It's the cheese

[Drunk Monk]

Stacy accidentally ordered two sharp cheddar cheese loaves through one of our delivery services recently. That was on top of my usual cheese stash. Been eating a lot of cheese lately. It has sparked a little joy in my otherwise dismal life...

[Greg]

At least you aren't dead.


Speaking of which......Yosemite? WTH?

[Drunk Monk]

I'm getting back to that. 

Lemme finish my cheese first.

[Drunk Monk]

Question One: Why isn't this in the Food section?

Statement One: It's all fun and games until......

An Italian man has been crushed to death under thousands of vast wheels of a Parmesan-style hard cheese, firefighters said Monday.
Giacomo Chiapparini, 74, was buried under the cheeses, each of which weighed almost 90 pounds, when a shelf broke in his warehouse in the northern Lombardy region on Sunday, creating a domino effect that brought down thousands of wheels, firefighter Antonio Dusi from Bergamo told AFP.
Rescuers "had to move the cheeses and the shelves by hand," Dusi said, adding that it "took about 12 hours" to finally find Chiapparini.

Parmesan and Grana Padano cheese age in warehouses in their corresponding regions, as seen in this January 1, 2012 file photo from Fiorenzuola d'Arda (Piacenza Province), Italy. / Credit: Massimo Di Nonno/Getty

The warehouse, located in the small town of Romano di Lombardia near Bergamo, contained a total of 25,000 wheels of Grana Padano, a hard cheese which resembles Parmesan and is very popular in Italy.
Chiapparini had been checking on the ripening wheels, which were stored on metal shelves, the highest of which stood at 33 feet.
A local resident told Italian media the collapse sounded "like thunder," BBC News reported.
Speaking to Italian media, a neighbor described Chiapparini as "very supportive… and generous." They said he had lost a child decades ago.
Bortolo Ghislotti, a friend of the victim, told NBC News that Chiapparini's son Tiziano had just walked out of the warehouse before the incident.
"Tiziano told me he heard a massive noise, he turned around and saw his father buried under thousands of cheese wheels," Ghislotti told the network. "He knows that if he got out seconds later, he would be dead too."

So one of the tricky bits of the latest update is that when you cut&paste text, the font size is reduced to super micro tiny. You have to do a select all and then bump up the font size to 3 or so. 

I didn't read this story before because the font was too tiny and with my aging eyes, I can barely read normal font. But then I recognized an image on my newsfeed and came back to see your teeny tiny font. So teeny. So I fixed it above.

Cheese on...

[Greg]

I just changed things on my phone because everything looked small. Now, everything is big. I like it.

[Drunk Monk]

Whenever I post from my phone, spelchuk takes over and makes it funnier.

[Greg]

The Funner Filter™

[thatguy]

https://www.businessinsider.com/edible-m...ers-2023-8

Parmigiano-Reggiano makers are putting edible microchips the size of a grain of sand into their 90-pound cheese wheels to combat counterfeiters

Kelsey Vlamis
Aug 17, 2023, 4:37 PM PDT

A worker cuts a wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese at the Casearia Castelli, member of Lactalis Group, at the Caseificio Tricolore in Reggio Emilia, Northern Italy, on April 19, 2023. 
Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images

• Makers of Parmigiano-Reggiano in Italy are adding microchips to their cheese wheels.
  
• It's the latest move to combat counterfeiters selling rip offs of the premium product.
  
• The chips, which are edible and placed on a food-safe label, cannot be read remotely.
  

The next time you dig into a bowl of pasta with freshly grated parmesan, you could accidentally be eating a microchip.

That's because makers of Parmigiano-Reggiano are implanting microchips into the casings of their 90-pound cheese wheels as the latest move to ward off counterfeiters, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Yes, there are counterfeiters of Parmigiano-Reggiano. That's because it's the original parmesan cheese officially protected by the European Union, meaning the name can only be used for the authentic product. Parmigiano-Reggiano must be made in a particular area of northern Italy's Emilia Romagna region and with specific production standards and techniques. It also has to be aged for at least one year.

Because of its world-famous reputation for quality, Parmigiano-Reggiano can be sold at a higher price point than cheese simply labeled "parmesan," which is typically an imitation of the original and is commonly sold in the US.

The Journal reported that the micro-transponders are made of silicon and about the size of a grain of sand. They are being placed on the casein label, a food-safe label commonly used in cheese production, which is placed on the cheese wheel. The microchip can then be scanned to pull up a unique serial ID that buyers can use to ensure they've got the real thing.

"We keep fighting with new methods," Alberto Pecorari, whose job is to protect the product's authenticity for a group that represents Parmigiano makers, told the Journal. "We won't give up."

The chips use blockchain technology and trace the wheel of cheese back to where the milk that was used came from. Other industries are also considering or planning to use the chips, including makers of drugs and car parts.

The Journal reported the chips cannot be read remotely or used to track someone should they ingest it.

Parmigiano-Reggiano is among the many food products that are formally protected in the European Union, including Champagne from France and Feta from Greece.

I bet it's that Bill Gates again...if he can't get us with vax, he'll get us with the cheese!

--tg

[thatguy]

Should we start an AI vs Cheese thread?

https://boingboing.net/2023/06/19/confus...heese.html

Confuse-A-Bot is a new game that helps you fight the real-life AI apocalypse with bad data … and cheese

Thom Dunn 
Mon  Jun 19, 2023 



Confuse A Bot is an upcoming in-browser video game from the creator of the viral video game Waiting In Line — but this time, instead of being hilariously boring, this new game's mundane approach can potentially protect us from the AI revolution. The premise is simple, and delightful: you basically take a bunch of this "Prove you're not a bot"-style AI verification tools — you know, the kinds that ask you to select all the squares with motorcycles — except you answer them with bunk data. 

Specifically, with cheese. 

Seriously, that's the game: you just constantly tell the robots that the image they're looking at is an image a cheese. As we all know, junk in means junk out. So all we have to do is convince the robots that literally everything is cheese, and they'll never be able to trick us into thinking that they're sentient then handing over the keys so they can destroy us (and/or allow the capitalist class to horde more profits through cheap labor). 

Here's how creator Rajeev Basu describes the game:

AI is only as good as its datasets. CONFUSE A BOT is a "public service videogame" that invites players to verify images incorrectly, to confuse bots, and help save humanity from an AI apocalypse.

While key figures in AI like Sam Altman have sounded the alarm many times, there has been littleaction beyond "lively debates" and petitions signed by high-ranking CEOs.

Confuse A Bot questions: what if we put the power back into the hands of the people?

How the game works:
– The game pulls in images from the Internet, and asks players to verify them.
– Players verify images incorrectly. The more they do, the more points they get.
– The game automatically re-releases the incorrectly verified images online, for AI to scrape and absorb, thereby helping save humanity from an AI takeover. It's that easy!

You'll also get the chance to learn a lot more about cheese.

Basu expanded on the idea a bit over email, telling me:

Although it all looks a bit stupid, that's actually some clever tech going on in the background that is actually reclassifying images incorrectly for real (based on how players play), and then spewing them back out online in real-time to be harvested by AI scrapers to learn from.

Cheesy? Sure! But cheesy can be revolutionary! Cheesy can be a form of resistance!
Confuse A Bot will be available in the early Fall; we'll update when it's ready

—tg

[Drunk Monk]

Once again, Star Trek predicts this.

The season premiere of The Lower Decks has a major plot point about Voy’s Neelix cheese. I won’t spoil it but it pairs perfectly with this Confuse a Bot idea. It reminds me of Monty Python’s Confuse a cat crossed with the ST: TOS ep I, Mudd.

[Drunk Monk]

This made me think of that great D00M melee we had at Lynch Castle in 'Toga when we started using individually wrapped slices of cheese as shuriken. Those were the days. Ahead of the curve, we were. 

Kraft is recalling some American cheese slices over potential choking hazard
Updated September 21, 20231:20 PM ET 
Vanessa Romo


Kraft Heinz is recalling 83,800 cases of individually wrapped Kraft Singles American processed cheese slices over concerns of a potential choking hazard. 
The food giant said Tuesday that a malfunctioning wrapping machine left a thin strip of plastic film on some processed cheese slices, after the wrapper had been removed. 
"If the film sticks to the slice and is not removed, it could be unpleasant and potentially cause a gagging or choking hazard," the company said. 
The problem was discovered after several consumers complained about finding the extra strip of plastic stuck to a slice. Six complaints were received of people choking or gagging, but injuries or serious health issues have been reported, according to Kraft Heinz. 
"Consumers who purchased these items should not consume them and can return them to the store where it was purchased for an exchange or refund," Heinz said. It added that the machine that caused the problem has been fixed and all other processing machines have been inspected. 
What to look out for
Not all batches of Kraft's American cheese slices fall under the recall. 
Consumers are specifically being warned to look out for 16 oz. Kraft Singles American Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product with an individual package UPC of 0 2100061526 1 and a "Best When Used By" date of 10 JAN 24 through 27 JAN 24. 
The individual packages will contain an S and 72 in the manufacturing code.
Three-pound multipacks of Kraft Singles American Pasteurized Prepared Cheese are also included in the recall. For these products, customers should look for a carton UPC of 0 2100060491 3 and a "Best When Used By" of 09 JAN 2024 through 13 JAN 2024 and 16 JAN 2024.

[Greg]

My first question is why isn't there a cheese thread for the cheese posts.

My second question is:

[Drunk Monk]

Do you even read the D00M4M at all?

http://www.brotherhoodofdoom.com/doomFor...php?tid=33

[Greg]

Not really. It's not my thing.

[Drunk Monk]

fair...