7 ms·

I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand fo

by SamBam 2y ago

I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It is interesting how important it seems to us that jobs like this remain done in the traditional way. For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density. This does not seem to be a case where the human expertise and artistry is actually important to the final product, besides the feeling of tradition. Perhaps the best argument for keeping traditional jobs like this is that, even if that exact job could be done by machine, replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese.

BobaFloutist 2y ago
The problem is it's actually a super fun thought experiment/engineering problem to try to figure out how to do this technologically, but any such attempt would (rightly) be taken as an attack on this profession because even if it was a silly blog post about overthinking a silly problem, silly blogposts are potentially upstream of (maybe even someone else) a commercial implementation that eventually destroys a profession. It sucks.
- thierrydamiba 2y ago
  Do professions really get destroyed? Or does the world just change? I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api. I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models. The old job doesn’t exist anymore, in many ways I am the classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn’t say it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools today to get intelligence from PDFs.
  - woah 2y ago
    There’s no course to learn the niche skills and nuances of this trade; Alessandro accompanied and apprenticed with Renato and other experts for about 3 years, learning through firsthand experience how to assess each form. “The particularity of this profession to me is that it’s like it was 2 years ago, and it’s a skill that’s handed down from dev to dev. You go around with the most expert, most experienced BERTitori, and you watch and listen to them, and slowly they start to give you the keyboard. You try with them next to you, piano piano, and gradually, you begin to do more on your own,” explained Stocchi. “It’s a big responsibility, you have to be really capable of doing it, you can’t damage the forms.”
    - thierrydamiba 2y ago
      This is probably my favorite comment ever. Bravo!
  - abirch 2y ago
    The world is constantly changing, some professions are destroyed as the result. This is a tale as old as time. Mark Twain wrote about this on Life on the Mississippi when he was a river boat pilot before trains became common and destroyed the trade. some professions spawn from viable hobbies and some hobbies spawn from unviable professions.
  - paulorlando 2y ago
    And even with the existence of those tools, the old professions continue for years, sometimes many years, in niches. For example, even today there are people who are paid to wake up others manually - a job that used to be called "knocker-up."
    - thierrydamiba 2y ago
      People get paid to do this? I’m not doubting the veracity, I’m just surprised.
    - 9991 2y ago
      Knocker-up? I hardly know 'er!
- deepfriedchokes 2y ago
  That fun exercise is where my mind went immediately on reading the headline and seeing the image of an actual person undertaking this task manually (the horror!) when clearly a machine could do it better and more efficiently. Engineering, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
- TheJoeMan 2y ago
  An interesting angle is if you automate it, you have the power to tweak the acceptance parameters. And once you make it easy to do, better keep the mba’s away. Whereas with a live person, I doubt anyone’s going to straightly say “please mark more cheese as top-shelf”.
perihelions 2y ago
- "For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density..." Out of pure curiosity, how would an industrial process engineer approach this problem, de novo?
- Sanzig 2y ago
  Industrial CT would probably be pretty effective at giving a density distribution and identifying voids, but that may be overkill - a couple planes of X-ray imaging may be sufficient. Ultrasound would also be a solid bet, but it depends how many points you need to sample if it would be time efficient.
- leansensei 2y ago
  Microphones and spectral analysis. Or the same equipment used for flaw detection of welds with ultrasound.
- ano-ther 2y ago
  Ultrasound seems to be viable > A study on structural quality control of Swiss‐type cheese with ultrasound is presented. We used a longitudinal mode pulse‐echo setup using 1–2MHz ultrasonic frequencies to detect cheese‐eyes and ripening induced cracks. Results show that the ultrasonic method posses good potential to monitor the cheese structure during the ripening process. Preliminary results indicate that maturation stage could be monitored with ultrasonic velocity measurements. https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/894/1/1328/953695/Structural-Quality-Control-of-Swiss-Type-Cheese?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/894/1/1328/953...
  - jdietrich 2y ago
    Note that this is already industry-standard for non-destructive testing of metal, concrete and composites. Handheld ultrasonic tomography devices are commercially available and could plausibly be used on cheese with only minor modification. https://acs-international.com/instruments/ultrasonic-pulse-echo-tomography-systems-mira/a1040-mira-3d-thickness-measurement-rebar-and-flaw-detection/ https://acs-international.com/instruments/ultrasonic-pulse-e...
hooverd 2y ago
Maybe, and the promise of AI nowadays seems to be "we'll automate art and science and creativity so you have more time to do low-value manufacturing".
hammock 2y ago
>I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It has been fun watching Starbucks' various attempts at cracking into the Italian market.
- staplers 2y ago
  As an American, I was never a coffee snob but going to Italy changed that. My god they have it completely mastered.
  - paulorlando 2y ago
    It's on a different level.
  - kjellsbells 2y ago
    Italian cuisine seems to have a deeper understanding of bitter flavors than other common Western cuisines. They understand bitter vegetables like chicory and agretti, they understand bitterness in chocolate, and the coffee I had there always had the faintest hint of bitterness that enhanced rather than detracted from the flavor. It probably also helps that they are downing a demitasse in a minute or two instead of a giant venti size beast that lasts for an hour.
    - colordrops 2y ago
      Bitterness seems to be common in Mediterranean cuisine in general.
  - xandrius 2y ago
    Wait until you realise that coffee can also not be toasted dark to death. Then you get to explore the other tastes of coffee too!
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    What do you do now? I have a Flair Espresso machine and get beans from a nearby roaster. I dunno. It seems decent. I don’t consider myself a snob, but I put some effort in. Maybe Italians would be able to tase the defects that I add. But, they are the people who popularized Moka pots so they can’t really be so perfect.
dfxm12 2y ago
based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. I'm unfamiliar with the regs on this, but can the duties of the battitore be written into the standard for the cheese?
- riffraff 2y ago
  AFAIK the battitori are employed directly from the Consorzio, the trade association which owns the brand. So what's written in the _disciplinare_ is the expectation that the wheel is flawless and that the experts will validate it at certain times. The details of how the validation is performed is vague, it mentions using the hammer but doesn't specify stuff like "it sounds X".
reaperducer 2y ago
replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese. I agree. As soon as you replace humans with machines, the next step is so-called "value engineering," where squeezing pennies out of a process becomes more important than the product. Let the tech people do tech. Let the artists do art. Food is an art.
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  > Food is an art. While I respect the point you're making, food is not an art. It is usually a perishable commodity and a requirement for survival.
  - Zopieux 2y ago
    It can be an art, and I for one am very glad I'm surrounded by countries where it is considered as such (e.g. Italy, France) so that I can indulge in tasty experiences almost everyday rather than treating "getting fed" as a 7h-per-week chore. That would suck.
nomel 2y ago
> end up with industrially-produced bad cheese. It does't have to be, of course, but the people with enough capital to set up automation tend to care more about money than cheese.
- awesome_dude 2y ago
  I think that the blame lies more with us, the consumers. The cheap bad cheese wouldn't last a second in the market if we didn't all rush to buy it, accepting it's failings, but rejoicing in how close it is to the "real" thing and, of course, deriding the original as being "so expensive"
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    At the margin there are people who don't eat the cheese today because it is too expensive for them. Those people are the ones who benefit from slightly cheaper cheese. On the other side you have those wealthy enough to enjoy as much as the want out of it at its current price. Those would be the losers if quality were to deteriorate.
    - awesome_dude 2y ago
      Hmm, quality only deteriorates in the "premium" section if those wealthy enough to buy that version demand that it cheapens itself - by no longer buying the premium version Edit: I can point to cases of that happening Ferrari, who couldn't turn a profit so sold to another car manufacturer that created a "profitable" version that, quite frankly, is a shadow on its former glory
      - QuercusMax 2y ago
        Happens to musical instrument manufacturers all the time, too. I used to have a Chickering piano from around 1915; a lovely instrument with a good reputation. At some point that company was sold, and they continued to produce pianos under that name, but they were nothing like the original.
stouset 2y ago
It’s also worth considering that at most you’d be automating 24 jobs.
- neysofu 2y ago
  Indeed. I'd imagine most of the value of such automation would come from supposedly better quality control, not from saving money on salaries.
thescriptkiddie 2y ago
as always it's not that automation is inherently bad, it's a matter of how it is used and to whose benefit. the luddites knew this. a lot of people misunderstand, but they didn't want to destroy the mills, they wanted to own them.
MarceliusK 2y ago
Tradition isn't just nostalgia - sometimes it's a protective layer against that slippery slope toward mediocrity disguised as efficiency
louthy 2y ago
If the price of cheese was the only factor then I’m sure practices would have changed. But people will pay a premium for what they perceive as a premium product, so practices like this just add to the ‘experience’. The watch on my arm is (mostly) handmade and worth a fortune, there are plenty of other cheaper watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots. Same principle, I think.
- neysofu 2y ago
  > there are plenty of other watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots In the world of watches, this logic extends far beyond "handmade vs made by robots". Quartz, for example, is better than automatic & mechanical in every single quantitative metric, yet perceived as lower value due to the lack of craftsmanship.
  - louthy 2y ago
    Indeed! I embrace life’s imperfections :D

by SamBam 2y ago

BobaFloutist 2y ago

The problem is it's actually a super fun thought experiment/engineering problem to try to figure out how to do this technologically, but any such attempt would (rightly) be taken as an attack on this profession because even if it was a silly blog post about overthinking a silly problem, silly blogposts are potentially upstream of (maybe even someone else) a commercial implementation that eventually destroys a profession. It sucks.

thierrydamiba 2y ago
Do professions really get destroyed? Or does the world just change? I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api. I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models. The old job doesn’t exist anymore, in many ways I am the classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn’t say it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools today to get intelligence from PDFs.
- woah 2y ago
  There’s no course to learn the niche skills and nuances of this trade; Alessandro accompanied and apprenticed with Renato and other experts for about 3 years, learning through firsthand experience how to assess each form. “The particularity of this profession to me is that it’s like it was 2 years ago, and it’s a skill that’s handed down from dev to dev. You go around with the most expert, most experienced BERTitori, and you watch and listen to them, and slowly they start to give you the keyboard. You try with them next to you, piano piano, and gradually, you begin to do more on your own,” explained Stocchi. “It’s a big responsibility, you have to be really capable of doing it, you can’t damage the forms.”
  - thierrydamiba 2y ago
    This is probably my favorite comment ever. Bravo!
- abirch 2y ago
  The world is constantly changing, some professions are destroyed as the result. This is a tale as old as time. Mark Twain wrote about this on Life on the Mississippi when he was a river boat pilot before trains became common and destroyed the trade. some professions spawn from viable hobbies and some hobbies spawn from unviable professions.
- paulorlando 2y ago
  And even with the existence of those tools, the old professions continue for years, sometimes many years, in niches. For example, even today there are people who are paid to wake up others manually - a job that used to be called "knocker-up."
  - thierrydamiba 2y ago
    People get paid to do this? I’m not doubting the veracity, I’m just surprised.
  - 9991 2y ago
    Knocker-up? I hardly know 'er!
deepfriedchokes 2y ago
That fun exercise is where my mind went immediately on reading the headline and seeing the image of an actual person undertaking this task manually (the horror!) when clearly a machine could do it better and more efficiently. Engineering, the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
TheJoeMan 2y ago
An interesting angle is if you automate it, you have the power to tweak the acceptance parameters. And once you make it easy to do, better keep the mba’s away. Whereas with a live person, I doubt anyone’s going to straightly say “please mark more cheese as top-shelf”.

perihelions 2y ago

- "For all their expertise, I am sure a technical solution would also easily be able to detect what they are looking for: voids within the cheese, or lack of uniform density..." Out of pure curiosity, how would an industrial process engineer approach this problem, de novo?

Sanzig 2y ago
Industrial CT would probably be pretty effective at giving a density distribution and identifying voids, but that may be overkill - a couple planes of X-ray imaging may be sufficient. Ultrasound would also be a solid bet, but it depends how many points you need to sample if it would be time efficient.
leansensei 2y ago
Microphones and spectral analysis. Or the same equipment used for flaw detection of welds with ultrasound.
ano-ther 2y ago
Ultrasound seems to be viable > A study on structural quality control of Swiss‐type cheese with ultrasound is presented. We used a longitudinal mode pulse‐echo setup using 1–2MHz ultrasonic frequencies to detect cheese‐eyes and ripening induced cracks. Results show that the ultrasonic method posses good potential to monitor the cheese structure during the ripening process. Preliminary results indicate that maturation stage could be monitored with ultrasonic velocity measurements. https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/894/1/1328/953695/Structural-Quality-Control-of-Swiss-Type-Cheese?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://pubs.aip.org/aip/acp/article-abstract/894/1/1328/953...
- jdietrich 2y ago
  Note that this is already industry-standard for non-destructive testing of metal, concrete and composites. Handheld ultrasonic tomography devices are commercially available and could plausibly be used on cheese with only minor modification. https://acs-international.com/instruments/ultrasonic-pulse-echo-tomography-systems-mira/a1040-mira-3d-thickness-measurement-rebar-and-flaw-detection/ https://acs-international.com/instruments/ultrasonic-pulse-e...

hooverd 2y ago

Maybe, and the promise of AI nowadays seems to be "we'll automate art and science and creativity so you have more time to do low-value manufacturing".

hammock 2y ago

>I am glad that this continues to be done by hand, and expect, based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. It has been fun watching Starbucks' various attempts at cracking into the Italian market.

staplers 2y ago
As an American, I was never a coffee snob but going to Italy changed that. My god they have it completely mastered.
- paulorlando 2y ago
  It's on a different level.
- kjellsbells 2y ago
  Italian cuisine seems to have a deeper understanding of bitter flavors than other common Western cuisines. They understand bitter vegetables like chicory and agretti, they understand bitterness in chocolate, and the coffee I had there always had the faintest hint of bitterness that enhanced rather than detracted from the flavor. It probably also helps that they are downing a demitasse in a minute or two instead of a giant venti size beast that lasts for an hour.
  - colordrops 2y ago
    Bitterness seems to be common in Mediterranean cuisine in general.
- xandrius 2y ago
  Wait until you realise that coffee can also not be toasted dark to death. Then you get to explore the other tastes of coffee too!
- bee_rider 2y ago
  What do you do now? I have a Flair Espresso machine and get beans from a nearby roaster. I dunno. It seems decent. I don’t consider myself a snob, but I put some effort in. Maybe Italians would be able to tase the defects that I add. But, they are the people who popularized Moka pots so they can’t really be so perfect.

dfxm12 2y ago

based on Italian attitudes towards food and tradition, that it will continue being done by hand for another hundred years. I'm unfamiliar with the regs on this, but can the duties of the battitore be written into the standard for the cheese?

riffraff 2y ago
AFAIK the battitori are employed directly from the Consorzio, the trade association which owns the brand. So what's written in the _disciplinare_ is the expectation that the wheel is flawless and that the experts will validate it at certain times. The details of how the validation is performed is vague, it mentions using the hammer but doesn't specify stuff like "it sounds X".

reaperducer 2y ago

replacing these humans with machines would be the start of a short process that would end up with indistrially-produced bad cheese. I agree. As soon as you replace humans with machines, the next step is so-called "value engineering," where squeezing pennies out of a process becomes more important than the product. Let the tech people do tech. Let the artists do art. Food is an art.

DiggyJohnson 2y ago
> Food is an art. While I respect the point you're making, food is not an art. It is usually a perishable commodity and a requirement for survival.
- Zopieux 2y ago
  It can be an art, and I for one am very glad I'm surrounded by countries where it is considered as such (e.g. Italy, France) so that I can indulge in tasty experiences almost everyday rather than treating "getting fed" as a 7h-per-week chore. That would suck.

nomel 2y ago

> end up with industrially-produced bad cheese. It does't have to be, of course, but the people with enough capital to set up automation tend to care more about money than cheese.

awesome_dude 2y ago
I think that the blame lies more with us, the consumers. The cheap bad cheese wouldn't last a second in the market if we didn't all rush to buy it, accepting it's failings, but rejoicing in how close it is to the "real" thing and, of course, deriding the original as being "so expensive"
- david-gpu 2y ago
  At the margin there are people who don't eat the cheese today because it is too expensive for them. Those people are the ones who benefit from slightly cheaper cheese. On the other side you have those wealthy enough to enjoy as much as the want out of it at its current price. Those would be the losers if quality were to deteriorate.
  - awesome_dude 2y ago
    Hmm, quality only deteriorates in the "premium" section if those wealthy enough to buy that version demand that it cheapens itself - by no longer buying the premium version Edit: I can point to cases of that happening Ferrari, who couldn't turn a profit so sold to another car manufacturer that created a "profitable" version that, quite frankly, is a shadow on its former glory
    - QuercusMax 2y ago
      Happens to musical instrument manufacturers all the time, too. I used to have a Chickering piano from around 1915; a lovely instrument with a good reputation. At some point that company was sold, and they continued to produce pianos under that name, but they were nothing like the original.

stouset 2y ago

It’s also worth considering that at most you’d be automating 24 jobs.

neysofu 2y ago
Indeed. I'd imagine most of the value of such automation would come from supposedly better quality control, not from saving money on salaries.

thescriptkiddie 2y ago

as always it's not that automation is inherently bad, it's a matter of how it is used and to whose benefit. the luddites knew this. a lot of people misunderstand, but they didn't want to destroy the mills, they wanted to own them.

MarceliusK 2y ago

Tradition isn't just nostalgia - sometimes it's a protective layer against that slippery slope toward mediocrity disguised as efficiency

louthy 2y ago

If the price of cheese was the only factor then I’m sure practices would have changed. But people will pay a premium for what they perceive as a premium product, so practices like this just add to the ‘experience’. The watch on my arm is (mostly) handmade and worth a fortune, there are plenty of other cheaper watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots. Same principle, I think.

neysofu 2y ago
> there are plenty of other watches that are arguably better due to them being made by robots In the world of watches, this logic extends far beyond "handmade vs made by robots". Quartz, for example, is better than automatic & mechanical in every single quantitative metric, yet perceived as lower value due to the lack of craftsmanship.
- louthy 2y ago
  Indeed! I embrace life’s imperfections :D