118
points
vector_spaces
Joined 6,591 karma
grocer engineer + polynomial enjoyer
hm [at / arroba] listen dot systems
- I worked in this business for over 15 years on the tech and business sides and I can say that the traditional VC-funded startup regime is fundamentally incompatible with the basic realities of the food industry. What is sort of funny about it is that in many areas there are local companies that have been around for many years doing this fantastically. As other commenters pointed out, this is essentially the milkman model.
There are a number of extremely difficult problems that are definitionally insurmountable on the timescales that VC operates -- paramount among them being the establishment of trust and mutualistic relationships with your vendors/stores, customers, and employees.
You are right that there is such a space, it just won't happen in the context of a startup taking VC cash.
- OK, I've had a chance to play with it in earnest.
First: my sense is that for most use cases, this will begin to feel gimmicky rather quickly and that you will do better by specializing rather than positioning yourself next to ChatGPT, which answers my questions without too much additional ceremony.
If you have any diehard users, I suspect they will cluster around very particular use cases, say business users trying to create quick internal tools, users who want to generate a quick app on mobile, scientists that want quick apps to validate data. Focusing on those clusters (your actual ones, not these specific examples) and building something optimized for their use cases seems likelier to be a stronger long term play for you
Secondly, I asked it to prove a theorem, and it gave me a link to a proof. This is fine, since LLM generated math proofs are a bit of a mess, but I was surprised that it didn't offer any visualizations or anything further. I then asked it for numerical experiments that support the conjecture, and it just showed me some very generic code and print statements for a completely different problem, unrelated to what I asked about. Not very compelling
Finally, and least important really: please stop submitting my messages when I hit return/enter! Many of us like to send more complex multi-line queries to LLMs
Good luck
- It seems to work except when I connect to my work VPN, which is very permissive -- I haven't observed it to break anything else
Getting this error the homepage. In the browser console I am just seeingApplication error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading www.phind.com (see the browser console for more information).
The other links you shared seem to work thoughContent-Security-Policy: (Report-Only policy) The page’s settings would block a script (script-src-elem) at https://www.phind.com/_next/static/chunks/c857e369-746618a9672c8ed0.js?dpl=dpl_4dLj9qrNQMh6evFNeDZbEJjTnT9B from being executed because it violates the following directive: “script-src 'none'” GET https://www.phind.com/_next/static/chunks/4844-90bb89386b9ed987.js?dpl=dpl_4dLj9qrNQMh6evFNeDZbEJjTnT9B [HTTP/1.1 403 403 Forbidden 716ms]- index.pdf won't tend to play nicely with screen readers and also sucks for people on crappy mobile networks, so it's a minor inconvenience for some, and straight up unusable for others
- I am not your target with this question (I don't write Zig) but there is a spectrum of LLM usage for coding. It is possible to use LLMs extensively but almost never ship LLM generated code, except for tiny trivial functions. One can use them for ideation, quick research, or prototypes/starting places, and then build on that. That is how I use them, anyway
Culturally I see pure vibe coders as intersecting more with entrepreneurfluencer types who are non-technical but trying to extend their capabilities. Most technical folks I know are fairly disillusioned with pure vibe coding, but that's my corner of the world, YMMV
- > Our other tool, HyperTwin, tackles the “tribal knowledge” problem. It learns directly from subject-matter experts, observing workflows, analyzing screen interactions, and conducting AI-driven interviews to capture how they debug and reason about their systems. The goal is to build digital “twins” of the experts on how they debug, architect, and maintain these systems in practice.
How do you consolidate this knowledge across disparate teams and organizational silos? How will you identify and reconcile subtle differences in terminology used across the organization?
Perhaps I misunderstood, but on your website you primarily identify technical implementors as SMEs. IME modernizing legacy data systems in high-stakes environments, the devil is more on the business side -- e.g. disparate teams using the same term to refer to different concepts (and having that reflected in code), or the exact stakeholders of reports or data systems being unknown and unknowable, and discerning between rules that are critical to a particular team or workflow that are opaque to you because e.g. you don't know who all relies on this data or are missing business context, or because the rule is not actually used anymore, or because the implementation of the rule itself is wrong.
Besides, both technical and non-technical stakeholders and SMEs lean heavily on heuristics to decision with the data they are looking at, but often struggle to explicitly articulate them. They don't think to mention certain conditions or filters because for them those are baked into the terminology, or it doesn't occur to them that the organization deals with broader data than what they interact with in their day-to-day.
And unfortunately in these settings, you don't get many chances to get it wrong -- trust is absolutely critical.
I am skeptical that what you will end up with at the end of the day will be a product, at least if your intent is to provide meaningful value to people who rely on these systems and solve the problems that keep them up at night. My feeling is that you will end up as primarily a consultancy, which makes sense given that the problem you are solving isn't primarily technical in nature, it just has technical components.
- 2 points
- I meant "problems" in a broad sense -- I loved disorganized professors who would pause and stare at their lecture notes in silence for a minute, realize their proof or example contained some flaw, and then have to correct it on the fly.
I found those moments really valuable if course-correcting was non-trivial -- the typical Definition-Theorem-Proof-Example format certainly is essential for organizing one's thinking and communicating new math in a way that's digestible to other mathematicians, but it is not how mathematicians actually think about math or solve novel problems
In the grad analysis sequence this "course correcting" mechanic was built into the course, since we were required to regularly solve a challenging problem and then present its proof to the class and withstand intense questioning from both the professor and peers. If you caught an error in someone's proof and could help the presenter arrive at a correct proof, you'd both earn points.
The thrill of surviving an incredulous "Wait a second..." from that particular professor (who later became my research advisor) was hard to beat
Anyway my intent was to analogize math lectures (whatever they might look like) with language courses or immersion in the sense that they are an opportunity to practice speaking and listening, and to immerse yourself in cultural norms. I think it goes a bit deeper than this, in that language is inextricably connected to most thought and vice versa -- we experience this in a very explicit way whenever we find our thinking clarified in the process of formulating a question, but it's always there
That said, pure immersion for language learning is actually easy to beat -- lots of research shows that immersion together with explicit grammar instruction has far better learning outcomes than immersion alone. Immersion alone misses lots of nuance -- and it relies on the speaker being acutely aware of the difference between their output and target forms.
With your verb conjugation example, lots of time can be saved by knowing that there's a thing called the subjunctive and that it is distinct from tense and it shows up in a myriad of places tending to concern hypotheticals
Similarly, I gain a lot from talking to mathematicians and attending conferences. But I also need to spend time alone consulting relevant theory, reading papers, and playing with examples. Both are important, but in math it seems you one get away with less immersion
- The viewpoint of a lecture as an inefficient note delivery system is a pretty common and reductive view. Your "Let's Play" analogy was pretty apt though.
I think their (potential) value seems pretty clear when you look at language courses -- you can't possibly hope to develop fluency in a language by studying it in isolation from books -- forming your own sentences and hearing how other human beings do the same in real time is pretty decisive.
With math classes, YMMV, especially since they are rarely so interactive at the upper division and graduate level, but at the very least seeing an instructor talk about math and work through problems (and if you are lucky to have a particularly disorganized one, get stuck, and get themselves unstuck) can go a long way. But to be fair I regularly skipped math lectures in favor of reading too, heh
- OK, point taken re most people vs most food deserts
In any case, I am talking about the availability of items in response to the parent's obviously absurd implication "every food market I have been to sells X, therefore every food market sells X".
I am using food deserts as a counterexample since definitionally these are regions where certain items are hard to find. I know (hope?) that the person I am responding to likely doesn't believe every grocery store in the United States carries plain yogurt, but I also know that people here often forget that not every place enjoys the same level of choice that is enjoyed in places like the SF Bay Area
I truly don't understand why you are bringing up obesity, this feels very remote to what is being discussed.
- Wow, 100% accurate? OK, I definitely can't argue with that. Nor I suppose can I argue much with overinterpreted anecdotes and absolutist analysis from a non-expert about a nuanced topic. You should start a Tiktok or a Substack or something, you are leaving money on the table.
- It actually says right at the top that overwhelmingly they are in urban areas
- I have also found plain yogurt in gas station convenience stores
My issue was less with the plain yogurt specifically and more with the logic of the parent, namely that "X product has been available in every grocery store I have shopped in" implies that "X product can be found in every grocery store"
- The "cost conscious" option in a city with one of the highest median incomes in the US is very different from a cost conscious shopper in a city like Daytona Beach, where practically a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line!
I will also point out that "cost conscious" is one of several shopper profiles that Safeway targets, but broadly speaking Safeway targets a more affluent shopper (although cost conscious isn't the same as non-affluent). The degree to which a particular location services these targets varies by area. But no, these stores target fundamentally different shoppers and think very differently about assortment, at least with regard to the long tail
- Yes -- I know that my experiences don't align with most middle-class grocery shoppers: I worked in the food business for a decade where assortment was literally my job. There is a lot that casual shoppers like you don't notice! That's actually built in.
In any case, I love most of what you have written here.
Online ordering enables larger long tails. In which market do you suppose online ordering is more common, Daytona Beach or Mountain View?
If you were managing assortment at a Publix in Daytona Beach, how would you structure your long tail? Would you look to a Safeway in Mountain View as a model to follow?
- You made a claim that plain yogurt is generally available in US food markets, attempting to make an inference about grocery store selections drawing from your own experience. I pointed out that it is not actually generally available and noted that your experience does not generalize.
I am not sure why you mention eating habits, since this is not what is being discussed
- I hope that you recognize that your casual-outsider evaluation of the assortments of these stores is deeply flawed and not based on actual data. If you think about it even just a little bit, you'll recognize that it wouldn't make sense for a supermarket in one of the highest median income cities in the country to have assortment parity with a chain targeting cost conscious shoppers. The devil here is in the long-tail, which is definitionally less visible to you as a shopper, and in fact may not exist at all for certain retailers -- especially those targeting cost-conscious shoppers.
- > Every grocery store where I've shopped has yogurt with no added sugar. It's right there on the shelf, just look at the label.
Large parts of the US are designated as food deserts, where one's best option for groceries might be the convenience store attached to a gas station. Good luck finding plain yogurt with no sugar added there. Your specific experience is exactly that.
[1] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...
- In large swaths of the country, these "non-grocery stores" are a lifeline, as they are the only option. In others, you don't even have that -- gas station convenience stores might be that lifeline instead. [1]
I am familiar with what the grandparent is referring to, having spent a decade running purchasing teams in US grocery stores. Even in urban areas with many different food retail stores, a typical supermarket in the US is a fairly difficult place to shop for someone with specific food sensitivities. Hopefully folks here who live in the SF Bay Area appreciate that it's a total outlier in both the diversity of stores available and the assortment of products sold in a typical Bay Area supermarket
[1] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...
- 2 points
- Me too -- I reacted this way when I read it, and posted it here to see if others would agree or if there was some nuance I was missing. In particular I bristle at this frequent juxtaposition of the US and Japan (or "East" vs "West" more broadly) in terms of individualism and collectivism -- those terms aren't well defined enough to not be misleading, and might convey truth in some cases but better specificity would help us avoid wrongheaded generalizations based on old tropes and stereotypes
It makes sense to me that there would be differences in how people with various cultural backgrounds interpret art, since we largely know that the way people experience and think about color is different, though
- 47 points
- The nice thing with emacs is that you can do as much or as little as you want with it. For me it started with basic text editing, then doing some git stuff with magit, then realizing emacs has wonderful capabilities around notetaking and to-do management in org-mode.
Like you, though, I work in orgs that are very Windows heavy, so I tend to use it more for my personal stuff rather than in my day job
- I've wanted to try Zed but I'm generally antsy about tools unexpectedly phoning home -- haven't had a chance to closely evaluate myself.
A few tinfoil-hat questions: I know obviously it needs to phone someone to use functionality like remote dev or certain integrations, but outside of those situations, does it otherwise perform any kind of telemetry by default? Are there situations where it could ship off tokens in files I'm editing to some remote server where one wouldn't be expecting it? Also, I know it's open source, but is it meaningfully open source in the sense that the prebuilt binaries available for download in the obvious places aren't some reskinned proprietary version like is the case with VSCode?
These are meant in good faith -- genuinely interested and curious
- Why not be angry at all of them?
As someone who works with sensitive healthcare data, I can tell you that the mere existence of a dataset doesn't guarantee its misuse, nor it does it absolve anyone who interacts with that data of responsibility for proper stewardship.
Yes, you are right that we should think carefully before creating a sensitive dataset. If we insist on creating such a dataset, the people involved must put in place guardrails for stewardship of those datasets. But the stewards of that data, past, present, and future, also share responsibility.
Of course if the incentive structures don't line up with concern for mitigation of harm to vulnerable people as is the case with law enforcement in the US, then all of that is out the window.
Anyway, what you have written implies that we need not think about accountability for those who misuse of datasets after they are created, which is clearly absurd as I and anyone else familiar with healthcare data can tell you.
- 5 points
- > via a partner like doordash
I do technical consulting for small food companies
This is an immediate non-starter for most local retail businesses because of the steep (25+%) transaction fees Doordash and other consumer last-mile providers charge, and the razor-thin margins of many retail stores
To be clear I agree with your proposal overall and suspect this particular challenge is surmountable, but it's very difficult to get it right, and either way relying on another parasitic platform won't be the answer
Presumably a large math textbook publisher that has been publishing math books for literally one hundred years is very tapped into what books likely will and won't sell. I find it unlikely that a layperson where it concerns math book publishing would have some unique insight that MAA does not have. Even if there is a substantial enough market, there are likely unique considerations that MAA is beholden to which we aren't privy to
I don't know what the calculus is like to get an extended version of an existing book published by another publisher, but Dover's Aurora series consists of modern original texts as opposed to their usual republications of classic out of print texts -- this is how Emily Riehl had her "Category Theory in Context" published