It’s really the worst. For the uninitiated, the platen where your bags go is actually a scale. The self-check-kiosk software waits for this bagging scale to quit moving (see: de-bouncing) before weighing and approving the scan and purchase of a single item. This is why, occasionally, if you’re too fast or too slow, the kiosk gets angry and makes you flag down an attendant.

That’s not a problem for 10 items or less, but for a whole cart? All that waiting around adds up. Because of all that, it’s literally impossible to achieve the same or better speed than an employee.

Jeorgia?

like sifting through resumes.

Then we need to call it what it is: This exchange is an HR screen.

Make no mistake, the oligarchs see the personal computer as a 40-year-old experiment that has failed, or needs to fail. They want their mainframes and CPU/hr billing back. Server hosting for enterprise uses has already gone this way for the most part. Small consumers are next.

As far as I recall, that’s how it went.

I was gonna say this is at least Digg 3.0.

That’s a good call. I kinda/sorta figured that the fire department would see it sooner or later, but that’s clearly not the case.

It might be a matter of just being under a rock for the last 10-20 years. Retail PoS systems have changed quite a bit in that time, but how you interface with gas pumps and dining, hasn’t changed at all.

Also: a lot of folks navigate digital systems by rote memorization and don’t read or think all that much. If you throw a new interface in front of them, just sit back and watch the bewilderment. Gotta give people like that time to learn it all.

Sadly, we still do. But it’s really more a matter of vendor preference these days, since some places (usually small/personal operations) don’t do digital payments. That and nobody carries large amounts of cash around, so checks are the only alternative.

That said, anyone that hasn’t moved on to prefer a bank card or credit-card is behind the times, or doesn’t have a bank account. Still, it’s rare to see these days, especially at the grocery store.

This is the core problem, right here. At a minimum, people need training to learn what information to ignore so you can navigate the whole thing. Even if you know the store’s layout, you still need to have the will to ignore advertising and disregard extraneous information. Being a fast reader that can do fast mental math, also helps tremendously.

Traffic flow is another problem. Wegmans is the chief offender here, IMO, by putting impulse items in massive crates that crowd the store entrance+exit combo. It amazes me that it’s not a fire hazard, because it makes entering the store a nightmare. But most grocery stores have awful choke points in produce, dairy, meat, and other high-traffic areas. And of course those are the stores that have no small carts or hand-baskets, obligating customers to gum up the works with big metal baskets that are 70% empty.

A better idea is a store that doesn’t flood your eye sockets with information you don’t absolutely need. Get rid of the special displays, end-cap bullshit, and vendor promotional stuff. Then, normalize all the price tags and include unit cost per lb/oz/L/whatever to make bargain hunting a snap. Then, measure the fucking carts and make sure that two can get by everywhere in the store. Finally, pick a store layout and stick to it. </rant>

I want to say that Aldi is already doing all of the right things, but I could be wrong.

In my greater friend-group, we call them “shamans”, and rotate responsibilities when people go on trips. Like a designated driver or lifeguard, it’s a position of elevated and celebrated importance, even though the traveler may not ever leave their couch.

and most importantly be human

Now that I think about it, it’s key to be the most human possible. People do irritating and annoying stuff when they toss sobriety out the window, and sometimes it takes a lot of compassion and empathy to manage.

Eh, I give it a 4/10 right now. There’s still some cool stuff to do and plenty of great people around, but generally, can’t recommend it if you don’t have to.

I know a handful of oddball pharma trivia facts, but that’s a new one on me. It’s just wild that a drug could even do that.

It’s worth adding that, if you are arrested, that phone is a treasure-trove of potential liability that will absolutely get used against you. Also, you’re probably not getting it back, so you’re better off without it. Carry cash, a map if you must, and coordinate rally points and fallback locations with your friends ahead of time.

A proper camera is a good tip, but make sure the camera memory and storage card are wiped ahead of time.

just living your life without a phone is getting harder

This is a bigger problem than most realize. Consider the barrier-to-entry for phones, internet access, and charging. Then add cashless payment on top of that. Combined, it creates a new red-line between economic classes, and a rather ugly one at that. At some point, this mode of commerce is going to get selected not for the convenience it provides, but for whom it excludes.

I’ll also add that getting access to a smartphone with total anonymity is impressively hard to do.

True, but the article is about projects getting de-platformed, so all that goes away under those circumstances. There’s value tied up in all that data, but the codebase itself might be far harder to replace securely if the public repo just vanishes. Better to have at least an alternate offsite backup - on another service even - if all you do is maintain a project-owner-controlled clone.

Plus, I know it’s a small gesture, but some folks might need that tiny push to migrate if they’re already fence-sitting about leaving.

For her sake, I hope she applied for QA.

I haven’t always been a fan of Go. It launched with some iffy design decisions that have since been patched, either by the project maintainers or the community. It’s a much better experience now, which suggests that maybe there’s some long-range vision at work that I wasn’t privy to.

That said, Pike clearly has a lot of good ideas and I’m glad Google funded him to bring those to light.

I’ll also say that after finally wrapping my head around Python and JavaScript async/await, I actually much prefer the Goroutine and channel model for concurrency. I got to those languages after surviving C++, and believe me when I say that it’s a bad time when your software develops a bad case of warts. Better to not contract them in the first place.

For anyone that needs to know: it’s criminally easy to set up git for multiple remotes, making a migration from GitHub a lot easier.

Remember that origin is just the default, and you can have any number configured you want.

• View all remotes: git remote -v
• Add new remote: git remote add $name $url
• Push to another remote: git push $remotename $branchname
• Pull from a specific remote: git pull $remotename/$branchname (note the slash)
• Fetch from all remotes: git fetch --all

The first two are just one-time setup, and the rest just get bolted onto your existing workflow. At some point, you’ll want to use git remote move names around, possibly even making origin something other than GitHub. Cheers.

A burn so severe, so long-lasting, that he no longer has to pay to heat his home.