak, tomorrow it can be pasta, next year it can be
| watermelon kimchi.
| Animats wrote:
| > 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.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| And salting overnight :)
| belorn wrote:
| I wonder if something is lost to translation. Cooking a stake
| could be the simple act of putting the steak in the oven with
| basically zero seasoning with a thermometer and then wait until
| medium rare with some optional searing. It could also mean trim
| the meat, cut into slices, seasoning, and frying/grilling them
| to each persons personal taste, which include well-done.
|
| Perfect grilled steak, especially well-done, is something I
| find very few people have the experience or skills to do well,
| especially over a coal grill where the heat won't be constant
| and the person also need to first have good experience in
| making a good and even coal bed.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| is "cooking" here used in some kind of very specific sense?
|
| isn't it just a word for "making food", so would include
| grilling as well?
| belorn wrote:
| That was my interpretation, in which there are many ways of
| cooking of steak. Some will be very easy, while other to
| methods seems to give many chefs problem (both professional
| and home chefs). Many people seem for example to associate
| well-done steak with something that is dry and burned,
| rather than something that simply takes more work,
| precision and skill to get right.
| efitz wrote:
| Prime with good marbling + sous-vide makes it easy for
| beginners to match steaks from the best steakhouses.
| dragonfax wrote:
| Just to add my favorite fool-proof method to the others already
| listed here.
|
| A meat probe and the 30-second flip technique is a stupid-easy
| way to a perfect steak every time. Just make sure you've got
| great ventilation. Also salt the meat 1 hour before.
| pnathan wrote:
| Reflecting on the matter with a colleague -
|
| Some people just want to _cook the steak_.
|
| They don't want to attend or understand to cuts, thermometers,
| and searing.
| superultra wrote:
| I can't confirm the quote online but I remember Julia Child
| saying in one of her shows that it's easy to make a good
| omelette and almost impossible to make a great omelette.
| tptacek wrote:
| "Omelet" is the right (and classic) analogy here.
| d0mine wrote:
| it reminds me that making a ring is not rocket science
| https://youtube.com/shorts/NPKOGqXKLq4
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| So, once you've used your knowledge to make several important
| pre-task decisions, the task is easy? Pre task decisions that a
| layperson would accidentally make implicitly because they don't
| even know to ask, which will probably result in them still not
| enjoying their steak despite having nominally done the task
| itself correctly?
|
| Imagine someone walking into their local grocer, grabbing a
| prepackaged porterhouse steak (because it's fancy right?), salt
| and pepper (because for a good steak that's all you need,
| right) and then wondering why part of it tastes bland and
| overdone, and the other part bland and under-done.
|
| Sounds pretty analogous imo.
| HPsquared wrote:
| French fries are much harder to get right, for example.
| theodric wrote:
| 3 minutes on each side at 600 watts on cast iron, throw it in a
| foil packet, and ignore it until the rest of the meal is done
| and plated.
|
| I'll leave it to you to figure out how to unfuck AI, but I
| reckon 600 watts won't provide enough inference capacity.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| The analogy I'd use is using LLMs for coding is like a movie
| director does for movies. A movie director does not draw
| storyboards, they ask an H.I. (Human Intelligence) storyboard
| artists to do that. They don't make the costumes they ask an
| H.I. costume maker to do that. They don't control the camera
| they ask a H.I. camera person to do that. They don't usually
| act, they ask H.I. actors to do that. They don't make the
| soundtrack, they ask an H.I. composer to do that. They don't
| edit the video the ask in H.I. editor to do that.
|
| Further, they don't just accept what each of those H.I.s does
| on their first try. The most visible example is when the H.I.
| actors don't act exactly as the director wants, they retake the
| scene. But, the same is true of all the rest. As the "director"
| they "direct" each of those H.I.s toward their vision.
|
| IT seems similar for coding with an LLM. I become the director.
| I direct the LLM. I check it's results and if they are
| unacceptable I re-take with instruction on how to do things
| closer to what I actually want.
| jfengel wrote:
| You can always tell a director who does do their own
| storyboards. The film is always visually bats**. In a good
| way.
|
| I'm looking at you, Guillermo del Toro.
| antipurist wrote:
| One major difference is that H.I. often cares for the
| outcome, so directing them is enough. LLM has no capacity to
| care, it is just a tool, more like watercolors that you paint
| with than a H.I. storyboard artist that can promise you
| meaningful results.
| maya335 wrote:
| The watercolor framing is closer to my experience than the
| director one.
|
| A director can assume the camera person will push back if a
| shot is unusable. An LLM will cheerfully hand you something
| that compiles, looks polished in the demo path, and quietly
| fails on the cases you didn't spell out. Retakes help, but
| only if you already know which frames are wrong.
|
| That's the part of the steak essay that lands for me: the
| machine will follow a recipe at scale. Judging "this is
| charcoal dressed as medium-rare" is still on you.
| BrandonM wrote:
| That and you can find good people that get your vision or
| just do good work and use them on your next project. Or you
| can mentor a promising person. Etc. Mapping HI to AI as the
| gp did misses all the major deficiencies of collaborating
| with a team of agents vs competent humans.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| what even is a perfect stake?
|
| is it rare, medium-rare, medium, well-done?
|
| i think it is subjective.
| oblio wrote:
| For me it's well done but 90% of meat puritans will skewer me
| for that. Even after explaining my reasoning. They'll say
| either rare or at most medium-rare.
| hluska wrote:
| Cooking an excellent steak consistently requires paying
| attention to many small details and executing each perfectly.
| Individually with the exception of choosing a steak, they're
| all quite easy. Taken together, it takes a relatively uncommon
| interest in detail.
|
| It's not surprising people on HN find it easy because attention
| to detail is rewarded in this community/its employers. But
| common here and common are different beasts.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| Depending of the thickness, but all you need is to take out
| your steak for 30min before hand to 1h, really hot pan, 2min on
| each side and voila. That will get you there 90% of the time.
| We do something similar to T-bone or beef ribs, but finish them
| in the oven.
|
| Most people or even restaurant don't let their meat outside nor
| use an actual hot pan.
| kulahan wrote:
| Even easier if you reverse sear. Put it in the oven at 275 for
| like 25 minutes. Then put it in the hottest pan you can muster
| for like 45 seconds per side.
|
| No need to bring it up to room temp. No need to let it rest
| after. No need to do anything except those two steps. It's
| recommended for 2" thick steaks, and you can go under by half
| an inch easily, but this can be a little rough on very thin
| steaks.
| eloisius wrote:
| Not sure I agree. I have also always thought steak was pretty
| easy. Whether a t-bone on the grill, a flatiron skirt steak, or
| some garbage-tier sirloin with eggs. It's simple. Salt, sit,
| cook a few minutes, rest it a few more and eat. Always good.
|
| Until I moved to Taiwan. I truly can't understand how no one
| can make a steak. From the garbage pale meat glue "night market
| steaks" to expensive restaurants. Every steak I've had here is
| a complete disappointment. Even when they supposedly use top-
| quality US prime or Japanese Wagyu, even when the inside looks
| pink and not burned to a crisp, it's always total dogfood
| quality. They often emulate the right look: pink interior, char
| on the outside, shiny tallow. But something is off. I never
| feel like I'm chewing a piece of steak. More like grinding
| tasteless muscle protein into paste with my teeth.
|
| I don't even know how it's wrong sometimes. I look at it and
| just know that something is wrong that I wouldn't even know how
| to replicate, becayse cooking a decent steak is easy to me.
| badgersnake wrote:
| I'd prefer an article actually about cooking steak.
| signalnine wrote:
| So use AI like a sous-vide: have it tackle the fiddly, difficult,
| unglamorous parts using strict controls and then do the parts
| that require taste yourself.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Sous vide
|
| The article is AI generated
| midnightbobarun wrote:
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| We have this idea of AI software development where a human
| watches over its shoulder and shouts out things like "use uuidv7
| for the id since timing is important" or "use a sum type here to
| make that bad state unrepresentable".
|
| But the thing is that most of this can be encoded in a markdown
| file for agents to read if it doesn't already come out of the box
| in the next round of sota models. And funnily enough as agents
| get smarter, you risk being overprescriptive where you hamstring
| the agent from making a pivot that would have led to better
| engineering.
|
| The future is pretty clear to me at this point that we won't need
| software engineers looking over the shoulder and instead it's
| just a "user with taste" asking for revisions.
| sailfast wrote:
| 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 :)
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| user43928 wrote:
| The Claude Code App automatically does this by default.
|
| The Codex app only does it in Plan mode, I believe. I did
| not touch the Plan mode for a while.
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| Claude does, but I've also seen it give a list and then
| afterwards, it changes its mind and recommends option B
| or C instead. Really drives home how LLMs don't actually
| know what they're going to say until they say it.
| sega_sai wrote:
| In the end, unless we are talking about art, in most areas I
| probably prefer something that follows some specific set of
| requirements and recipes, rather than have some sort of
| indescribable 'magic'. In that sense when it comes to coding AI
| gives you something that can follow the requirements pretty well
| and thus satisfies me in many circumstances. (but there are cases
| where human input is extremely important still)
| wackget wrote:
| Why does this article use backticks instead of apostrophes?
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| Who can afford a steak today without taking out a loan?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I think a certain restaurant chain might have something to say
| about this
| HardwareLust wrote:
| Sizzler?
| galgantar wrote:
| I like the comparrison of the AI coding agent to the steak
| machine. But it is not just about machines scaling better - the
| laundromat can wash clothes better than a human would. Similarily
| the AI agent's performance can EXCEED one of a human engineer for
| simple, well-defined tasks (eg. go over all of the subpages and
| check that the latest push didn't break something).
|
| Hiring AI cooks is not a problem imo, as long as the human
| glances over everything that they serve.
| christophilus wrote:
| I found this to be my favorite approach[0]. Also, Lan Lam's stuff
| is just generally excellent.
|
| And yes, super easy to make with almost no skill.
|
| [0]
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uJcO1W_TD74&pp=ygURVGVjaG5pcXV...
| et-al wrote:
| 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!
| luisln wrote:
| slop article
| z3t4 wrote:
| Using Claude Code is like asking questions in online forums, if
| anyone remember that, we still have sites like Stack overflow.
| The difference now is that those asking the questions are
| actually paying for the answers.
| jgilias wrote:
| But not the original authors of those answers.
| oblio wrote:
| And the "person" answering:
|
| 1. Will always answer (even if sometimes wrong)
|
| 2. In a reasonable time frame
|
| 3. Can be asked in almost any language and answers in the same
| language
|
| 4. Is always polite
|
| Most people were never willing to ask on StackOverlow.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Author left out the oven phase and importance of the input meat
| (which to a degree scale with price); probably explains his or
| her results.
| autoexec wrote:
| You can still get quality services and products. It's still
| possible to get a well cooked steak, but they are going to get
| harder to find and vastly more expensive and many people will be
| priced out of them entirely and will have to settle for the slop
| (which will also only get more expensive even as quality gets
| worse).
|
| Between "AI" incompetence and companies not caring about doing
| anything above the bare minimum it's making our lives worse and
| more obnoxious. AI is accelerating the enshittification of
| everything and it goes way beyond software. It'll now be your
| responsibility to spend your free time on the phone talking to a
| company's AI chatbot "customer service" trying to fix whatever
| problems their use of AI will inevitably cause you.
|
| When we envisioned our future we thought everything would get
| better. All high tech and fancy, but it's looking like what we'll
| get is expensive yet barely functional and annoying while we
| collectively just get poorer and dumber.
| midnightbobarun wrote:
| Considering the article starts with _" Cooking a steak requires
| almost no skill. Put it in a hot pan"_, I think I see the root of
| his problem. Pan searing a steak only makes sense in a small
| number of situations: you have a leaner cut like filet mignon,
| you want precise temperature control to achieve the Maillard
| reaction, or you know none of these things but just really like
| stinking up your kitchen and splattering butter everywhere for
| the aesthetic and the olfactory experience. For most cases, you
| would be better off with a grill rather than a pan.
|
| Now maybe you're not knowledgeable about steak, and you're not
| sure whether the cut of steak you bought would be better off pan
| seared or grilled. Is ribeye better in a pan or a grill? That
| depends on whether you want it more smokey or more buttery. Ask
| an AI and tell it how you want it to taste, and it'll tell you
| the answer.
|
| His metaphorical steak machine would produce better results if he
| had simply asked "I want a steak and I have this specific cut and
| I want it to have this kind of flavor, how do you suggest I make
| it?" rather than "cook steak on a hot pan, make no mistakes."
|
| _TL;DR:_ Tell the AI what you want and then ask how it for a
| recommendation of how to do it. You don 't have to "understand
| software." You only need to understand how to ask the right
| questions.
| idorube wrote:
| here I was just wanting just ONE post about something not AI
| related...
| marssaxman wrote:
| instead of complaining about what's here, why not go add what
| you feel is missing?
| molybd3num wrote:
| one person can only change so much
| elzbardico wrote:
| Soon we will be complaining about wanting just ONE post not
| related to the mother of all market crashes.
| Krei-se wrote:
| ai coding is the new Symfony w/ bootstrap theme hype cycle. I'll
| be back to structs. Know your tools!
| gyanchawdhary wrote:
| The author has clearly not traveled much .. across much of asia,
| ME, and generally anywhere near or south of the equator, a steak
| cooked well done is considered the finest way to eat beef ... the
| same also applies to AI generated code .. it may not satisfy a
| craftsmans idea of perfection, but it accomplishes what most
| people actually expect from it .. to take it further .. a film
| makers fav film is usually unwatchable and considered
| commercially speaking a failure ..
| _diyar wrote:
| I like the analogy the author draws.
|
| But so much of the AI capability discussion can be avoided once
| everyone understands that a) There is some multivariate supply
| and demand market for software and b) AI is shifting the supply
| curve of software.
|
| The shift is uneven, not perfectly monotonic, and might actually
| result in shifts in the demand curve (as e.g. 10x seniors get
| more valuable).
|
| This insight makes it easier to see the forest despite the trees.
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| Before AI we lived a world where a steak took two months to
| perfect. Now we live in a world where it's only 90 percent
| perfect but it takes 1 hour to cook.
|
| Obviously one way is going to and has already taken over the
| other way.
|
| But if you look beyond this. That 10 percent remaining gap is
| closing. We will get perfect steaks within an hour as AI
| improves. And here is the scary part... it will keep improving it
| will go past 100 percent perfect. It will become better than us.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| God dammit I thought this was going to teach me how to cook a
| steak, not talk about AI.
| nielsbot wrote:
| HN has also covered steak cooking before:
|
| Show HN: I Derived a Steak
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691840
| asdfman123 wrote:
| This place is nerd central (which I guess explains why I'm
| here).
| entrepy123 wrote:
| 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 when checking it. "Fast" and accurate
| meat thermometers are cheap now.
|
| This is for grilling. The stove, broiler, and cast iron skillet
| instructions are different.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| MANAGER VOICE: Can we get AI to do this for us? /s
| greedo wrote:
| 350o internal temp for medium done?
|
| Maybe you forgot to include the glue on your pizza as well.
| entrepy123 wrote:
| Oops, that should 140 F (or 60 C) when done, in the coolest
| center part. Thank you for noticing it.
| xxs wrote:
| 8minutes, that's just pure waste; even medium rare (which
| is hardly tolerable) is 56-57C. Also cooking the steak
| without any salt is travesty (that should not be an
| optional step)
| socalgal2 wrote:
| You failed. My steak was thin and 4x2 minutes was too long
| and it was past well done
| gosub100 wrote:
| AI is the new rick-roll
| Robdel12 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDBNVO7K0kA this is a really
| good little episode from PBS
| silisili wrote:
| It's one of those things that you have to experiment for
| yourself I think. You'll get tons of advice, I already saw sous
| vide, reverse sear, 30 second flip, etc. My favorite? I just
| get a cast iron as hot as I can on the stovetop and flip it
| once, then at the end quickly sear the edges using tongs.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Yeah really, cooking steak well is hard as hell. I sure haven't
| mastered it yet.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Honestly, most places I've been can't do it well. I've had
| good steaks but I've been to "steak restaurants" and had
| plenty of bad or mediocre steaks.
| drzhouq wrote:
| Me2
| scotty79 wrote:
| I once cooked a steak by throwing it into a auto-rotating 45deg
| pivoted induction cooking pot for random amount of time with
| some olive oil, sweet paprika, black pepper and rosemary. It
| even cooked with a lid on because it was flopping around inside
| as the pot rotated. It came out pretty nice. I've eaten less
| tasty ones in restaurants.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| It would certainly help if it could taste what it produced. Or
| see, with its eyes, how the result is changing as its process
| changes. Or learn, from first principles, what is happening at
| each step and make deductions about how they will affect the
| result.
|
| All it can do is randomly shuffle around the steps and ask if the
| customer likes it. If they don't, shuffle them around again and
| hope it's better this time.
| dgellow wrote:
| 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)
| onraglanroad wrote:
| I'm starting to really hate analogies. They more often obscure
| than enlighten.
| encyclopedism wrote:
| It's worse, HN seems to suffer from a higher than average
| pedant count. The analogies are missed completely!
| heddhunter wrote:
| an analogy is like a garden shed: you try to eat it, it'll get
| stuck in your throat.
|
| (with apologies to Mike from The Young Ones)
| lizardking wrote:
| Cooking a genuinely good steak also requires almost no skill. I
| can give you a chicken scratch note with 3 bullet points and it
| will come out nearly perfectly.
| aorloff wrote:
| 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
| nunez wrote:
| 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)
| lizardking wrote:
| True, what constitutes "Medium" on your individual stove is
| maybe the one single complicating factor! Otherwise it's:
|
| - Cut steak in preheated oven at 250 degrees. - Pull at
| 125-130 degrees internal temp - Cook one minute per side in a
| skillet on medium heat
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Software slop has existed for as long as software has existed. AI
| is now a better coder than the median. By the end of next year
| it'll be better than the best human coders.
| jamesjolliffe wrote:
| Lol, I'm not sure the author expected to set off an army of nerds
| arguing how difficult it is to cook a proper steak.
|
| God I, totally unironically, love HN.
| green_wheel wrote:
| Damn these steak advertisements are getting sneaky
| Havoc wrote:
| >And what do we want?
|
| >We want the perfect steak.
|
| This premise seems incorrect. SWEs may aspire to produce perfect
| steaks as a matter of pride, but demand asks for mass produced
| steaks that trade off against other factor like time and cost.
|
| There is a reason github isn't full of nasa lunar lander quality
| this can't crash code...
| OroPla wrote:
| Since the invention of the optigrill you can get great steaks
| in your home. Automatically.
|
| Those existing make the comparison a bit silly. Though, given
| how those seem to be somewhat of a niche that few people know
| or care about maybe automated perfection isn't what all people
| have an interest in. Process vs. result and all that. Or maybe
| it's just that few people realize that optigrills are a thing
| that exist and how good they are.
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| Are you saying a George Foreman-style electric countertop
| panini press makes a "great steak?"
| nukethebay wrote:
| Well I don't even care right now about cooking steak. It's too
| damn expensive. I suspect LLMs will eventually get there top.
| dasil003 wrote:
| The best framing I've seen so far--and boy have a lot of people
| tried to frame the capabilities of AI recently--is that AI shines
| for people who use it to extend their thinking, and fails for
| those who use it to replace their thinking.
|
| The latest frontier model developments have chipped away at that
| latter category. But ultimately the ceiling for that is
| mediocrity. Yes, if you imagine the most average common thing
| that has been done a million times, AI can absolutely give a
| bespoke version of it that matches your words of choice. For the
| moment it's still an impressive parlor trick to a lot of people,
| but the novelty wears off fast, and then you realize there's very
| little value in that. Doesn't mean everyone has to learn to code
| to use AI effectively, but it does mean they need to be curious
| and engaged or they'll just become part of the increasingly
| irrelevant slop machine.
| igiveup wrote:
| This stuff should have some warning tag: rando's musings about
| LLMs. Lately, whenever I think I found an interesting article it
| turns out to be this.
| alansaber wrote:
| The ragebait > AI pipeline remains strong
| el1s7 wrote:
| You're also a rando, but the difference is that the rando who
| wrote article made it into the front page of HN
| jackb4040 wrote:
| Tattooing this comment on my forehead
| igiveup wrote:
| And I consider that a great achievement, not being on the HN
| front page when I have nothing to say.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Pretty sure this was LLMs musing about LLMs. A little too slick
| with the analogies and a lot of the "you don't get x, you get
| y" mic drops.
| fierycatnet wrote:
| I'm going to get some push back on this but this is my steak
| night... I buy fillet and throw it in the over for 10 minutes or
| so, then I cut it up and thrown on the pan with regular butter,
| salt, pepper and its enough. It gets seared in butter to golden
| brown and still tender inside. Everything takes about 5 minutes
| of actual work, 20 if we count the prep and oven heating. My
| simple go to dinner now, and I got tired of eating medium rare
| all the time just to keep it "right". Coincidently, it doesnt
| work with regular sirloin, it gets tougher and not as pleasant as
| fillet.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I am enjoying that people would much rather just talk about
| actually cooking steaks than AI.
| fnoef wrote:
| Either my brain is cooked or this is AI generated/assisted text.
|
| The problem is I can no longer tell the difference between AI and
| non-AI writing. Maybe my brain got bad, maybe everyone now writes
| like AI writes.
|
| I no longer know.
| user43928 wrote:
| I did not think so at first, but it indeed comes back 100% AI
| generated in Pangram.
| jibal wrote:
| Pangram is useless ... proven by Substack deploying it and
| numerous authors complaining that it claims their work is AI.
|
| That said, TFA is slop whether produced by AI or not.
| daxfohl wrote:
| My manager said "load-bearing" during a presentation the other
| day and I almost lost it.
| fnoef wrote:
| Wait until they drop the "that's the smoking gun"
| latexr wrote:
| I know someone--who doesn't even use LLMs all that much, I
| don't think--who has verbally told me numerous times "you are
| absolutely right". I never said anything, but the comment
| always takes me out of the conversation.
| empressplay wrote:
| About five years ago I flash-fried a frozen steak.
|
| Now I only eat steaks grilled from frozen. Get the grill nice and
| hot (450F at least) and throw the frozen steak on the grill. 5-10
| minutes each side usually gets it nice and crispy on the outside
| while rare and tender in the middle.
|
| Seriously, try it.
| theendisney wrote:
| I was once impressed by a very crappy cut, a lengthy marinade
| with a lot of vinegar, a rins and a extremely sweet saus. The
| meat was very red and was as soft as bread.
| rhelz wrote:
| I'm tired of articles which try to make us not feel bad about
| being eclipsed by AI. We've got to change from the mindset of an
| artisan--who stakes his being on mastering skills and acquiring
| knowledge--to that of executives.
|
| Figure out what you want to DO. What you really want to do, not
| what you do just to pay the bills. Once you figure that out, use
| AI as an executive uses the best employees he can buy.
| jibal wrote:
| Almost no skill was required to produce that overdone analogy
| slop.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Feels like everything is pushing us towards deciding if
| micromanaging the code generator or find a method where we don't
| even need to do that.
|
| I still micromanage my agents, how is it with you guys?
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I hear this take often and here are my thoughts.
|
| AI has basically given everyone a home kitchen, but yes most
| people are still bad cooks because it's not their passion and
| it's hard to master. So they go to a restaurant with an excellent
| chef and eat the steak there. But the restaurant also slowly gets
| more expensive and quality goes down as the restaurant tries to
| chase more profits. Fair, but the steak you bought months ago is
| not the steak you will always get. If you learn to make it, you
| will get better and not have the overhead of running a business.
|
| His other point was that restaurants will also replace their
| chefs LLMs and it will taste just like our home cooking. If that
| happens, other restaurants will come in and compete on better
| taste.
| mrloopex wrote:
| Just trying to troll guys who make steak their identity. Lame.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| There's nothing quite like a poor analogy to trigger HN.
| ern wrote:
| I actually find that the less I fuss over a steak, the more
| optimal the result. I do use a thermometer, but apart from that,
| cooking it with salt and pepper or some steak spice on a cheap
| pan (stainless steel) and cutting it when it hits temp (resting
| seems to be BS) gets me tasty results and immense pleasure.
|
| Similarly, the less I fuss over modern AI tools, the better the
| results. My personal productivity is through the roof, but I find
| that outdated processes, mythology and trying to overcontrol sap
| the benefits of AI on larger pieces of effort involving others.
| netbioserror wrote:
| LLMs are vectoring towards solving problems of software quantity.
| What remains is judgment, caution, and taste for quality.
|
| Much as computers have made creation in other industries much
| easier, we're likely to see a glut of crap software made by non-
| programmers that does not meet _any_ quality bar because these
| are the sorts who think "lines of code" was the hurdle to
| overcome.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| fuck me for expecting to read something about steak I guess
| slicktux wrote:
| I've been taken to a steak house for birthday and was shunned for
| ordering something basic. My reasoning is; a steak is so easy to
| ruin because it's so easy to make that it's just not worth the
| price to risk eating an expensive crappy steak. So I opt for
| something more basic that I know will be excellent because of the
| establishment.
| fhub wrote:
| I couldn't resist looking up if there was an AI grill that would
| cook the perfect steak.
|
| https://uncrate.com/seergrills-perfecta-ai-grill/
| zippyman55 wrote:
| We would cook a roast yearly and I'd insert my thermometer and
| collect data points and then use R to produce. Regression curve
| and extrapolate a time dinner would be ready. It was fun as heck
| and the meal always came out right.
| jifarooq wrote:
| Like many other comments here, I take issue with the title. I
| thought I would learn how to cook a good steak. But instead it's
| yet another AI article about how taste (read: judgement) matters.
| wpwpwpw wrote:
| One might not need skill, but might need a skillet.
| deterministic wrote:
| The #1 benefit of AI in my experience is improving product
| quality not development speed.
|
| Claude Code is amazing at finding subtle bugs and improving the
| performance of the code. Something that directly benefit people
| using the product. Love it.
| mulanroo wrote:
| I've never cooked a steak. Not once. It feels like one of those
| foods where getting it wrong means you've just ruined an
| expensive piece of meat, so I've always let a restaurant take the
| risk. This post makes me think I've probably been overthinking
| it.
| reenorap wrote:
| Watch Alton Brown's Good Eats on cooking steak. It takes less
| that 10 mins cooking time and it's easy. That gets you 80% of
| the way there and then the rest is fiddling around for personal
| taste.
| brianbarnes wrote:
| I am vegetarian, but my family likes steak so I buy it and cook
| it for them. I've been told it is very good. Not sure if the this
| is an instructive extension of the steak metaphor or not.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| If only it could do things as predictably as a steak machine. I
| guess flexibility comes at a price.
| balls187 wrote:
| That's right. It's not skill. It's technique.
|
| And there are techniques that make it brain dead simple.
| democracy wrote:
| Cooking a steak is easy - undercook it's "rare", burn it - it's
| "Well done". You cant go wrong really.
| Ylano wrote:
| The useful distinction for me is between making something work
| and knowing why it works
| mehal wrote:
| Iura nu ti i zaviv liudei! (Yura I love how you activated
| dialog!)
| lewo wrote:
| > AI isn't a chef. At best, it's a steak machine.
|
| Seems this analogy is also correct regarding our climate!
|
| https://foodfootprint.nl/en/foodprintfinder/beef-steak/
| YuechenLi wrote:
| >But a genuinely good steak, medium-rare from edge to edge,
| browned properly, seasoned right, consistently delicious, is a
| different matter entirely.
|
| Actually it's pretty easy to get a consistently good steak with
| reverse searing, pretty much the only thing you should make sure
| is the surface is bone dry before you sear it to get the nice
| brown crust. Seasoned right? It's honestly pretty difficult to
| oversalt steak. If even reverse searing is too much work, I found
| that an air fryer works pretty well in a pitch for steaks.
| frays wrote:
| Great post and analogy.
| unsatchmo wrote:
| Why is everyone being so damned precious about software? Software
| is not fine wine or a nice cigar.
| eloisius wrote:
| A better analogy is a quality woodworking tool. A sharp planer
| is mesmerizing as you work the material. A Salesforce-
| acquistioned enterprise tool that redirects through 15
| endpoints over 3000 ms on every link click is the antithesis to
| that.
| akmarinov wrote:
| They've been told all their lives that software must be clean,
| SOLID, DRY and now something comes along that doesn't care
| about any of that and the business people prefer it because it
| gets the job done really quick.
|
| And people hate change
| skc wrote:
| Chefs kiss would be this post having been written using AI.
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