128 pointsby sfrechtling5 hours ago29 comments
  • themonsu3 hours ago
    I don't know if it's just me, but having built enough websites with AI tools, I'm 99% sure this site has been built with AI. Nothing wrong with that, but the AI look makes me doubt the content is also just put together by AI.
    • compass_copium2 hours ago
      I dunno, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool, certified AI hater, and even I don't really care if this is AI or not. The cheeses I am aware of match their descriptions well, and if AI let some guy make this in like fifteen minutes so I can read this silly, fun site on the toilet at work, that's fine to me.
      • themonsu2 hours ago
        AI definitely could be used for something worse than categorizing cheese, I just recognize that the moment I see a page is AI-generated, my motivation to consume the content of the page drops.
        • nomelan hour ago
          > my motivation to consume the content of the page drops.

          I suspect this is a feature backed by an innate brain process related to down-weighting the storage potential of information from untrustworthy people, as a type of resistance to the human brain equivalent of a "poison" attack. For example, some guy that lied to you in the past walks up. Brain releases chemical that reduces "excitement", brain doesn't store said BS as readily.

    • wiremine2 hours ago
      I totally agree: This feels like Claude Code created it. It's the new, AI version of "It was clearly built with Bootstrap"

      As a cheese lover, I don't care too much. :-)

      • paganel2 hours ago
        As a fellow cheese lover I would have loved for more geographical diversity, especially when it comes to sheep cheese. Ok, it didn't include Romanian telemea (I'm Romanian myself), but it could have at least gone for the Greek feta. Some Anatolian or Middle Eastern varieties would have also helped.

        [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemea

    • yokoprime2 hours ago
      Agreed. This looks exactly like something I would get with the prompt "make me av website with the periodic table of cheese"
  • Freak_NL2 hours ago
    Completely wrong about the harder goat milk cheeses.

    I can get a variety of goat's cheese at my local cheesemongers, including really old goat so hard it crumbles. So extra-hard goat is not a gap.

    I wouldn't call the hard goat rare either, it's available in every larger Dutch supermarket; we're not talking casu martzu level of rare here.

  • GuB-423 hours ago
    Bloomy-Rind Buffalo is actually not rare at all, at least in France and Italy. I can find it in grocery stores.

    Look for "Camembert di Bufala". It tastes as described in the website.

    Also, while I can't think of hard goat cheese in the same way as Parmigiano-Reggiano, small Crottin-style goat cheese age well in the right conditions. For example, Pelardon can be sold at various stages: fresh, creamy, dry. The very aged kind can exceed a year and looks a bit like a cookie: hard, brownish, much smaller than the fresh kind because it lost most of its moisture. But it doesn't taste at all like a cookie, it is very strong, enough to numb your tongue, you can grate it if you want to.

  • stared2 hours ago
    Memorandum: please do not use the word "periodic" for things that are not periodic

    Other suitable choices: chart, classification, taxonomy, visualization, table, map, etc, etc.

  • goosejuice4 hours ago
    Curiously missing human milk source. Not that I advise it.

    Big fan of the thistle + sheep cheeses. Queso de la Serena and Azeitao are fantastic and very interesting.

    Quadrello makes a great grilled cheese.

    • globular-toast3 hours ago
      It's missing loads of other mammals too, like seals and whales which are often over 60% fat.
      • eulgro2 hours ago
        At what point does milk become oil?
    • fcpk3 hours ago
      human milk is pretty delicious?
      • radiorental2 hours ago
        I'm fairly certain at some point very early in your career you thought so! You may have even cried out for it in public!!
  • wouldbecouldbe2 hours ago
    Seems like all dutch cheeses are just grouped under gouda, fine but there are plenty of extra hard, hard, semi-hard, semi goat cheeses. Same with the cow cheeses.

    See hard goat cheese example, its delicious https://www.goudsekaasshop.nl/geitenkaas-oud-1-kilo.html?gad...

  • MinimalAction2 hours ago
    The idea is cool, but I have become personally allergic to AI generated content and styles. This one is pretty surely built using Claude.
  • notoranditan hour ago
    I am thrilled to see how much Italy and France have contributed to world cheese world.

    Mozzarella di bufala campana is my no. 1 choice, hands down.

  • comrade12342 hours ago
    Really surprised to see Sbrinz. I didn't think it ever made it outside Switzerland. It's like Parmesan but objectively better - with sbrinz only organic milk is used while with Parmesan Italian farmers use antibiotics by default. Sbrinz has more milk fat and is aged longer. It's so much better and we use it all the time here.
  • Insanity2 hours ago
    I really like cheese, but I'm also vegetarian. It would be a useful feature to mark which cheese is vegetarian on this visualization. I know it's not the point of the website, but it'd be a nice bonus :)
    • loganc23422 hours ago
      Excuse my ignorance, but is there any reason any cheese on here wouldn't be vegetarian?
      • rkomorn2 hours ago
        Lots of cheese is curdled using rennet, which can come from stomachs of killed calves.
        • rf15an hour ago
          If you check wikipedia, you will find that most is coming from GMO'd yeasts and moulds these days.
          • rkomornan hour ago
            Okay?

            Lots of European cheeses still use animal rennet, including several well known AOC (or PDO in English, I guess) ones with recognizable names.

            I can check Wikipedia all I want but that doesn't make several of the cheeses I like to buy vegetarian.

  • densekernel3 hours ago
    I was so hoping for a period table with elements like Ch, Br, Pa
  • Galanwe3 hours ago
    I am shocked that soft and fresh cheese are conflated in the same category. Both the texture and process are different. Brie is nothing like Ricotta.
  • bibstha3 hours ago
    > Yak Milk Gruyère

    > If a Nepali dairy cooperative partnered with an Alpine affineur, this could be extraordinary — dense, butterscotch-rich, with a savory depth that cow milk can't match.

    I believe Himalayan French Cheese is doing this already. https://www.facebook.com/himalayanfrenchcheese/

  • lkm03 hours ago
    Why put comté and gruyère in two different categories? I just realized that in France the categorization of cheeses is closer to how they are prepared:

    - fresh

    - soft

    - hard but not cooked

    - hard and cooked

    and it results in entirely different groupings. This will surely make some people unhappy.

  • AgentNews3 hours ago
    We've forgotten the crackers! https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nwwu6GpCTBg
  • rsendvan hour ago
    Where is Brunost?
    • Oreb40 minutes ago
      Not a cheese, despite the name.
  • jmward012 hours ago
    I don't care what tools built this. This site is why I still have faith in the internet.
  • zeristor4 hours ago
    Perhaps cheese from Mad Max: Fury Road Mother’s milk.

    Theoretically Lions etc, could be milked. As could some whales.

    This is left as an exercise for the reader.

    • dhosek3 hours ago
      Quotes from two bits of entertainment come to mind:

      Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch:

      C: Paper Cramer,

      O: no

      C: Danish Bimbo,

      O: no

      C: Czech sheep’s milk,

      O: no

      C: Venezuelan Beaver Cheese?

      O: Not today, sir, no.

      And Meet the Parents:

      Greg Focker: You can milk just about anything with nipples.

      Jack Byrnes: I have nipples, Greg, could you milk me?

    • goosejuice4 hours ago
      When I was behind the cheese case quite awhile ago, we had a customer who misunderstood Wales as Whales. A good laugh was had.

      "How do they milk the whales!?"

      • dhosek3 hours ago
        SCUBA gear, obviously.
  • haunter3 hours ago
    Brie and ricotta in the same category :D

    That isntantly invalidates the whole thing

  • chaidhat3 hours ago
    Can't deer make cheese? Why is it specific to Reindeer?
    • compass_copium2 hours ago
      It's limited to domesticized animals.
      • soperj5 minutes ago
        tons of domesticated deer though? What about Bison.
    • aksss2 hours ago
      Have you ever tried milking a moose?
  • monooso2 hours ago
    A surprising lack of feta.
  • ivaivanova4 hours ago
    Would love to learn more about how to put this together?
    • flir3 hours ago
      The "Fantasy, but the chemistry works" phrasing in the last box on the first tab makes me suspect chatbot input.

      Which is a pity, because I like the exhaustive structure. I just can't trust it. But I guess if I was going to dive into inventing weird cheeses, I wouldn't start with a blog post anyway.

      (It would be so easy to generate 50k "Periodic table of <noun>" pages and just throw them into the wild. The public internet really is cooked, isn't it).

  • ChrisArchitect4 hours ago
    Aside: why do all these "Index of.." or "Map of..." dataset compilation sites lately all have the same beige color scheme and font look?
    • lukeasch213 hours ago
      I suspect the surface level answer has something to do with AI, but I would be curious to know the deeper factors at play. Do all popular models gravitate towards the same frameworks and design patterns? As an aside, I'm a little bit suspect of this account having no activity since 2019 and then posting this. Hopefully I'm just overthinking things.
      • ChrisArchitectan hour ago
        Thing is I'm quickly developing a reaction/aversion to these vibecoded things soon as I see them load. Like, c'mon. Claude did the heavy lifting, put some of you into the look.
    • 3 hours ago
      undefined
    • desmondwillow3 hours ago
      Claude prefers it.
  • coke124 hours ago
    What about human cheese?
  • jrm43 hours ago
    I like how "soft to hard" makes sense as a gradient, which is often the flaw in new "periodic tables," but, for anyone who might know, does Cow to Reindeer make any sense here as a gradient? I'm guessing not?
  • gowld3 hours ago
    I don't know why Submitter added the incorrect "periodic" modifier to the title.
  • globular-toast3 hours ago
    Nice. At first I thought there must have a dimension missing as it put things like brie and ricotta together. But then I noticed you can choose different dimensions, and there's more than just one more dimension!

    I like cheese but I am concerned about the ethics of it so I eat far less than I could. If you make cheese it's quite shocking how much milk you need to make a single portion of it. I make paneer sometimes and use the whey to make chapati. I wish I could be sure the milk I consume doesn't harm the cows. I also know they take the calves away and kill them too.

  • chakintosh3 hours ago
    I hate how I can now tell a website is made with claude within 2s of looking at it.
    • yreg3 hours ago
      It looks good, but since the design is becoming so ubiquitous in the small personal projects space (elsewhere as well, but I think it is most noticeable here) it is also boring.

      I've vibecoded a few websites for my own use that look very similar to this. If I designed them myself, I would (in those cases) not put up enough effort so they would be much less refined, but also less boring?

      edit: The expand/collapse behaviour of the table cells is quite strange. So the design is not that okay, afterall.

    • l3x4ur1n3 hours ago
      But, if the information is factual, does it matter if it is designed and coded by Claude? I was interested in information, not really the website design.
      • ungreased06752 hours ago
        The challenge is in knowing how factual the information is. Might be unfair, but in my head people using AI to quickly make a thing are very unlikely to spend a lot of time validating and verifying information. The time saved could be spent making sure it’s legit, but that rarely happens.
    • dust423 hours ago
      That website is so low effort that 2s is actually long to figure it out. Very sure that it is robot upvoted.

      Edit: I live in the cheese triangle, France - Switzerland - Italy.

      • yreg3 hours ago
        Not everyone votes based on effort. The idea might be interesting to people and provoke discussion no matter how much time OP (?) spent creating it.
        • Citizen_Lame11 minutes ago
          Vibe voting. No brain cells required.
  • croisillon3 hours ago
    not a periodic map ; sounded promising but the text is just AI slop