These things really suck. The novelty wears off instantly. It's uncomfortable having to either stand up to get something from the robot or awkwardly reach over while sitting down. The moment when food comes out is the most likely time for customers to express positive emotion at a restaurant. You don't get to express gratitude toward human staff and the staff don't receive that positive feedback. The people working there are relegated entirely to cleanup and maintenance.
I work as a server on weekends to stay sane and for....some reason, corporate had the grand idea that automated cleaning robots (it's like a roomba but a bit taller) going around would improve the guest experience.
Our floors aren't ever really filled with trash though! We're one of those 2010s-era brewpubs so it's a large, open space but these things are so awkward to navigate around and I wish so much that they would send them to the basement.
Sorry for being nosy, is it about fighting loneliness? If that's the case, is it effective / something you'd recommend?
I've been thinking about it for myself, and I worry that the physical exaustion, coping with nasty customers and lack of deep relationships on the job would make any benefit moot.
Mostly to get a few miles of steps in, honestly. Throughout high-school, undergrad and grad school I worked as a server and it's just become something that helps me stay sane (and I love the food we serve tbh).
For what it's worth, working as a server can be really helpful for loneliness though - at virtually every place I've worked, the coworkers become very close and good friends as we all commiserate together throughout the shift haha
Serving did help me a ton with getting comfortable speaking in large groups of people; was a huge benefit - being able to strike up a conversation with just about anyone, build rapport and make a connection has been infinitely helpful in my personal and professional life.
I'm sure there is a better way to frame this but when I approach a table of guests I kind of pull from a "rolodex of personalities" to instantly make them comfortable and build rapport (since it's kind of awkward on the guest side, too, if that makes sense) - it's like having hundreds of small, genuine conversations a day. Some tables can be toxic but they are quickly forgotten by another group who are incredibly fun to wait on.
Definitely recommend trying it out at a non-corporate location if you have one! I work at a Rock Bottom which is a definitely a corporate owned brand but it's a lot less suffocating than a chain like Applebees, Olive Garden or others in that vein. A local place will give you a lot of agency and autonomy on how to manage your tables - the owner at the Mexican restaurant I worked at would walk up to your table and tell them to 'get the hell out' if they were being hostile towards you
I'd argue that robo taxis are a bit different. I've had some pretty sketchy experiences with poor driving on ride shares, and some women prefer having a robo taxi to a human driven one for evening rides.
The only bad interactions I've had with restaurant staff was staff getting a bit irritated at ordering slowly.
Have you ever been to hama sushi, sushiroh or Kura sushi? These are chains where you order from a tablet and it gets delivered via belt to your seat or pick from the belt. You pay at an semiautomatic kiosk. Meeting the staff is optional
Not always. They use these robots at higher end places like better hot pots joints (like Haidilao) which are full service, the robots deliver the food from the kitchen but typically it will be unloaded by wait staff. Allows wait staff to spend less time bussing food from the kitchen, and some of these restaurants can be quite large.
> But I guess the robot companies are making money.
This isn't the first time and won't be the last time the general public had to deal with things being worse, just so companies can make money. We can't have companies not making money. Good heavens!
I would guess that abiogenesis is often framed around randomness as a strategy to argue for its implausibility. Of course, a completely random system is unlikely to produce enough coherence to convince anyone that it could be possible.
But in reality, the universe is full of patterns. The laws of physics are not random. Water behaves in very specific ways. Our planet revolves around the Sun in 365 day intervals. The planet rotates every 24 hours. Even out of these two interlocking patterns, you can see how energy delivery to the surface of the planet could result in mechanical and chemical cycles that may result in non-random mineral formation, concentration gradients, and thermal dynamics.
Scientists argue that abiogenesis is a result of inherently chaotic but non-random processes, not a hypothetical probabilistic scenario like monkeys with typewriters.
It already has, for better or worse. Why does anyone still take this guy seriously? It's one thing to be skeptical that AI is going to make the world a better place... it's another thing to be skeptical that it exists and actually does things.
You can't grasp this because there is no FTL communication. Quantum entanglement does not enable FTL communication, and wormholes etc. are entirely theoretical.
It doesn't even enable STL communication, other than eg superdense coding and similar. But that's not what people mean when they think entanglement can be used for communication.
Is "what is this ?" even a productive comment in itself? That's the point the parent is trying to make. If you click on this link, and you can't tell what it is, you probably don't care what it is. And after that, if you don't care enough to search "Daffy Duck" on Google or whatever, you really don't care what it is. Why would we possibly need a Hacker News comment explaining what Warner Brothers cartoons are?
Carmack is a great programmer to be sure. Commander Keen, however, was not a better version of Mario. It was worse than Mario in every way -- art, music, and gameplay are all inferior.
Nobody outside of Gen X PC gamers know what Commander Keen is. Everyone knows what Mario is. While copying may be the way design works, copying only gets you so far.
The article didn't say it was better. No one thought it was better. It was just the first time anyone was able to smoothly side scroll on a PC. By copying something, he was able to push the boundaries of the perceived constraints of the technology which I believe is what the article is pointing out.
To add to this Commander Keen was released on a very limited platform. More people were gaming on Nintendo systems than personal computers. If Commander Keen was released on Nintendo things may have gone differently.
Even if that were true (and I don't think it is), Commander Keen should be compared to Mario 3 (which still came out over a year earlier than the first Keen), not Mario. And 4-6 are most appropriately compared to Super Mario World, which was released the same year.
Keen was/is great, but Mario 3 and Mario World are on the shortlist for best game ever.
htmx itself is not the future of anything. Businesses are not using htmx to make money and nobody is hiring for htmx. It's an ideological technology rather than a practical one. Maybe it'll inspire something that will turn out to be the future of frontend, but it won't be htmx as it is now.
> nobody is hiring for htmx. It's an ideological technology rather than a practical one.
Nobody is "hiring for" json either, or for git. Yet they are in incredibly wide use.
The thing is, htmx isn't "the front-end solution" React and co are selling. It's a new component that can be added to any classic/boring server-side stack to help it do more. These stacks are very practical, not "ideological" (lol), they made the web the powerhouse it is today.
If anything, the audience of frontend frameworks is Javascript/front-end developers; the audience of htmx includes anyone who can glue together some html and a http server. People who have been using java, or python with django, or C++, or rust, or OCaml on the backend. That's a lot of people even if they're not explicitly hired based on whether they have learned the docs of htmx.
IMO, the most distinct flavors in Dr. Pepper are cherry and almond. Benzaldehyde, an "artificial cherry" molecule listed in this spectrometer video, is found in both cherry and almond extracts.
If you're familiar with the taste of amaretto or marzipan, try thinking of those next time you drink a Dr. Pepper. That will unlock the flavor discrimination for you.
But I guess the robot companies are making money.