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Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

cheeseprofessor.com

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Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#91

Post by deepfriedchokes »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #7
SamBam wrote: post #4

I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within…

The problem is it's actually a super fun thought experiment/engineering problem to try to figure out how to do this technologically, but any such attempt would (rightly) be taken as an attack on this profession because even if it was a silly blog post about overthinking a silly problem, silly blogposts are potentially upstream of (maybe even someone else) a commercial implementation that eventually destroys a profess…

That fun exercise is where my mind went immediately on reading the headline and seeing the image of an actual person undertaking this task manually (the horror!) when clearly a machine could do it better and more efficiently.

Engineering, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#92

Post by faizan-ali »

ericjmorey wrote: post #89
thaumasiotes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're talking about a country where the police has a special olive oil tasting department The US government operates several special tasting departments.

Probably not anymore

In the US, the best example is in California. To get the California Olive Oil Council stamp of extra virgin quality, you must have your oil tasted by the government body. I'm one of such tasters :)

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#93

Post by bee_rider »

staplers wrote: post #37
hammock wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It has been fun watching Starbucks' various attempts at cracking into the Italian market.

As an American, I was never a coffee snob but going to Italy changed that. My god they have it completely mastered.

What do you do now?

I have a Flair Espresso machine and get beans from a nearby roaster. I dunno. It seems decent. I don’t consider myself a snob, but I put some effort in.

Maybe Italians would be able to tase the defects that I add. But, they are the people who popularized Moka pots so they can’t really be so perfect.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#94

Post by stouset »

SamBam wrote: post #4

I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within…

It’s also worth considering that at most you’d be automating 24 jobs.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#95

Post by awesome_dude »

nomel wrote: post #73
SamBam wrote: post #4

I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within…

> end up with industrially-produced bad cheese. It does't have to be, of course, but the people with enough capital to set up automation tend to care more about money than cheese.

I think that the blame lies more with us, the consumers.

The cheap bad cheese wouldn't last a second in the market if we didn't all rush to buy it, accepting it's failings, but rejoicing in how close it is to the "real" thing and, of course, deriding the original as being "so expensive"

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#96

Post by JohnMakin »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #65
BobaFloutist wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it's actually a super fun thought experiment/engineering problem to try to figure out how to do this technologically, but any such attempt would (rightly) be taken as an attack on this profession because even if it was a silly blog post about overthinking a silly problem, silly blogposts are potentially upstream of (maybe even someone else) a commercial implementation that eventually destroys a profess…

Do professions really get destroyed? Or does the world just change? I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api. I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models. The old job doesn’t exist anymore, i…

Of course professions get destroyed, and it can happen by the world changing. Not sure why they have to be mutually exclusive - You don't see people lighting kerosene lamps on the streets anymore, and I doubt those same types of people are working with streetlights now.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#97

Post by cookie_monsta »

fracus wrote: post #84

They make it sound really complicated, requiring years of mentorship, but really, it was just determining if the sound is the same on multiple taps. It would seem pretty obvious if you tap over a hollow.

Your job looks really easy to an outsider too, regardless of what you do

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#98

Post by david-gpu »

awesome_dude wrote: post #95
nomel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> end up with industrially-produced bad cheese. It does't have to be, of course, but the people with enough capital to set up automation tend to care more about money than cheese.

I think that the blame lies more with us, the consumers. The cheap bad cheese wouldn't last a second in the market if we didn't all rush to buy it, accepting it's failings, but rejoicing in how close it is to the "real" thing and, of course, deriding the original as being "so expensive"

At the margin there are people who don't eat the cheese today because it is too expensive for them. Those people are the ones who benefit from slightly cheaper cheese.

On the other side you have those wealthy enough to enjoy as much as the want out of it at its current price. Those would be the losers if quality were to deteriorate.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#99

Post by some_random »

bluGill wrote: post #33
alnwlsn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a news piece from my area about 10 years ago. A field was to be mowed, and they were considering options. They could get some high tech self guided lawn mower, or they could let a herd of goats graze on it. They went with the goats. It did not go over well with the former lawn mower operators, who found themselves no more employed than they would have been if the robotic lawn mower took their job i…

With goats someone has to fix the fence, apply vaccines, and lots of other labor. Not as much as a lawn mower operator though.

Maybe there were indeed more jobs created by using the goats, but those jobs were likely filled by people other than the human lawn mowers.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#100

Post by throwup238 »

paulorlando wrote: post #83

Curious about this quote: "'My elder colleagues tell me you never stop learning, even after 50 years of doing it,' recounted Stocchi. 'The day you think you’ve learned everything is the day you’ll start making errors.'" - To me this implies that there is more variation among the cheese than I'd expect. In this role don't you see every likely cheese over 50 years? It seems like a static product, where production metho…

Cheese cultures have been bred to be relatively genetically stable but they still experience genetic drift over time that can affect the product in unforeseen ways. Contamination can also introduce unknown pathogens and bacteriophages can cause mutations. Cheesemakers can eliminate the vast majority of the variation in the process but its core input is still very much alive and organic so there’s only so much they can control it.
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