• 0 Posts
  • 37 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: October 30th, 2023

help-circle





  • Truly self driving cars would allow you to participate in other activities safely while the car moves you. You could read a book, play a game, apply your makeup, etc. Given that trade-off, I think most people would be willing to sacrifice the extra 2.5 minutes a trip.

    2.5 minute estimate derived from the difference of travel time between half the average US daily travel of 42 miles at a speed of 60mph and the same distance traveled at 68mph.

    Most people would accept the trade-off of being in the car 5 minutes longer per day if it meant they got 42 minutes of leisure instead of 37 minutes of weaving through traffic.

    Also with a critical mass adoption of self-driving cars the speed limit could be increased.







  • Why would you merge the Senate and the House, especially in the direction of the House? The Senate, being a statewide race, has a tendency to attract moderates as they need to appeal to a much broader group. The House, being significantly more local, more easily allows extremist views on both sides of the aisle. Expanding the seats and ensuring representatives represent roughly equal number of constituents as each other will itself go a long way.

    The term limit of SCOTUS seems low. That almost syncs with a double run of a president allowing some to get potentially multiple appointments while others get none. That leaves the stability of the court left in some part to chance. Expanding the courts and setting the term limit in a way that each president generally gets an appointment per term would help deradicalizing the courts.

    There should probably be some incentive to actually encourage domestic job production. In a global economic environment without such incentive there will continue to be job losses and even with UBI an unnecessary burden will increase over the years. That can threaten stability and lead to cutting life saving services. A CCC program can help a lot, but we also need private industry to seek domestic labor more broadly.

    Municipalize infrastructure and health production. The government should actually own some factories and produce goods itself rather than the bloated bidding contractor stuff.

    Don’t let public employees leave their positions only to be immediately hired back as a contractor at a much higher rate. If you want to work for the public sector, work for the public sector.

    Pay public sector workers (including academia) enough to allow people that actually want to pursue those careers to live comfortably and to entice more people to transition into those careers.

    Fund education for all for as long as they want it. Educating your populace means you will have a more skilled and more innovative workforce which will lead to better outcomes for everyone.

    Significantly reduce copyright protections. They should not let anywhere near a lifetime, and they just serve to hamper derivative innovation.




  • They also fuck up because they aren’t designed and implemented properly.

    • Walmart’s don’t accept tap to pay.
    • Whole foods’ requires manual keying in of pastry items as different options (they don’t have danishes in their DB so they need to be rung up as a bagel; per the human worker that resolved the issue for me when I predictably couldn’t find the item they failed to include).
    • None of them allow you to cancel the order (such as when you want to check the price of an item because the store neglected to actually list the price on the floor).
    • None of them let you remove an item (such as a duplicate scan or removing a luxury item that stretches your budget or rang up higher than you were expecting).
    • You can’t purchase shaving goods, alcohol, canned air, or other adult items without intervention (probably no way to actually avoid this one, but it doesn’t promote a smooth flow) and the kiosk often locks down until aided by an associate preventing you from continuing to scan your items while you wait.
    • Often locks the kiosk when placing a reusable bag in the bagging area.
    • Inconsistent payment methods: some allow you to scan your card at any point in the process, some process payment the moment your card is scanned, some require a manual trigger on screen prior to scanning your card.
    • Often forces popups between scans (“This kiosk is in card only mode,” “Enter your loyalty card number,” or “how many bags did you use today?”)

    I’d like to:

    • Walk up and set down my bag
    • Scan all my items
    • Remove arbitrary items
    • Tap my card
    • If required; verify my age and have an associate clear any blocks
    • Grab my stuff and leave

    Instead what often happens:

    • Walk up and set down my bag
    • Kiosk locks because there’s an item in the bagging area
    • Pickup my bag, move to a different kiosk and set my bag on the floor
    • Scan my first item
    • Dismiss the card only pop-up
    • Dismiss the loyalty pop-up
    • Scan the item again because the first scan just wakes the machine and the order doesn’t start until you dismiss 2 popups
    • Put the item in my bag on the floor
    • Scan the next item
    • Dismiss pop-up about first item not being in the bagging area
    • Take first item from my bag on the floor and set it in the bagging area
    • Kiosk locks until associate clears it
    • Scan a razor blade
    • Kiosk locks until associate clears it
    • Scan the remainder of my items
    • One of them scanned twice
    • Click the visible delete button next to duplicate item
    • Kiosk locks until associate clears it
    • Tap my card
    • Realize that this unit works differently than the last one I used and click the “Finish and pay” button
    • Select card as the payment type (on the kiosk in the card only queue getting run in card only mode)
    • Dismiss the bags used pop-up
    • Tap my card again
    • Move all my items from the bagging area to the reusable bag on the floor
    • Collect my receipt and goods and leave

    I’m glad that you’ve consistently had a good experience with them, but I have not. While each of our experiences are anecdotal, the machines’ failure to routinely accommodate my expected use case is an engineering failure. I am a software engineer by trade and know how to interact with computers well. While we have a running joke about customers not reading what’s on their screen that’s no excuse to design an interface that cannot properly react to unexpected or unusual inputs or tasks.


  • Proficiency is absolutely key. I was troubleshooting a feature with a Jr the other day and asked him to search through the log out put (that was currently being displayed on his terminal). Unfortunately he was trying out a new emulator and didn’t know how to actually search the output.

    We went about it a different way, but at the end I just told him it didn’t matter what tools he used as long as he actually knew how to do what’s required with them and to please get that figured out for next time.