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Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

rogerdickey.com

21–30 of 103 posts

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#24

> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food? > Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time! Funny to who ? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying wei…

here's how this likely went down:

1. they found the dataset and thought "i bet there are weird order combos i could write a blog post about"

2. they did all the analysis and found nothing all that interesting

3. posted it anyway

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#25

> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food? > Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time! Funny to who ? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying wei…

Yes! This is how you do humor. Demand precision. Dissect all the things!

Nah, but sometimes a bit of thinking, reasoning and editing can make things funny, doesn't mean you need to create a thesis about it. But in my mind, just stating "Someone bought Oreos and lube in a store" isn't exactly the epitome of humor, maybe I'm just getting old.

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#26

> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food? > Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time! Funny to who ? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying wei…

yeah the idea of "funny" seemed pretty puerile to me

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#27

> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food? > Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time! Funny to who ? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying wei…

It's "funny" because sex is taboo in puritanical cultures like the US. Obviously you're not going to use the lube on the Oreo's, but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something? It's unexpected and the mind laughs, even though theres a perfectly normal explanation that doesn't involve those two things being together. Same for adult diapers and…

> but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something?

This sounds like what someone/something that never actually been in a supermarket would think and imagine. You go to the store, buy a bunch of stuff, why would all the things be related? Feels like a typical mistake a LLM would make.

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#28

Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post: Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart. Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to…

much more interesting than the actual article

Re: Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

#30
post #6

Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post: Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart. Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to…

Berries are most certainly not seasonal anymore. They should be but we thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them. They're always on the shelf. Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore? Probably something that can be found in this dataset as well.

Depends where you are. I am in Southern England.

Strawberries are available year round - we get them from Morocco and Spain outside the summer. They do taste differently and during the off season are less reliably red all over.

Thus I will buy them only in the Summer.

Prices also change over the year.

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