Mine is people who separate words when they write. I’m Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct...
I think it’s precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don’t do it right then and there, no one else can.
I’m talking about a massive park in the absolute heart of the city. Located such that is naturally surrounded by city high rises. *People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies. I’m trying to say located centrally, heart of the city, you know where the high rises are. Yes I understand nyc has more, the...
All the McD*nalds in my area have been upgraded with order kiosks. Regardless of all the controversy around self-checkout, and minimum wage, and automation taking our jobs, I personally love them. I can take my sweet time composing my order, I can see the full selection (such as it is), I can see pictures and prices clearly...
Yup yup! In a just world, if you have 100,000 workers at a factory, and then they get replaced by robots maintained by 1000 robot technicians, you should have ended up with a Star Trek utopia where 99,000 people now don’t have to work and can pursue culture and passions. In the real world, the factory product price gets halved, the technicians get paid 10x what a worker used to get (20% of total revenue), and the factory owner gets 80% of total. The former workers are now jobless, homeless, and penniless and can’t afford the product they used to make.
They tell us “Replacing jobs is OK! We’ll invent more new kinds of jobs, as old obsolete jobs free up labor. Everyone will be better off!” but the new jobs are mostly “telemarketer”, and “tech support scammer”, and “ornamental hermit” at factory owner’s mansion.
But all that still doesn’t convince me we should be smashing the robots as a job protection scheme. I wish there was a way to keep the automation and have the Star Trek utopia instead!
We can keep the supermarket cashiers, we just have to demand it. Always choose the full-service line, and complain loudly if there are not enough cashiers to keep the line short, scoff at any suggestion to use the self-checkout and demand to speak to a manager and corporate. As I said elsewhere, one person can only do so much, but when a million people keep doing it the mountain will have to move. I feel personally responsible for the installation of these cashboxes by insisting to pay in cash every single time for the past several years.
How can you be sure it doesn’t eliminate positions? Is there some rule that states “every franchise must be staffed by exactly 8 people at all times”? Seems more likely to me the schedules will be adjusted until every worker is still occupied 100% of the time.
I’d personally prefer to focus on making food too, but there could be others who actually prefer manning the register.
Instead of “smashing the robots”, may I interest you in “eating the rich” option? It looks like you have been thinking a lot of smashing, but not enough about eating. Remember your priorities!
Literally starving to death is more difficult nowadays than in the past, but every society is still structured around the idea that you must be doing something wrong if you are not employed. Food, housing, healthcare, all tied to employment, and the substitutes they maybe give you are designed to only barely keep you alive until you find more employment.
Yes, every job that has become obsolete in the past due to automation has been replaced with a new kind of job, many of which could not have even been imagined before. We don’t have buggy whip manufacturers, but we do have programmers. But that doesn’t mean that will continue always. Jobs that disappear now or in the near future may never get replaced. And many jobs that exist now, I’d argue, are totally bullshit already, and we don’t need more of them. We as a society need to reassess our expectations for 100% employment and better reallocate resources according to the new norms.
Oh yeah, the app is probably even more convenient, especially with the pre-checkin, and the hygiene too, but there is no way I’m using that tracking bundle 😂. When I was born, nobody was counting how many burgers I was eating, and I’m not going to allow that to change. It’s a shame too because they hide all the actually good deals in the app, the ones that make eating there actually affordable, so I find myself not even going to eat there anymore. I feel like a rube paying the full price. Probably better for me in the long run anyway.
They’ve been the most vocal opponent to $15 minimum wage increase in New York, which I’ve always found odd, since they’d be the ones to most benefit from it via competitive advantage, as you said, due to economies of scale. They’ve been making threats the entire time “We’ll replace cashier with computers! If you raise the wage, we’ll totally do it, you’ll see!” and I’m like “Dude, if you had the capability to do it, you gonna do it either way anyway, why you extorting us?”
I guess the smaller competitor restaurants will need to get kiosks as well. They can’t develop their own in-house technology like the big chains do, but they can still purchase 3rd-party ready solutions, like all of them have already done with online ordering. Slightly more expensive to use 3rd party, but that’s economies of scale for ya.
All good points! When these kiosks started out, they were ridiculously laggy, way more than a simple GUI had any right to be, as if every tap and swipe had to be proxied through New Zealand. Thankfully the lag has been solved in one of the interface updates since.
The upsell spam is still annoying, but having used the interface a couple times I have become the Neo of offer dodging. Tap tap tap (No I don’t want to log in. Yes I am sure I don’t want to log in. No, I don’t want to make it a meal. No I don’t want to add a soda or side of nuggets. Checkout. Cancel payment. Done!) Would be better without, but currently manageable. As others have mentioned, they already managed to fuck up the tableau screens above the counter by having the images move around, so that if you want to know how much a medium fry would cost you have to wait through 30 seconds of slideshow first, and then not miss the 2 seconds that the price is actually on screen. The kiosk is actually the winner for me here.
The waiting in line to pay cash was my last problem, which is why I got excited to see these automatic cashboxes installed. Money goes in, food comes out.
To be fair, it is literally true that I am at least partially responsible, even if only by one part in a million. If there were a million people like me, and we each individually and separately decided to refuse to use the kiosk and demanded to be served by a human cashier and left the store if one was not immediately available, the owners would have no choice but to keep the humans. I just happen to like the kiosks because I am not a luddite.
This is a different situation than self-checkout at supermarkets. There yes you could argue a cashier who is experienced with scanning items all day and has access to a fully-featured POS can scan all your items faster and more efficiently than you could ever do on that locked-down self-checkout pos, and owners who take away cashiers are purely saving money at the expense of your time. But here you yourself have to communicate your order either way. I much prefer to browse at my leisure and tap at pictures rather than shouting my order 3 times while there is an impatient line behind me.
machines here have 2 options side by side on the screen for you to select how you want to pay - cash at the counter or card at the machine
Good to know, thanks! It used to be this way here too, but they stopped displaying the “cash at counter” option on the screen entirely after one of the interface redesigns. What they really want to force you to do is use the app all the time, so they can have better tracking and would have no need for cashiers OR kiosks.
I don’t see why you are being so stubborn about this. If you don’t like the numbers I gave you because “you can still go up to the counter and get a real person” it’s an easy adjustment to make that tells the same story: before kiosks = 5 people working 75% at food and 25% at register, after kiosks = 4 people working 95% at food 5% at register. The conclusion is the same - your claim that automation does not eliminate positions is simply incorrect. I thought maybe you had some insider knowledge on mandatory staffing levels, but it seems you are just bad at math. Everyone else in these comments was arguing about jobs disappearing (not me! I only wanted to show off the cool cashbox) - it must have been really confusing to see all those people upset about something which you can’t even comprehend as a problem.
You really don’t see the difference between 5 people working, spending 80% of time making food and 20% floating at register, versus 4 people working 100% making food serving the same total number of customers now that registers have been nearly entirely replaced by kiosks and apps?
The recent post made me fear that a lot of you are taking this “monkey looks at double-slits” meme, which was only ever supposed to be a funny monkey meme, actually seriously. Honorable mention goes to @kromem, whose 12 posts on the topic, insisting that the quantum eraser experiment (but not the delayed-choice quantum...
Yes, double slit interference happens with both photons and electrons, and even with C60 buckyballs and organic fluorescent dye molecules (arxiv.org/abs/1402.1867)! This post is more so about the quantum eraser, as a counterpoint to the 12 posts about it that @kromem wrote in the other thread. The first experimental quantum eraser paper from 2001 uses photons, so that’s the figures I used here. There might be newer papers that use electrons, like this one doi.org/10.1126/science.1248459 from 2014, but I don’t have access to it. I presume detecting the electron there using induced current or whatever would disturb its wavefunction to the same severity as using the polarizer filter does here.
In this experiment, yes. There could be other experiments with electrons instead of light, maybe where you toggle on some kind of magnet to measure which slit an electron goes through, but the measurement itself would still disturb the electrons in a manner where you shouldn’t be surprised when the interference pattern disappears.
I mean, quantum mechanics is still definitely different from classical physics. There are things like the quantum bomb tester, and the Bell inequality violation is still totally real. But the way quantum mechanics has been presented to me in popular science has totally fucked me up. It was not until college quantum physics classes that it all turned out to be actually quite straightforward. And every each time after that when I go back to a research paper underlying some popular science presentation I’ve seen in the past, it turns out there was some giant 3d glasses just off-screen that the presenter somehow “forgot” to mention, and awareness of whose presence totally removes the “fuck”-factor.
In this experiment, they didn’t even bother measuring which slit each photon passes through. The 3D glasses don’t measure or observe the photons, they merely polarize them (although they do block 50% of light). The detector D_S doesn’t measure which-path information either. The researchers could have placed a circular polarizer in front of D_S, and when they get a hit they could have said with confidence “this photon came through the top slit!” but they didn’t even bother doing it this time. The fact that the 3D glasses alter the light in a manner which makes the which-path information theoretically measurable (even if not actually measured), alone is sufficient to destroy the interference pattern.
The paper doesn’t use an actual screen, they only have the detector D_S that they move up and down to record the coincidences. I simulated what the monkey would see had there been a screen in place for the purpose of the meme. I copied down the datapoints from the graph and simulated 100,000 photons hitting the screen with the probabilities indicated by those points. My javascript pastie is available here: html.cafe/xcd2a5ed3?k=19f51bff26c65bcf253ee5257a5… Importantly, the monkey can never see images 4 and 5 on the physical screen - those can only be displayed on the computer. The monkey will only ever see image 3, which is the sum of 4 and 5.
Both this paper and the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment paper (arXiv:quant-ph/9903047) only show a single blob, not the double stripe. If anyone has a paper that clearly shows a photo with the double stripes the way it’s shown in the classic monkey meme, I’d like to add it to my collection!
Obviously if the slits are big and wide enough apart you will just get two spotlights, so that doesn’t count. It wouldn’t even demonstrate wave physics, let alone quantum. It has to be a paper where there is some switch you turn on or some filter you slide in place or whatever that makes the image on the physical screen toggle between two stripes and multiple.
If we cover one slit, it will look like figure 3, shifted to the side and at half intensity.
They talk about how it was never actually possible to do this before, because it requires very fine “electron optics” and manufacturing of components, like slits and shutters, with nanometer precision. So while the thought experiment with electrons itself was proposed by Feynman in 1963 (which is probably what inspired the monkey meme and the like), it was not actually realized until 2019. I’m also now guessing that the electron quantum eraser paper from 2014 doesn’t use a double slit but some other electronic quantum circuit that is easier to work with.
The two-stripe photo to match the monkey meme, with electrons and measuring which-way information, probably doesn’t exist yet. So that’s why!
18+ What irritates you the most with your own language?
Mine is people who separate words when they write. I’m Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct...
Why wasn't NYC's Central Park concept copied by other cities?
I’m talking about a massive park in the absolute heart of the city. Located such that is naturally surrounded by city high rises. *People are giving examples of parks that are way off in the boonies. I’m trying to say located centrally, heart of the city, you know where the high rises are. Yes I understand nyc has more, the...
Minimalists (reddthat.com)
This fast food order kiosk accepts cash (mander.xyz)
All the McD*nalds in my area have been upgraded with order kiosks. Regardless of all the controversy around self-checkout, and minimum wage, and automation taking our jobs, I personally love them. I can take my sweet time composing my order, I can see the full selection (such as it is), I can see pictures and prices clearly...
The real double-slit quantum eraser they don't want you to know about! (mander.xyz)
The recent post made me fear that a lot of you are taking this “monkey looks at double-slits” meme, which was only ever supposed to be a funny monkey meme, actually seriously. Honorable mention goes to @kromem, whose 12 posts on the topic, insisting that the quantum eraser experiment (but not the delayed-choice quantum...