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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • It wasn’t about the cashier, it was about the line.

    Before self checkout, the wal mart near me would on a typical day have 3 or 4 cashiers working. At the height of their adoption, they had 28 self checkouts typically up.

    But now, they have 2-3 self checkouts open and a big line, while you can generally find one of the handful of cashiers with no one waiting. It baffles me that people would wait to self-checkout when there’s a cashier open with no line, unless people have just that much social anxiety (a wal mart seems a tricky proposition) or else people are liking their chances for skipping scan of an item here or there.


  • I think you may be right, but anecdote in favor of a pull out:

    At my area wal mart, it got to a pretty nice point, about 28 operating self checkout lines. Never had a line, they had disabled the bagging scales and disabled the voice.

    Now, they usually have 5 reserved for Walmart plus people, and 2 to 3 running with a longer line than a human cashier. Then a line att the door as they want to audit everyone’s receipts. It’s an obnoxious experience, and reportedly they still have more theft than they would like.

    However, they are pushing than I can get my orders delivered within 22 minutes, or pickup. Think they are pushing people to the theft proof options where you don’t get anywhere near the merchandise that you haven’t already paid for.


  • AI, yes.

    Once got flagged for theft because the camera saw me put a box down on the far side of the scanner and then used the handheld scanner because it was large. Evidently the box getting past the fixed scanner without scanning triggers theft even if you scan it.

    In a convenience store, I put products on a platform and I don’t have to scan barcode and it just “scans” my whole order all at once with machine vision. It worked well for me, but seems to have the clerk on high alert to watch it like a hawk from any mistakes, which sounds exhausting. I got the sense that it screws up a lot and the clerk is on the hook for it.


  • Yeah, booking a flight is only difficult because I make it difficult by deciding about how I feel about cost versus layovers versus time of departure/arrival.

    For grocery shopping, I’m very specific in what I want, and it’s easiest just to pick them specifically. For a lot, I’d rather just go in person to the store to look over things. In fact, whenever I spend money I’m pretty specific in what I want and I don’t want something to “improve” things by letting me be more vague.

    As a point of comparison, fast food ordering. Apps and Kiosks were actually a step up for me, because it was easier and quicker for me to see what the options are and select precisely what I want. AI order taking would be a huge step backwards from there. Even when ordering from waitstaff at a restauraunt, I always like to have my finger clearly pointing to the menu for what I want to order.





  • Frankly, I feel like the media hasn’t really engaged him in tech for the last couple of decades since he stepped back. So he hasn’t been pushed for takes on tech.

    There is zero reason to expect Gates to have particular credibility on this front, he hasn’t been part of “the game” in a long time. Even then his perspective was a bit indirect.

    If back in his hayday you had asked Gates about the core technologies of the Web infrastructure, he would have confidently assumed Windows NT, IIS, MSSQL, and . net would be the foundation of everything. Not because of deep technical understanding and vision, but because his guys were doing it and surely his guys were the best guys.




  • Generally I’ve found that:

    If the facts are painfully obvious from a simple web search, then GenAI has a decent chance of getting it right. This can be useful if you can’t recall any “key” words well and the GenAI can craft several searches and get there.

    However, if it does mess up the facts, the result looks superficially the same as “correct”. So while it can give accurate data, you always have to double check. This can still be useful, as finding the right search terms can be a decent help.

    In coding, sometimes in some situations, you can have requirements that are absolutely testable, and thus you can have the models retry and retry until it works. This isn’t always feasible. Even when it seems feasible, you may screw up the criteria, or the GenAI when enough freedom disables a probablematic test rather than solve it, and it likely will generate code that’s not really fit to modify. There are a lot of situations where this is useful, but it is infuriating that non technical people and even some low skill technical people assume this is always the case.

    Then when you get away from facts mattering, it gets “better”. Example, someone jokingly asked for one to “make gta6”. After a while it came back with a GTA 1 clone. Lots of people were impressed, because whatever it did could be considered a success even as it obviously didn’t match the expectation. The operators also like to GenAI some webcomic, where it is a fiction. They almost always didn’t have any interesting thought going in so they tend to be crap, but “correctness” didn’t matter.

    Of course, also making fakes. Supreme case where looking correct matters but being factually correct does not matter at all. GenAI above all else “seems” correct.


  • He repeats the “better than humans at coding” which is super situational. Executives got so used to “code is code” mentality they can’t seem to understand that just because they can prompt up straightforward apps and other folks have done stunts like “make a knock off of this compiler” does not mean it’s just better than people.

    Also very bizarre to say they have perfect memory, they are pretty spotty at that.

    On the matter of support, it will generally always such because it’s rigged for the company in all matters where helping the customer would go against the company’s interests. Has been a long time. Why pay warranty when you can make it so painful they will give up?




  • Have to dig into the nuance of this specific scenario.

    A new memory vendor would be a huge capital expense, and investors are generally a bit apprehensive about that.

    Further, it would be years before they could theoretically roll out product, a delay that investors would need to be awfully patient for under the best of circumstances. Further, we went through this dance in recent history, people thinking that the chip industry needed huge advancement and expansion of supply, only for demand to subside to normal before any of that expansion could even start.

    And the stated payoff? Lower margin product than competition. Not exactly exciting to tell your investors your whole game plan is to make less money than your competition.

    Then there’s the reality that this is not an innate direct demand of memory for the sake of memory, it is intrinsically linked to these big AI companies, leading to the big question: Is this a bubble that has a risk of popping? If so, then the market will go poof before you have a single item shipped.

    Even if broadly, you think the AI is viable, if any one company, especially OpenAI, gets left behind, the memory market could collapse. If not for Sam Altman’s very specific purchasing commitments, the memory pressure would probably be much more modest.

    Ok, fine, you are a ride or die believer in the durability of the AI boom and that every company is going to win. However, even if the AI companies do very well, what’s to say they will still have the same appetite for hardware by the time this new enterprise gets going? A pivot from aggressive training to exploiting more what they have done, or some breakthrough that dramatically takes down their bloated memory requirements. If you believe in the AI boom, then just directly investing in the AI companies is the safer bet.

    At the end of the day, an investor has a choice between being confident in the AI boom and investing directly in the AI companies, or being a bit less confident and investing in the memory vendors that are making bank now with a weaker, but still viable post-pop story. If you aren’t comfortable directly investing in the AI companies now, then you almost certainly aren’t comfortable with a long shot that only benefits if the AI boom keeps going exactly the way it has been going.

    Yes, effort is underway to do this in China, but it’s more about supply chain sovereignty than free market interests. It may have similar benefits, but here the free market is unlikely to be the impetus for increased supply in this scenario.