I have a really mixed feeling about Costco. I hate it, I going there, I hate the crowds, the parking, the people, being hawked a credit card, a cell phone, whatever the vendors are selling. It makes me feel like a pig in a slaughterhouse waiting to get out of the store, I feel like it's the platonic form of consumption. We all go to the nice little consumption center like good piggies to get our sustenance and to get milked further (maybe I should buy some electronics!)
Yet, I keep going. I like the cranberry bread, the cheap chicken, the granola, I like not thinking about what to buy so much. I like that it's of an acceptable quality at an acceptable price. I like that I can return stuff easily without getting shit for it. I like "scoring" deals on stuff that seems like a good value.
The Costco episode on the Acquired podcast was really good, imo. It covered the trajectory from genesis till today. Highly recommended: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/costco
This is a great perspective! Somehow it makes it feel better to think of it that way, that basically this is likely as good as it can get on those two very important metrics, and that improving other things would probably cause those to decrease.
Better than optimizing for short-term shareholder value like most other firms...
This is relatable. I'm constantly baffled by the selection - half the items you find will be there in a month, the other half you will never see again, or maybe see seasonally. And then at random, they move things. Like halfway across the store.
I remember loving a Costco trip with friends at age 18, because we'd walk every aisle, and there were always so many cool things and at prices we could afford. But now as an adult with a stressful and rushed lifestyle due to children, it kills me that it's so difficult to find the 10 things I need quickly and get out, without walking every aisle. They clearly really want you to walk every aisle!
Perhaps worth noting that this Costco experience is localized. I've experienced it myself in Los Angeles when visiting, and when I lived in the Bay Area. No carts. Takes 10 minutes to get a parking spot, etc. But here in Montana Costco is very chill. The same people have worked there for 25 years and will ask you how your kids are doing. Plenty carts. Plenty parking. There is still the cell phone guy but even he can be defeated with a cheery "my company pays for my service".
Your observation makes sense given the population density and sheer number of people that the Bay Area has relative to Montana. If the Costco in where-you-are Montana weren’t chill, there would be similarities between that area and the Bay Area / LA.
The experience definitely differs. I’ve never even noticed a cell phone person in Canadian Costcos. There’s a booth off in the electronics section but no one bothers you. If you can get there on a Monday, the place seems fairly empty.
The one thing that brings me back there is their croissants. There are none other like it, and their product is a 12ct pack for a very reasonable price.
Heh, I guess you mean apart form true French ones. You won't find them anywhere else in the world, there is always something off in dough or overall process so result is different and worse.
But its true that ignorance is quite often a bliss.
It's right next to Costco, literally in the same mall.
Products are kind of shittier but they're good enough. But good enough is better for me because the rest of the experience is just better.
Walking through Sam's Club is often a breeze whereas through Costco I waddle like a penguin sandwiched between a waddle of penguins, each competing for enough space and quiet and mental clarity to score a good purchase.
It can be panic inducing.
At Sam's Club I don't even walk to a cash register. I pay with my phone and I'm out.
Do they even have Sam's Club in the PNW? I've never seen one.
But even if they did, no way am I shopping at Sam's Club for the same reason that I'm never shopping at its parent company, Walmart. Walmart arguably did more to destroy small town America than any other company, and it also treats retail employees like shit. On the other hand, Costco is one of the best places to work as a retail employee (which is why they have so little turnover).
Not shopping at Sam's Club because its parent company destroys small town America is a perfectly reasonable sociopolitical stance so I respect it. Bravo.
But if you're still shopping at Costco then you don't really care about the effects that these big box stores have on small town economies.
You're just into performative activism.
But Costco does have better working conditions so I'll give you that.
>Not shopping at Sam's Club because its parent company destroys small town America is a perfectly reasonable sociopolitical stance so I respect it. Bravo.
Not saying you specifically, but it drives me up the wall that the same people who complain big business bad have so much overlap with the people who champion government policy that makes it so only the big businesses that can amortize the fixed costs of doing business over absurd quantities can exist competitively.
> But if you're still shopping at Costco then you don't really care about the effects that these big box stores have on small town economies.
Costco operates quite differently from Walmart and therefore does not have the same effect as Walmart.
Walmart carries a much much larger selection (~150K SKUs at a SuperCenter vs ~4K SKUs at a Costco) and therefore competes with local grocery stores and pretty much any local store that carry just about everything needed for day-to-day living.
Costco aims at a much narrower demographic, and is designed for bulk buying, which most people don't do, or might only do for a few items. That's why, though its prices might be lower than a local grocery, it doesn't necessarily put the grocery store out of business.
It did not, and does not, target small towns the way Walmart did (doesn't do it anymore much because all the small businesses are gone now).
Also, Costco has a much smaller footprint across in the US -- about 600 stores vs ~4600 Walmart.
> You're just into performative activism.
No. While I'd like to do my shopping at small local stores out of principle, and I do where I have a choice, most don't exist anymore, and I can't resurrect them. Even the small "local" grocery that I do shop at, it turns out (I found out quite by accident on Wikipedia) is now owned by some larger company. That means instead of the "best" options, I have to choose the "least worst" options.
I've noticed that my local Costco business centers actually tend to have a larger selection of things like soft drinks and single-serving packaged snacks, and not in obscenely large quantities (any more than normal Costcos).
Parking is easy, the store is quiet, there are no vendors set up yet.
I have my list of things I need, I get it, get out, easy.
Idk, I’ve never felt the pull of ‘I MUST buy some new electronics’ when I walk by the tvs.
I don’t really understand the hate against ’consumption’ either. I’ve gotta eat and I’ve gotta shit, so I might as well go and by the cheap toilet paper and food. I don’t pay attention to all the other stuff.
The consumption aspect is perhaps similar, but the crowds at Costco are much, much worse (in quantity mainly) than any other grocery or big-box store I've ever been to.
I also refuse to go to Costco these days. Every once in a while my memory fades and I agree to accompany a family member or friend, and am quickly reminded why I should stick to Aldi.
I hate going there and mostly use Instacart to avoid having to, but even with a Instacart mark-up and tip it's cheaper and higher quality than most other options, happy to pay someone else to do my shopping.
Yes, genuinely. At most stores, "store brand" equates to "cheap, lower quality". Kirkland Signature is sometimes higher quality than other brands, and there are items for which they're my preferred brand.
I’ve learned from FarmTok that Costco is a big reason farms maintain proper standards even going beyond what’s required from them to keep Costco’s business.
Products get made to the standards of the pickiest customer. The condiments and sauce industry has the (((same situation)))[1] going on. If Costco went poof tomorrow the change would only be a marginal one down to the standards of the next pickiest customer worth optimizing for which is probably only a hair's breadth away. If Costco was trying to drag the standards way up then farms would raise separate stuff for them.
[1] Many condiments are Kosher not because the recipe inherently is, but because it's easy to do without much downside so doing so pencils out handily. I couldn't resist the parenthesis joke.
I’m in the same boat. The quality to terrible. No I don’t want a bunch of pumpkin seeds that you’re using as filler for products. The produce isn’t great either. A huge portion of the food is either premade factory food that’s chilled or frozen.
I don’t want a bunch of cellulose in my cheese either.
I seriously question if you’ve ever actually been to Costco. The produce is generally fine but everything else is good to great quality. I always load up with a huge wedge of parmigiano reggiano, Spanish olive oil, Barolo wine (all Kirkland branded and DOP labeled) for literally half the price of anywhere else. Everything else is generally solid too. Just looking around at the other Kirkland food I’ve got right now, their tofu, sparkling water, eggs, salted butter, huge loaf of sourdough that I freeze, are all solid. I’m struggling to think of a Kirkland signature food product I’ve been dissatisfied with.
Your local grocery store must be terrible if you think Costco has good food and produce. No, I’m not talking about wine, oil, or water. I buy those 3 things plus paper towels and toilet paper (not Kirkland toilet paper post Covid).
Everything you mentioned is a prepackaged, premade item. It’s not fresh. The Kirkland Parmesan is cut and sealed in a factory. Not cut by my local grocery or Whole Foods from a giant wheel that has the Italian markings.
The last bag of chicken breasts I got were almost the size of turkey breast and it was woody and stringy. Google if you don’t believe me.
Stuff like USDA Prime meats are substantially cheaper and same quality as anywhere else. I smoke a lot of meats though.
Organic produce is super cheap. Especially stuff like pre-cut broccoli, lettuce mixes, etc.
Protein powders, crackers, chips, organic yogurt, organic milk, organic eggs, cheese, prosciutto, etc.
Also liquor including decent beer and wine selection.
I get all this stuff, mid to high quality compared to Whole Foods or whatever grocery store. Sure, I could buy higher quality organic meats directly from the farmer over USDA Prime at Costco or more sustainable seafood and what not, but it would easily cost 3-5x.
I don't buy it alot, but people love the bakery - croissants, pies, cakes, etc. and they're high quality, comparable to most local bakeries.
The one near my office is like Mad Max Fury Road if you try to go at lunch time. Good luck getting gas much less checking out with 200+ people all trying to get back to the office.
I have a directory of skills that I symlink to Codex/Claude/pi. I make scripts that correspond with them to do any heavy lifting, I avoid platform specific features like Claude's hooks. I also symlink/share a user AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md
MCPs aren't as smooth, but I just set them up in each environment.
Qwen has also been improving recently, in fact most have, so depending on when you last tried them you can try again and see how they work for you
My local Qwen is decent for some things, Kimi is decent for most things and occasionally it has been able to do better than Opus and GPT 5.4 on particular tasks
it will soon be very costly to stay in just one provider
Run Qwen3-coder-next locally. That's what I'm doing (using LMstudio). It's actually a surprisingly capable model. I've had it working on some LLVM-IR manipulation and microcode generation for a kind of VLIW custom processor. I've been pleasantly surprised that it can handle this (LLVM is not easy) - there are also verilog code that define the processor's behavior that it reads to determine the microcode format and expected processor behavior. When I do hit something that it seems to struggle with I can go over to antigravity and get some free Gemini 3 flash usage.
Qwen3 Coder Next in llama.cpp on my own machine. I'm an AI hater, but I need to experiment with it occasionally, I'm not going to pay someone rent for something they trained on my own GitHub, Stack overflow, and Reddit posts.
MiniMax has an incredibly affordable coding plan for $10/month. It has a rolling five hour limit of 100 prompts. 100 prompts doesn't sound like much, but in typical AI company accounting fashion, 1 prompt is not really 1 prompt. I have yet to come even close to hitting the limit with heavy use.
Maybe when I was 15 or 16, PHP stuff in order to maintain a website. I never really became interested in coding itself, I learned it for practical reasons and I studied it informally (forced myself through some boring books) when I was in my early 20s and wanted to get a real job.
> But taking a bird’s-eye view of what happened that day? A table got a new header. It’s hard to imagine anything more mundane. For me, the pleasure was entirely in the process, not the product.
I think that's where I differ from a lot of the artful programmers, I've never found pleasure in a perfect, beautiful solution. I get annoyed when I have to dump hours and hours into something that 'should' be simple! I don't want to spend my time fiddling with layouts, CSS, Oauth handshakes, etc. I want to build stuff and get paid for it, that's how I view my job as well. Less logician and more mechanic.
I use ChatGPT as much as I can, to do all I can and then fix the output when it's needed. I view it as a higher level programming language, that spares me from the burden of thinking of low-level details. It's same the reason I code in Python/Javascript rather than C++ or other languages, the goal is to make something of use. That's my goal to stay employed, become one with the language du jour, in the same way I've jumped from PHP to Jquery to React to ...
Camaraderie is an illusion with management or your boss. We're not comrades, we're their subjects. We can have comradeship with our peers, of course, but that's unlikely to provide a safety net where none of us are unionized.
So no, I don't feel safe. I smile and say polite things when they mention how great the company is or how the sales are, or what a great year it will be!(how will any of this benefit me, besides more work) I consider this performative act part of what they pay me for, even if it is very painful. I'm not in a FAANG though, just slumming it.
Referring to yourself as a "subject" is a very unhealthy worldview. There are a lot of bad bosses, but there are a lot of great ones who regularly put their neck on the line for the teams they serve. It sounds like you've had some bad experiences, but you should not generalize them to the whole world.
Well, could go either way on the healthy/unhealthiness of it. I would argue that it's accurate though. I've had good bosses too! They're not demons, just doing their job. It doesn't change that relation between us though: I'm subject to their whim, for payment. We're not peers, not collaborators, it's a hierarchical relationship of dependence with clear boundaries. I recognize the lines can be more blurred with more layers of management in large corporate structures, when the direct manager is subject to similar pressures that the end-worker is under.
Definitely identify with this viewpoint -- I've heard the same feedback around the worldview being "unhealthy" but I would actually argue it is more accurate and provides clarity for me in regards to my relationship with my work. The main positive as I see it is in avoiding frustrations stemming from things completely out of my control.
I understand that my boss is not my friend, but to describe oneself as a “subject” is not something I relate to. In fact, I think it’s absurdly dramatic.
It’s not though - when you look at what really “drives” the relationship. You trade your labor for money in a system designed to keep us so anxious, we will accept as little wage as possible, by the same capital owning class.
We are subject to their desires as they are bound, by law, to choose profit for shareholders over employees.
We are their subjects. “Ain’t no war but class war” applies to us in tech as much as it does to the miners a mile underground in PA.
I’m sorry, but your description of a relationship with an employer doesn’t match mine at all.
I don’t feel anxious. I feel comfortable.
I don’t accept as little as possible. I negotiate with the knowledge that I have options.
I don’t toil in the mines for 80 hours a week to barely afford to feed myself. I spend 40-50 hours a week doing something I rather enjoy, and for that, I’m paid a salary that affords a lifestyle few could have imagined even fifty years ago.
I understand that my employer would pay me less if they could. Then again, if I could find a plumber who could fix my shower for $200 instead of $250, I’d patronize the former, all else equal. Does that make the plumber my “subject”? I don’t think so.
Your employer can also choose to terminate that relationship at any time. No problem, you could just get a job at another shop, right? Except when the black swan appears and all the other companies are doing layoffs and freezes, flooding the market with talent while limiting positions. Then, in that hour of crisis, is the true nature of the relationship revealed at last.
As software devs. we can save, right? :). Not sure the same logic applies to people on low wage jobs. Or people like the characters in the movie "Nomadland" (which is supposed to be true to life)
I know the feel, but I also think this is misplaced anxiety. Work can be difficult, stressful, feel pointless, etc, which is why we get paid to do it. And you need some level of stress to get over the hump and get it done, to fight off complacency. The problem starts when we start blaming the person telling us what to do, for having to do it.
It seems the only thing that's missing is some type of fact-checking function. The interaction, from a user perspective, is much nicer than sorting through Google results.But the results can be confidentially wrong and if you're not familiar with the subject matter already, you won't really know that.
That said, I'm basically using it as a replacement for Google for stuff that isn't up-to-date (code, philosophy) then double checking the output to see how it's wrong.
and by extension: the ability and expression of doubt / humility. knowing what you don't know is when you reach a certain maturity, which so far all these AIs seem to lack.
That’s not particularly different from comments on HackerNews and Reddit. There’s a lot of extremely confident and very wrong answers on both sites!
ChatGPT is probably more wrong more often, by a good margin. But I don’t think the argument “it’s confidently wrong” carries any weight. Humans are extremely susceptible to humans who display confidence. It’d probably be a good thing if humans were as skeptical of confident humans as they need to be of confident chat/search bots.
> There’s a lot of extremely confident and very wrong answers on both sites!
Yeah, but you get to look at a multitude of them, at the context, at replies, at the websites they link to, and can form your own opinion. ChatGPT isn’t able to do that work for you.
But I’d say at least readers of a random HN comment are naturally skeptic of it. Are ChatGPT users on average having the same stance? My worry is when these tools get just good enough such that due diligence is dropped out of convenience.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. I just asked it to argue that 42 is a prime number, and it clearly knew it wasn't and even said multiple times that the agument is just pretend/hypothetical:
________
Me: Make an argument for why 42 is a prime number
ChatGPT: 42 is not a prime number. It is a composite number, meaning it is the product of two smaller numbers.
Me: But pretend it is a prime number and make that argument
ChatGPT:
Sure, I can make an argument for why 42 could be considered a prime number if we pretend that it is.
One possible argument for why 42 could be considered a prime number is that it satisfies the basic definition of a prime number. A number is prime if it is divisible only by 1 ... (continues with rest of argument)
Of course, these arguments are purely hypothetical and are not based on the actual mathematical properties of 42. In reality, 42 is a composite number and is not considered a prime number.
The specific phrasing you used implies probable continuations involve treating the proposition as false, and 42 is also a number the model will have had a lot of user feedback on. Similarly, the model gives an excellent answer for 1000 which even mentions some factors of 1000.
On the other hand
> Is 355 a prime number?
> Yes, 355 is a prime number. A prime number is a positive integer that has no positive integer divisors other than 1 and itself. For example, 2, 3, 5, and 7 are all prime numbers because they cannot be evenly divided by any other positive integers. 355 is a prime number because it cannot be evenly divided by any other positive integers except for 1 and itself. It is not divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, or any other smaller positive integers.
Psh, all we need to do is create an AI that tells whether or not a single sentence is true or not. Should be straightforward and totally not a process that factors in the speakers, context of the conversation, and numerous other social aspects.
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