Next time I’m about to get intimate with my partner I’ll remind myself that life is just token sequencing. It will really put my tasty lunch into perspective and my feelings for my children. Tokens all the way down.
People used to compare humans to computers and before that to machines. Those analogies fell short and this one will too
I’m in an interesting place. Here in Seattle I am two blocks from one of the largest Amazon Fresh stores. It was built on the former location of a local grocer. The construction was almost complete before Covid hit, but Amazon shuttered the store during that time. As a result there was no groceries in my neighborhood from 2018-2023.
Now it seems Amazon is going to leave us a grocery desert yet again.
They were piloting smart carts at the location. The cart scans your items so checking out you just push the cart through a scanner that weighs it. But this invention was like a microcosm of Amazon’s whole fuckup with groceries. The problem with the store wasn’t that I couldn’t check out fast enough, it’s that it was a shit grocery store. They had popular products but they were missing all the unpopular, low margin products you need to actually cook (baking powder, shortening, tomato paste, soy sauce…). They only hire non-union jobs program people at the registers because Amazon believes that cashier is a sub-human role.
The previous store had an owner who would wander the aisles and chat with customers. The new store has Europeans with clipboards who watch you as you shop.
My brother has worked as a stocker for King Kullen in New York for 20 years and is a union worker.
In the Seattle area where the poster is from, pretty much all the grocery stores are unionized. Workers at big stores like Safeway, Fred Meyer, QFC, and Albertsons, and local stores PCC, Uwajimaya are represented by UFCW3000. https://ufcw3000.org/shop-union
The more-expensive stores sometimes do. My friend's wife works for one, and the store is closing because it's too close to a discount grocery to get enough traffic to stay open.
The union is making her transfer to a much further location or lose her seniority, for some nonsense reason involving the closer locations historically being part of a different union, despite them now all being the same one.
Not to be rude but there’s 4 Amazon Fresh locations in the greater Seattle area and each of them is next to multiple other large/small grocery options.
For instance, the one in north Seattle (Shoreline) is within eyesight of a Safeway, a Sprouts, two international markets and a chef wholesaler.
The other three locations are similarly crowded with options.
Jackson St location is the only walkable option in its neighborhood. It wasn't very good (terrible selection, stocking issues, slowly increasing locked section) but it was convenient.
There's no walkable grocery store in that area. My friend lives in the area and uses a wheelchair, and Amazon Fresh was the only actual grocery store she could go to.
As much as I'm hoping they do, I would be very surprised if they open a Whole Foods in that area.
Food deserts do exist, but Seattle's Central District is not one of them. This US government tool used to literally be called the "Food Desert Locator" until the current administration re-named it to "Food Access Research Atlas"
It's really the suburban areas of Seattle that develop food deserts, likely due to restrictive zoning for commercial properties and minimum lot-size requirements that make sure that every grocery store is a long SUV ride away from the cu-de-sac neighborhood.
If the term Food Desert offends you, I can gladly switch to calling it Food Apartheid instead.
A giant, multinational, multi-trillion-dollar corporation that will only bargain with individual people living paycheck-to-paycheck? Huh, what a weird power imbalance!
Surely it doesn't have anything to do with their documented history of treating their blue-collar workforce like utter garbage.
I think Amazon are largely shitheads to their low level workers (and still assholes even to mid-level workers), and I am in no way defending them. I'm in fact sickened by them. I will never work for Amazon.
But the implication above was that the non-union employee is the "sub-human" option. I find that attitude pretty gross too. Humans are human whether they are union members or not.
Yes most people in the US would be healthier if they started eating 10% less, even if that 10% came entirely from their protein intake. We just eat too much period.
The framing of the title makes me wonder what we as humans will think of software from this time 100s of years from now. Will the future be a complicated, dense ecosystem of interconnected intelligent systems, putting our current complexity to shame?
Or in the future will we look at the current time as the Wild West, the time when software moved more swiftly than the law. Where oil was there for anyone with a big enough guns to protect it.
Maybe we will experience our own butlerian jihad and realize that the thinking machines were controlling us the whole time. We will look at TikTok how we now look at the proliferation of ether in the 1800s.
I think software is about to become disposable and that’s uncharted territory. Furniture used to be carefully handcrafted and was meant to be passed on for generations. Now that’s a bit of a quaint idea and you probably don’t want your parents’ old couch. There’s a good chance it came flat packed and you assembled it yourself. At work there’s constant nail biting over generating low-quality code. I can’t help but wonder, why reuse any of it? What do you need libraries for? If it’s not hard to specify, it’s practically free to produce now.
> I think software is about to become disposable and that’s uncharted territory.
I agree that most software will likely head that way. I wonder what this means for the economics of the open source ecosystem most software depends on. In a future where most software is made by the successor of LLMs can a human dev grab a tutorial and write software or will it be too unintelligible for a human to do?
The Vernor Vinge SF novels have the profession of "software archaeologist", someone who digs through the layers of systems in order to extract understanding.
Probably the RAG AIs of the future will use it to help generate their users’ software. The AIs themselves might as well use the simple conventionally posix-y stack that we’re all familiar with, because they won’t have any trouble remembering complex invocations. But I bet they also won’t need as deep a stack (why have framework on framework on frameworks if you are an AI and don’t mind boilerplate and tedium?), so they’ll need a source for what over-complicated code looks like.
It would be interesting to see if there would be a market for handcrafted/vintage software the way there is one for luxury items like expensive watches.
Why is it always a blame game? What dos that accomplish? There’s no “good guy” administrations. There’s just realpolitik. The current iteration of ICE is an outgrowth of the Obama admin, as is the problem with billionaires in politics. Biden put a target on Maduro's head before leaving office (continuing to fill a multi-administration powder keg re: Venezuela). Trump just had the panache to brazenly do the deed instead of waiting for the next guy to do it. Horrible? yes. Unprecedented? Hardly.
Now I’m not saying things are inevitable. Trump has a bull-in-china-shop mentality. But he is only being manipulated to set the same agenda, just faster than any president in living memory.
Maybe. I just find most “which administration really started XYZ” discussions are a way for people to feel better about their affiliations. Because ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ are continuous and not an inherent property of things, it is always possible to construct a causal chain that happens to start wherever convenient for your rhetorical purposes.
lol @ “west/israel/free market”. I think you have an aliasing bug.
Why would leftists (or anyone) be confused who the bad guy is here? Generally as a rule of thumb for international conflict you can count on the left to be on the side of the underdog, no matter how naive a view that may be in a given circumstance.
Because someone held a flag in austrailia 8 months before this current Iranian conflict, you assume “the left” (globally!?) is in support of the Ayatollah?
Even more rich because Iran is currently massacring their /leftist/ population who were protesting for rights like /free markets/. How does that dissonance feel to you?
> you assume “the left” (globally!?) is in support of the Ayatollah?
Where did I imply that, justonceokay? And no, I don't think every leftist supports the Ayatollah. Do you think every leftist, globally, doesn't support them?
I was as vague as you were, in referring to leftists. I gave a concrete example of there being confusion about who the bad guys, since you questioned why leftists (or anyone) would be confused.
People used to compare humans to computers and before that to machines. Those analogies fell short and this one will too
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