Thank you, Hacker News, for promoting — if only briefly — this marvel of an article from Physics World (or is it physicsworld?) about the more scientific aspects of the final and most important step of making coffee. Funnily enough, it focused on the two methods I’ve settled on after a couple of decades of tinkering: espresso and pour-over.

Refreshingly, it is not a “well-actually” article that would use theoretical physics and/or laboratory experiments to prove coffee experts wrong. In fact, much e-ink is spent confirming practices that baristas have settled on, including the coffee-to-water ratio, steeping time, pressure used. There were, however, two things that could make me change how I’m doing things.

For espresso, theory says that using less coffee with a coarser grind would — to me, paradoxically — result in equal extraction and coffee tasting the same despite not using as many beans. With the price of coffee rising, this could be a big deal so I will check it out. Although, to me the benefit of a proper espresso is that it allows you to get a tasty liquid out of sub-par solids, so I would never go with the most expensive beans to begin with (ahem). No, the $2/oz bag is reserved for the queen of brewing, which is the pour-over.

And for the pour-over, there is but a single thing I should change: the height from which I pour, which should apparently be far higher than I’m doing now. A pretty diagram shows the reasons why 20cm is the right height from which the stream of hot — 96°C, thank you very much, so you’d better have a temperature-controlled kettle — water onto a coarsely ground pile of dreams. And there is no safe way to do it from that high up without a gooseneck kettle, so add that to your kettle requirements. Sadly, they don’t go into the quality of the filter and the differences between plain paper, Chemex and metal meshes. I am sure there is much physics involved.

Now before you start commenting that good ol’ Folgers in a hotel room drip machine will do for you, thank you very much, let me suggest a few decidedly unfussy methods of coffee making that are infinitely better than drip coffee out of a plastic tub:

• Aeropress, which used to be the main way I made coffee but abandoned as the family and the number of coffee-drinkers in the house expanded (we are currently at three; five with grandparents visiting).
• Nescafe Gold, which is probably the best instant coffee you can get and it doesn’t get any less fussy than pouring hot-ish water into a mug.
• Turkish coffee, with strong preference for Mehmet Efendi which, if not in Istanbul, you can easily get online.
• Boiling raw beans in DC tap water for about 30 minutes.

Okay, maybe not that last one.

I tend to avoid podcasts in the style of Joe Rogan, those that begin with a 15-minute long ad block selling mushroom supplements followed by hours of meandering conversation between two people who may or may not be under the influence. Who in the world has the time?

So for that reason I avoided the podcast of one Dwarkesh Patel even as I occasionally linked to an article of his. I filed him mentally in the same “Avoid!” bucket as Lex Fridman — probably unfairly, as no one in the world can be as big of a mental bore as Fridman — without giving his podcast a chance. Although, judging by his writing on AI, I would not have liked the tone even if I had heard it. I remember, in fact, resisting the temptation to pan some of his more outlandish texts prophesying the rise of our LLM overlords with a tone which was as matter-of-fact as it was uncaring about human culture and society. My headphones are a direct link to my brain and I did not want that kind of world view to influence it.

Well a whole bunch of people are about to get influenc’d, because the New York Times has just published a glowing profile of Patel and his podcast, framing the show as a way to “eavesdrop on the A.I. elite” while burying an important fact — the one that kept me from listening in the first place — in the fourth-to-last paragraph:

Mr. Patel doesn’t see himself as a journalist, and he will do things that news organizations’ ethics rules generally prohibit, such as signing onto an amicus brief on behalf of Anthropic in its recent lawsuit against the Department of Defense, and angel-investing in companies whose founders he has interviewed (he disclosed the stakes). He believes in a “glorious transhumanist future,” and his tone isn’t adversarial. But his admirers say that his technical fluency and extensive preparation enable him to follow up or push back on superficial answers that most interviewers would simply accept. The Jensen Huang episode became heated as Mr. Patel repeatedly challenged the world’s most valuable company’s chief executive on the national-security implications of selling chips to China. “If I do cover a topic,” Mr. Patel says. “I think my reputation would suffer a lot if I don’t ask tough questions or don’t do it in a deep way.”

Of course, praising for this kind of pushback on a transhumanist podcast is like praising the host of “The Ultimate Potato Chip Podcast” for pushing back against Frito-Lay’s most recent price hike: it goes without saying that you like junk food.

But it was not this small bit of confirmation bias which made me link to the NYT. Rather, it was the same revelation that piqued Tyler Cowen’s interest, if for a different reason. Rather than paste the whole excerpt, let me provide a (human) summary: bored during the covid pandemic, a 19-year-old Patel asks the libertarian George Mason economist Bryan Caplan to be a guest on his brand-new podcast; Caplan agrees. They continue the exchange, online and in person, while Caplan is spending months in Austin, TX at the home of his billionaire friend Steve Kuhn. ⊕ [Note: This wasn’t the only good billionaire-themed article in the NYT. For more reasons why Americans should probably do a bit more to clip their wings see the travails of one Sergey Brin and the series of hardships he endured that pushed him to the right. ] Kuhn also meets Patel and, liking the cut of his jib, offers to invest in return for equity. So do other people in the Caplan-Kuhn circle which inevitably expands all the way to your friendly neighborhood founder of Amazon. Cue NYT’s signature glazing.

Crikey. Fans of C.S. Lewis should recognize immediately the themes he raised in The Inner Ring, The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, essays and books which were most likely not on Patel’s reading list during his formative years. One can only wonder whether his belief in “the glorious transhumanist future” came before or after the Silicon Valley billionaires made landfall in his young mind.

• Cory Doctorow: The enshittification multiverse, in which Doctorow proposes a general theory of enshittification to match his initial, special theory. I enthusiastically concur.
• Anonymous on the Marginal Revolution comments section: On health care price transparency. The only non-Xified content you can find on Marginal Revolution these days is in the comments, so I am glad that Cowen highlighted this minute dissection of the madness called American medical billing. Needless to say, I concur.
• Reese Richardson: A do-or-die moment for the scientific enterprise. ⊕ [Note: ᔥAndrew Gelman, who sure loves his mile-long headlines. ] This is the author’s summary of a more detailed paper in the academic journal PNAS which points to a looming catastrophe of LLM-boosted scientific paper mills holding hands with pliant journal editors to decimate the signal-to-noise ratio of the literature. Of course I concur!
• Cory Doctorow, again: Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance”. His review after actually reading the whole book, and yep.

All I can think of while reading Nilay Patel’s software brain essay, quoted and linked to all over the web, is the slight but dense Metaphors We Live By. Software databases — metaphoric file cabinets and manila folders — now themselves becoming metaphors for physical objects is truly Escherian.

Last week I wrote about the scammy way in which a large hospital system, Johns Hopkins, tried to bully us into paying them money we didn’t owe. The responses to it on Mastodon after a boost from Corey Doctorow were unlike anything I have received before, at least in the English language. [Note: There was a period of about a year or two, early 2020 to late 2021, when a thing I tweeted in Serbian ended up in a tabloid. Around the same time a Serbian TV station lifted an annotated covid graph I had been updating, without attribution of course. Crazy times, may they never return. ] Who knew that American “health” “care” “system” could arouse such strong feelings.

An unexpected turn in the conversation was towards veterinary medicine and how it too is undergoing general enshittification under pressure from private equity and no regulatory barriers. Which got me thinking: could veterinary medicine serve as a proxy for what would happen to human medicine if it were to become deregulated? What would a wholly free-market medicine, a libertarian’s wet dream, look like? Now clearly I have neither the time nor the will to sink hours into this kind of research, but do you know who does?

Yes, I asked Gemini to formulate a research plan, then passed on the plan with the Deep Research toggle on to create a report titled “A Comparative Analysis of Veterinary and Human Medicine: Evaluating Deregulation Proxies in the United States Healthcare System”. The goal was to test whether veterinary medicine could serve as a proxy for deregulated human healthcare and personally I don’t think it achieved that objective — this could be just my anti-AI bias — but it did provide a few juicy quotes, such as:

Theoretical free-market economics suggests that corporate consolidation should benefit the consumer by driving down costs through supply-chain efficiencies, centralized administrative services, and immense economies of scale. The empirical data from the veterinary sector directly contradicts this theory. Instead of utilizing their massive scale to lower consumer costs, corporate consolidators have leveraged their localized monopolies to exercise extreme, unchecked pricing power.

And two paragraphs down:

Furthermore, corporate management fundamentally alters the clinical culture at the ground level. Veterinarians operating within these corporate structures report worsening working conditions, including intense pressure from non-medical corporate managers to “do more and see more patients,” meet specific monthly revenue quotas, and upsell clients on expensive and potentially unnecessary diagnostics to satisfy debt obligations. (21) To protect their market share and ensure high practitioner retention despite these conditions, these corporations frequently deploy aggressive non-compete and non-solicitation agreements, legally preventing veterinarians from opening independent practices nearby and artificially suppressing labor mobility. (21) This data definitively indicates that in a deregulated medical market, institutional capital prioritizes relentless profit extraction and margin expansion over consumer cost-savings or provider well-being.

Reference 21, to save you a click, is a letter from Elizabeth Warren to CEO and President of Mars Inc — which in addition to hocking teeth-numbing treats is also apparently a veterinary behemoth — outlining her concerns about the industry consolidation with ever more references. An actual report would have to dig down into them and find primary sources for Gemini’s claims, but even this is publishable.

And here is the conclusion:

Ultimately, the hypothesis that veterinary medicine serves as a highly accurate proxy for human medical deregulation is remarkably robust. The comprehensive data confirms that stripping away third-party mandates, emergency care obligations, and unlimited tort liabilities yields a highly efficient, point-of-care transaction model that eliminates administrative bloat, enforces total price transparency, and accelerates clinical innovation. Yet, it simultaneously exposes the harsh, unyielding realities of a pure free-market health economy. The veterinary paradigm proves definitively that while deregulation optimizes the speed of scientific advancement and the profitability of specialty providers, it structurally abandons the foundational concept of healthcare as a universal human right, replacing it entirely with a ruthless, capital-gated commodity market.

Woah there, Gemini. With such strong language I do feel obligated to declare that the original prompt was as neutral as possible. I wonder what ChatGPT, Claude or Grok would have to say on the topic, and if Grok in particular would have a different view.

📚 Finished reading: Dark Gods by T. E. D. Klein, a short story collection you’d get if you transported H.P. Lovecraft from 1920s New England to 1980s New York City, then asked him to water down the weirdness and narrow the horror from Cosmic to Upper East Side. Which is to say, I wasn’t impressed.

Another weekend, another free hour to improve Inkling, the 95% Gemini-generated Emacs client for Inkwell. In addition to fixing a couple of annoying bugs — and how great is it that every RSS feed is its own unique snowflake? — I’ve added a bookmark manager for micro.blog’s bookmarks, complete with tagging. Next up: adding drafts to Microbe.

A mere 50 pages in and I can already tell that Inventing the Renaissance will be a banger of a book. Three concepts in particular stood out for there relevance far outside that particular period in history:

• Legitimacy, why it is important to have it and how to obtain it. Marrying into a noble family, graduating from a well-known program, surviving a few years in big pharma/big tech, getting linked to by a major website, etc.
• Zombie ideas as wrong theories that lead to more research that leads to correct theories but then refuse to die — cruthes that outlive their usefulness. See also: zombie medicine.
• Conflicting projections, as in the Medicis playing to role of “merchant scum” in Florence, a city which tends to banish people with ambitions towards nobility, while at the same time playing up your high status to the outsiders who view symbols of nobility as a sign of legitimacy (see above). It is a tough game to play which is why the AI companies are failing at it so spectacularly (to investors and eneterprise clients: we will eliminate the need for XX% of the work force; to the plebs: let us build data centers, it will create jobs; to themselves: why do they hate us?)

No surprise that it has been nominated for a Best Related Work Hugo Award, and kudos to Palmer for compelling me to write the first “currently reading” post in almost two years (the last one was also for a book she wrote).