noirbot

Sure, I'm not denying what's in that quote - that the emphasis is usually on lighter roasts. Somewhat because there's already a number of older roasters who do nothing but dark roasts.

Many of the cups I've had at Dark Matter in Chicago are decidedly on the darker side, and they have Starry Eyes which is specifically sold as their dark roast. I don't think they post exact roast curves, so I'm not sure there's an objective way to denote what qualifies as a "real" dark roast, but I'm guessing most people who like a more classic dark roast would at least find it acceptably close. Roasters in Atlanta like Chrome Yellow, Dancing Goat, or Portrait also tend to be on the darker side, though I'm not sure if they have mainstay coffees.

It's not as if I've never had a cup of Lavazza or Folgers or Cafe du Monde to compare to. I grew up on basic coffeemaker grocery store French Roast all day every day.

For sure. I think there's some tragedy in it all just being called espresso. For many reasons, modern espresso machines aren't really producing shots by the same method as a classic machine. Improvements in pumps and temperature controls, not to mention grinders, are producing something that looks the same but may as well be a totally different drink. In the same way that an Americano isn't the same as drip coffee even though they may look the same.

I was with you up until "all third-wave beans are lightly roasted". I suppose it's literally true relative to old espresso roasts, but there's still plenty of third-wave roasts that are decently dark. Maybe not Folgers/Lavazza dark, but you can definitely find more oily/heavy roasts that aren't overly acidic.

There's also a third axis in brew technique - most old-school espresso is only vaguely the same brew method as what you'd get at a third-wave shop where the newer machines have fairly precise temperature, flow, and pressure controls, as well as more consistent grinds with less fines.

Sure, I get it! Maybe it is all just a fad that will pass. I don't hold judgement for people who enjoy a more classic espresso, but as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I was in Europe most of 15 years ago and you'd essentially get "oh, you're one of those people" looks if you wanted anything but a dark roast espresso. The OP of this thread would likely be as annoyed by trying to get "a cup of coffee" in Italy as in any pretentious city in the world, assuming he doesn't happen to like dark roast espresso.

Both sides can be pretentious. Dogmatic attachment to tradition can be pretentious just like overzealous modernism. I certainly wouldn't order an espresso in Milan and then be upset that I dislike it, but I would find it annoying that it's difficult to find a cup of coffee I do enjoy, just like my British friends find it difficult to find a cup of tea that meets their preference, which I also think is a sub-par way to prepare a drink.

Plus, the espresso fad is kinda already long-dead in America. Sure, there's Starbucks, but no one's really getting a black coffee or espresso shot there. If anything, America's contribution to coffee that has persisted for decades is drip coffee and more recently handbrew pourovers (though Japan and others also contributed a lot there). There's a reason the Americano is essentially just espresso made to taste like drip coffee.

I think this misses the point of all of this by making any sort of objective statement here. There's nothing inherently wrong with tradition and stability of a style like Italian espresso. Someone who grew up on it may very well hate an espresso made in a different style with a different roast profile and bean origin and that's quite fine.

The issue in my mind is the dogmatic orthodoxy of people who enjoy French or Italian espresso saying that anything else is borderline immoral, or at best "pretentious". I happen to prefer more modern espresso styles, but there's also joy in a good traditional Italian shot.

But that is, in itself, a normalcy bias. I don't generally like Italian roast coffee. It's too oily and generally upsets my stomach. It's not a flavor or style I like in espresso. I'm not going to claim no one should like it - clearly people do, but if you don't like that, Italy is a really bad place to live because it's so orthodox about its espresso and doesn't support "pretentious" places that may serve something that doesn't taste "normal".

Just because a specific style has been around for years doesn't mean it's the only valid style that's not "pretentious".

But "plain" isn't a thing. There is no "plain" coffee. There's what Nestle and other old companies bought from near slave labor in various countries over the years and blended into what people expect now, but even those beans independently often taste better and different if made properly with modern technique and even basic equipment.

People are used to the specific flavor that, for instance, commercial Bunn coffee makers that haven't been properly cleaned for decades tastes like. There's not really any way to emulate that outside of intentionally buying bad equipment.

I'm still honestly confused that people have a hard time with the menu. I literally seek out going to the best and most fancy-ass coffee shops in the world when I travel and most of them will still serve you a normal Americano or Espresso if you order it. Some don't have drip/carafe coffee because that requires specific equipment and I could see that being complex, I guess, but then that's because you went to a especially high end coffee shop. I often have to go out of my way to find a shop that does pour-over. A lot of the world doesn't do drip or pour-over at all until recent times. Ten years ago, I had to go to the British expat bar in Prague to get a drip coffee because every other shop in town was espresso only and looked at you weird if you wanted an americano.

The options even then aren't usually all that complex unless you're into espresso, and then you should be used to ordering a latte/cappuccino/double shot if that's what you want. Your "black coffee" options are almost never more complex than various origins of drip coffee, where if you literally do not care, you can just order the cheapest. I'm perplexed by people who look at a menu of 4 options for drip coffee and seemingly have a mental breakdown due to complexity. The most number of drip/pour over options I've ever seen at a coffee shop was 8 and it was at the central roastery of one of the best coffee roasters in the world.

You can still buy coffee at McDonalds or 7-11 or plenty of other basic places! It's not like that was outlawed!

Sure, but that's essentially the thrust of the OP. "Look at these decadent vapid influencers drinking their expensive (but fairly priced) coffee. Why can't I just get basic cheap (exploitative wage based) coffee any more in this modern city? Surely they're the ones forsaking value and tradition."

A lot of critiques of modern coffee are based in a sort of silent "but I got used to the benefits of imperial colonialism and exploitation. How dare these new people make me consider where my drinks are from and what should be paid for them." I'm certainly not claiming that's a conscious thing - status quo bias is a big thing here, but it's odd how often "paying a living wage" and "caring about sustainable farming" is decried as decadence and depravity that's destroying the old and more honorable ways of living.

And the usual retort you get if you point that out is "but this new fancy coffee tastes worse", which always strikes me as amusing coming from folks who minutes before were claiming it all tasted the same and mocking the idea of tasting notes being real.

Having a preference for a traditional status quo blend is still a preference!

Most fancy coffee shops do do that though. If you walk in and ask for a drip coffee or an espresso, especially if you just say "I want a basic espresso", you'll probably get what you want. I'm sure there's some places that would be annoying about it, but most specialty places deal with plenty of people coming in every day not used to ordering in specialty places.

If you really want a basic coffee with the cheapest beans you can find, why would you go to a fancy shop? If anything, it's more likely to work there than going to a multi-course restaurant and trying to order a hamburger. There are other businesses that serve a "no choices" need.

This is also a huge part. A lot of the "look at this insane price for coffee" is because exploitative practices for centuries has led to people having price expectations for coffee that are unreasonable in a fair market. There's definitely crazy high end coffees that are $20 a cup for various reasons, but $6 pounds of coffee from the grocery store are also an anomaly.

I mean, it's seldom that complicated even. They just went from having one choice of espresso to, likely, at most 3. The most fancy coffee shops I've ever been to usually don't have more than a couple espresso options dialed in at any given time. If you don't care, just pick the cheapest or ask for the person's favorite.

I'm sure there is some influencer/performative aspect to this as well that the author is reacting to, but the complaint strikes me mostly as a "I was ok with the status quo, and I dislike that other people prefer things other than that". Having preferences and choices is not by default some sort of pretentious thing!

Sure, but sometimes you also want to travel. I find myself doing this a lot when I'm on a trip - you want to dive into a new culture or location, do things you wouldn't do, but you also need time to recharge and feel something a bit more normal.

Coffee shop or brewery or dive bar culture can vary some place to place, but there's usually core elements of the sort of social contract that are core to it and can provide a sense of routine or homely comfort even when you're staying at a hotel in another country. Having an experience that's 80% the same as the one you'd have back home can make it easier for you to recognize and appreciate that 20% difference sometimes and learn about a new culture.

Sure, but t-shirt and jeans is also what everyone working at an Apple Store wears. It'd be one thing if they didn't say what to wear - then I'd totally understand going a bit above, but if they specifically put in "not formal", then it seems reasonable to assume they mean "match the uniform generally".

I'd mostly agree, but with them specifically calling out "not anything formal" as part of the expectations for interview attire wouldn't be the time I'd want to be riding the line of "is this too close to formal". This isn't a job at a tailor or stylist. You're not being tested on your understanding of the roles of various garments in different levels of fashion over time.

Presumably OP had seen/visited an Apple Store before and knew what employees wore there, so it's not a mystery what the uniform is, and therefore what is probably meant by "don't wear anything formal". It's not some kind of gotcha.

It depends - I'm conducting interviews now and I'm totally ok with people screen sharing and showing me their internet searches and AI prompts as part of the interview. Part of the skills I'm hiring for is "can you find the docs/information you need to solve this", so knowing how to use whatever tools you prefer in order to do that is important.

I mean, if they said not to wear something formal, that doesn't really seem like bias as much as just not following instructions. If I showed up to an interview where they said to wear a suit and I was in jeans and a polo, I'd expect to get turned down too.

I mean, maybe, but as folks in the comments pointed out, she literally lobbied on behalf of Amazon and others against regulation on big tech companies. She worked against a number of EFF efforts, for instance.

To be clear, I don't think this is some hidden effort to secretly support Trump, but it's such an obviously bad move that was then defended that makes it hard to understand what he was possibly thinking.

If he'd been deep in the comments talking about how he personally knew this lawyer and laying out why he was convinced she was a good pick, then maybe. But outside of him saying "solid track record", I don't think I saw any actual articulation of the record he's saying she had, and plenty of people calling out the things she did that were as pro-Big Tech as Chuck Schumer's daughters that he called out as marking the decline of his support for democrats.

Which is the additional part of this being horrible judgement. If it was just "This person is someone I think is good" then sure. Maybe he's wrong, but it's a defensible position. Publishing a detailed explanation of why he's disowning an entire political party that had literally just had Lina Kahn doing some of the most aggressive anti-trust prosecutions in decades is wild. There's a space to just cheer for people doing things well that your organization agrees with, but he chose to issue statements condemning entire parties and praising others by name.

That's really the core of it for me. Literally no one was asking for or expecting his input on the appointment of an assistant attorney at the US DoJ. Trump probably doesn't even know who this is or what their job is. The fact that Proton's CEO decided to talk about it is most of the attention this appointment even got.

Even outside of me thinking it was a poorly thought out endorsement, it's just so amazingly unnecessary. I follow journalists and activists around anti-trust and internet regulation and I literally hadn't heard about this appointment.

I may have missed it in the thread, but I didn't really ever see an argument. Just a "I trust the republicans and their pick". There was no deeper discussion or assertion of why this was a good pick. All of the followup was about how he disliked the democrats and liked Vance.

That's not really a solid argument to me. No part of the original post or the followup helps me understand why he thinks a former lobbyist for Amazon and Google would be for anti-trust action against them.

Most of the responses on reddit, while overblown, are generally pointing out that most of big tech was funding Trump and Vance's election. If most of the CEO's argument is how much the democrats are in the pocket of big tech, that seems quite relevant. A pretty substantial percentage of the money spent to elect Trump was from Musk and other VC folks, and Bezos notably killed an endorsement of Harris at the newspaper he ran.

As someone said in the thread, it feels like the CEO took a "the enemy of my enemy must be better" in this, when it's entirely correct that both US parties are in the pocket of corporate interests. He's not wrong about the Democrats, but that definitely doesn't mean Trump's appointments are better. He could have just decided to sit this out and say nothing, which makes it all the more objectionable that he decided this was his time to show up and publicly try to get Trump's attention to praise him. As far as I know he wasn't @ mentioning Biden to praise the various anti-trust actions that were taken over the last few years.

So, I think that's referring to a different message though. Most of what I referred to was from the official Mastodon account: https://archive.ph/LlbSj

Either way, it wouldn't have been much better if he'd personally posted the things the official account posted, or if the official account had posted that political rant with a "A response from our CEO:" at the top. Endorsing specific governmental actions would be something I could be fine with them doing, but calling out specific parties and candidates just feels like poor judgement.

https://archive.ph/LlbSj

Here's the archive. Do you really think I'd write up all of that just completely making it up?

Most of the rest of it is from a reddit thread here: https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_poli...

Throughout, he doesn't really give any actual justification for why he thought the original post was correct or remotely well informed. I haven't seen anything from him that acknowledges that he's praising an ex-lobbyist as being good for antitrust, or any explanation of why he'd think it was actually a good appointment for his asserted values. The only stated reasoning was "democrats bad, republicans good". There's no discussion of the role Musk and Thiel and Bezos played in electing Trump. There's no discussion of any Biden-era anti-trust action and why he'd think Trump's folks would do more.

It's hard for me to come away from it with a positive opinion of the CEO's decision making and judgement.

The CEO posted something, and then the official Proton account also followed up with a multi-post writeup of how democrats were all captured by big tech as if the appointed person in question wasn't a former tech lobbyist.

I don't think it should follow them forever, but for a company a lot of people are looking to to protect them against US government intrusion, picking this time specifically to @ mention Donald Trump and praise him appointing a big tech lobbyist and then have official company account defend him is certainly a bad look even if it mostly got deleted.

Things like email security and VPNs are 99% a business of "do you trust this company to defend you against a nation-state as best they can" and injecting themselves into what, for them, is international politics at very least shows questionable judgement.

If it was a post now about the action against Microsoft, sure. But preemptively praising someone's appointment feels very "kissing the ring" in a way that I don't want my trusted security company to be doing.

The CEO praised one of Trump's picks for an attorney overseeing internet regulation and then when asked about it, the official Proton account replied with multiple posts about how Democrats were sold out to big business and Republicans were the party of small business. Also about how J.D. Vance was the only person to want to talk to Proton about internet regulation. It's worth noting they also left out that the attorney in question lobbied for multiple big tech companies before being appointed and Proton's whole argument was "democrats are captured by big tech".

Then when further asked about it, the CEO essentially said he didn't actually know much about the situation and hadn't meant it as an endorsement despite the original posts essentially being a one-sided attack on Democrats and all praise for the current administration, including @ mentioning Donald Trump. He also kept saying "my comments from last year" when they were from December and the controversy was in Jan.

At best it seems quite naive from Proton's side to think the administration where Musk, Zuckerberg, and Cook were front row at the inauguration, and was generally funded by Musk, Thiel, Bezos and a raft of other VC folks is going to be more aggressive at regulating big tech companies and for internet privacy in general. At worst, they're trying to curry favor with/actually in favor of the current administration and don't want to admit it because a lot of their value as a business is for people who don't want the government to see their data.

I think this is kinda the best way. If you're a manger who used to code, do the sort of tedious tech debt stuff for your team. Update dependencies. Build small tooling improvements. Do the sort of stuff your devs probably want to do but have higher priority work that will get in the way. That's likely work that doesn't require you to have deep knowledge of how everything works, but still provides value.

If your project is complex enough that's not an option, then write onboarding docs and other technical stuff. IMO, the manager shouldn't be writing code much, but they should always keep a running version of the project. They should be able to run tests, confirm that PRs function locally, just keep a basic attachment to things.

I've definitely seen this - managers reviewing or submitting code that was woefully unfinished. It forces the team to decide how much to push back against the person who decides if they get a raise in a way that's decidedly unfair. It also taints your perception among the team.

It's that old quote - better to keep silent and be thought possibly a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. If your job isn't primarily coding, and you parachute in to "help out" and end up making more work than you save, that burns a lot of goodwill that you can't really get back. You're not some junior dev that's going to get better with mentorship.

Strong agree. The best managers I've worked for have been capable of coding and were often former devs, but didn't insert themselves into the team's flow like that.

It's very easy to turn "but I code" into a weird ego trip for a manager to try to look good while just making their team slow down to deal with the fact they're bad at code review or coding at all.

It's not like there's a lack of work to do for most managers that's not coding.

Man, I wish the manager's ass was ever on the line. The amount of times I've seen a manager's whole team get laid off and the manager get moved to a different team to fuck everything up again is too many times.

I think I've seen a manager get laid off never. And often seen half their team laid off because they were terrible at their job, but the management class takes care of their own.

And it betrays a total lack of care for substance. Zelensky has delivered public speeches in the US, while wearing a suit if that matters saying thanks to the US for their support. He just said it to the whole country, and while Biden was president. Trump doesn't care if the US gets credit, he wants to steal that credit personally, despite literally having been impeached for trying to extort Zelensky.

It's amazing levels of personal pettiness and ego. That's before you get to them inviting a Russian state news person to watch and then claiming they "snuck in" as if someone can just bumble into a meeting of world leaders.

They have enforcement powers if they they prevail in the suit and the people who have legal power enforce their will. Which is something that has happened in the past. That includes them just successfully abusing the defendant into settling, no matter if they would have won in the long run.

The RIAA clearly has the power to enforce economic harm on anyone who has to defend their lawsuits. Against small enough defendants, that makes their positions extremely relevant.