aaronbaugher

The small-town Dollar General I visit turned the second, usually-idle checkout lane into a self-checkout about a year ago. A few months later, they turned it off and haven't used it since.

I suspect it just didn't make sense to have an employee outside smoking or sitting in the break room scrolling on a phone while the customers went through and maybe paid for their goods, when that employee could simply run the checkout counter.

Smart people can get away with tricks like that.

I'd love an example too, and an example of the classical system that this replaced. I'm willing to believe the worst of the school system, but I'd like to understand why.

Probably. I hated memorization when I was a student too, because it was boring. But as soon as I did some teaching, my attitude changed to, "Just memorize it, it'll make your life so much easier." It's rough watching kids try to multiply when they don't have their times tables memorized, or translate a language when they haven't memorized the vocabulary words in the lesson so they have to look up each one.

True. Even in the strictest US states, the lockdowns were actually voluntary stay-at-home orders, because very few people could survive more than a few days without trips to get food, and there are a lot of necessary services that have to happen. Just for one small example, how many homes across the country need a plumber in a typical day, and would have sewage problems and disease eventually if plumbers weren't allowed to move around to do their work?

The idea that the virus ever could have been stopped if we'd just all cooperated harder was a retcon invented later by people who wanted to criticize other people for not caring as much as they did. The actual experts always said the best we could do was spread it out.

Yeah, a whole lot of Americans who still click the "religious" box on a poll are just going on habit and family tradition, or they go to a church that's become part social club and part community charity center. (Nothing wrong with charity, of course, but you don't have to be religious to be charitable.) It doesn't mean what it meant a few generations ago, when, probably coincidentally, there was less crime.

Yep. Eventually the businesses shut down the stores that have too much theft to be profitable; then people complain about problems like food deserts and accuse the businesses of isms; then well-meaning people elect politicians who promise to make it all better; then the politicians use tax breaks, sweetheart deals, and social pressure to get the businesses to open stores in those areas again.

The cycle continues because we can't learn a lesson that sticks for more than a generation, and the next generation thinks it'll be better this time because they care more than their parents did.

I've noticed in a lot of newer movies, people's phones only vibrate and they always notice it and grab it (unless the script says they miss the call/text for plot reasons). Of course, the scene is always quiet at that moment, so you can hear the vibration effect and believe that the character does too. In real life, it doesn't often work that way.

It seems odd because it assumes you agree that silent prayer would make people feel unsafe, and that prayer is a form of "freedom of thought." You could agree that freedom of thought is a human right, but not think that applies to prayer. You could also think silent prayer outside abortion clinics won't make people feel unsafe, but still think it should be banned. Unless you agree with at least one of the assumptions they're baking into the answers, you can't give a satisfactory answer.

The question itself is very simple, and the answers should be "yes" and "no." All the rest is message.

I got high marks for cursive in grade school, but I switched to printing in high school when I took Latin, because it made the distinction clearer between m's and n's and things like that. Forty years later, I'm trying to go back to cursive because it's faster, but it's a whole lot harder now.

Aside from learning, I also find that pen-and-paper is much more effective for journaling, when I want to work through a problem or brainstorm something. Once I've worked it out, I'll often type it in so I've got it saved in a searchable, archivable form. But putting it on paper first seems to help me think about it. It's like I see the words in a deeper way than when I'm putting them on the screen.

People who don't know how to code know they don't know how. They can look over your shoulder and see that it looks like gibberish, and they also have no interest in understanding it even if they could.

On the other hand, designing the software or engineering a solution to the problem seems like something they could do, as far as they know, because it's not something concrete that they can look at and see is beyond their abilities.

I assumed it came from investors trying to get out in front of a coming trend that didn't happen, or didn't happen yet.

There's a desire by part of the population, including some people who are influential in the culture and politics, to ban meat or make it prohibitively expensive, in order to reduce the load livestock puts on land and other resources. So if you believed that push was going to reach a tipping point in the next few years, where a lot of people who like meat were about to find that real burgers and steaks were out of their budget, you might think it's a great time to get into the fake meat business and be ready to serve that market.

That didn't happen, but I can see why someone might have thought it was going to, or might think it still will.

> Because the customer wasn't the user - it was their boss and shareholders.

I'm starting to get asked, "Could AI help you do such-and-such faster?" At first I tried to explain why the answer is no, because such-and-such doesn't lend itself to what AI is good at. But I'm starting to realize I'm going to have to tell them I am using it and maybe give them an example once in a while, because they're hearing too much about its wonderfulness to believe there's something it can't help with. They're going to think I'm just being stubborn even though I tell them I'm not opposed to using AI where it makes sense. If that means the job actually takes a little longer to add in the part where I use AI to speed it up, they'll be happier.

I asked an LLM to guide me through a Salesforce process last week. It gave me step-by-step instructions, about 50% of which were fine while the others referenced options that didn't exist in the system. So I followed the steps until I got to a wrong one, then told it that was wrong, at which point it said that was wrong and gave me different instructions. After a few cycles of that and some trial-and-error, I had a working process.

It probably did save me some time, so I'd call it a mild success; but it didn't save a lot of time, and I only succeeded in the end because I know Salesforce pretty well and was just inexperienced at this one area, so I was able to see where it was probably going off the rails. Someone new to Salesforce would have been hopelessly lost by its advice.

It's understandable that an LLM wouldn't be very good at Salesforce, because there's a lot of bad information in the support forums out there, and the ways of doing things in it have changed multiple times over the years. But that's true of a lot of systems, so it's not an excuse, just a symptom of using LLMs that's probably not going to change.