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Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders

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

#31

Post by stephantul »

mritchie712 wrote: post #24
embedding-shape wrote: post #2

> 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

The file drawer effect, except this one maybe should have stayed filed.

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

#32

Post by zem »

amelius wrote: post #16

My conclusion: there's nothing funny about groceries, no matter how you order them. Counterexamples welcome. (Makes sense as I never felt the urge to laugh after looking in someone else's shopping basket. Anyway, perhaps that's why I'm not a data analyst.)

> Counterexamples welcome.

I mentioned "peas and honey" in another comment. zucchini and lube if you wanted to go for "haha weird sex practices", though just having condoms/lube in there doesn't make things intrinsically funny the way the OP seems to imagine. baby food and wine/headache pills/earplugs, for more sitcom-level humour ("haha, yeah, having a newborn is hard, we've all been there!"). knife and large garbage bags for a darker turn

the basic idea is "these two specific items suggest a funny image of them being used together, with the added context that it was likely just a random coincidence". it's not laugh-out-loud humour, but it can be amusing.

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

#33

Post by collabs »

pasc1878 wrote: post #30
anonu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had an interesting conversation with my mom recently when she said don't buy apples. It isn't in season right now. And I didn't know what to say because I didn't even know apples had a season. I just bought the bag of gala apples without much thought to it.

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

#34

Post by fragmede »

embedding-shape wrote: post #27
fragmede wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would an LLM make that mistake? It depends on why you went shopping. If you are blessed with a surplus of executive function, you can make a list and then get everything on that list when you go shopping. If you are not so privileged, you find yourself having to go to the store in pursuit of a specific mission. Get all the thinks to bake a cake for the birthday party that's to tonight, and don't get laundry detergent while you're there, even though you're running out.

Feels like a typical misunderstanding that a neurotypical would make.

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

#35

Post by hbcdbff »

disillusioned wrote: post #3

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…

I wonder if there is a statistically significant group of people with a mild potassium deficiency, who crave bananas due to it, but then go off them again when their potassium stores are replenished.

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

#36

Post by breezybottom »

hbcdbff wrote: post #35
disillusioned wrote: post #3

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…

I wonder if there is a statistically significant group of people with a mild potassium deficiency, who crave bananas due to it, but then go off them again when their potassium stores are replenished.

No.

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

#37

Post by breezybottom »

fragmede wrote: post #20
embedding-shape wrote: post #2

> 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…

Sex is about as normal and pervasive in American culture as it is anywhere. Have you never watched HBO?

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

#38

Post by trebligdivad »

disillusioned wrote: post #3

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…

The initial grouping of 'pack of organic bananas' with individual bananas feels like a wrong number in the pack problem; eg we typically want one a day so want to buy 7 in a weekly shop but the pack size is 5.

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

#39

Post by robrain »

collabs wrote: post #33
pasc1878 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had an interesting conversation with my mom recently when she said don't buy apples. It isn't in season right now. And I didn't know what to say because I didn't even know apples had a season. I just bought the bag of gala apples without much thought to it.

Apples are kept in cold storage to extend “the season” across the year. No guarantee you’ll get fresh apples in a supermarket even if you see workers harvesting them as you drive to the store.

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

#40

Post by embedding-shape »

fragmede wrote: post #34
embedding-shape wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why would an LLM make that mistake? It depends on why you went shopping. If you are blessed with a surplus of executive function, you can make a list and then get everything on that list when you go shopping. If you are not so privileged, you find yourself having to go to the store in pursuit of a specific mission. Get all the thinks to bake a cake for the birthday party that's to tonight, and don't get laundry deter…

Because after a couple of visits in the store, you realize that all the items you buy aren't necessarily related to each other, either by observing your own behavior or others. Not sure having a list or not is important, jumping to conclusions based on "oh, they bought oreo AND lube, they must be related" is exactly what you see LLMs do, and why you generally don't want to tell them unrelated stuff, because of how they work they end up being part of the context and kind of "pollute" the rest.
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