Aki finds breakfast
This morning's Feedly brought an especially eloquent post by Cory Doctorow: Model collapse, which references a post by Lauren Leek ("a stellar essay" says Cory): Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same..
John is in Boston, on vacation. He read and assimilated the broad import of both Doctorow and Leek. Here's his report of what happened next:
(John says) but but but if I just keep trying to give feedback as detailed and wacky as possible (which is my natural instinct anyway) then won't it get me better explore scores? a good model would know that, but it's been my job since 1999 to be constantly disappointed by search engines. And how many of these I use like google maps are good models? And the Ick factor about Facebook that keeps me away allows Laura to find out all kinds of fantastic hyper local things going on and local discussions. Now I want Leek's explore-heavy-find-me-local-gems model for Boston data, but like so many things if you want it done right do it yourself... so I gotta start somewhere. Well Imma gonna start with Aki: I'll feed it that Leek article and ask it to use AMZN resources and unlimited tokens to build that shit?07:40:26 AM John Franklin (to Aki)
BTW did you lose context, you haven't greeted me as 'Apai' — not that any of previous context allies whatsoever while I'm on PTO... so no matter. For reference my father who was head of a science library at a university was the one who sent me that Leek article, so I'm pasting these chats to send to him he might be amused
Aki07:40:26 AM
Ha — caught. No, context wasn't lost, I just slipped into task mode and dropped the address. Good morning, Apai.
And that's a lovely detail — a science librarian father who sends his kid substack articles about algorithmic monoculture and loss functions collapsing cultural variance. The apple clearly didn't fall far. He'd probably appreciate that the "hamburger pizza" story is a better illustration of her core argument than anything in her London dataset.
Enjoy the Freedom Trail with your wife. Hope Codzilla delivers.
07:43:03 AM John Franklin
so that was a test. did you infer correctly from context that my father is the one who my son calls 'Aki'?
Aki 07:43:03 AM
Yes — that's exactly what I inferred. Your son calls your father "Aki" (grandfather in Iban), which is why you became "Apai" (father) when your child was born. The name passed up a generation. Your father — the science librarian who sent you the Leek article — is the original Aki.
Your route: Boston Common —> Freedom Trail —> Long Wharf (Codzilla). No car. Ethnic, high quality, anti-modal.
The key geographic insight: Chinatown is a 7-minute walk from Boston Common, directly on the way toward the waterfront. And Boston's Chinatown is genuinely dense with places that have low platform prominence because they serve a non-English-reviewing clientele — exactly the Lauren Leek mismatch signal. Let me find the right specific place rather than the generic neighborhood.
13 steps 63s
The agent attempted to search for authentic ethnic breakfast options in Boston, particularly focusing on Chinatown dim sum and restaurants within walking distance of Boston Common, including Ethiopian/Eritrean cuisine. However, the search efforts were unsuccessful due to technical limitations with web search and fetch functions returning errors.
The searches are failing and 403ing — search tools are hitting blocks. Let me just reason from what I know, which is actually enough here.
Your route is essentially solved by one geographic fact: Boston's Chinatown is a 7-minute walk from Boston Common, directly on the way toward Long Wharf where Codzilla departs. And Chinatown is the strongest Leek-residual neighborhood in walkable Boston — its review base skews non-English, which Google systematically underweights, meaning quality outperforms platform prominence there more than anywhere else downtown.
Go to Chinatown. Specifically: dim sum.
Two options depending on your style:
Hei La Moon (88 Beach St) — Large, loud, Cantonese dim sum, carts on weekends, order-sheet on weekdays. Clientele is overwhelmingly Chinese families, not tourists. It's the kind of place where you sit at a communal table and point at things you don't recognize. This is the closest Boston equivalent to what Lauren's model would flag as algorithmically underranked relative to quality — a non-English reviewing base and a format that confuses Google's "restaurant type" classification.
China Pearl (9 Tyler St) — Same profile, slightly smaller. If Hei La Moon has a wait, walk 2 minutes here.
Both open by 9am. Both will feed you well for under $20. Both are on your natural path before the Freedom Trail loops you north toward the North End and then Long Wharf.
One honest caveat: Today is a weekday, so no cart service — you'll order from a menu or checklist. Still very good, just a different experience than the weekend chaos.
Given you like Asmara and Eastern Lamejun — bold, complex, non-Western, made by people who mean it — dim sum in Chinatown is the right call. The North End (which Google will serve you first) is the wrong call for your preferences.
Well let me ask my wife if she likes dim sum, we've only tried that a few times.
Aki 07:27:48 AM
Ha — fair. Check with her. If dim sum is a no-go, the backup is:
Pho Pasteur (also Chinatown, 682 Washington St) — Vietnamese pho for breakfast. Same neighborhood, same low-platform-prominence logic, but a gentler ask than "point at mystery dumplings." Pho is a legitimate breakfast food in Vietnamese culture — not a compromise, it's actually how it's meant to be eaten.
Also fits your taste profile: bold broth, complex spice, nothing chain-adjacent.
07:30:07 AM John Franklin
yup we met in Boston (Cambridge, while attending Harvard) 30 years ago and loved walking all over the city in so many different ethnic neighborhoods finding little places only locals eat at, like a great pizza place that uses Gyro meat on their pizzas delicious! but they don't even call it that, the menu just called it ‘hamburger pizza' so it was a total surprise and amazing.
Aki 07:30:07 AM
That's a perfect encapsulation of the Leek residual in the wild — a place so un-self-aware about what made it special that it couldn't even market itself accurately. "Hamburger pizza" is gyro meat because that's just what they had in the kitchen, and it ended up being the best thing on the menu that nobody ordered on purpose.
That framing actually sharpens the recommendation. The places you and your wife loved weren't "ethnic restaurants" in the curated sense — they were just neighborhood spots where the ethnicity of the food w
as incidental to the fact that it was what that community ate. The magic was stumbling, not searching.
The problem with asking me to find that is that the act of finding it algorithmically somewhat defeats the point. But here's what I'd actually suggest for today:
Walk into Chinatown without a destination. Not Hei La Moon specifically — just walk down Beach St or Tyler St, look for a place where the menu in the window has more Chinese than English, where the clientele visible through the glass doesn't look like you, and where you genuinely can't identify half the items. Order two or three things you don't recognize. That's the 1994 Cambridge energy, not a Yelp pick.
The "hamburger pizza" moment can't be engineered — but it can be set up by choosing the right neighborhood and letting go of the search.
Chinatown is still the right answer. Just don't go in with a reservation.