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Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

cheeseprofessor.com

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Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#111

Post by thierrydamiba »

paulorlando wrote: post #80
thierrydamiba wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And even with the existence of those tools, the old professions continue for years, sometimes many years, in niches. For example, even today there are people who are paid to wake up others manually - a job that used to be called "knocker-up."

People get paid to do this? I’m not doubting the veracity, I’m just surprised.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#112

Post by QuercusMax »

awesome_dude wrote: post #101
david-gpu wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm, quality only deteriorates in the "premium" section if those wealthy enough to buy that version demand that it cheapens itself - by no longer buying the premium version Edit: I can point to cases of that happening Ferrari, who couldn't turn a profit so sold to another car manufacturer that created a "profitable" version that, quite frankly, is a shadow on its former glory

Happens to musical instrument manufacturers all the time, too. I used to have a Chickering piano from around 1915; a lovely instrument with a good reputation. At some point that company was sold, and they continued to produce pianos under that name, but they were nothing like the original.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#113

Post by tharkun__ »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #110
JohnMakin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I might not see people lighting kerosene lamps but I see people climb big ladders to fix lamps that light up public spaces. I assume the people doing that work might have been lighting lamps in the past.

The profession of "lamp lighter" definitely has been destroyed though. The person that can raise a burning stick to a kerosene lamp has to have a different skill set than the person fixing lamps in public spaces. I'm assuming you don't mean "screwing in a light bulb" type work, which would be close enough in skill requirements, that the person whose profession was destroyed could reasonably do the new profession without a lot of learning being required.

In the same vein, you doing OCR and now doing other work is not a profession change. You're still a computer scientist doing computer engineering work just on a different problem set.

Lamp lighter to cheese tapper is a profession change. A lamp lighter with bad hearing or attention to detail is not a problem per se. Tapping cheese to see if its ripe (and all the other skills that come with cheese making) will potentially be different enough.

Now the problem comes in, when lamp lighter is supposed to start doing OCR engineering work. Unless the lamp lighter was horribly over qualified, most lamp lighters will not be able to do OCR engineering or any computer scientist style engineering work at all.

Professions do get destroyed all the time. Hopefully while a new profession is born that has similar enough skill level requirements as the previous ones, just in different form. Like a lamp lighter might do well in an Amazon warehouse but not as an AWS software engineer.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#114

Post by TheJoeMan »

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…

An interesting angle is if you automate it, you have the power to tweak the acceptance parameters. And once you make it easy to do, better keep the mba’s away. Whereas with a live person, I doubt anyone’s going to straightly say “please mark more cheese as top-shelf”.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#115

Post by Zopieux »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #74
reaperducer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese. I agree. As soon as you replace humans with machines, the next step is so-called "value engineering," where squeezing pennies out of a process becomes more important than the product. Let the tech people do tech. Let the artists do art. Food is an art.

> Food is an art. While I respect the point you're making, food is not an art. It is usually a perishable commodity and a requirement for survival.

It can be an art, and I for one am very glad I'm surrounded by countries where it is considered as such (e.g. Italy, France) so that I can indulge in tasty experiences almost everyday rather than treating "getting fed" as a 7h-per-week chore. That would suck.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#116

Post by kulahan »

saltcured wrote: post #56

I'm wondering if I remember an urban legend or other apocryphal story. From the headline, I immediately thought of an answer I swear I learned about in some machine learning class years ago. People were struggling with a food inspection device that tapped (cheese? fruit?) like this, trying to emulate what a human expert did. The punchline was that the human expert didn't really know how to articulate their decision e…

Almost sounds like it’s related to some fermented product, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was indeed cheese. I don’t think scent is great for much besides checking current state.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#117

Post by kulahan »

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.

Wait, you just hit keys on a keyboard all day and see if it works??

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#119

Post by thescriptkiddie »

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…

as always it's not that automation is inherently bad, it's a matter of how it is used and to whose benefit. the luddites knew this. a lot of people misunderstand, but they didn't want to destroy the mills, they wanted to own them.

Re: Why Tap a Wheel of Cheese?

#120

Post by lightedman »

tharkun__ wrote: post #113
thierrydamiba wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might not see people lighting kerosene lamps but I see people climb big ladders to fix lamps that light up public spaces. I assume the people doing that work might have been lighting lamps in the past.

The profession of "lamp lighter" definitely has been destroyed though. The person that can raise a burning stick to a kerosene lamp has to have a different skill set than the person fixing lamps in public spaces. I'm assuming you don't mean "screwing in a light bulb" type work, which would be close enough in skill requirements, that the person whose profession was destroyed could reasonably do the new profession with…

"The profession of "lamp lighter" definitely has been destroyed though"

It's somewhat still held by the same people that somewhat-traditionally did the job. In some places, it used to be job of the night watch constable to light the kerosene lamps. Police now days just report a broken traffic light.

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