max-ch

I work for a global consumer goods company - we print probably billions of (1d) bar codes on packs per year.

1d bar codes will go extinct, but only after every scanning system at every retailer has changed to recognize 2d bar codes/qr codes. This will likely take decades.

In the meantime, there will be a world where 2d bar codes and 1d bar codes will coexist on packs. With the additional confusion that many packs already have qr codes, either for consumer information or for internal tracking at the plant (batches for quality control), so we will probably have a little zoo of qr codes for a while, until they all finally can be merged.

Many observations ring true for me, with the K-shaped effect on software developers and product owners.

Besides the utility for users, Flora Incognita is also a massive crowdsourcing project for science: They use the GPS location of photos in combination with the identified plants to build a temporo-spatial database of confirmed plant sightings. (To my knowledge no link to any personal data of users.)

Thanks for sharing. I‘ve read your write-up but not yet your story.

1. Honest question: What exactly about this contest and way of writing was enjoyable to you? I‘ve seen your very analytical approach for identifying a premise but then relatively little control about all the rest.

2. I‘ve seen on your website that you also write fiction outside of this particular contest. Can you describe a bit how you use AI there and where you see it as helpful / not helpful for writing fiction?

Same here: 10 year old Roomba from the 6xx series, still going strong. I bought official replacement parts for a wheel, some brushes and a new battery: Replacing them was very easy - just a few screws, no glued-together parts.

> Thanks for your enthusiasm. Obviously, things seen from the inside aren't as ideal as a non-physicist person might think.

Thanks for sharing, this is a good additional perspective. I didn’t mean to look at CERN with rose-tinted glasses.

I was trying to convey that I marvel at the achievement of building a machine of this size and complexity. I didn’t mean to say that working conditions are perfect - in the same way as I can marvel at the Taj Mahal but also know that being involved in its construction must have been a horrible experience.

I would argue that a part of the underlying reasons are coming from structural issues within academia / knowledge work in general and, to some degree, fundamental psychological flaws of humans. I have seen versions of what you are describing also in other workplaces. This is not to say that your experiences and observations are invalid - rather, that they are probably not unique to CERN and a broader issue.

(My employer hired many ex CERN researchers for the IT / Data Science team throughout the last years. If you are still in the area, there is a non-negligible probability that we work for the same company.)

I was visiting CERN on one of their Open Days during the previous shutdown. This is one of the rare occasion where visitors can enter the LHC. I walked for about 500m along the beam which is remarkably small despite all its protection.

Standing inside LHCb (one of the experiments where they track collisions) was one of my most awe-inspiring moments about science and technology. Photos don’t do it justice. It’s a multi-story building underground, but every inch is covered with cables, sensors etc. Seeing it on photos is one thing, standing inside the biggest machine built by humankind is a completely different experience and hard to put into words.

The amount of thinking and planning that went into it is insane. CERN staff is super-friendly and open to talk and explain. If you have the possibility to visit, do it - especially with guided tours and on their annual Open Days.

Fantastic read!

In the mid-2010s, I was interning at the German federal statistical office. Some of the team assistants were there since the 1980s/90s and had still learnt to use those tools as part of their vocational training. They also showed me the tools and the instructions for drawing exactly aligned tables by hand and the resulting bound sets of tables with hundreds of pages. Completely mind-boggling how much time they must have spent on a single project, now all automated away.