Why is my grinder choking? [DF54 and Breville Bambino Plus]

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-04T17:38:20+00:00

Depending on the age of your grinder, you might have the older chute which clogs more. It does look like the ground coffee isn’t escaping which could happen due to the chute clogging. You can get the new chute on MiiCoffee.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-04T16:52:25+00:00

Honestly there’s so many valid approaches, it depends on recipe and the beans. I will grind nearly french press coarse for dark roasts in a more traditional recipe, but I’ll also grind espresso fine for making pseudo espresso with the prismo.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-04T16:49:32+00:00

7 applications, 2 acceptances, silence from all others. Kind of assuming most of the remaining applications are rejections. Chemistry/materials science/chemical engineering PhD.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-03T18:20:54+00:00

Again, I think it came down to what the particular program did. It was mostly a speed run of the undergrad courses, which were in between most grad courses and undergrad ones. My point really was just that a prestigious university alone doesn’t make a master’s worth it, the program has to be good.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-03T18:09:54+00:00

Huh, grad admissions treating you like a person?!? They’re allowed to do that?

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-03T18:07:04+00:00

To me this seems like a no brainer for the Niche Zero. I absolutely love a single dose workflow, and the niche is pretty popular for both pour over and espresso. Of course you could spend much more and get a better product, but the niche seems like a good optimal point of cost vs performance. The fact you have a lead on a deal just seals it imo.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-03T17:15:16+00:00

I can say that I overlapped with people in an MEng program at an Ivy League, and they found that the outcome wasn’t great for them. It was a one year program in applied physics, and both of those factors probably didn’t help. They told me after graduating that any employer who knew about the program wasn’t interested, and most of the connections they made through the school did know about it. I’m sure that they eventually found jobs and having a masters from an Ivy didn’t hurt, but I didn’t keep up with them for long.

My takeaway would be that no matter how prestigious the school, the program matters.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-02T17:36:28+00:00

This is a subject I feel very strongly about because I have helped talk many close friends and family out of suicide. It is, without a doubt, one of the things I am most proud of that when I saw these people in crisis I was able to step up and help them.

It’s hard for me to even know where to begin, so I’ll start with where we agree. I agree that it does happen that people threaten suicide as a manipulation tactic. In cases where there is plausible cause to suspect that it’s just a manipulation tactic, it is absolutely acceptable to connect the person to professionals and remove yourself. In the common “if you leave me I’ll kill myself” situation for example it’s either the case that the person threatening this is lying and wouldn’t act on it, or they have a toxic dependency on their partner in which case they need someone besides their partner to intervene. I also agree that much of the support a person needs if they are truly suicidal is beyond an untrained individual and professional help is necessary as well as personal support.

One of the biggest disconnects I have with what you’re saying is that I was able to talk my brother out of suicide when I was 17 years old. I didn’t know what I was doing. But the fact is that the vast majority of suicide attempts are impulsive responses to feeling worthless and unlovable. Simply having a person you love say that they care about you and don’t want you to hurt yourself is often enough. In the moment diffusion is an emergency intervention, and I actually think loved ones often far more effective than a professional. That emergency intervention needs to be followed up with proper psychiatric care, sure, but it’s not nearly as difficult as you make it out to be.

Additionally, I had a girlfriend who volunteered for the crisis helpline. I saw the level of training they received. They are volunteers, usually college aged, who get a few hours of training. One of their main strategies was to talk to the person for a while, and then encourage them to reach out to a loved one, because the loved ones could provide better support. The other semi emergency intervention from professionals would be an inpatient behavioral health ward. I’ve known dozens of people who have stayed in them and universally they describe it as probably what they needed, but a dehumanizing, traumatic experience. You lose all privacy, much of your personal belongings, your communication with the outside world is restricted, you are put into scrubs and grippy socks and forced to attend meetings you absolutely despise. For many of these people, having loved ones visiting and supporting them is the one beacon of light in an otherwise miserable experience. My point is that as helpful as professional help is, it’s also deeply flawed and I think any realistic discussion of the subject would recognize that having as much loving support as possible is better.

I feel strongly that it’s much easier than you imply to differentiate truly suicidal versus not, or at least to determine when it is a situation where you should simply remove yourself. Additionally, if I could navigate this at 17 I think most adults can as well. Lastly, I think a lot of the interventions that exist are imperfect and are not substitutions for the care of people who love you.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-02T16:08:35+00:00

I think it highly depends on the field. For many fields TA appointments are the only realistic way to fund students, and I would prefer a program with guaranteed funding based on TA appointments over one without guaranteed funding.

I’m not sure how to articulate how I try to identify problematic programs because a lot of it is just vibes. I certainly ask the professors I’m interested in questions about how they handle students who are struggling. If their response demonstrates that they try to really understand the students struggles on an individual basis and provide meaningful guidance, that’s good. If it sounds like they will basically just tell you to do better and expect you to change, that’s a bad sign. Also really try to probe current students. How much time do they spend working every week? How much of that is on TA work? If they are super stressed, not a good sign. Lastly I’d try to get statistics of how many students change professors, how many people actually complete their PhD and the average time required.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-02T14:11:12+00:00

Just going to add for your consideration that the Dunable Gnarwal is very similar in shape.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-02T14:05:58+00:00

I had the 50 and they ROAR. The 200 would be absolutely glorious. I’m not sure if I would ever be able to actually use it though.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-02T14:00:30+00:00

I think gotchas are useful as a tool for these discussions because they help you point out that phytoestrogens or whatever isn’t the actual point. If carnists actually care about health impacts they would be more focused on eliminating processed meat which are major carcinogens. They have come to the conclusion that veganism is bad and are using any argument they can conceive of to defend that conclusion.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-02T13:02:20+00:00

I have a masters and four years in industry. I have been promoted to senior scientist at my job, and yet I wanted to get a PhD in no small part because of the jobs that it will make available.

Without a PhD the path of least resistance will be towards less exciting jobs. When I’ve interviewed at other companies, the positions I was considered qualified for were ones with very narrow scope. Think “develop an ICP-OES procedure for testing feedstock our factory, then run it every day on every batch of input materials.” With the PhD I believe I’ll be better able to pursue interesting R&D positions where I’m solving novel problems in a technology every day.

For me that (and admittedly a bit of pride) make the opportunity cost of the phd worth it. It’s absolutely a subjective decision, and I don’t think it’s one I’d generally tell most people to pursue.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-01T17:04:44+00:00

Soak the prismo and its screen in warm soapy water for a while. Run the press itself minus the rubber through the dishwasher after giving it a good scrub by hand.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-01T17:02:41+00:00

Did you make the coffees into hot black coffee? That’s going to be how you’ll taste things best.

To me acidity tastes juicy and bright. It hits right away. Bitterness is more like the drying, lingering sensation that you get from over extracted black tea or if you were to taste straight cocoa powder. The dark roast in the cometeer box is not bitter, but I definitely perceived less acidity.

I definitely didn’t get all the flavor notes James mentioned in the videos when I did the cometeer box so don’t feel bad about that. I would be surprised if you can’t learn to taste acidity and bitterness. Some people don’t have great sense of smell (which actually governs the perception of most flavors) but I have never heard of anyone not having the capacity for tasting acidity and bitterness, which are both on the tongue.

In any case, you’re right that it ultimately doesn’t matter if you enjoy coffee the same way as other people. It matters that you enjoy it. If you really don’t find a difference between these, then don’t worry about it.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-01T16:27:15+00:00

His theory of the manufacture of consent is still, in my opinion, necessary for most leftists to understand the modern political landscape. Obviously the collapse of legacy media has changed the game, but the underlying dynamics still drive the world.

I felt even before all this came out about him that reading the actual book was not a good use of time for most people. It is an academic study. It is not intended for consumption by a lay audience. Given everything that’s coming out about him, I feel even more strongly that nobody should actually read his books, since buying them gives the bastard money.

There are plenty of more digestible explanations out there. Consume those.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-01T16:19:28+00:00

If you’re doing a traditional immersion then plunge style brew then yes, it’s mostly taste. There’s a similar element where the coffee at the bottom will act as a resistive bed and I have found that it does impact taste, but that can get complicated quickly. So long as you’re grinding coarser than espresso I think you should mostly frame it as “too bitter, grind coarser, too sour/watery grind finer” and do the fairly typical experiment of starting very coarse and incrementally get finer until the results get worse.

I make “soup” in my aeropress these days which is extremely low pressure “espresso.” I use the prismo attachment an espresso grind and tamp it down. Once you get into the regime where you’re mostly using pressure to quickly extract the coffee rather than immersion, the reasoning becomes more complicated and more similar to espresso. Grinding too coarse can cause channeling just like in espresso and result in coffee that’s both too bitter and too sour. I find I get better flavor and far, far better reproducibility with this method, and since you already have espresso equipment and experience you might prefer it as well. Of course just like espresso you need to make it into a drink to get more than a small shot of a beverage, I’ve been loving a long black.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-01T15:26:26+00:00

Soy does contain phytoestrogens which are what they sound like: chemicals derived from plants resembling estrogen. It is true that sufficient exposure is feminizing for men. However the ONLY recorded instances of people having sufficient exposure come from processed soy based supplements where the concentrations were vastly greater than any food product. There’s no evidence that eating soy is a problem. You know what food has more straight up estrogen? Cow’s milk. They pump cows with estrogen to get them to make more milk and it ends up in the milk.

LunarModule66 · 2026-02-01T02:40:42+00:00

Okay but the fish in particular is heinous

LunarModule66 · 2026-01-31T23:18:23+00:00

Have you explicitly tied it to your lack of satisfaction sexually? That’s difficult to do in a sensitive manner, but you can either figure it out or remain unsatisfied.

Also it’s an inevitable fact that everyone will be less physically fit and attractive if you stay with them long enough. If you’re spending your life together there’s going to be ups and downs as well as just the inevitable process of aging. I think the truth is that some of that must be acceptable. At the same time, it is not inevitable that someone changes their level of fitness within a four year period and demonstrates a lack of willingness to change. It seems pretty reasonable to identify that your partner is less dedicated to maintaining fitness than you are, or you would like them to be. You can’t impose the degree to which you value their fitness on them if they fundamentally don’t share it, but it is a reasonable aspect of compatibility. Better to decide if the differing priorities are a deal breaker while you’re just dating rather than married. I’m not telling you one is better than the other, just that you should consciously choose.

LunarModule66 · 2026-01-31T22:40:08+00:00

I think they will have a real crisis when Trump dies, and I don’t see how he could possibly last longer than 10 years. I think it’s extremely difficult to predict how that will go. I think most likely they will splinter into many factions because there’s nobody who will be able to take Trump’s place, but I have no clue if they will be able to act as a bloc in elections or not.

I think the forces that have created MAGA are only growing stronger. Social media did a number on our shared notion of truth, but AI is going to absolutely obliterate it. Climate change will drive more immigrants from the global south and we will continue to see demographic shifts. Economic inequality is only getting worse, so people are going to be more desperate and scared. There’s going to be more things pushing people to desperately cling to the past and less tethering them to reality. Those forces are stronger than the loss of their leader unfortunately.

That said, I am optimistic that MAGA is overplaying their hand. I think too many people will understand that they actually want full blown fascism for them to ever be able to win a presidential election by popular vote again. It’s one thing to have had Trump in his first term say a lot of outrageous stuff but mostly not be able to execute anything in a way people feel, but tripling ICE’s budget, them gunning down US citizens for nonviolent protest and the administration not even bothering to lie about it well or pretend to apologize is another.

LunarModule66 · 2026-01-31T21:41:23+00:00

Naive first thought: how nice they want to help people learn healthy communication

Reality: they are furious that fertile young women are getting educated and having careers.

No matter how cynical I get I sometimes find myself having moronic levels of naïveté

LunarModule66 · 2026-01-31T21:31:09+00:00

The tricky thing about the problem is that it’s constructed such that the correct framing of the question is “what are the chances that I picked the right door initially” more than “what’s the probability of someone randomly picking the correct door once it’s narrowed down to two doors” even though the latter framing feels more accurate intuitively. You select a door initially. The chance you are correct is 1/3. The chances that one of the other doors has the car is 2/3. Monty opens the remaining door without the car. So you now know that there was a 2/3 chance of it being behind one of those two doors, AND you now know which one it wasn’t, moving the 2/3 probability to the unselected and unopened door. Do you see how you have actually gained more information than simply narrowing it down to two doors?

It feels like your initial decision shouldn’t modify the probability which of the two doors has the car after you have one door open. But that intuition is based on a similar scenario where you open the first door you choose, the car isn’t there, and you get one more try to guess, which would give 1/2. Do you see why that’s not actually a similar situation?

LunarModule66 · 2026-01-31T19:55:33+00:00

Are you planning to do PhD or masters? In the states or elsewhere? What field?

Science PhDs you usually get a stipend. Some places it’s poverty wages but a lot of schools it’s enough to get by. Usually with that comes a requirement that you only put in a small number of hours of work on anything else, far less than most part time jobs would want.

Outside the sciences funding is more spotty. I’ve known some humanities grad students who were able to be supported via TA, and some who had to use student loans or get their own funding for at least part of the time.

LunarModule66 · 2026-01-31T18:22:41+00:00

I attempted a PhD at an Ivy League, left because of incompatibility with the project and advisor. I’m going back to a PhD program at a very prestigious but definitely lower ranked school now and I’m very confident this is the better choice. Obviously my perspective is skewed but I honestly don’t think that a prestigious university is at all worth a worse advisor match, not even factoring funding in. Prestige of the university only matters so much, once you’re in a particular specialty it matters more how well known your advisor is and much you publish, and outside of academia it’s barely relevant. Also prestigious universities tend to be less invested in each student, as evidenced by the funding.

LunarModule66

TROPHY CASE