Posted by yusyd 5 hours ago
There are far, far better cooking examples out there.
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.
isn't it just a word for "making food", so would include grilling as well?
I'm not sure if this analogy holds up in the AI software metaphor that the author of the blog post is making.
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
Knowing really is half the battle.
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.
I can certainly tell the difference between a good steak and a bad one.
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!
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.
Really, I get it, even bad pizza is still pizza.
Or pick dancing: when you start out, you’re entirely occupied with placing your feet in the right spots at the right time. As you practice, your mind gets freed up and you’re able to make deliberate alterations, embellishments, larger figures. That seems impossible at the start.
I don't like coffee. Can James Hoffmann change that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-iNAyu-ejo
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.
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.
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:
Sir, I regret to inform you that you are going straight to hell.
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.
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.
That simple process, suggested by Nathan Myhrvold (former MSFT cto) in the modernist cuisine, produces a filet better than most restaurants.
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.
Bad restaurants, sure. It does not hold a candle to any half decent steakhouse.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It might take more than 10 years, but robots will almost certainly master cooking single pieces of meat.
It's substantially harder to reach self driving than it is to cook a "good" steak.
Sure, for probably quite a long time you'll be able to find someone who can cook a way better steak than the best robot, especially because taste is extremely subjective...
You can debate the horizon and the extent, but changes ARE coming.
Change is the only thing you can count on besides death.
I 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.
Well, we don't know that, because neither have been achieved.
Sure, we will completely ignore Waymo and move goal posts...
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?
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.
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.
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.
If you get those parts right (and control the inside temp via sous vide or reverse sear) most of the other stuff is pretty marginal in how much it helps. Even all of the extra herbs, and butter basting and everything -- relatively insignificant compared to just getting the salt-level right.
I'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...
Cheap knock off a Big Green Egg with hardwood charcoal can get to 650°F or so pretty quick, and does an amazing job of finishing up after a reverse sear.
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.
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".
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"
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.
This way undersells what's actually happening: fecal matter from the intestines gets onto your meat. This shouldn't happen with proper practices.
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.
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.
It might be more impressive, but I don't see how reverse sear is 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.
Show HN: I Derived a Steak https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691840
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.
Maybe you forgot to include the glue on your pizza as well.
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.
> 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?
Saying this to set expectations based on having a business license since 1984.
>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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, we built Electron because there are a huge number of people who are too lazy to learn anything outside of HTML/etc for creating a UI. It's not actually hard to make a UI using the native desktop frameworks.
We built Electron because web devs were a dime a dozen. It was an economic decision, not a technical one.