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Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

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Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#71
Chickfila is very much a top-to-bottom ownership company. They own every step of the process in the cooking, from the machines, to servicing, to the logistics behind maintenance.

It's really exciting to see a company like this just want to own everything they do, and not reach out for 3rd party tools and SaaS and such.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#72
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, regardless of my personal thoughts on the topic, the ethics of eating animals are a lot more controversial among the HN crowd than LGBTQ rights.

Chik-Fil-A is not an arbiter of LGBTQ rights. Their small 6-figure donations to organizations that focus on other issues do very little in the grand scheme of things. Do you really think Chik-Fil-A is directly causing more suffering by donating to a few charities in amounts this small than by raising in captivity and then killing billions of chickens? I see no way to reasonably argue that.

Chick-Fil-A is just the service provider, if not for Chick-Fil-A people would get their chicken elsewhere. If they were raised in a place that felt less like captivity, that would probably be worse for the environment, in terms of using more natural resources per pound of chicken produced. There are trade-offs to everything.

Chick-Fil-A isn't really in the meat business, they're in the restaurant business, and given that they aren't in a very tiny niche, their menus feature meat. They sell plenty of soft drinks and fried potatoes which reduce the amount of meat as a percent of the total calories.

Finally if you're going to get people excited about animal rights, it's probably better to mention cows than chickens. To me, Chick-Fil-A's ads suggest eating chicken as a lesser of two evils, without ever saying that eating chicken is evil. We also don't have a separate word for chicken meat like we do for cow or pig meat, which I think serve as euphemisms.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Political values are important to point out. Companies create these tech blogs as a recruitment vehicle. You should know if the company you're considering applying to is funding bigotry (or "wholesome family values" if that's your angle).

> 'Bigotry'. noun : intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself. Surely castigating the owner of Chick-fil-A for advocating his personal beliefs is the truest example of bigotry here.

No, not really, since his personal beliefs involve advocating for others to suffer.

He suffers nothing by permitting LGBT people to live as they wish.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#74
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the grandparent's political stance is to be outraged at anybody he/she disagrees with and has an unhealthy obsession to blurt it out on discussions that aren't political.

All discussions are political. The only question is whether or not the politics at hand affect you. And to quote Chick-fil-a's CEO: "Jesus had a lot of things to say about people who work and live in the business community … Our work should be an act of worship. Our work should be our mission field." So he sees everything they do as political as well.

Not political. Religious. For those of us who are Christians, our politics are driven by our religion, not the other way around.

The Heidelberg Catechism sums it up well:

> Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

> A. That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#75

Having worked with some of CFA's competition and comparing their IoT architectures, I'd say these guys have their heads on straight. Kudos to them.

I've never been to a retail establishment with anything close to the credit card speed of CFA. The cashier can swipe and grab receipt in one smooth and quick motion. It's so fast you feel like it's broken or slight of hand.

I wonder how they do it or why other companies can't or don't do it. CFA stores are so much busier than even an average McDonald's, maybe the efficiency gains are just worth more.

No idea how they handled the chip card shift.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#76
post #3

If you want to see the actual hardware used at the restaurant, check out the previous blog post: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at... Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs.

NUCs are surprisingly well-built little machines. I have one in my car, and I give them my absolute seal of approval. I've heard of people running little VMware clusters on them too.

If they had OOBM of some kind I would ditch all my hardware at home and replace it with them.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was not helpful. Sometimes people take jobs just to survive; I know I have.

Yeah, me too, but at least I wasn't writing Medium articles about how cool it was that I was generating revenue to be funneled directly into conversion therapy youth camps.

This person[0] seems to have found a way of engaging the CEO in dialog. I, personally, think this is the best way of discussing differences.

[0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/shane-l-windmeyer/dan-cathy-c...

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#78
post #34
post #3

If you want to see the actual hardware used at the restaurant, check out the previous blog post: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at... Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs.

Interesting as it seemed that smarter edge/iot nodes would be like ARM/RaspPi, yet it seems it may get even as high as (or just straight to) Intel nuc.

Working with RaspPi and Docker has been surprisingly difficult. Docker's support for multi-arch is poor at this point, and also applications that are I/O heavy seem to bottleneck at the network.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The write lifespan in DWPD on any sd card is a tiny fraction of the expected lifespan of even a cheap $55 consumer SSD. Part of the problem is that even if you only write 1GB per day the card is highly likely to reuse the same sectors over and over.

...the card is highly likely to reuse the same sectors over and over. One would have expected this to be an area of focus for RasPi developers? Surely some driver could be updated to avoid this?

The Linux kernel in raspbian treats the SD card like a normal block device. I'm not aware of any special optimization for write wear leveling at the OS level, or on the board's sd card controller.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#80
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should probably not rely on Google's fairly crappy dictionary definitions.

Yes, instead of relying on dictionaries, words should mean whatever you want them to mean.

Bigotry does not just mean 'intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself.' It's a silly definition, not what I want it to mean.
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