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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The costs you are minimizing are extremely high. Things like engineering, cost of manufacture, heck even the cost of a higher quality motor with less play/tight tolerances is vastly more expensive than you are letting on. Figure parts costs alone on a base model grinder are around 20 dollars for a 200 dollar sale price. Most of these are probably in the 200 dollar range with more time required to assemble.

    In comparing a <200 dollar grinder to a 700 dollar grinder like the niche, the difference is night and day for parts, layout, and requirements for output. Plus the cost of higher quality burr sets and tight tolerance burr carriers.

    The per unit costs associated with what is required to produce a small output, high quality part is high. How many units do you think each one of these companies makes? Compare that to baratza or kitchen aid. It’s not even in the same ballpark.

    Obviously it goes towards insanity with the 3k dollar plus units, but then again many of them are commercial focused and can happily churn out hundreds of pounds of ground beans. Or into fully billet cnc machines one offs.


  • A car is a solved problem. So please, buy a used Honda civic and use it to haul 10 tons of stone up a steep incline. Day in and day out.

    A bit hyperbolic, but the issue is one of specialization and volume. These grinders see small sales and have very special configurations. To produce something like that costs more money than a spinning wheel grinder. On the other hand it is consistent in scope and output with many issues resolved via many production iterations or through manufacturing processes which are difficult to scale.

    Yes at some point the prices to benefit ratio drops, but seriously, grinders (next to the beans themselves) are the most important part in the taste of your coffee. Don’t you feel like you deserve the best?


  • Code yes, but the information, lists, and capabilities beyond that no.

    I do think it’s a low risk, but it is not zero.

    They could also do some nefarious stuff if they get bought out.

    Don’t get me wrong I hope they last and I’m just plain wrong, but pihole works great and is a bit more pure.

    About ui/ux, you are one hundred percent right. People want and demand simple. Single click install and setup is what is really needed and pihole loses resoundingly in that, especially if combined with encrypted dns request forwarding.


  • Same can be done with Pi-hole. Yes it isn’t ootb, but it is easy to do.

    There are still challenges with doh and isp packet scanning. Even without clear text dns, your isp still knows where you go, if not from the lookups. They still inspect traffic and destinations and can make very detailed inferences, even without https inspection on DoH or other packets.

    Pihole is fully for free. AdH seems to be the same for now, but it is a company running it, they want to make money. I would be a bit worried about this.

    This also doesn’t stop devices from doing their own dns over https. Adguard home and pihole will try to block the DoH locators (canaries) but can’t actually stop a tv from connecting to a known ip if it wants to.

    Don’t get me wrong. I highly recommend something, and adguard home is nice, but I’m not convinced by its the right long term solution nor does either solution provide the sum total.











  • Beans, grinder, technique. Then machine.

    I’ve had a number of machines (decent now) and it isn’t required to make something really good. Learn the basic techniques to get the flow and pressure right with your unit of choice. Dual boiler or switched boiler (either steam or brew via a switch) is my suggestion there, as the heat exchangers are great, but you have to play with them to know how it works.

    Learn Wdt.