211–220 of 326 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?
You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And everyone knows how well-received clippy was :D
Clippy became infamous because it couldn't actually do anything it claimed to do. It also seemingly broke the courtesy guidelines by appearing uninvited and stealing focus.
I’d not heard of this fallacy* but it makes perfect sense. Well executed human greeting is such a killer asset if you get it right. There’s a few million years of genetic programming inside us all that responds unreasonably positively to hospitality. If someone enters my home and is not drinking their desired beverage in under four minutes, I have brought shame on me and my family! I think we are all programmed to re…
So the setup goes, if a doormans function is defined as opening the door, then he can be replaced by a cheap mechanical thing; this misses that he is both covering more incidental tasks, and providing a human interface to the business. These things are very valuable, but not captured in the "guy who operates the door" definition.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user. What? No, you're making the Doorman fallacy here, explicitly. The company THINKS they're saving money by pushing the work to the customer/end user, but there's more to wait staff than just taking orders and payment - they provide the ability to smooth over any difficulties experienced during the meal, they…
I wouldn't go to a restaurant that used QR codes twice. But I can't go to a different supermarket as there's only one in a reasonable distance away, or use another train line, or avoid a government form.
I am on the other end of the spectrum. I enjoy QR ordering. I dislike talking to people. Upselling me is not a thing. I can take as long as I want. I don't have to flag/bother someone. No one screws it up except me. I see exactly what's on my bill.
That is not a situation likely to continue beyond the next moment.
My favorite version of this is robotic and drone-based package delivery. In many ways it could be useful and add efficiency to a congested system. But then you find out just what it is that delivery people actually do, the variety of security systems, steps and walkways, exceptions to rules, and so on and realize that what drones and robots automate is not really "the job" at all. The last mile, in logistics, hospita…
if we had a standardized way to deliver packages like we do mail (the heavily regulated mailbox!) this would not be a problem, it's a phenomenal waste of human effort to navigate this uniquely for every location it's not like a doorman where there's useful social interaction
Aside re: restaurant technology: In a restaurant a year ago with "pay via your phone" service. Server gave us a receipt w/ a QR code. I scanned the code, copied the URL to my clipboard, and looked it over. There was a base64 blob on the URL. I decoded it (because Termux and I'm a nerd) and saw obvious parameters I could fuzz. I changed the check ID (incremented it), left the store ID alone, re-encoded it, and found I…
That’s such a benign vulnerability that it doesn’t even feel like one. Per your description, the worst thing an attacker can do is see the food ordered to a check number (in a public restaurant) and pay a bill that isn’t their own? On the flip side, some services go absolutely overboard trying to secure low-blast-radius things, or don’t properly scale security to the risk of an activity. I have a service provider tha…
At every all-hands meetings, core team gets to present, gets to showcase the new features, gets celebrated for "going the extra mile" for customers.
But the real extra mile, is the patience, empathy and thoughtful communication (which is a rare talent, really) of the entry level engineers, who are also humble and nice to be around with, being the only ones who contribute positively to the company culture, as opposed to the ego-tripping 10x engineers.
Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
But the real reason to replace them is to please investors who don't wanna be behind the AI-efficiency-hype. They can't be promoted to a core team, because where's the efficiency in that?
> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued. Hasn't that been a fact of life ? If anything, apps made it barely made easier through splitting either the whole bill equally or offer a bit by bit checking interface. Otherwise on the role of QR codes and online menu, it actually helps a lot for allergies as everyone can check their for each individual item and adjust accordingly…
In my experience, waiters tend to be quite good at splitting bills. I feel like many of them remember what people had, maybe they get good mental maps of seating or person meal type just like taxi drivers used to get good mental maps of London before GPS. (And printed menus tend to have allergy info too, just like online menus sometimes don't.)