Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

You hit on a great point -- Edge infrastructure buffers outbound internet traffic but does not replace the need for a good circuit.

If it wasn't problematic it probably wouldn't be called a paradox.

I'm inclined to divide intolerances into two types: intolerances based on what somebody thinks, and intolerance based on what somebody is. I'm further inclined to model intolerances as a directed graph where nodes represent a group of one of those two types, e.g. conservatives and men might be represented by individual nodes of those two types respectively. Edges represent an intolerance, e.g. there would be an edge pointing from Klan members to black people. The former node would be of the first type, the latter of the second.

Where there's a cycle in this graph we are seeing a mutual intolerance of people with different ideas. An example might be people who think the Earth is flat and people who think it is round. Who is right? It's impossible to say without diving into the issues themselves.

    flat earthers  round earthers

Because what you think is independent of what you are, nodes of the second type cannot have outgoing edges. Incoming edges represent base intolerances of the sort that have historically been very harmful: racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. Obviously these edges represent a different type of intolerance because they are based on innate attributes that their targets have no control over. To a liberal person, they are essentially definitionally bad. To an illiberal person, they're fine. Great, even, depending on who you ask.

Note that I'm talking about liberalism in the general definitional sense, not in the modern U.S. politics sense (i.e. "the left").

So, how about this graph taken from real life (the represents two edges, one pointing in each direction):

    anti-racists  white racists -> non-whites

Deletion of the rightmost edge (i.e. deletion of white racism) means that we also have to delete 'white racists' or the implied meaning of the graph is paradoxical. It then follows that we have to remove 'anti-racists'. Now we have no intolerance at all—all that's left in the graph is `non-whites`, enjoying their existence without harassment, and all it took was the elimination of racism. You could also remove the 'white racists' node, with similar meaning and identical effect.

However, deletion of 'anti-racists' leaves the racism intact. I'd argue that this form of graph appears in many places where there is an illiberal group intolerant of a type two group and a liberal group locked in mutual intolerance with the illiberal group. The inverse setup doesn't really appear because, as I noted before, edges pointing to type two nodes represent a sort of intolerance that is anathema to liberals.

I'd also argue that there is a strong implication that these sorts of edges are the most important to remove—because, as demonstrated, doing so causes the rest of the graph to collapse. They are the "root cause", if you will, of many webs of interconnected intolerances.

It should be obvious that this model denies the assertion made by many modern American 'conservatives' that intolerances are all equivalent and relative, "the tolerant left", etcetera. I would say the water is most muddied by the fact that our 'left' and 'right' do not map cleanly onto liberal and illiberal. It's easy and sexy—but invalid—to apply the same political label to someone who thinks gay couples should be able to enjoy the same legal benefits as heterosexual married couples, and someone who thinks all white people should be killed.

P.S. Damore is a moron and his pseudoscientific screed was legitimately offensive to his co-workers. That's fine justification for him to be fired from his job at a private company. As for the rest of it, we live in a culture of growing illiberalism and zeal for generating outrage. It's a bummer.

Hey this is Brian and I wrote the article. Great question.

1) MQTT -- we have a lot of cases where we want to share data between physical or "software" devices in-restaurant, without internet connections. MQTT is our primary channel for sharing messages between things, and for collecting data in general to be exfiltrated to the cloud.

2) "Brain" apps -- these are "smart" applications that collect data from MQTT topics and make decisions about what should be done for a given restaurant process. Today, the reality is we do not automatically cook anything. We do, however, have some restaurants that have more intelligent screens to help them know what to cook at any given moment based off of forecasting models that use the data we collect from many different things. These generally run at the edge to preserve their function in cases where there is high latency or bad WAN connections.

3) In the past we had a POS Server in the restaurant. It was a single point of failure for things like drive thru order taking with iPads and mobile orders. The move to K8s lets us run a microservice that can intake mobile orders on a more resilient infrastructure. To be clear, we have not made this shift just yet, but its something we are working on that will ultimately be transparent to customers but that will make their ordering experience more reliable. We have many cases like this.

Overall, our workloads aren't "heavy" which is why we did an array of three moderately sized commodity compute devices. We wanted a smart, sensible ROI on the hardware. We do have enough business-important apps that need to run in a low-latency high-availability environment to push us out of just cloud (internet dependent) and to the Edge. In the future, maybe this can change and we can use cloud only. It seems Edge is an industry trend though, with many workloads moving towards their consumers (a lot of gaming, but a lot of retail as well).

Great question and I hope this helped -- if not just let me know.

Yeah but... I didn't say any of that.

I may be alone on this one, but if Chick Fil A automated most of their workers, I would stop eating there. Part of the reason I go there is I am always impressed at just how good they are at customer service. There isn't another fast food restaurant that even comes close that I know of.

I hate talking to machines, I hate talking to automated voice menus instead of getting actual assistance from a human being. I hate ordering stuff online and dealing with slight one off cases. The google Ai assistant had me cringing for weeks. I especially have a deep hatred for self checkout lines. They can all burn in hell.