Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! This week, we received the first copies of Issue 2 of our magazine! As of this Monday, we will move from pre-ordering to just regular ordering, so if you wish to get the magazine at its discounted pre-order price of £18, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details), then this is the last weekend to order.
In 2018, I saw two visions of the future. Down one path, there was Ohh Cha, the Japanese matcha pop-up that took place inside Muji Tottenham Court Road over the course of two weeks, serving koicha as thick as molten chocolate and usucha of various provenances – the type of matcha that compelled Japan to create kaiseki dining, tea ceremonies and the architecture of the tea house just to put a bowl of it in its right place. Down the other path, was the tin of chilli kale matcha I spotted on a supermarket shelf that promised to ‘destroy hangovers’. Of course, London chose the second path.
Over the last few years, matcha has taken over London, just as it’s taken over everywhere else in the world. As someone who used to work in the tea industry, and spent the best part of a decade trying to get people to drink good matcha, this has been a strange experience. Matcha is everywhere and people – particularly young people – love it, even if it’s low-grade matcha (and, increasingly, not from Japan, but from China). Meanwhile, the scarcity of matcha has pushed the prices for premium matcha up; from what I’ve heard, in the last year the wholesale cost has almost tripled. Whatever the grade, London has an insatiable need for matcha (note: all of these are real!): Biscoff matcha, Terry’s Chocolate Orange matcha, toffee nut Cream matcha, matcha tiramisu, matcha ramen, matcha hummus, matcha biriyani, matcha milk pedicures and, most ominously, daytime matcha raves.
My former colleagues at Postcard Teas now everyone is into matcha
So, in today’s acid reflux, I’m handing over the column to Niloufar Haidari to explain this pivotal moment in matcha culture on a global scale, and why it just might mean the death of civilisation as we know it. Jonathan Nunn
It’s 7pm on Saturday and you’re at a matcha rave in Dubai, by Niloufar Haidari
Time Out Dubai on Instagram: "And you thought matcha was boring…
It’s 7pm on Saturday and you’re at a matcha rave in Dubai. The afro-house is bumping, ladies are swaying around like Sims, taxes are being evaded. There is much pain in the world, but not on this rooftop. Here there are digital nomads, myopic influencers selling dreams, and Europeans who moved to the UAE to escape the creeping tide of Islam in the West. There are also, for some reason, iced matcha lattes. Two Asians, seemingly the only non-white people in attendance, hand-whisk the green powder and serve it up to the partygoers with pink foam. A posh-looking man in a blue shirt and cream trousers offers a matcha ice cream cone to the camera with a smile and the Dubai skyline behind him. There is a complete dearth of swag, personality and vibe.
Drinking matcha is obviously not a new practice. Its history in Japan goes back nearly a thousand years, while whisked tea dates back even further in China. Starbucks has been selling (bad) matcha as ‘green tea lattes’ since 2006, the earthy, bitter taste of cheap matcha masked by everything from vanilla syrups to blueberry purées and sweetened coconut milk. But matcha has recently become a status symbol for wealth signalling and wellness culture, propelled in part by ‘aesthetic’ lifestyle TikToks, in which influencers in blush-coloured athleisure pose with matching strawberry matchas at ‘morning wellness raves’.
“Matcha lattes – and memes about them – have become a micro-economy, the beverage of choice for both aesthetic girlies and performative males, two categories of people that mostly only exist online to generate content”
However, such events are not confined to the cursed dropshipper-populated corners of Bali and Dubai. This summer there were matcha raves in Vienna, Madrid, Frankfurt, Perth, Tijuana and Cork. Louis Bekk, a French DJ who seems to have made a career out of playing bad house remixes at pop-up brand activations, allegedly ‘turned the matcha scene on its head’ when he hosted an alcohol-free day-time rave at Marylebone’s How Matcha.
Of course, the reason I know so much about Gen Z green drink culture is not because I think it is a frivolous industry emblematic of impending societal collapse (although it is) but because I myself love this shit. When a matcha spot opened in Brent Cross’s new food court, I was ready to fall to my knees with gratitude at the prospect of finally being able to access a delicious silly little drink anywhere near my home in Neasden – the last place in zone 3 where you still can’t get a half-decent flat white. Its best-selling drink is the peach collagen yuzu; I personally alternate between the vanilla and brown sugar oat milk options, sometimes adding a shot of ashwagandha or bee pollen if I really feel like recreating my experience of the time I lived in LA. I will happily travel anywhere that gives me the option of topping my drink with sweetened cream cold foam, and have on more than one occasion found myself the oldest person in the queue at Jenki, waiting 20 minutes to spend £6.50 on a rose collagen matcha latte just to Feel Something – or maybe to avoid feeling anything at all.
A friend made me aware of a reading list from A16Z containg recommendations for books, weighted towards science fiction since that’s mostly what people there read. Some of my books are listed. Since this is the season of Thanksgiving, I’ll start by saying that I genuinely appreciate the plug! However, I was taken aback by the statement highlighted in the screen grab below:
“…most of these books don’t have endings (they literally stop mid-sentence).”
I had to read this over a few times to believe that I was seeing it. If it didn’t include the word “literally” I’d assume some poetic license on the part of whoever, or whatever, wrote this. But even then it would be crazy wrong.
I’m not surprised or perturbed by the underlying sentiment. Some of my endings have been controversial for a long time. Tastes differ. Some readers would prefer more conclusive endings. Now, in some cases, such as Snow Crash, I simply can’t fathom why any reader could read the ending—a long action sequence in which the Big Bad is defeated, the two primary antagonists meet their maker and Y.T. is reconciled and reunited with her mother—as anything other than a proper wind-up to the story. In other cases, notably The Diamond Age and Seveneves, I can understand why readers who prefer a firm conclusion would end up being frustrated. It is simply not what I was trying to do in those books. So, for a long time, people have argued about some of my endings, and that’s fine.
In this case, though, we have a big company explicitly stating that several of my best-known books just stop mid-sentence, and putting in the word “literally” to eliminate any room for interpretive leeway.
This isn’t literary criticism, which consists of statements of opinion. This is a factual assertion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my editors, in an unflattering light.
It is interesting to speculate as to how such an assertion found its way onto A16Z’s website!
Hypothesis 1: it was written by a clanker
By far the most plausible explanation is that this verbiage was generated by an AI and then copy-pasted into the web page by a human who didn’t bother to fact-check it. This would explain the misspelling of my name and some peculiarities in the writing style. Of course, this kind of thing is happening all the time now in law, academia, journalism, and other fields, so it’s pretty unremarkable; it just caught my attention because it’s the first time it’s directly affected me.
The flow diagram looks like this:
That does a pretty good job of explaining how this all might have come about. So far so good. But it raises interesting questions about what happens next: the faulty quote from this seemingly authoritative source in turn gets ingested by the next generation of LLMs, and so on and so forth:
A hundred years from now, thanks to the workings of the Inhuman Centipede, I’m known as a deservedly obscure dadaist prose stylist who thought it was cool to stop his books mid-sentence.
Hypothesis 2: human with bad data
In this scenario, which seems more far-fetched, we have a sincere and honest human writer who is reporting what they believe to be true based on false information. It breaks down into two sub-hypotheses:
Sub-hypothesis A: Impecunious human with faulty bootleg PDF
There are bootleg copies of countless books circulating all over the Internet, and have been for decades1. Very often these are of poor quality. It could be that the person (or the AI) who wrote the above excerpt decided to save some money by downloading one of those, and got a bad copy that was cut off in mid-sentence.
Sub-hypothesis B: Non native English speaker with faulty translation
Even in the legit publishing industry, the quality of translations can be quite variable, and it’s difficult for authors to know whether a given translation was any good. I’ve seen translated editions of some of my books that look suspiciously short on page count. For all I know there might be translations of my books (legit or bootleg) that actually do stop mid-sentence!
…anyway, thanks for the plug
I genuinely am grateful to have been included on this list! But I had to say something about this astonishing howler embedded in the otherwise reasonable verbiage.
Oh, the Ending
Even the most cynical and Internet-savvy among us are somehow hard-wired to take anything we read on the Internet at face value. I’m as guilty as the next person. This has been a bad idea for a long time now, since bad actors have been swarming onto the Internet for decades. Now, though, it’s a bad idea for a whole new reason: content we read on the Internet might not have been written by a person with an intent to misinform, but rather by an LLM with no motives whatsoever, and no underlying model of reality that enables it to determine fact from fiction.
About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.
Nearly two years ago, I decided to 3D print a mechanical calculator.
This project is extremely in character for me. I love old technology, and especially mixing old and new technology (like sending digital data via ham radio).
When you want to 3D print something, there are different levels of how sane you can be. The sanest option is to find a design on a site like Printables or Thingiverse that someone else made. Ideally, one that consists of as few parts as possible.
When I looked at the available 3D calculator designs, there were everything from simple ones with just a few gears, to modular ones based on historic designs (like Blaise Pascal’s calculator), all the way up to a 3x scale replica of the Curta Type I, the most advanced mass-produced mechanical calculator before electronic calculators took over the market.
There were two main features I wanted: a modular design, and a simple design. Unfortunately, the only modular design was modeled after Pascal’s calculator, and not very simple at all.
So, I decided to take the less sane option and design one from scratch. I did not realize how big of a challenge I was jumping into.
My first design was straightforward:
Design #1
The two gears each had 10 teeth. One gear (blue above) would let you read out a number from a dial. The other (orange) would have an extra nub on a single tooth, which would serve to carry a sum into the next decimal place. The posts the gears sat on would be tilted, so only that extra tooth would make contact with the next gear.
I was having trouble getting the correct angles, when I realized there was a more elegant solution. By flipping every second set of gears upside down, they’d be lined up naturally.
When I printed the first prototype, I discovered that the gears I had made in TinkerCAD were not interlocking and turning correctly. There was way too much of a gap between the teeth:
The advantage of 3D printing is that it lets you fail quickly. I realized I needed to know more about how gears were designed.
It turns out that there is an optimal gear tooth shape that was discovered in the 18th century, potentially by Leonard Euler. They’re called “involute gears”, and they transmit force along a straight line between gears of any number of teeth.
Involute gear teeth
There are plenty of CAD libraries to generate custom involute gears. I found a good one, and designed a ten-toothed gear. After a few iterations to test the fit, I had my first full draft print:
Also note the lightweight base design
But this version still had a big problem I hadn’t foreseen. I had presumed that when one tooth of a ten-toothed gear fully passed through a gap in a second ten-toothed gear, both gears would turn one tenth of the way. As it turns out, this is completely wrong.
Notice that the gears have turned through two teeth, not just one
So it was back to the drawing board. Eventually, I found the appropriate bit of trigonometry and determined that I could use a gear with 30 teeth of a specific size, with the carry tooth turning its partner gear by exactly 3 teeth. To make the design easier, I also decided to have the carry tooth stick out from the rest of the gear. This meant the carry gear needed to be printed with supports, but the support would be small and easy to break off after printing.
This design kinda worked. The main issue left was that the gears kept slipping upward on the posts. My first solution was to use little c-clips on top, which worked okay, but wore out over time. Still, I was satisfied enough to declare the project finished.
About a year and a half later, I decided to come back to the project and make an improved version with a better fastener. After trying and failing to build a system that screwed together, I settled on a version held together with pegs that rotate into place. This version has held up for the last couple of months, so I’m ready to share it with others.
3D model of final version.
Side view. I will add a photo when I return home.
You can find the model and print instructions on my Printables page here.
Statistics are interesting because they are often used to sway arguments, or entice people. This discussion looks at the impact of normal statistics without an underlying context. Take the example of a cookware company that uses statistics in its advertisements (very few other companies provide statistics of any sort). Some of the statistics are shown below.
103 Michelin-recognized restaurants use the cookware.
The cookware is used in over 2,000 global restaurants.
90,000 pans in service.
These numbers may seem significant, but in the context they are not. For example in the first statement, “100 Michelin-recognized restaurants use the cookware”. Worldwide there are approximately 18,713 Michelin-recognized (not starred) restaurants. So 103/18713 = 0.55%. One would argue that this really isn’t a significant number. If we were to look at only Michelin-starred restaurants, some 3700 worldwide, the number would increase to 103/3700 = 2.78%. The number looks a lot better if we only consider North America, where the number is 1941, so 103/1941 = 5.3% which is 10 times as significant, but still not that much.
For the second statistic, that it is “used by over 2,000 global restaurants”, let’s look at a number of scenarios. This is hard to quantify, because how do you define a “global restaurant”. It has to be different from a run-of-the-mill restaurant, because there could be 15-25 million of those. A better way to look at is to consider the number of professional chefs who run restaurants. Let’s consider just Canada first, where there are 62,200 chefs (2023). This would give us 2000/62200 = 3.2%. If we look at the USA, this number climbs to 286,000, and 0.7%. Neither is earth-shattering, and if we include worldwide restaurants the number just plummets.
The last statistic, 90,000 pans, is quite meaningless. It’s just a reflect of how many pans have been sold, and can’t really be compared to other companies because they don’t publish their data. Some vague figures suggest the Le Creuset foundry in France produces 25,000 items a day. Restaurants use either stainless steel or aluminum pans, and to put the number into context, there are circa 97,000 restaurants in Canada alone (of course the 90,000 pans were not suggested to come from restaurants exclusively).
There is nothing to say that the numbers used in the advertisements are whatsoever incorrect, but they do provide a level of ambiguity because they aren’t given in any frame of reference. Numbers only mean something if put into context.
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