imroot

I've always said that in the back of my mind, the most successful grocery store would be the 'walls' of the store -- bakery, deli, produce, meats, floral, cheeses, dairy and having a little selection of store brands in the middle where consumers can pick up (and vendors can pay a premium for endcap space, because they're the only non-branded products out there), with the rest of the SKU's behind the walls of the grocery store in a fulfillment only model.

Kroger should have pulled a Wal-Mart and turned to their shrink-heavy stores in urban centers to online fulfillment only -- basically only their delivery drivers can retrieve items for an order, and everything's shopped by an associate (Look south of the MicroCenter in Dallas if you want to see what one looks like: it still has the Murphy USA in the parking lot and is basically an unbranded walmart building with 'driver' and 'associate' entrances -- and then deployed the robotics there: less retail space, more online/fulfillment capacity (have humans grab produce and custom sliced/packed items, robots pick the dry goods), and while you lose some cashier jobs, you'll probably have net improvement in terms of time waiting to be picked.

Some of my best hacker/nerd friends I met at notacon. It had a vibe that no other con I’ve been to has had.

I ran a large cloud environment for two different US based retailers.

Grocer A: They built their cloud strategy with Azure in mind. Microsoft partnered up with them early on at the C-Level and grocer was given a metric fuck-ton of free services to help build and identify the proper cloud strategy for all of their 2500-ish stores.

Luxury Goods Retailer B: Moved from a Data Center to AWS, since that's where our corporate IT partner recommended we go to. C-level leadership tried to get some fake products removed from Amazon.com, Amazon.com said no, we were given the green light to spend "...whatever needed to be spent" to get us off of AWS and over to Google Cloud as quickly as possible.

It's been my experience that the Google Cloud sales reps will always usually reach out after money raising announcements and other acquisition events just to let you know that they're there and please spend money with them. It was never "Don't fund your competitor," it was always, "we're google, our tech works, they're not going to sunset google cloud, our support sucks, use our partner."

What overhead?

Just about every web server these days supports ACME -- some natively, some via scripts, and you can set up your own internal CA using something like step-ca that speaks ACME if you don't want your certs going out to the transparency log.

The last few companies I've worked at had no http behind the scenes -- everything, including service-to-service communications was handled via https. It's a hard requirement for just about everything financial, healthcare, and sensitive these days.

Percepta was a company that was doing a lot of CV/ML in this space looking for shoplifting traits. They had a few paying customers before they were completely acquired by ADT Business. A lot of shoplifters use the PLU for bananas when tag swapping higher-ticket items at the self checkout, so, more than likely, they wanted to check that you were actually purchasing bananas.

I've eliminated Chrome from my personal systems when uBO stopped working. Blocking v2 manifests also broke a few extensions that were being developed for my day job: they've spent the last few weeks working on Firefox extensions and are almost at the point where they're getting ready to wipe Chrome from our corporate machines.

My optometrist told me that I have a tendency to 'overcompensate' the last time I had my rx checked; I now tell the optometrists that I have a tendency to overcompensate and ask that they dilate my eyes before anything starts and it's really helped me reduce eye strain.

In the 90's my grandma had her knee replaced. She was bed-bound for 2 weeks before they'd start physical therapy to get her knees back in order. (Ironically enough, her first knee was recalled...so she had a total of three knee surgeries Left, Right, then Left again) over a span of 11 years.

In 2018, my mom had her left knee and right knee done at the same time...and they had her up walking the halls of the floor the next day and was back at home less than 72 hours after her surgery, and she's walking just fine these days without any assistance.

As someone who manages a bug bounty program, this kind of pisses me off.

For some of our bugs given on h1, we openly say, "Hey, we need to see a POC in order to get this to be triaged." We do not provide test accounts for H1 users, so, if they exploit someone's instance, we'll not only take the amount that the customer paid off of their renewal price, we'll also pay the bounty hunter.

My manager was just following orders to protect his job: he has kids and a wife at home and I don’t blame him, but, he’s one of the few bosses that I don’t keep in communication with.

I hope your daughter is doing better and is adapting to a normal life post-transplant.

If you knew who it was, and understood the culture there, it’d be totally on brand for them.

Large, global retailer with their tech center in the Midwest. Most of the long term goals were presented from Italy, most of my coworkers were there because they had been there for 10-20 years and were zombies waiting on their package so that the company could move their jobs to Dallas.

Ironically enough, when I relocated to Dallas, one of their recruiters reached out. I think it was one of the few times that I’ve ever been unprofessional and was laughing as I hung up the phone to a recruiter.

About six years ago, my seven year old son passed away: he had liver cancer at a really young age, had a full liver transplant at six months, and lost all hearing as a side effect of the anti-rejection medications. It was a sudden turn -- he was participating in his school's holiday program on a Friday (spending the rest of the afternoon with me at work on his iPad because neither mom or the babysitter could pick him up) and had passed on a Wednesday.

My job at the time gave me three days off before calling to ask me if I could come back to work, with my boss and HR on the line telling me that they also 'gave me the weekend' (since I was on-call when it happened). When I said that I needed more time away in order to deal with it, they fired me, then begged me to come back as a contractor a few months later.

I was so upset over the things that happened that I turned them down -- it wasn't what I wanted to do and it wasn't how I wanted to be treated: I'm much more selective about where I'm working at these days.