I love the Witness, like the Portal games and hate the Talos Principle. To each their own, I guess.

The premise of this study makes no sense. The goal of coffee brewing is to get a very specific extraction at around 20% that tastes good. If you go above the ideal, it's going to taste overextracted.

If you want to maximize extraction at all costs, you can just use immersion brewing with mixing. You don't need fancy pour-over technique.

That said, it's still interesting to learn more about the physics of extraction in pour-over coffee.

It also suffers from an attempt to perfect something ruled by a "Bathtub Curve", that is, a curve with two steep or asymptotic, undesirable boundaries and a broad, roughly equivalent "acceptable zone" in between. (Imagine trying to find a low point in a bathtub to sit at. Probably 90% of the top surface of a bathtub meets the criterion of "low", and no one really cares enough to sit at the lowest point.)

They don't even provide numbers - does their method save 1% of the coffee? Even saving 15% of the coffee used is not very significant, especially if the make-process is difficult to get right.

This is an article begging to be summarized by a headline like "Scientists have discovered how to stretch your coffee budget!".

I read in a different article that this study was a side project during Covid lockdown.

The scientists had all they needed to run these experiments, were stuck indoors drinking coffee, and could do it all in relative isolation

Thank you very much! Do report back if you have time to try it. Good and bad, both are welcome

I'm not an expert on the subject, but this seems like a very insightful post. I especially liked the part about forecast skill analysis being impossible for tail risks.

Any ideas on how to reduce errors in low resource languages? How did you choose the list of languages to support?

I’m really just relying on OpenAI’s models for now, and supporting the same 65 languages GPT-4o supports. Was there a particular language you’re interested in that you’ve found the models produce disappointing results?

Well I study Ukrainian and was just curious why it's missing, since it's on the supported list for both whisper and OpenAI TTS. I can't find a list of languages supported by GPT-4o anywhere in the release materials or API documents. It's not in GPT-4 technical report either.

I'm native in Finnish and would say that 4o writes sort of ok Finnish but definitely makes many mistakes. I'd imagine many of the languages on the list of supported ones are worse.

I see I have mistakenly omitted Ukrainian from the App Store description, but it is definitely supported in the app. I can't speak to its quality, but I would be interested to hear what you think.

No doubt Google has some awful incentives when it comes to user tracking and making money from ads. But tracking has real benefits for spam and fraud detection. So any attempt at reducing tracking can be siderailed into "personal privacy vs. public safety" discussion.

Fraud will exist even with tracking, Google still serves malware through their ads. There's no public safety and trading privacy for it means you get neither.

I don't know if perpetual free trial fits for your definition of genuinely free, but I'm trying to build a competition for Descript at https://smartmediacutter.com/

Hi, matcha.video looks very cool! I'm working on https://smartmediacutter.com which has some overlap in functionality. I'd love to have a chat about matcha and if you have any plans for commercialization, etc.

Thank you very much! Sorry to hear that your PhD wasn't what you wanted. These days it's much easier to provide value outside of academia than inside it.