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.

Part of it is that the bosses often don't know what they want, so they leave the details up to marketing or whoever, so replacing marketing or whoever with AI would mean figuring out what they want. The boss can tell marketing, "Make a brochure for new product ABC," and marketing can run with that and present him with a mock-up, he can make a couple revisions, they shine it up based on those, and then they're done. To replace them completely with AI, he would have to provide a lot more guidance and it would take more iterations to get a correct result that he likes. It wouldn't be completely unlike the current process, but it would demand more of him, which wouldn't make him happy.

Last week I was talking to my boss about a project I've been working on for him, and he asked whether AI could help me with it to save time. I pointed out that a lot of the holdup in the project has been his not knowing exactly what he wants (because he's not sure what the software we're working with can do until I do it and show it to him), and an AI can't tell him what he wants any more than I can. Sometimes you just have to do the work, and technology can't help you.

I served on a grand jury a while back, and one of the few cases that wasn't a slam dunk was one where a woman's baby smothered while in bed with her and under the covers, possibly while the mother was using someone else's prescription drugs. Some of us were queasy at the idea of potentially putting a parent in prison, thinking that losing your own child and carrying that guilt was punishment enough, plus the question of what would happen to her other children, who by all accounts were well cared for (she was a single parent with no father in the picture).

We quizzed the prosecutor about it, and he said he understood that, but, as he put it, "A child is dead." He hoped to use the seriousness of the charge to get the mother to accept counseling and supervision as part of a plea deal; but his office couldn't just let it go, which is what a lesser charge effectively would do in my state. After he explained that, he got the indictment. Maybe this prosecutor is thinking the same way.

My place is actually rural, but there's one of those little cornfield subdivisions (I like that term) a few miles from me. I don't really get it either. I like living in the country, but they don't seem to, since they bring their town ways with them, landscaping their places to a T like they're competing with each other, calling the police on stray dogs, and stuff like that. They don't seem to live any differently than they did in town, so I guess it's about the presumably cheaper land and the distance from noise and crime that makes up for having to drive 20-30 miles to town for work and groceries.

It's unlikely that the people in that rural subdivision are driving two hours a day for work. In the US Midwest, you're rarely more than 30 minutes from a town large enough to have some jobs. For instance, there's a town of 1100 near me that has a veterinarian, general store, post office, gas station, auto mechanic, school, a couple bank branches, and so on, which all employ people, some at pretty good salaries. And within ten miles of that town, there are a couple of those little blocks of suburb-looking houses like you describe.

Or the people living in them might be retired, or work from home, or work on local farms. Whatever the case, they're not driving a long way for work.

Right. The big lie of what's called Our Democracy (in the US, UK, and other Western nations) is that having 51% on your side and winning elections means you get some control over government. What recent years have made clear is that the bureaucratic class does what it wants, and resists most attempts by the people to control it through their representatives, using its media wing to call those anti-democratic and other epithets. At best, you can make temporary changes that the machine will roll back as soon as it can get rid of your representatives.

No one who knows anything about cattle does, but that leaves out a lot of people these days. Polls have found people who think chocolate milk comes from brown cows, and I've heard people say they've successfully gone "cow tipping," so there's a lot of cluelessness out there.

If it were highly effective, it already would have replaced importing the workers, since it's cheaper to hire them over there. But I've seen multiple companies go big on offshoring and then scrap it after a few years and hire domestic again because it went poorly. There may be a new surge of interest in it if importing people gets harder, but I don't suppose it will go much better than it did before.

It's hard for me to believe that anyone working in a tech industry hasn't seen this kind of thing happening or heard managers/owners talking about gaming the system. When people say they've never heard of it or don't think it happens, I wonder if they're incredibly naive or being evasive.

When you're tilling, planting, or harvesting, you're often trying to beat the rain or the season. You don't want to go any slower than necessary.

My town still has quite a few third places (the mall, bowling alleys, bars, etc.) and even some new ones like a trampoline place. Most of them are struggling because the young people don't go out. Go into a corner bar on a Saturday night, and you'll see more people in their 50s than 20s. The pool league that used to run 6 divisions a week is now down to 2.

So as far as I can tell, people (especially the young) stopped going out, and then third places started going away.

In fact, the petty criminal may benefit the regime, if his crimes damage those the regime sees as a greater threat to itself and its goals.

When you see a headline that starts with "Farmers [something]", it always refers to large farming corporations and the lobbying organizations like Farm Bureau they fund. It never means they went and interviewed Farmer Hank with his 50 cow dairy or his 1000-acre grain and pasture operation.

Also, it's useful to remember that before tractors, there were horses, and the equipment pulled by horses was gradually converted to tractors. With horses, the farmer might sit on the equipment and use reins, or he might walk in front of the horses and lead them. Either way, he had control of them without literally sitting on them. So when the first tractors came along, it probably wasn't automatic to think you needed to sit directly on it. And it was a lot easier to hop on and off them when they were small machines without cabs. They were pretty dangerous, really, with little in the way of safety protection over moving parts, so I can see why people thought a rule was needed to keep the driver on the seat.

Tractors are made heavy for traction (hence the name), not for safety. In addition to the weight of the tractor itself, fluid is often added to the tires for extra weight, and weights added to the front for more traction and to keep the front down when pulling a heavy load.

You can gain some traction by going from tires to tracks, as some modern tractors do, but you still need a certain amount of weight or you're just going to spin when you're trying to pull a 30-foot-wide chisel plow through soil and last year's stalks.

Going fully autonomous might make tractors a little cheaper, if they don't need A/C and mirrors and things like that, but not lighter. And they'd still need the human stuff for occasions when it can't drive itself anyway, like moving it around the barn lot or going down the road to the next field.

Yeah, that's a concern too.

I'm not opposed to the idea of autonomous (or better near-autonomous) tractors working in fields. They'd definitely be safer than autonomous vehicles on roads. I just think people, especially at a tech-loving forum like this, are a little too quick to assume safety concerns are fully covered. Perhaps they can be, but will they be when large corporate farms cut corners on things like maintenance?

I started driving tractors when I was 10, and I've been in a couple situations where equipment failure required some quick action to get stopped before serious damage was done. Shit happens, and should be expected to happen and prepared for.