And yet, some of the most important questions that come up with technology is which one should I use, how much does it cost, what are the best practices, what serious risks should I look out for, and that sort of thing. With generative LLms we are being told use the latest, or maybe the full super intelligence expected in a few months, pay whatever, best practices are just emerging but focus on not using it too much and avoiding overload, and the risks are seriously deteriorated skills and focus which don't matter anymore anyway. And while these critical questions lack compelling answers people are seeing kids who can't answer basic questions or think things through, data centers causing massive complications, and theft of intellectual property on a grand scale. Instead we go over and over about what you can do with this technology and what human employees are good for anyway.
In the past bullshitting would only get you so far, but now bullshitting is both pervasive and revered. Contributors who specialize in taking things all the way, getting not just features but entire projects complete and fully functional aren't even in the conversation. What matters is the appearance of speed, not proof of completeness.
Sustainability will be most stretched where the bottom line actually matters. Medical devices and data processing, commercial aviation operations, precision manufacturing, and such. Bullshitting only takes you so far until actually doing the thing and showing that with high confidence becomes the only criterion.
This is the cost of not allowing this technology to be organically introduced and spread. By ramming generative LLMs at everyone and linking usage with job qualifications and performance issues like this have been sidelined along with the increasing costs and unknown liabilities from rampant intellectual property theft. And as long as capital is in command and even senior contributors are nothing more than chips at a gambling table this will continue.
The waste generated is also a major challenge. Having fresh food always ready means trashing a lot of meals. In the US there are networks of food banks and such, but it can still be difficult to keep up with the flow of unpurchased food that is no longer fresh.
Badly. Until a few years ago there was a franchise-wide rule that no food could be discounted even if it was close to expiry, so either the staff/owners bought them and ate it themselves, or it went in the dumpster.
Giving expired food to homeless people is not really a thing there either.
Convenience stores changed a lot around 2010 when they started real time tracking Every Damn Thing. Even in the mid 00s staff ate, took home, or gave away whatever they wanted to from the expired pile.
I was merely answering your question about how Japan deals with it (by trashing it, mostly). I guess the US could do that but unlike Japan, I'd expect people to break into the dumpsters and steal the food out of it. The trashing of food might offend people more in the US.
In terms of geography though, Japan has an extremely efficient and well developed cold chain and the country is pretty much a line from north to south. The US is clearly more spread out and significantly larger than Japan. That causes problems with both delivering the food to stores and (as other people have mentioned) efficiently moving waste to food banks.
People and customs related to food are not primarily geographic in nature. Japan is a strongly ordered society, not a roiling chaotic mess like the US. When people run into trouble they often hide their shame and starve themselves rather than beg for food. And it isn't like the network of food banks in the US was easy to set up or keep running.
It wouldn't make much sense to develop infrastructure around a source of rapidly-expiring food before that source existed. But once the food is there, demand for it will quickly develop.
There's a general theme in policy discussions of people saying "system X has a feature that system Y does not have; therefore, moving from system Y to system X must require a fully-developed auxiliary system to be in place for dealing with that feature before the move can even be considered a possibility". This is complete nonsense; it's what people say when they want to object to something, but don't have any reasons.
That's kind of what I was leaning towards. It's a problem that needs solved, but it's not necessarily hard to solve, nor does it need solved in advance.
It's the kind of problem can often very nearly resolve itself.
Here in the States, I've seen what can happen at the end of the night at a busy Little Ceasers in a not-great part of town. They've got a lot of unsold pizzas, already boxed, that they simply need to get rid of so they can close up and go home.
So they walk out the back door with armloads of pizzas and... casually give them away to the people who are waiting out there. It's a very calm and surprisingly tidy process that goes by quickly. This happens at the same time every night.
The only apparent cost is whatever it takes to maintain the base amount of humility required to let this happen instead of dutifully marching the pizzas over to the dumpster and tossing them in.
This routine is almost certainly an invention of evolution, instead of planning.
The state should handle personal records, authentication, and age verification. Compliance should be as simple as implementing dead simple state provided interfaces.
Seems more like the issue is nuance and consideration or not. One side is saying that it is possible to do things that have value using LLMs. The other side is pointing out that this technology has increasing costs, is requiring data centers that have strongly negative environmental, social, and economic impacts, is promoting rampant, industrialized theft of intellectual property, is inserting errors, hallucinations, and psychotic ideas into all usage, and is at a number of levels doing damage to kids, elders, and professionals who are exposed.
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