• 3 Posts
  • 112 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle








  • I’m tall and long in the torso. The last serious car accident I was in my head bashed against the ceiling in a frightening way. Or, it would have been frightening if I had any memory of it. I had a brush burn on my forehead which could only have happened if my head was pushed way back from hitting the ceiling. Before you ask, I always wear a seatbelt.

    Anyway, that’s not why I’m replying. I’m generally ok with car headrests, although I usually have to lean the seat back pretty far to just fit in.

    I bought a new office chair. I specifically chose one without a headrest, but it showed up with one anyway. At it’s highest adjustment it sits right between my shoulders.

    The world seems designed to fit such a narrow range of people.



  • NABDad@lemmy.worldtoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksRich tax.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    12 days ago

    Which is just “reduced staffing” in different words. If the kiosks weren’t there, they would have hired more workers, built more restaurants, etc.

    Except the study specified that the increased sales were related to the presence of the kiosks. They could do point of sale promotions that just weren’t reliably done if a person was in between the customer and the computer.




  • NABDad@lemmy.worldtoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksRich tax.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    12 days ago

    I don’t have a link handy, but there was a study that showed that fast food businesses didn’t reduce staffing when they replaced cashier’s with kiosks. Rather, they shifted employment to areas that couldn’t be replaced with a kiosk, enabling the staff to meet the increased demand and increased sales that were a result of the kiosks.



  • I had a professor in college that said when an AI problem is solved, it is no longer AI.

    Computers do all sorts of things today that 30 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. Back then many of those things were considered to be in the realm of AI. Now they’re just tools we use without thinking about them.

    I’m sitting here using gesture typing on my phone to enter these words. The computer is analyzing my motions and predicting what words I want to type based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next from the group of possible words that my gesture could be. This would have been the realm of AI once, but now it’s just the keyboard app on my phone.



  • Many, many years ago, the hospital where I work had a medical transcription company to transcribe dictated radiology results.

    At the time, users would access the server via DEC terminals or a terminal application on their computer.

    One radiologist set up a script in the terminal application to sign off all his reports with one click. Another radiologist liked it so the first let the second copy it.

    Later, the second radiologist opened a ticket with IT because all his reports were being signed by the first radiologist. Yeah, because he didn’t update the script to change the username and password being used to sign the reports.

    That’s an amusing anecdote, but the terror comes from the fact that NEITHER RADIOLOGIST WAS READING THEIR REPORTS. BEFORE SIGNING THEM.

    The reason they are supposed to sign the report is to confirm that they reviewed the work of the transcriptionist and verified that the report was correct.

    No matter what the tool is, doctors will assume the results are correct and sign off on them without checking.