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Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

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Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#121

Post by client4 »

wuliwong wrote: post #62
siruncledrew wrote: post #2

I don't know why, but for some reason the juxtaposition of traditional, brick-and-mortar brand images with tech blogs about building modern application technologies is amusing to me. It's seeing two completely different sides of the same organization. There's 0 condescending sentiment behind it, it's just like "wow, that was unexpected."

I'm in Atlanta and have had a few discussions with people at Chik-fil-A (CFA) about joining on of their teams. I have a good friend that just moved from Intel to CFA working on business analytics. It seems like a really great place to work. And yes, whenever I mention to someone that I might be working on machine learning problems at CFA I always get a puzzled look in return. :)

Their food court is amazing. You can have steamed salmon and a Spicy Chicken sandwich at the same time. Also free to your family.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#122

Post by ocdtrekkie »

dvtrn wrote: post #116
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a custom piece of software that powers a display in the car, syncs and plays my music, and logs GPS. It also can manage audio and video recording and is intended to handle some future features[1] I have planned, so I wanted to over-spec rather than under-spec. [1] It's the same software that runs my home automation system, so an inevitable feature is my car and home units interacting, I wrote half of a piece o…

Have you documented any of this or written on your home automation endeavors? I'm looking to "Tony Stark" my house up a bit (i.e. voice control, some touch enabled panes in the kitchen/office) but want a bit more control than something purpose built, off-the-shelf while also being a bit more insulated than Alexa or Echo. The NUC has been on my radar as a device that I may go with as the brains of the operation, and I…

I get asked to do more of a "write-up" a lot, but it's hard to figure out how to format or frame it. I have a fairly large pile of opinions about how one should go about doing this, but it's hard to concisely organize my thoughts on it into a coherent write-up.

The code is here: https://github.com/ocdtrekkie/HAController but I don't know if I'd really recommend others use it. The main perk to me is that it's designed around what I want and use (I tried a lot of alternative options before rolling my own), so unless you also really like Visual Basic code and have a brain ordered bizarrely similarly to mine, you may want to start somewhere else.

I'd love to chat about what I've learned along the way or what ideas you have (because I might borrow them!), if you want to chat elsewhere hit me up at inbox (at) jacobweisz (dot) com

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#123

Post by tomjen3 »

bradleyankrom wrote: post #6
dpeck wrote: post #4

with articles like this and Mac'd from this YC cohort it seems like an increasingly interesting time in the restaurant/technology space.

the domain is interesting, but I worry about the long-term effects of maximizing efficiencies (read: automation) forpeople who rely on jobs in that industry.

We would probably be okay, if it wasn't because we are also looking at soonish fully automatic trucks, which will kill all the jobs in the trucking industry, plus all the jobs at the trucking stations, mechanics etc, plus the retail collapse.

I guess if you aren't in one of those areas, and you have a business that hires a lot of low income people, times will be good, but like you I don't think the rest of the market can take up the slack; there are only so many people who are willing to pay for laundering.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#124

Post by pvg »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #112
pvg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The quoted definition of bigotry as "intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself" is from the New Oxford American Dictionary, from Oxford University Press (the OED people). If that's what Google is using, I don't think I can rely on your definition of "crappy."

Yep, it's a crappy definition that does not reflect current usage. It doesn't even reflect the definition in the OED, if you want to check there. 'Bigotry' is not limited to difference of opinion. Nobody uses it like that, you can take a look at the quoted usage examples here, which are from current publications.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigotry

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#126

Post by factsaresacred »

caconym_ wrote: post #108
factsaresacred wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> '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.

I love seeing this argument. It's like you people think you can raise any arbitrary instance of hate/intolerance/ bigotry onto a criticism-proof pedestal simply by brandishing a dictionary. Like, who are the real bigots: Nazis, or the nasty people who have the gall to disagree with their racist, antisemitic, etc. views? Is the answer not obvious? Does the question send you scuttling back under your dictionary? I'm fi…

You're missing the point. I'm not concerned about the word. I'm concerned about the definition - those quickest to cry bigot are often guilty of acting like one themselves.

Case-in-point: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey being forced to apologise for eating at Chick-fil-A during LGBT Month. What kind of bizarre intolerant nonsense is that?

Another case-in-point: Boston and Chicago mayors claim "Chick-fil-A values are not [our] values" and refuse to let them open branches in those cities.

Absurd.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#127

Post by ereyes01 »

TickleSteve wrote: post #115

Can anyone explain what the actual problem is they're solving using 'edge computing'? I get the feeling this is a completely unnecessary use of technology.

They said in the article without getting super-specific that they have low-latency / high-throughput / time sensitive data processing needs in each restaurant. It sounds like they have a whole bunch of sensors tracking their inventory and food preparation pipeline. Other comments here link to other blog posts by them with more details about french fry done-ness deep learning models, for example (wacky but cool).

If you had to go across the internet to the cloud at such a high rate from each restaurant, this would probably come with pretty high failure rates and levels of flakiness. It makes sense to me to process the local data firehose in-house and keep the rest of the common high-level stuff in the cloud.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#128

Post by unit91 »

monocasa wrote: post #111
unit91 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

monocasa, HN won't let me reply to your next comment, but regarding: > a reflection of their religious principles or their political ones This is actually a common misunderstanding and what I'm trying to explain. "Religious principles OR political principles" means there are actually (at least) TWO categories of ideas a person holds, with specific items (homosexuality, death penalty, etc.) falling inside one of those…

> This is actually a common misunderstanding and what I'm trying to explain. "Religious principles OR political principles" means there are actually (at least) TWO categories of ideas a person holds, with specific items (homosexuality, death penalty, etc.) falling inside one of those categories. > That's a secular worldview, and it isn't how Christians think And yet literally the previous comment you say > Not politi…

I was responding to scope of the statement:

> So he sees everything they do as political as well.

Obviously we have political views, but they're a only subset of religious views. By analogy, geometry exists and is a legitimate field of study. But if you said "all mathematicians think about is geometry" that would be false because it's too narrow in scope. If he's consistent in his Christian worldview "he sees everything they do as religious as well" would have been true.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#129

Post by reaperducer »

timdorr wrote: 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.

Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs.

Funny how the world has changed.

I got my first taste of real computing from a guy in the next town who would buy dead PDP's from local McDonald's restaurants, fix them up, and sell them on.

He always said the hardest part wasn't replacing broken parts, it was that invariably the machines would always have soda spilled in them, no matter where they were stored. Cleaning the insides was his most time-consuming task.

One of the advantages of an Intel NUC is that it probably has a lot more horsepower than an old PDP/11. It's probably also a smaller target for wayward beverages.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#130

Post by coffeesn0b »

djhworld wrote: post #64

I enjoyed reading this post, but came away with more questions. They talk about providing a service for developers to deploy stuff easily, but I'm wondering how that works in practise. I've very little experience with Kubernetes, the author mentions they run 'mini' kubernetes clusters at each restaurant. Does that mean they have to deploy software/container updates to each restaurant one by one? Or is it abstracted a…

Hey! Caleb here... I'm the lead SRE building the clusters on the restaurants.

Each individual restaurant gets it's own cluster (we aren't fully deployed yet). There are too many network latency challenges and too much immaturity around federated clusters to take the route (unfortunately).

We currently use gitops, which houses all the configs per cluster in a single repo per restaurant (CRAZY amount of corgis!)... we call that Atlas (the repos) and we made a little pod called Vessel that polls and applies configs in those repos.

We're almost done building something called Fleet that will generated and manage those repos (Atlas) at scale. Ie; a UI where we can say "send this version to 10% of restaurants" and it will regenerate and deploy those configs to all the appropriate Atlas repos, which will then get pulled down by Vessel.

We tried doing all this with Helm but failed miserably. Maybe it was us? But templating vs gitops... the choice seemed obvious.

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