There is now an epic and much-needed update to the English lyrics page for an essential, early song from my favorite band, Finland's Maustetytöt.

Along with the lyrics to Muistot karkaa (Memories escape), find a fun and easy Finnish language lesson by the (equally essential) lilli m, who is behind this entire lyrics update.

Two related stories in the past week:

Shubham Bose shows how reading a story on the New York Times website involves downloading 49 megabytes and making 422 network requests to, as he describes it, "mine your data" and auction your attention to "dozens" of ad networks in a process "incredibly hostile" to the reader.

Meanwhile Zack Whittacker quotes the FBI director confirming for the first time that his agency buys information about Americans that was collected by corporations online. "It has led to some valuable intelligence for us," the FBI director told Congress.

The business of brokering private data is inherently murky, and no one has, as far as I know, drawn a straight line from a news article to a federal surveillance dossier. But also as far as I know, no one is bothering to try and prevent that from happening, either.

Which is pretty surprising, given that news consumers are being asked to dig deeper into their pockets every year to pay for what they read online. Does anyone actually think they will contentedly pay to be surveilled, once they know it's happening?

All tracks from the new Maustetytöt album, Itken jos mua huvittaa, released Friday, are now translated, and in many cases with notes.

My AI translation process has evolved and involves more, and hopefully more effective, review. More soon on that, hopefully.

Translations for three new Maustetytöt songs are available, including this devastating number.

I got some great notes from lilli m on how Maustetytöt seem to be artfully playing with the Finnish word "kiusaus" in their new single on school bullying. They seem to use it to mean, variously, "temptation," "bullying," and "ham casserole." (In fairness, all Finns apparently consider ham casserole a form of temptation.)

AI English translation of Maustetytöt's new single, "Hapentuhlaaja." (Previously)

My favorite band sings in Finnish.

Maustetytöt are an indie-pop/iskelmä duo. Their name means "spice girls," like the British band, an inside joke. They sing about depressing topics but in a way that is surprisingly uplifting. Sort of Morrissey meets the Magnetic Fields (meets Markus Allan).

Despite singing in Finnish, they have gained an international following (especially in Europe) after appearing in the excellent Aki Kaurismäki film Fallen Leaves.

They were subtitled in the film and I suspect owe much of their extra-Finland popularity -- they sold out venues in Paris and Berlin in 2024 -- to the existence of Lyrcis Translate (the website) and an English subtitled, and very well shot and perfomed, set of songs from a concert at Helsinki Kulttuuritalo in late 2020.

I don't speak Finnish, but by the time I came across Maustetytöt they already had three albums out and every song had English lyrics available somewhere on the internet. And even early songs that are rarely heard any more had Finnish lyrics that could be machine translated with a click (except this one, which a kind Finnish soul transcribed after I begged in the comments.... kiitos "lilli m").

But yesterday Maustetytöt released the first single, "Oslo Helsinki Berliini Kokkola," from their forthcoming album. When I put on my headphones last night, I found it had a captivating, restrained sound, brighter and more spare than their past productions, and was clearly about the band's relentless 2023-2024 tour schedule, where they hit 96 cities with 166 shows (versus Taylor Swift's 53 and 149 on her tour, in almost precisely the same date range).

But how to actually understand what they were saying? There were no native Finnish lyrics up yet, much less English translations.

I turned to the same tool I use to transcribe recorded work interviews, OpenAI's Whisper. I use a packaged version of Whisper for the Mac. I give it an audio file and it gives me an interactive transcript of my interview. I always double or triple check its output against the original audio before publishing anyone's words, and have found it to need shockingly few correctoins.

Until a few days ao I didn't realize Whisper (at least the large model) can also transcribe singing. Boy, can it.

After downloading the YouTube version of the new Maustetytöt single and reducing it to audio, I handed the file to Whisper which produced a transcript that seemed plausible to a non-Finnish speaker. The words seemed to line up with what I heard on the audio (one nice thing about Finnish is that pronounciation of letters remains consistent across words, unlike in English). I could see there were some errors even without understanding the transcription; for example words changing from one iteration of the chorus to another even though they sounded the same on the recording. But generally the accuracy seemed prety good.

Then I translated the Finnish text using Google Translate. Whisper can translate directly but my copy, MacWhisper, for some reason does not use Whisper's translation capability, instead falling back on Apple's on-computer translation system, which cannot handle Finnish.

The translation mostly seemed to fit the theme of the song. I did some spot checks on lines that seemed to not make sense or in context or were otherwise jarring. Correcting those lines involved a fairly desperate and scattershot attempt to understand them in a language I don't speak: Machine translating various fragments of a line or set of lines; searching phases; looking up individual words and their many, many Finnish declensions; asking Google search's built in AI (often on accident) about idioms or phrase meanings (surprisingly useful).

I had a pretty decent set of lyrics within about 20 minutes of deciding to put them together. The hardest part was formatting - putting Finnish lines next to English ones.

I've been fixing little things ever since. For example, a news story (in Finland) about the new single said it mentioned Juhla Mokka, the leading coffee bean brand in Finland. This mad me realize Whisper had misheard this as "juhlamakasta," which roughly means party (so Google Translate tells me). I had thought the singer said "I like to party / I don't like the spotlight." Actually it was "I like Juhla Mokka [staying home with coffee] / I don't like the spotlight", which makes a lot more sense!

The next day someone (of course) wrote the Finnish lyrics into a comment under the YouTube video. It looks like Whisper did a very good job, matching the human transcription almost verbatim.

Google Translate seems to have fallen down a bit more, but it at least let me accurately understand the bulk of what I was hearing. So much of the experience of a rock song is not about the words. Even the experience of listening to a singer is as much about the sound of their voice as the words they say. If you can add a 80-90% accurate translation to that you're not missing tooo much. Especially when time is of the essence; on the internet, a better translation will come in time.

You can find my transcript and (mostly machine) translation of Maustetytöt's new single Oslo Helsinki Berliini Kokkola here. It's likely still got some errors but I'll probably keep finding and fixing some of them over the next few days at least.

You can find all my English language Maustetytöt lyrics here. That page only contains things I could not find native translations for. The rest of the band's songs are in English (via actual Finnish speakers) on Lyrics Translate. Nothing beats human translation -- when you can get it.

Earlier this year, iPhone developers Marco Arment and David Smith sat down to discuss how they efficiently manage their apps as sole proprietors. Arment makes a podcasting app and Smith makes an app for customizing your homescreen with widgets. Both are successful businesses.

One thing that made me a little sad was that both men said they found it important to avoid facilitating direct communication between human beings.

Here's Arment, for example:

I intentionally have not created any way in Overcast for users to write text or post images that would be visible to other users. Because then you have user to user communication, then you have things like harassment, illegal content being posted, takedowns, all sorts of stuff you have to deal with.

And so, you know, and you look at the problem set of a podcast app, it's like I can do 95% of what people want without incurring some of those giant burdens that would require a staff to moderate and things over time.

Smith similarly called it "a massive sort of obligation" to enable features like allowing users to, for example, send pictures into one another's widgets. "So I just don't go near those," he said.

On the one hand, I completely understand where both developers are coming from and can't fault their choice. I've actually been the editor sending a reporter to ask a tech company why they allowed bad behaviors to fester on their platform for so long (if only because others were leveling this criticism). I've become very familiar with how far some powerful people expect platforms to go to police their content, and why that expectation exists.

But I'm also old enough to remember when the internet was a more free and hopeful place, and when connecting people directly — strangers very much included — was considered one of its great superpowers. We've spent the last decade or so becoming intimately familiar with what can go wrong when you connect people online and how to mitigate the risks inherent in doing that.

There are also costs on the other side, though, in creating expectations for how platforms should police communication and in focusing a good chunk of interface design on stopping the worst actors. If we designed parks and cafes and sidewalks to thwart the most malevolent people who might use them, they would be a lot less enjoyable for the rest of us, and much of the web increasingly feels nerfed in this way.

I hold out some hope that the pendulum of conventional tech wisdom will swing the other way soon, and that we can collectively see the value in online spaces that bring people together and find some ways to make it easier for people like Marco and David to build and manage those spaces in a way that feels safe for everyone.

Because I think we've only begun to scratch the surface of how the internet can bring people together to accomplish great things.

I was recently one of 20 people laid off from The Intercept, and one of my sources of comfort in the wake of that event has been re-watching Drifting Clouds, a 1996 film from the gifted director Aki Kaurismäki. It portrays a couple who lose their jobs amid recession in early 1990s Finland. There's a great scene set at the closing night of a restaurant where one of the couple works as head waitress. The owner spends her last moments there listening to a band play the sentimental iskelmä song Kohtalon Tuulet, or "Winds of Fate," and watching the aging clientele dance. Subtitles helpfully translate the wistful lyrics into English:

My youth is gone, but bitter I never should be
Happiness I was able to feel
With my friends to accompany me

All of our dreams now faded away
Bringing tears to my eyes

The winds of fate took all that away
All of our dreams never fulfilled

When those winds blow over me some day
You will never see me here again

As the band plays its final notes inside the plush and colorful restaurant, the head waitress, from the cold grays of a Helsinki sidewalk, bundles the owner off into a cab. "Thanks for everything, Ilona," says the owner. "And farewell."

"Goodbye manager," says the head waitress.

It is about as moving a depiction as I've seen of the last moments of a job, of the heartbreaking blend of sentimental humanity and brutal reality.

But really what sticks with me are the lyrics, and how Kaurismäki links the "winds of fate," a kind of death, to the end of a job. It's a perceptive move, because these days our careers feel like a series of hypotheses about how the world will work — and all of them are eventually smashed.

The Intercept I just left is, for example, one in a series that were born and died in my seven and a half years there: The editor in chief who hired me left a few months in and was replaced, the parent company's business model switched from blogs to streaming video, the publication went from for-profit to nonprofit, we housed and then relinquished the Snowden archive, the staff grew and shrank, the focus evolved.

Another provocative media company where I used to work, in the same building as The Intercept, was profitable and thriving until one day it ended up bankrupt because its reporting angered the wrong billionaire.

The couple in Drifting Clouds persevere, even as the setbacks pile up to comical heights, and with some merciful good luck create a new start for themselves. Similarly, change in the media business has done me more favors than harm. When I started college, my expected career track was to start at a small newspaper and hop to a series of progressively larger ones, earning a pittance along the way. By the time I graduated there was an explosion of web publications, then blogs, then digital media juggernauts like BuzzFeed and Vox, nonprofit investigative publications like Pro Publica and The Intercept, then the micro-nonprofits, and now further atomization into the likes of Substack and Patreon-supported publishers. I find these new vistas invigorating.

I'm on record as saying that some post-me Intercept is going to be the best yet, but I'm still proud of the ones I was a part of. My colleagues there (and the contractors and freelancers I worked with) were unbelievably talented and generous human brings, and thanks to them my teams

• revealed hidden NSA listening stations in a New York skyscraper and across the U.S.;
• exposed Google's secret plans for a search engine censored by the Chinese government;
• revealed Facebook's secret blacklist of people and groups too dangerous to praise;
• reported out the biggest-ever leak of files from Chinese authorities;
• explained new forms of surveillance, from tower dumps to your car's onboard computer to plug-in video surveillance networks;
• shined light on Oracle's activities in China;
• carefully redacted, reported out, and published more than 2000 internal NSA documents; and
• caught Zoom lying about encryption.

Yes, the "winds of fate" eventually blew over me, and I got bundled into my metaphorical cab. That was the price of being able to work at a fearless investigative online magazine with the kindest and most capable coworkers I've ever encountered, and it was absolutely worth it. At some point I'll figure out what comes next; hit me up on LinkedIn! In the meantime I'm enjoying some much-deserved beach time with my family this summer, which thankfully comes with some much nicer winds (and sadly not any iskelmä).

—Ryan Tate, June 15, 2022

I make coffee using a stainless steel, double filter, 32 oz french press called the Espro P7. It’s a big improvement over conventional french presses — producing a cleaner cup and keeping coffee hot and insulated — but you may need to substantially alter your brewing process to obtain an equivalent cup of coffee, particularly if you are a bit finicky about coffee. Below are some tips

It brews more quickly

The P7 seems to need about 25 percent less time to extract equivalent flavors from a given amount of coffee than a conventional glass press. I hypothesize this is due to the insulated stainless steel walls keeping the water hotter during the brew process.

You may need a trick to keep the lid on during brewing

The P7 has a double filter exposed to coffee both below and on the side of the plunger. This innovative design is superior to a conventional flat, single filter at removing coffee bean particulate from your brew slurry, but occupies much more space in the press:

With a conventional press, the filter protrudes below the lid only perhaps 1 cm and it is no problem to keep the lid on while brewing by simply retracting the filter into an “up” position. With the P7, retracting the filter in this way creates perhaps 5cm+ protrusion, seriously limiting how full the press can be, particularly if you do not wish the grounds to be touched by the filter. In fact, I had trouble filling even to the “minimum” fill line in the beaker with the lid on and filter attached.

Nonetheless, you can brew the P7 to maximum capacity with the lid on by simply removing the plunger mechanism from the lid prior to the start of brewing. This involves unscrewing the filter from the plunger stem, perhaps five seconds of work (and something you do when cleaning anyway). Then remove the plunger stem. Then you put the lid on by itself. Then you attach the plunger and screw on the filter before brewing.

(In practice you don’t actually remove and re-attach the filter every time you brew. You just never put it on in the first place, after disassembling it to clean, then you attach it when it is time to plunge.)

There is no need to let the coffee fines “settle” after you plunge

With conventional french presses, some connoisseurs like to give 30-60 seconds after they plunge to allow fine particles that made it past the filter to settle on top of the filter as gravity pulls them down; this keeps them out of the dispensed coffee. The technique is suggested by (for example) James Hoffman and Tim Wendelboe. It is superfluous in the Espro P7 in my experience, so you can just skip that step.

(One exception: I have found more darkly roasted beans that are ground quite fine, for drip coffeemakers, can, in fact leave particulate that makes it past even the P7 filters. This is not an issue for me now since I have moved to a slightly coarser grind, see next section.)

You may want to adjust your grind settings

If you are still grinding your beans quite coarse for french press, buying a P7 offers a good excuse to experiment with finer settings, since the filters can handle finer grinds. You may find more desirable flavors are extracted from the coffee at finer grinds, and/or that brew time may be shortened.

Conversely, some people, per Wendelboe and Hoffman above, were already grinding finer for the french press than conventional wisdom has historically dictated, for example all the way down to drip coffee maker levels. They may find that the higher, more even brew temperature of the insulated P7 actually encourages them to go a couple of notches more coarse. This is because the hotter water in the P7 is extracting more flavor from the beans, and, for the same quantity of coffee and brew time as a conventional press, may produce bitter and overexacted coffee, particularly at fine grind settings.

Personally, I use a Baratza Encore burr grinder, and went from a setting of 15 (drip) with my Bodum to a setting of 21 (Chemex) with the P7. The Encore manual suggests a setting of 30-32 for french press, in keeping with traditional advice for conventional press filters.

Consider making more coffee in fewer batches

When I used a Bodum french press, I would make one cup of coffee at a time, three times per morning. This ensured that each cup was hot and properly extacted; the filter on a conventional press exposes too much of the used coffee grind to any liquid left in the beaker, in effect continuing some of the brewing process rather than properly holding the coffee.

With the P7, not only does the coffee retain more heat due to superior insulation, it is also much better sealed off from the coffee at the bottom of the pot. So now I make all three cups at once. It can take me an hour or two to dispense all the coffee and it remains very good.

A note: The P7 is actually bad at making small batches like a single cup of coffee. It retains so much brew under the filter compared to a conventional press that it is pretty inefficient to make a single cup. Espro makes smaller models if you want to make a single cup.

You will “waste” a bit more coffee

Even brewing a near full press of coffee at a time, the P7 seems a bit less efficient than my Bodum, Since the filter rides higher up the sides of the pot, per the picture above, it seems more volume is left outside the filter.

I intended to quantify this difference with a test, but unfortunately my Bodum pot shattered before I could do this. I can report that the P7 yields about 850ml of coffee when you brew 1100ml of water and 61g of coffee beans. Although this seems significantly less efficient than the Bodum, it is completely worth the slight extra waste, in my experience, to get the superior tasting coffee. The espro coffee tastes so much “cleaner” I can’t go back.

Bringing it all together: How I  brew

So given all the above this is specifically what I do to brew an excellent cup of coffee in a P7, in case anyone finds it useful. For context, my water is always 208F (via our trusty Zojirushi pot).

(Remove plunger rod and filter from lid per above if not already separate. I always leave mine separate after washing.)

Ensure the two filters, detached from the lid, are twisted and clicked together. This will make it faster to attach them later.

Grind 61g coffee at medium coarse (Chemex, 21 on Baratza Encore), put into P7 pot.

Put pot on scale, zero scale. Start count up timer.

Fill pot with 1100g (ml) of water, making sure to wet all grounds.

Put lid on pot.

At 1 minute 20 seconds, remove lid, stir grounds, re-attach lid.

At 2 minutes, remove lid, stir again, skim foam from top with a spoon (per Wendelboe in this video at 3:30).

Attach plunger to lid: Put plunger rod through lid, screw filters on to it.

At 3 minutes, place plunger + lid on top of press and press.

Dispense and enjoy coffee, returning to pot for more as needed. It stays pretty hot! In fact, I pour half cups initially in order to let the dispensed coffee cool more rapidly.

Notes

As you can see, I brew at a 1:18 coffee:water ratio, which works well for the beans I buy, which tend to be medium roast and relatively fresh.  I also prefer sweet flavors to bitter; based on what my local coffee shops serve, other folks seem to enjoy more bitter compounds and may like a richer ratio.

I also think finer grinds will probably work well with the P7, given (probably) some adjustments to the timings above, although some beans (darker roasts) seem to “shatter” more in the grinder into finer particles which can escape the P7 filter, and for those you may want to experiment with providing time for the grounds that make it past the P7 filters to settle.