McDonald’s is an interesting example because they’re increasingly replacing cashiers with kiosks. Robotics/LLMs seem to have diminishing returns compared to that in the order taking realm.

I love it when people invent things to force everyone perform self service and call it 'progress'.

I like it, I order on my phone before I get to the place and just pick it up.

Any reason to like the old way is just nostalgia in my head.

There are pros, but ultimately we’re all still apes, we need human interaction and contact. It can’t be completely replaced with technology.

> we need human interaction and contact

Indeed, but not at McDonalds.

Is ordering a burger really human interaction and contact?

Do you really need a human to ask whether you want fries with that?

I usually see people preferring to use the self service in McDonalds or supermarkets when given the option of either, so the consumer must find some benefit to it.

I always choose self service because that's where the volume is. I can wait in one of any Costco lines with 4 carts and 1 person checking them through, or I can wait in the line with 4 carts and 6 self service checkouts.

Despite the math working out insanely well for self service checkout, sometimes the gamble still doesn't pay off and the single employee burns through 4 carts faster than 6 self service checkout kiosks.

Costco does pretty good here though, drug stores go slow as hell.

I have a mental list of who the fast/slow checkout people are at my store, would be curious to see numbers but I think the fast people are more than 2x as fast as the slower ones.

I really appreciate the ability at Costco to scan with my phone as we pick up items. Check out becomes a breeze. But I absolutely hate self-checkout grocery stores unless I just have a few items. The idea that I'll run a cart full of groceries through self-checkout is insane. Not only do they routinely not have accurate bar codes requiring some sort of lookup from an attendant. I'll have things which require human clerks to "approve" anyway like wine. In addition, my self-checkout lines don't have the full conveyors like the human checkout lines. So everything has to be moved from cart directly to bag and there isn't enough bag space so you have to start putting bags into the cart which still has groceries. The whole thing is a mess and I hate it.

I don't know what they are thinking, the kiosks are not cheap to install or maintain, they are buggy, and they've put me off from going into McDs anymore. The In-N-Out nearby is cheaper, friendlier with plenty of employees working, (and better quality), so not sure what McD's end game is here.

I don’t like them either. The UX is annoying and it’s way too large. The benefit is that I get to see more options than can fit on the screens and they have photos, but still in person just seems better.

But I’ve read they’re effective, apparently, in consistently upselling compared to a human, so I’m guessing that’s their play.

Sure, but not the kitchen staff, which is where the robotics dream is supposed to take you.

I watched a show over 20 years ago that showed a fully automated robotic kitchen at McDonalds. I can only assumed they have continued to evolved it and perfect it as the technology has improved. I think it’s simply a question of when it hits the tipping point on cost.

There may also be an issue with logistics when it comes to making sure the machines keep running if there is a problem. They can barely keep the ice cream machines running.

I imagine kitchen robots are harder than they might sound. Kitchens are rough environments for machines. They are hot, greasy, and steamy. And everything that comes in contact with food needs to be able to be taken apart, washed, and sanitized at least daily.

True, that’s a good example of the commenter’s “last 5% is the 95%”

I hate those stupid things so much. They're really, as far as I can tell, just moving all labor to the kitchen and drive-thru, while considering the dining area an afterthought.

Maybe they're just following the trends their own numbers tell them are happening, but I don't think they trust robotics enough to put an area they truly care about under its purview just yet.

Even 30 years ago more than half the sales at a McDonalds were in the drive through. Some new McDonalds don’t have much of an inside dining room at all anymore, while having multiple drive through lanes.

Yeah the introduction of the kiosks is what tipped the scale and stopped me going to McDonalds. And I used to eat there a couple of times a week at least.

McDonald’s is also pushing their app pretty hard with lots of incentives.

Just right-click any file in VSCode/Cursor to see how absolutely chaotic and tedious a long menu is without icons. Now imagine that Google Docs example without icons.

It’s much easier to recognize the funnel icon to make a filter, than to skim all that text.

MS Office only has icons for the things that matter most. I think MS even had a UI guideline similar to the one that is cited from apple in TFA, but I cannot find it.

The author doesn't ask for _no_ icons at all. So I really don't get this critique.

Intentionally omitting some icons is a really powerful tool to draw attention to the actions that the user wants to do most of the time. I think that pattern went away in some places because it looks more consistent (that doesn't mean that usability is better) and some designers have some kind of OCD. At least that's what I have experienced in that exact case.

I never noticed this but VS Code has almost no icons in menus. I'm fine with this though. We aren't supposed to use the menus all the time but rely on shortcuts or the command palette.

Perhaps the solution is to split the menu up instead of giving you a long, tedious menu that is unparseable without even more visual noise of icons.

UI designers should prioritize clarity and discoverability, not minimizing "tediousness", "length" or "noise". Menus group together related functions so you can find them, and splitting them would harm that. This kind of thinking has led to a lot of terrible UI designs.

AI-generated section “NVIDIA’s earnings” nerfed the credibility of this piece.

“Bad” seems extreme. The only way to pass the litmus test you’ve described is for a tool to be 100% perfect, so then the graph looks like 99.99% “bad tool” until it reaches 100% perfection.

It’s not that binary imo. It can still be extremely useful and save a ton of time if it does 90% of the work and you fix the last 10%. Hardly a bad tool.

It’s only a bad tool if you spent more time fixing the results than building it yourself, which sometimes used to be the case for LLMs but is happening less and less as they get more capable.

If you show me a tool that does a thing perfectly 99% of the time, I will stop checking it eventually. Now let me ask you: How do you feel about the people who manage the security for your bank using that tool? And eventually overlooking a security exploit?

I agree that there are domains for which 90% good is very, very useful. But 99% isn't always better. In some limited domains, it's actually worse.

Counterpoint.

Humans don't get it right 100% or the time.

That is a true and useful component of analyzing risk, but the point is that human behaviour isn't a simple risk calculation. We tend to over-guard against things that subjectively seem dangerous, and under-guard against things that subjectively feel safe.

This isn't about whether AI is statistically safer, it's actually about the user experience of AI: If we can provide the same guidance without lulling a human backup into complacency, we will have an excellent augmented capability.

Your mistake is assuming there is some correlation with usefulness and size.

The JS Gmail UI from 15 years ago was just as functional as the one today.

Websites that are supposed to be simple lists end up bloated and laggy because of really poor JS that makes one request per item iteratively to populate a list.

I do like the old JS Gmail UI. But the current JS Gmail UI doesn’t feel any slower. It is cluttered with more features, but some of them I find useful. (Displaying my calendar and being able to accept invites right in Gmail being a big one.)

As someone who used the HTML gmail interface right up until google pulled the plug: the JS version is much slower to load. Every morning, I get to have about 10 seconds thinking about how it used to be faster.

It absolutely is slower. To an extreme degree even. It takes 10 to 20 seconds to load and is incredibly sluggish to use on some low-end machines I use regularly.

I disagree that we should be optimizing for low end machines and holding back on product improvements for the 80% mass market. Technology improves, it’s one of its best traits. We don’t need to be stuck in the past.

Low-end machines aren't necessarily stuck in the past. e.g. $150 minipcs that use 5W to give you a perfectly snappy desktop Linux experience.

I think those machines are super fun and a snappy Linux experience is very satisfying. I use a lightweight WM myself on Linux and prefer it over the heavy ones. But this segment is 0.1% of technology users and we shouldn’t constrain applications to the limited hardware that this population chooses to use.

I’d argue that in many of these instances, less is far more.

I want my car to just be really good at being a car, reliably get me from A to B. A Bluetooth connection to the stereo system is nice, but I don’t need a freaking 20” phablet right next to my face when I’m driving.

When I go to a website, I’m usually looking for information, to read something. I don’t often want fancy scroll and animations, I just want clear readable text free of distractions.

More and more these two examples seem to be going away, we’re losing the plot of what the point of these things are.

In a lot of ways, I agree with you. I think the key thing is that the complexity should be appropriate to what needs to get done.

Animations and etc. that distract from the actual content are superfluous. Agreed! I hate it when sites scrolljack.

But lots of HN posters want to impose the same austerity on every website, regardless of whether it’s appropriate. You can’t build Linear in 100KB of JS. Nor would you want to run it on 1 GB RAM. And that’s the case for a lot of economically useful applications.

Keeping things as simple as possible shouldn’t be the goal. It should be keeping it simple enough for the use case at hand.

You can do a lot with little, it just requires investing more in development which understandably most companies are uninterested in. Besides, plenty of websites are bloated as all hell. Why does a newspaper website, for example, have to be very much more than plain html?

Newspaper websites are a good example of bloat, true. I think if you’re in the business of primarily serving text content and not doing much interactive stuff, you don’t need a heavy site. A lot of them tend to cram their websites with trackers and ads and I guess that’s a business thing.

Tbh, it’s unpopular around HN, but I felt like AMP was a great experience for users. AMP pages were super fast and had no annoying banners - and none of my pet peeve: layout shift.

Actually a plain car would be great

I crank the window up and down 3x faster than the little button

And I could adjust my damn seat before electricity is available... sigh

I’m glad you want that! But, most people wouldn’t. Also, electric seat adjustments give you way more options than the manual adjustments could. And typically with more precision than the under seat bar with discrete positions.

> But, most people wouldn't.

How do you know?

To me it’s so obvious that it doesn’t require testing. The market shows it; there are nearly no production vehicles at volume with crank windows.

Because the cost of another SKU exceeds the benefit, but you're saying the benefit is negative to everyone.

Don’t get me started on automatic rear hatches. They close so slow it drives me crazy.

I can be in the house before it gets there, but I don’t trust. Just let me close it.

with you on manual seats? But crank windows? Nah man, power windows and locks are a requirement for me, as is a modern sound system, ac, and cruise control.

Goody | Remote | $200–250K + equity and benefits | Full-time

Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.

I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.

We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.

Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.

Check out our jobs minisite at https://jobs.ongoody.com/swe and feel free to email me at mark@ongoody.com.

Most of the loudest critics - and, I’ve found, many commenters on HN - are entirely out of touch with the majority of technology users. To think that nobody wants these features isn’t based on what we see in the real world, which shows a billion users using ChatGPT every month. That, plus the fact that AI browsers already exist and have users, indicates that the argument is more “I don’t like AI and everyone else should agree” rather than “the data shows that nobody likes AI”.

Those critics then straw-man by saying the AI will take up a ton of resources in your browser (it could be as simple as a text box) or collect your data secretively (what company wants to deal with that PR fallout?).

Had to scroll way too far to find a comment like this. Unfortunately HN famously doesn’t understand what the average consumer wants. The Dropbox comment comes to mind.

I hadn't read comments about Dropbox and products/features until maybe a week or two ago and somehow don't know the reference despite having spent most of the last 20 years in tech.

I presume the story is along the lines of "someone declined to invest in Dropbox and lost out" but what do I need to google to get the actual context? I don't need a full rehash here.

Edit: or is it "Dropbox is adding features nobody wants" and then turning out to be wrong?

Edit again: presumably it's not about "Nobody Cares" by Dropbox, the band.

The Dropbox thing is exactly what I was thinking of when I was writing my original comment.

Here is the reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

The basic summary is that a HN commenter suggested Dropbox was redundant because you could do some convoluted setup that 0.1% of the world would understand and 0.001% would actually want to use (and yes, that’s still a few hundred thousand people) and overall that aged poorly.

Much appreciated. :)

Edit: shame it wasn't about the band and the song though.

Goody | Remote | $200–250K + equity and benefits | Full-time

Goody is hiring a full-stack Staff Software Engineer who likes to ship at a startup pace and has an eye for exceptional UI/UX.

I'm Mark, the technical co-founder and CTO at Goody. Despite being something everyone does, gifting is one of the areas of commerce yet to be disrupted. Our goal is to make people's days by making gifting easy, while building a sustainable business on that market opportunity.

We're looking for engineers who like to build at a startup pace, have a critical eye for detail and user experience, and thrive when given autonomy and ownership.

Our product is used by Google, Stripe, Anthropic, Meta, NBCUniversal, Notion, and others, and we also offer a developer API for commerce.

Check out our jobs minisite at https://jobs.ongoody.com/swe and feel free to email me at mark@ongoody.com.

Hey there, Mark! I wanted to let you know that I sent you an email. :) Love what you're doing at Goody, by the way.

Just as the core idea of a book can be (lossily) summarized in a few sentences, the core crux of an argument can be quite simple and not require wading though the whole discussion (the AGI discussion is only 30 minutes anyhow).

Granted, a bunch of commenters are probably doing what you’re saying.