Notices by Berkubernetus (fuzzychef@m6n.io), page 2

#Portland folks, #grocery worker #strikes this week!

TL;DR: Fred Meyer and New Seasons are having grocery worker strikes soon, shop accordingly.

The following two grocery worker strikes are starting this week:

- Fred Meyer 1-week strike, starting today at 6am and lasting for one week, or until management starts bargaining in good faith, whichever comes first.
- New Seasons 1-day strike, this Sunday ( August 30 ).

(1)

The Fred Meyer strike includes pharmacy, so if you have a prescription there which must be renewed before next Wednesday, you may need to work with your medical provider to get it moved.

Alberstons/Safeway, WinCo, Market of Choice, and local independent grocery stores like Grocers Outlet or La Bouffe are not on strike.

If you don't care about unions, you can stop reading here. If you do, more info on the strike and follow-up in thread. (2)

For Fred Meyer, it's UFCW555 which is on strike, due to management refusing to negotiate with the union at all. This includes all Fred Meyers from the greater Portland region. You can track strike information via their Facebook page and web page, and read more about the strike.
- https://www.facebook.com/UFCWLocal555/
- https://www.ufcw555.org/bargaining-update-8-23/
- https://www.ufcw555.org/ulp-strike-dates/

(3)

@inthehands @daniel Sorry, I don't quite understand your answer.

@inthehands @daniel How are you getting 2 boosters a year? Are you paying cash for one of them?

@inthehands @dalias @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus Well, given corporate performance recently across the industry, you CAN make a strong case for LLMs replacing CEOs.

(Mostly because the average CEO is a platinum-spoon baby who is utterly unqualified for the job.)

@inthehands @ct_bergstrom @jenniferplusplus 100% of arguments of "LLMs can replace job X" are based on the speaker not really having any idea what job X entails, whatever it is. Science, medicine, programming, even customer service. LLMs cannot do any of it.

This is the arrogance of assuming that everyone else's job is easy.

@inthehands There's a far more sinister commentary on this, about the role of True Love romances in suppressing class unrest. But I'll stick to the funny commentary.

@inthehands You've seen this SMBC, yes?

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/curse

@cwebber Good standards get created for bizarre reasons. Like ... SQL is with us because IBM and Oracle wanted to undermine Ingres.

Facebook is starting to remove links to Mastodon as "spam".

I'm sure this is just an accident. Really.

When people ask why it's worthless for #LLMs to write code, show them this:

@inthehands In my (really good) HS economics class, we got to play a citywide stock market game, where econ students pretended to be traders and followed the stock market (this was sponsored by a local newspaper). In deciding positions, I looked at local company Digital Computing and decided that it was tremendously overvalued. So I put all my money into short-selling it.

This was November 1987.

1/

@inthehands I should have won the game by like $1m. But, given the win, the admins of the game decided that I must have had inside information and disqualified me. There was no appeal.

Coincidentally, the "winner" was the grandson of the president of the school board.

This was also a great education into how US Capitalism and the stock market actually works.

2/fin

Lynn Conway, computer hardware pioneer (and genius) has passed away. None of her obits do justice to her accomplishments, so here's wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway

She pioneered asyncronous execution, VLSI circuit design, and practically the whole modern field of chip design.

She was also a trans woman who -- having been unfairly terminated by IBM -- never stopped fighting for the rights of trans people.

Rest in power, Lynn.

Condolences.

Mike Karels of Berkeley Unix/BSDi died of a heart attack on his way home from BSDCon.

Karels was responsible for implementing TCP/IP on BSD, which was later ported to Linux. Since you're reading this, you are benefitting directly from his work.

RIP, Mike. We won't forget you.

https://freebsdfoundation.org/mike_karels/

I hope this message finds you, I hope this message brings you and in the darkness binds you.

Suddenly this meme feels relevant again!

PostgreSQL maintainer Simon Riggs has died in a small airplane crash, on Tuesday.

For those who didn't know Simon, he's responsible for PostgreSQL Binary Replication and many big data features. He and I worked together at Greenplum 2006-2008. Postgres would not be the world-leading DB it is today if it weren't for him.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjex992z0wlo

@emilygorcenski Hah!

I was a paid drywall mudder for a while. Took until my 3rd day before I wasn't sanding all my joins to fix them.