this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I've used several drive thrus where I felt that just having a Google form for me to fill out would have been more effective. Also drive thrus are helping to destroy the world. #fuckcars

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

My neighborhood's commercial district banned drive-thrus in the zoning code, and those corporate motherfuckers still try to build the damn things!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can't we just press buttons in a screen ourselves?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Exactly. I know a much of McDonald's have self order kiosks. And if you live near a Wawa/Sheetz/royal farms (all USA chains) they use mobile order kiosks. The tech exists they just don't want to use it for the drive thru for some reason. Drive up ATMs are all over the place so it's not like it's a foreign idea to use a touch screen from a car.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I hear you. Please download this app, click yes to all permission requests, then you can order using the design our team of highly paid (but non-technical) designers have been working on for the last 2 years.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am also helping to destroy the world

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Either cut it out or get 'er done.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

the ai food delivery bots are actually just remote controlled

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

More like "RI" - Remote Intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Remote AI

Arguably Intelligent

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People are touting this like it's a good thing or something, presumably this means a 30% reduction compared to the previous staffing this would have require. 30% is a lot.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think it's perceived as good? (curious, why would it be?) Just that it's disingenuous to market it as AI. Everyone and their mother now has """AI""" 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, good is probably the wrong word, I mean "positive in the sense it shows AI can't replace humans".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh, i get it! Yeah, 30% is a considerable percentage.

Where I work (text-based customer support), a few weeks ago I stumbled upon a spreadsheet analysing that they could "save" 25% in wages by implementing GPT-4.

It may still be mostly humans on the line, but 1 out 4 of us may get the boot.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, so far, all of them require tons of humanly produced data.

Discriminative AI (deep learning et al) requires humans to label data for hours on end, per use-case.
And generative AI (LLMs et al) require just insane amounts of human works to copy from, albeit not necessarily limited to individual use-cases.

I guess, what I'm saying is that the ratio of how much labor humans (involuntarily) invested into AIs, compared to the labor these AIs actually perform, is likely a lot higher than 70%.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But that's mostly labor humans were doing anyway.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This would be true, if recording and labelling that work was free. But it isn't, it requires effort.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just noticed something about this scene from R&M: they have solid color wallpaper. Do people actually do that? I think I only ever saw patterned wallpaper. Also the idea you can just grab the paper in the center implies such a degree of hand strength to be silly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's a thing here in Europe. I'm guessing, because our walls are generally concrete, we usually either throw on decorative plaster or a wallpaper, to make it feel a bit warmer and have a uniform surface which accepts paint more readily.

It's even quite common that if you rent an appartment, that the walls have wallpaper on them, which is painted with a fresh coat of white paint every time someone moves out and the next folks move in.
And then some people, after they move in, will just paint (some of) the walls in a different color, if they feel like not living in pure white...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I'm a vegetarian. Ordering an impossible burger off the broiler from Burger King always seems to make the drive-thru person want to fight me, for some reason. They're often too occupied to hear what I'm saying well, and they don't always put it on the screen right away. When I ask to confirm it, ~80% of the time they give me lip service.

This is my metric. As long as Burger King keeps giving me shit, I'm in favor of AI replacing their jobs. If they were kinder, I would never think this. To be honest, this experience has kept me from going to Burger King most times. Try ordering this at 10 places that aren't dead and you'll see what I mean.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You're talking to a 40 year old with no future working three minimum wage jobs who will be homeless if any of them let him go.

Be kinder to fellow working class people. Hold the capitalists responsible for creating this situation in the first place.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're talking to a 40 year old with no future working three minimum wage jobs who will be homeless if any of them let him go.

Well that's a wild assumption.

Be kinder to fellow working class people. Hold the capitalists responsible for creating this situation in the first place.

I am kind, I promise. Voices often get raised at me when confirming my order, and I stay calm anyway. I'm not obligated to get yelled at for simply trying to place an order.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Idk I work shitty retail because of gender/sexuality discrimination Like no ppl shouldn't yell at you but like I got kicked out of my house by my husband for losing that job

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Burger king has never seemed like a place I'd voluntarily go as a vegetarian. Tried walking in once and the smell alone made me turn around and go elsewhere

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Most of them. They try to "jumpstart" their prodigy by gathering "training" data by employing remote workers that they will massively underpay. They claim that they'll transition to pure AI over time. They... just kinda don't, lol.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I've suspected that different periods of Replika was actually just this.

Like when they were offering dirty chat but using models that didn't allow it, that behind the scenes it was hooking you up with a Mechanical Turk guy sexting you.

There was certainly a degree of manual fuckery, like when the bots were sending their users links to stories about the Google guy claiming the AI was sentient.

That was 1,000% a human initiated campaign.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Remember how we had uncle Ben's rice and Autn Jemima with the black avatars representing their brand? I noticed that these AI drive throughs use the voice of a young black kid. Isn't it just more of the same? Exploit young black kids for decades, throw them away but steal their voice for an AI Chat. Kinda fucked up imo

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can't listen to it right now, but the issue with characters like Aunt Jemima is that they were just racist stereotypes given a name and slapped on a box.

I think a good analogy for this situation would be a themed chain where an AI pretends to be a comedic racist caricature.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well, yes, those caricatures are based off black people that worked in the food industry and came to represent a big part of it. So food brands held on to the image as a way to sell their product. Adopting the voice of a black kid for the AI drive through is not much different imo. It's a fictional representation of a person that used to do that same job.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Building it first is far more important than building it right.