The article contains a rather beautiful example done via camera (and product photography demands that you get the froth and lighting just in time and just right) decorated by an artistic employee.
The owner had to resort to her standby Canva when the employee left, but lacking time due to a newborn.
To me, having followed all kinds of embedded links over to Vermont and Germany, the latter example being extraordinarily unappetizing. [0]
Stepping back to get the big picture, it seems to me that small business owners have gotten spoiled by local artists and artistic employees who created really beautiful signs and brochures. Come crunch time, it's either pay a local artist or DIY. And to get "pretty" artwork, many resort to AI, which mostly ain't pretty, sometimes pretty grotesque.
But this seems to be a case of wanting things both ways. AI is famous for really bizarre food rendering, as exhibited below. Customers really want food and preparation to look real. So why not set up a simple grid (say, Pages on a mac or Libre Office or Scribus) and pair the best photo you can grab with a description opposite it, on a nice background?
Other than KISS, you can get excellent art for a price, or slop for cheap (or at least, artificial art that advertises itself as such).
Increasing costs affect not only businesses, but people needing work, some of whom have lost jobs and income, are understandably upset.
The workflow I described can be done for little cost if DIY is not suitable, perhaps even a local photography class (who would work for (coffee) beans?)
I refer friends learning photography, intrigued by their phone cameras, and wanting to expand their skill set, to community college and other classes. Maybe even one of those starving artists.
Businesses brag about sourcing locally. I see a way to do so, but good art requires good artists, just as product photography requires some skill.
You can't have it all, or damn cheap. You must choose wisely.
P.S. My Dad was a commercial artist and I am an amateur photographer. And I make my own coffee. Yikes, the cost. If it's atmosphere, do put some nice art on the walls and let the product speak for itself.
> So why not set up a simple grid (say, Pages on a mac or Libre Office or Scribus) and pair the best photo you can grab with a description opposite it, on a nice background?
Or, for that matter - skip the photos, just do text, maybe with a few bits of clip art if you're feeling daring. Photos are hardly essential for coffee drinks, which tend to all look the same in real life anyway.
> The level of athleticism in professional basketball players is superhuman. They too are alien beings. And very quick learners. Getting the best of them in a sport they live and die in is a near-impossibility by 2040.
Essentially, we admire the outliers, the 7 sigmas in our population. But they pay a price, supposedly compensated for with astronomical salaries. But many's the athlete who can barely get out of bed and walk. It's a hell of a price.
I'm a very poor pianist, and have to wonder at some pieces specifically created to show extreme virtuosity. Actual artistic beauty is all over the map, in my own opinion. And then there are the tenors!!
From "Amadeus" Mozart is quoted as saying (I need to check) "manly love, Signore. Not male sopranos screeching.
And yet, the opera channel greatly favors "Nessun Dorma" from Turandot and “Ah mes amis”. from La Fille du Regiment. It has an astonishing 9 high C’s
And there are your 10,000X outliers.
Beauty and excellence can and do exist within a sigma or two. We worship the ultra-wealthy as their excesses trash the planet. But! cognitive biases [0].
And wouldn't it be better if more kids played basketball, or piano or lemonade entrepreneur (I sure could use a lemonade now) than watching someone else, or being boxed out by zoning laws enforced by town cops with tanks and rocket launchers.
> To be very clear, I fully expect to watch robot olympics. I will be one of many willing to pay to see robots dance, compete in sports, and amaze us with their kinetic abilities. Basketball robots are likely to invent new basketball moves that humans didn’t think of doing, or couldn’t do easily. In the long-term, robots could change how humans play basketball professionally.
I watch planes fly and space telescopes explore the universe, but they are meant to help us travel and learn, not to compete with us. There is vast space and yes, divinity within us to grow and achieve happiness, without looking elsewhere. Spectacle aside, games are wave functions that collapse into W or L, and lately, sports are overtaken by gambling. While this robotization opens vast new vistas for speculation and insider cheating, I feel the need to explore my own potential rather than someone else's, though I am inspired by less monumental works that push me to do better and do more. There's room to grow within those limits, and how many of us really exercise more than a percent or two of our potential?
I have always gambled on myself and my ability to learn and grow in balance, not to break some record with 'superhuman" effort, and records are made to be broken.
And where are the home-cleaning bots, exoskeletons and self-driving cars that don't kill? I really, really, really could use them today.
What is a "lie" vs what is the "truth"? We don't have consistent answers as living beings, why do we expect probability to distinguish, even if as a rhetorical argument?
These are still token probability machines, and though the models in the last 6 months do more "thinking", they use certain tokens (actually, but wait) to "intentionally" inject path bifurcation so the next most likely token is conversation that questions preceding statements, like statistical BFS/DFS over the token / embedding graph, but you want to make certain path choices closer in equality so both are explored.
Buddhists who follow the Lotus Sutra have the idea of a Bodhisattva of the Earth [0]. Very briefly, we are all endowed with Buddha nature, but most do not realize it. Bodhisattvas are people like you and me who realize not only their inherent Buddhahood, but who vow to help others as equals.
So much so that they incur a little karma in order to return to this "mean streets" world in the next trip and do even more good.
Such "mission and purpose" in life is really uplifting, and if you ask people their misson and purpose, their answers might range from "I don't know," to "To go to somewhere else much nicer" to the Silicon Valley goal of "Whoever dies with the most toys wins"
I have no recollection of any past lives :-) but I wish to do good while I am here, and like Pascal's wager [1] I figure that as I strive to do more good in this life, past failures being learning moments, not guilt trips, it wouldn't hurt me to increase my "faith, study and practice" [2] just in case I get to do it all over again. I was gifted with intelligence to seek out truths, and did so as a scientist and engineer. It took me a very long time to find this Lotus Sutra Buddhism, which I finally did when I stumbled upon a book by Richard Causton, "The Buddha in Daily Life" (formerly "Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism") at Half Price Books. So be it. Buddhist concepts are analogous to modern scientific concepts, first made known in "The Tao of Physics", Our understanding of the universe has advanced and harmonizes more over time.
Unfortunately for your premise, we don't seem to remember previous lives, but I am grateful for being so gifted entering this one, and if I or some other person with no recollection of me benefits from my karma, great.
What I find depressing is that notion that life is a zero-sum game, which leads to the insane concentration of wealth, something that you can't "take with you" and the "creative destruction" (or uncreative destruction) that abounds because "It doesn't matter, there's a better world "somewhere else", which is life-denying and the results of such thinking are evident. [3]
I'll keep trying, even if I have only one shot at it.
Again.