I intellectually understand the retailpocalypse replaced by online shopping, but I will always want to try on clothes before buying them, and that goes double for shoes. After trying out New Balance for a year or two in adulthood I ended up going back to Nike running shoes (I still remember my pair of Air Icarus from high school, so light), just seemed to fit my feet better.
Hopefully most people here getting ribeyes aren’t getting them from the same factory farms that supply McDonald’s and sell other cheap kinds of beef. A ribeye is an occasional luxury and best bought from the farmer.
The industry has mostly consolidated packing and distribution. McDonald's is mostly selling trimmings from cows that also produce high-end steaks.
Surprisingly enough, they hold most beef processing plants to higher standards than the rest of the industry (they're still buying cheap trimmings, don't get me wrong), because they do so much volume, basic probability tells us that most food poisoning outbreaks would hit them otherwise.
Sure, you could find a farmer that raises cows and butchers them on site, but that's rare, and the easiest way to actually achieve that is to buy a whole or half cow at a time.
Most small farms don't bother with that: they raise it from calf to adult on grazing land, then send it to a feed lot where the miracles of modern science significantly increase the cow's weight before slaughter. Cows that are still producing calves get retained to grow the herd next year.
If you want to pay extra for this, look for "grass-fed, grain-finished" beef. Most unlabeled stuff in the US goes through that funnel though.
Back when McDonalds was first rolling out their standardized restaurants and menu, it was pretty common for restaurants to buy fresh ground beef from local sources, some of whom were less clean and less careful about temperatures and selling old meat. It was also common for them to mix in old meat with fresher meat to try to "hide" it. Since it's all ground up, it's hard to tell.
So they developed standards and demanded that all their hamburgers be formed, frozen, and packaged by the processor and kept frozen until cooking. It's really the safest way to handle that volume of ground beef through the distribution chain.
Apparently their 1/4 lb burgers now use fresh beef, not frozen. Not sure how that's handled but it sounds more risky.
Too bad. I get mine from the small town butcher/locker when I’m in the Midwest in summer, and the neighborhood farmer’s market on the east coast the rest of the year. A couple of ribeyes a year and I’m good, so I see them as an affordable luxury where I can pay for good prime meat from a short supply chain.
Yes. And there are a ton of companies that sell just loose stones, so you can take it to a locally owned shop for the ring and setting, thereby keeping more of the money in your own community.
Which sucks because I feel there is some good stuff but it’s buried. This is going to be like every “era” on the web, isn’t it? We must be 2-3 months away from sites that people threw up simply to create the Reader Mode of the AI era, where we will all link to articles via an intermediary 12 Foot Ladder type site that runs the content through a different AI taught to boil the article to its essence and then tersely rewrite those bullet points in something close to human language.
I use routatic/proxy (actually my own fork with various changes/fixes http://github.com/nijave/proxy/ -- fyi the fork is all vibes...)
Some gateways/proxies/hosts also offer multiple endpoints (z.ai has both Anthropic endpoint and Completions endpoint)
Edit: Here's the PoC I made for work although it assumes you're using Cloudflare Access (VPN) with a Cloudflare AI Gateway to hand wave the auth away (auth to the LLM API gets auto injected by Cloudflare Access derived from the client's VPN connection) https://gist.github.com/nijave/6f5e5793a992619808135ce85fa49...
Claude Code supports the base URL env var so you could tell it to talk with any LLM API endpoint that receives the Anthropic style request format, e.g. DeepSeek.
Claude Code allows you to change the config such that you use the harness with different models - you can actually ask a coding agent to configure it for you
I hadn’t been to IKEA in a decade or more but went this weekend to get new furniture for our kids. Today I put together a “vanity” for my daughter, and couldn’t help but think of the vanity I had in my room as a teenager that my mom had I inherited from some other family member, solid wood with beautiful birds-eye maple veneer. “Simulacrum” was the word I kept muttering to myself as I thought about what this next year in AI coding will bring.
Pondering this one night last week, I realized that because LLMs can only reason with written language, what we might be seeing emerge with Opus’s load-bearing mumbo jumbo is its own creole for structural reasoning. Not only are our brains wide, our senses are, too. I slow down to a crawl when I have to read actual math in a CS paper, but show me diagrams and I can reason about whatever sort of data structure or algorithm, no problem. Opus by and large can’t and its adaptation has been to adopt metaphor for structural reasoning. So while it may be exceedingly annoying to chat with, I sort of wonder whether this metaphorical-reasoning behavior has been selected for precisely because it leads to better coding outcomes.
> because LLMs can only reason with written language
Is that right? Think of code that draws a square, the representation of that code in storage, the movement of electrons, and the 'actual' square on the screen -- these are all to us transcriptions of same thing across different domains or media, and we can deterministically translate back and forth between them, but there's no real, actual, essential identity property. The code isn't the square. The electricity isn't the code. The storage isn't the electricity.
I think of LLM reasoning and output similarly. The underlying graph of weights, matrices, and other data aren't knowledge, understanding, or language. 'Translating' the system's output to language is jusas valid and correct as translating it into some visual representation that would be incoherent to us, like a sequence of flashing lights or imperceptible noise patterns projected over an image of a dog.
I guess this is all a very long winded way of restating Chinese-room problem: we feed the man in the room a message; he returns one that, for all the world, is indistinguishable from a "real" response that you and I might send, but, like you said, he has no access to sense data. He also has no access to the biology underlying real mental processes. He also doesn't have any personhood that we can discern. He has, rather, gradually developed through reinforcement the tendency to provide responses approximating all of all of that.
I'm not sure the epistemological question "does he understand" (which is what the Chinese-room problem asks) has any meaningful answer. There's no mind, so there's no understanding. What there is, rather, is a system that generate patterns that we map to language and that our brains therefore map to communication, personhood, meaning, etc. It's the square I mentioned earlier. It's to us a convincing simulacrum, and it may be faithful enough to us to stand in those things, but that's not what it is.
My sense is that LLMs are (a) the big-data Pyramids of Giza and (b) a consequence of hardware and software developing ways of generating abstractions that capture and generate more complex patterns than were previously possible to capture or generate in a manner comprehensible to humans. Everything humans do follows some kind of pattern. Language is the perfect way for a machine to capture that, because is simpler than the world itself and has clear rules and patterns, encoded in representations computers already have, that, modeled well enough, can generate output indistinguishable from the real thing -- what you or I might do with it.
But the pattern matching that it does, and that we translate into language, is much more numerically rigorous and complex than anything you or I consciously do with words (hell, most people can't even figure out when to use "lie" vs "lay") and not doing what you or I do with it. It's not language. It's the square on the screen.
But now I wear Hokas. Nike’s loss.
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