First, I'm reminded of a joke: Then I'm saddled with the sad reminder that we, the public, are the QA testers now. QA is one of the first things to go when companies want to "get lean" and,...
First, I'm reminded of a joke:
A QA engineer walks into a bar and orders a beer.
She orders 2 beers.
She orders 0 beers.
She orders -1 beers.
She orders a lizard.
She orders a NULLPTR.
She tries to leave without paying.
Satisfied, she declares the bar ready for business. The first customer comes in an orders a beer. They finish their drink, and then ask where the bathroom is.
The bar explodes.
Then I'm saddled with the sad reminder that we, the public, are the QA testers now. QA is one of the first things to go when companies want to "get lean" and, unsurprisingly, management with too much faith in AI just sent it out into the world without doing anything resembling a reasonable QA test. Likely just enough to show that it works in their perfect scenario. Of course, it immediately failed and they have to go back to the drawing board. I'm honestly surprised that nobody figured out how to get the AI to give them free food, but if they try pushing this out again I'm certain people will try.
One of my first jobs out of college almost 20 years ago now was a QA tester for the military (as a civilian techie). Most of it was manually done, because effort to automate tests at that given...
One of my first jobs out of college almost 20 years ago now was a QA tester for the military (as a civilian techie).
Most of it was manually done, because effort to automate tests at that given stage of app (and before CI/CD was trendy) greatly exceeded "have the junior guy poke at it till he breaks it."
I 100% think the world has trended for the worse when we expect developers to write their own tests. Bug reports suck without detailed reproduction steps, and being a manual QA tester taught me to write good ones.
Every prod release should have a seperate, human tester trying to break it before release. While automated tests can prevent regressions really well, they definitely don't do "If I resize the window just right I can crash the page" testing well.
While automated tests can prevent regressions really well, they definitely don't do "If I resize the window just right I can crash the page" testing well.
Most definitely one approach yes. But it's not gonna catch the problem if it's not putting input in. The point is human beings are much more creative at trying to break things. See also: Wall...
Most definitely one approach yes. But it's not gonna catch the problem if it's not putting input in. The point is human beings are much more creative at trying to break things.
See also: Wall jumping in Vanilla WoW.
I definitely automated stuff as I went along; Autohotkey was my friend.
Fuzzing is about putting a big variety of different inputs into a system and identifying the inputs that produce weird or unexpected outputs. In theory, it's really good at finding bugs of the...
Fuzzing is about putting a big variety of different inputs into a system and identifying the inputs that produce weird or unexpected outputs. In theory, it's really good at finding bugs of the "wall jumping" kind, where one particular unexpected input at the wrong moment produces bad results.
The difficulty is figuring out how to hook up the output of the fuzzer (basically a stream of random bytes) to the inputs of the system you're trying to test. Fuzzers mostly work best when the subject under test has a clear, reproducible "input -> output" structure, whereas games have a more complex "input + state + time -> output". But for complex software like compilers or databases, fuzzers are great at finding the sorts of bugs that a QA team might occasionally stumble onto.
At least one fuzzing tool seems to be trying to fuzz classic games to improve their tool. (I've never used their product, so I'm not trying to shill; I just think their blog posts are neat.)
At least one fuzzing tool seems to be trying to fuzz classic games to improve their tool. (I've never used their product, so I'm not trying to shill; I just think their blog posts are neat.)
Well, they probably learned from the Chevy's misadventures. There's no real reason for this to handle cost, it only needs to interpret menu items and quantity.
I'm honestly surprised that nobody figured out how to get the AI to give them free food,
Well, they probably learned from the Chevy's misadventures. There's no real reason for this to handle cost, it only needs to interpret menu items and quantity.
I went to Taco Bell a couple weeks ago and got the AI taking our order. It did fine at first but got a little tripped up by a modification and the human took over very rapidly. We ended up...
I went to Taco Bell a couple weeks ago and got the AI taking our order. It did fine at first but got a little tripped up by a modification and the human took over very rapidly. We ended up chatting with him at the window and he said that the AI for him has been great as he isn’t rushing people out of the window to take the next order. He did say that he noticed it has trouble with certain modifications though and does much better with folks ordering standard items. This kind of struck me considering that in my experience Taco Bell is the chain that is the most customizable (swapping sauces, no sour cream, grilling burritos, etc).
Tid bit that a lot of people probably don’t know, Taco Bell was one of the first fast food places to adopt online ordering. Naturally, the instinct was that in order to make the online orders...
Tid bit that a lot of people probably don’t know, Taco Bell was one of the first fast food places to adopt online ordering. Naturally, the instinct was that in order to make the online orders compatible with the orders on the POS terminal in the store, the menu had to be exactly the same.
That means initially, all of the modifications available on the cash register were also available on the online menu, since that was the easiest way to do it. Everyone loved it and it became a huge selling point, so it was never modified.
Every fast food restaurant is also exactly like this, but some opt to design the menu in a way that hides these options from you.
I don't think all order terminals offer the same customization options. I know for a fact that McDonald's POS systems had more options than the touch screens.
I don't think all order terminals offer the same customization options. I know for a fact that McDonald's POS systems had more options than the touch screens.
Yes, because they hide the options on the touch screens. The backend supports all three systems, and they could allow those options on the touch screens if they wanted.
Yes, because they hide the options on the touch screens.
The backend supports all three systems, and they could allow those options on the touch screens if they wanted.
I’m not sure, wasn’t involved in those decisions, I was pretty far removed from the actual clients when I worked at that company. I’m not sure that McDonalds even uses the same backend that Taco...
I’m not sure, wasn’t involved in those decisions, I was pretty far removed from the actual clients when I worked at that company.
I’m not sure that McDonalds even uses the same backend that Taco Bell does, I know that when I left there was talk of migration, but I left before it was started, if it was started.
I only know that they all work the same way - for orders to show up on the screens in the kitchen, it has to all be compatible.
They could also staff up, rethink their business around humans etc. But I'm glad that AI makes his paycheck a little more bearable.
We ended up chatting with him at the window and he said that the AI for him has been great as he isn’t rushing people out of the window to take the next order.
They could also staff up, rethink their business around humans etc. But I'm glad that AI makes his paycheck a little more bearable.
Am I crazy or do the title and the contents say basically opposite things? The title implies that they're planning to roll it back, but the contents and quotes both read like generic "we just need...
Am I crazy or do the title and the contents say basically opposite things? The title implies that they're planning to roll it back, but the contents and quotes both read like generic "we just need to work out the growing pains" type lines.
I've been looking around for such a definitive statement reported somewhere. I can find vague speak like "rethinking", "reconsider", and "in talks", but nothing saying what their plan actually is....
I've been looking around for such a definitive statement reported somewhere. I can find vague speak like "rethinking", "reconsider", and "in talks", but nothing saying what their plan actually is. The most definitive-sounding thing I found across half a dozen articles or so is saying that they're going to be more selective with expansion plans, but that tells me effectively nothing.
It's pretty confusingly written in the article. The "not using it in drive through" line seems unambiguous, but is contradicted by the direct quote two sentences later.
He said the firm was "learning a lot" - but he would now think carefully about where to use AI going forwards, including not using it at drive-throughs. [emphasis mine]
In particular, Mr Matthews said, there are times when humans are better placed to take orders, especially when the restaurants get busy.
"We'll help coach teams on when to use voice AI [emphasis mine] and when it's better to monitor or step in," he said.
It's pretty confusingly written in the article. The "not using it in drive through" line seems unambiguous, but is contradicted by the direct quote two sentences later.
Yeah, this is where my confusion comes from. I also personally find the "not using it in drive through" to be strangely ambiguous for a statement that seems like it should be unambiguous. The...
Yeah, this is where my confusion comes from. I also personally find the "not using it in drive through" to be strangely ambiguous for a statement that seems like it should be unambiguous. The reason is that it's not stated as any sort of policy, or even directly quoted, and is bundled into a sentence about what he "would now think carefully about". So to me that sentence reads as likely just saying that he's been thinking about the future AI plans and one of the considered options is ceasing voice AI in drive through.
Not commenting on the article per se, but two fast food places near me (wienerschnitzel and taco bell) have both deployed their in-test AI order-takers, and they've been a much better experience...
Not commenting on the article per se, but two fast food places near me (wienerschnitzel and taco bell) have both deployed their in-test AI order-takers, and they've been a much better experience for me than the hard-to-understand scratchy mic and speakers of old. I've been able to flub my words, change my order, make a modification, and it's all worked pretty much exactly like I'd hope it would. The lines seem to move a little quicker, too, so I think most people are using the system effectively.
Having worked fast food myself as a teen, man I would have loved not being on drive-thru talking duty. It was the worst of the roles by a mile.
The Whitecastle near me has the absolute worst implementation of AI in the drivethru. When you approach, it shows a screen of terms & conditions and requires you to say "I accept the terms" to...
The Whitecastle near me has the absolute worst implementation of AI in the drivethru. When you approach, it shows a screen of terms & conditions and requires you to say "I accept the terms" to start ordering. Then when you finish, it just goes on and on and on about some membership or something, I just drove away.
I have to say that one of the major benefits of giving up fast food a few years ago is not having to deal with AI drive-through nonsense. There are videos all over tiktok about how terrible they are.
I have to say that one of the major benefits of giving up fast food a few years ago is not having to deal with AI drive-through nonsense. There are videos all over tiktok about how terrible they are.
Fast food has felt like punishment for years. That was before the price changes took away their only real appeal for me. They're rarely fast, and most of them have a barrier to entry if you're...
Fast food has felt like punishment for years. That was before the price changes took away their only real appeal for me. They're rarely fast, and most of them have a barrier to entry if you're used to the good old days where you walk in, ask for something, pay for it, and then leave. I am simply not interested in installing another app or learning another low quality kiosk, while a skeleton crew rushes around ignoring me because they fired all of the staff.
Skeleton crew is right. In some McD locations you can’t get your own ketchup packets (which is already ridiculous). So you go to the counter and try to get the attention of someone and they’ll...
Skeleton crew is right. In some McD locations you can’t get your own ketchup packets (which is already ridiculous). So you go to the counter and try to get the attention of someone and they’ll look right at you multiple times and ignore you because there’s only 3 people during lunch rush and now they’re handling app, drive through and in person orders.
The ability to order fast food online is a major cause for its enshittification. Even if the line looks short you’re actually competing with 20 online orders. On top of that I’m convinced it’s the main cause for the price increases. The CEOs saw millions were willing to pay $35 for two burgers and fries to be delivered. So they realized their in store prices were too low.
I wrote a diatribe on fast food pricing already. These companies are showing off that pricing is a game, and they are very much intent on winning that game.
I wrote a diatribe on fast food pricing already. These companies are showing off that pricing is a game, and they are very much intent on winning that game.
A computer can never be held responsible, so a computer should never be in a position of responsibility. Let it make life and death decisions when it can be put to death for mass murder.
A computer can never be held responsible, so a computer should never be in a position of responsibility. Let it make life and death decisions when it can be put to death for mass murder.
I propose all current and former C-Suite employees should be 100% be responsible for any and all crimes/travesties that happen under their leadership. Thus the company selling "Responsibility AI"...
I propose all current and former C-Suite employees should be 100% be responsible for any and all crimes/travesties that happen under their leadership.
Thus the company selling "Responsibility AI" has a few human heads to put on the chopping block alongside it's product.
Alternatively I go to Taco Bell once or twice a month and never had issues with the "AI" drive through. I usually don't have issues with voice recognition though. But I never noticed anyone in...
Alternatively I go to Taco Bell once or twice a month and never had issues with the "AI" drive through. I usually don't have issues with voice recognition though. But I never noticed anyone in front of me in drive thrus having issues either though.
I haven’t experienced AI at the Taco Bell drive thru, but I think I would enjoy it. I had a Baja Blast Dream Freeze once 4 years ago and I’ve never been able to order another. Even when there’s a...
I haven’t experienced AI at the Taco Bell drive thru, but I think I would enjoy it. I had a Baja Blast Dream Freeze once 4 years ago and I’ve never been able to order another. Even when there’s a whole poster up in the drive thru line, the drive thru people never seem to understand what I’m talking about. Half the time I end up with a Baja Blast soda instead of a freeze, so it’s not even close to correct.
I never complain because I understand that Taco Bell ordering is a lottery and sometimes you lose, but I can’t imagine that AI could possibly be less accurate than the real Taco Bell employees I’ve met.
First, I'm reminded of a joke:
Then I'm saddled with the sad reminder that we, the public, are the QA testers now. QA is one of the first things to go when companies want to "get lean" and, unsurprisingly, management with too much faith in AI just sent it out into the world without doing anything resembling a reasonable QA test. Likely just enough to show that it works in their perfect scenario. Of course, it immediately failed and they have to go back to the drawing board. I'm honestly surprised that nobody figured out how to get the AI to give them free food, but if they try pushing this out again I'm certain people will try.
One of my first jobs out of college almost 20 years ago now was a QA tester for the military (as a civilian techie).
Most of it was manually done, because effort to automate tests at that given stage of app (and before CI/CD was trendy) greatly exceeded "have the junior guy poke at it till he breaks it."
I 100% think the world has trended for the worse when we expect developers to write their own tests. Bug reports suck without detailed reproduction steps, and being a manual QA tester taught me to write good ones.
Every prod release should have a seperate, human tester trying to break it before release. While automated tests can prevent regressions really well, they definitely don't do "If I resize the window just right I can crash the page" testing well.
Isn’t it what fuzzing is for?
Most definitely one approach yes. But it's not gonna catch the problem if it's not putting input in. The point is human beings are much more creative at trying to break things.
See also: Wall jumping in Vanilla WoW.
I definitely automated stuff as I went along; Autohotkey was my friend.
Fuzzing is about putting a big variety of different inputs into a system and identifying the inputs that produce weird or unexpected outputs. In theory, it's really good at finding bugs of the "wall jumping" kind, where one particular unexpected input at the wrong moment produces bad results.
The difficulty is figuring out how to hook up the output of the fuzzer (basically a stream of random bytes) to the inputs of the system you're trying to test. Fuzzers mostly work best when the subject under test has a clear, reproducible "input -> output" structure, whereas games have a more complex "input + state + time -> output". But for complex software like compilers or databases, fuzzers are great at finding the sorts of bugs that a QA team might occasionally stumble onto.
At least one fuzzing tool seems to be trying to fuzz classic games to improve their tool. (I've never used their product, so I'm not trying to shill; I just think their blog posts are neat.)
Well, they probably learned from the Chevy's misadventures. There's no real reason for this to handle cost, it only needs to interpret menu items and quantity.
I went to Taco Bell a couple weeks ago and got the AI taking our order. It did fine at first but got a little tripped up by a modification and the human took over very rapidly. We ended up chatting with him at the window and he said that the AI for him has been great as he isn’t rushing people out of the window to take the next order. He did say that he noticed it has trouble with certain modifications though and does much better with folks ordering standard items. This kind of struck me considering that in my experience Taco Bell is the chain that is the most customizable (swapping sauces, no sour cream, grilling burritos, etc).
Tid bit that a lot of people probably don’t know, Taco Bell was one of the first fast food places to adopt online ordering. Naturally, the instinct was that in order to make the online orders compatible with the orders on the POS terminal in the store, the menu had to be exactly the same.
That means initially, all of the modifications available on the cash register were also available on the online menu, since that was the easiest way to do it. Everyone loved it and it became a huge selling point, so it was never modified.
Every fast food restaurant is also exactly like this, but some opt to design the menu in a way that hides these options from you.
I don't think all order terminals offer the same customization options. I know for a fact that McDonald's POS systems had more options than the touch screens.
Yes, because they hide the options on the touch screens.
The backend supports all three systems, and they could allow those options on the touch screens if they wanted.
Why not? Seems like a good opportunity to upcharge.
I’m not sure, wasn’t involved in those decisions, I was pretty far removed from the actual clients when I worked at that company.
I’m not sure that McDonalds even uses the same backend that Taco Bell does, I know that when I left there was talk of migration, but I left before it was started, if it was started.
I only know that they all work the same way - for orders to show up on the screens in the kitchen, it has to all be compatible.
They could also staff up, rethink their business around humans etc. But I'm glad that AI makes his paycheck a little more bearable.
Am I crazy or do the title and the contents say basically opposite things? The title implies that they're planning to roll it back, but the contents and quotes both read like generic "we just need to work out the growing pains" type lines.
They won't use it for drive through service going forward
I've been looking around for such a definitive statement reported somewhere. I can find vague speak like "rethinking", "reconsider", and "in talks", but nothing saying what their plan actually is. The most definitive-sounding thing I found across half a dozen articles or so is saying that they're going to be more selective with expansion plans, but that tells me effectively nothing.
We clearly have different interpretations of the quote from this article.
It's pretty confusingly written in the article. The "not using it in drive through" line seems unambiguous, but is contradicted by the direct quote two sentences later.
Yeah, this is where my confusion comes from. I also personally find the "not using it in drive through" to be strangely ambiguous for a statement that seems like it should be unambiguous. The reason is that it's not stated as any sort of policy, or even directly quoted, and is bundled into a sentence about what he "would now think carefully about". So to me that sentence reads as likely just saying that he's been thinking about the future AI plans and one of the considered options is ceasing voice AI in drive through.
Not commenting on the article per se, but two fast food places near me (wienerschnitzel and taco bell) have both deployed their in-test AI order-takers, and they've been a much better experience for me than the hard-to-understand scratchy mic and speakers of old. I've been able to flub my words, change my order, make a modification, and it's all worked pretty much exactly like I'd hope it would. The lines seem to move a little quicker, too, so I think most people are using the system effectively.
Having worked fast food myself as a teen, man I would have loved not being on drive-thru talking duty. It was the worst of the roles by a mile.
The Whitecastle near me has the absolute worst implementation of AI in the drivethru. When you approach, it shows a screen of terms & conditions and requires you to say "I accept the terms" to start ordering. Then when you finish, it just goes on and on and on about some membership or something, I just drove away.
I have to say that one of the major benefits of giving up fast food a few years ago is not having to deal with AI drive-through nonsense. There are videos all over tiktok about how terrible they are.
Fast food has felt like punishment for years. That was before the price changes took away their only real appeal for me. They're rarely fast, and most of them have a barrier to entry if you're used to the good old days where you walk in, ask for something, pay for it, and then leave. I am simply not interested in installing another app or learning another low quality kiosk, while a skeleton crew rushes around ignoring me because they fired all of the staff.
Skeleton crew is right. In some McD locations you can’t get your own ketchup packets (which is already ridiculous). So you go to the counter and try to get the attention of someone and they’ll look right at you multiple times and ignore you because there’s only 3 people during lunch rush and now they’re handling app, drive through and in person orders.
The ability to order fast food online is a major cause for its enshittification. Even if the line looks short you’re actually competing with 20 online orders. On top of that I’m convinced it’s the main cause for the price increases. The CEOs saw millions were willing to pay $35 for two burgers and fries to be delivered. So they realized their in store prices were too low.
I wrote a diatribe on fast food pricing already. These companies are showing off that pricing is a game, and they are very much intent on winning that game.
How bad will AI have to mess up to get fired from a job?
A computer can never be held responsible, so a computer should never be in a position of responsibility. Let it make life and death decisions when it can be put to death for mass murder.
Operative word: should.
Just you wait.
I propose all current and former C-Suite employees should be 100% be responsible for any and all crimes/travesties that happen under their leadership.
Thus the company selling "Responsibility AI" has a few human heads to put on the chopping block alongside it's product.
...we should hold corporations and institutions to the same standard...
Alternatively I go to Taco Bell once or twice a month and never had issues with the "AI" drive through. I usually don't have issues with voice recognition though. But I never noticed anyone in front of me in drive thrus having issues either though.
I haven’t experienced AI at the Taco Bell drive thru, but I think I would enjoy it. I had a Baja Blast Dream Freeze once 4 years ago and I’ve never been able to order another. Even when there’s a whole poster up in the drive thru line, the drive thru people never seem to understand what I’m talking about. Half the time I end up with a Baja Blast soda instead of a freeze, so it’s not even close to correct.
I never complain because I understand that Taco Bell ordering is a lottery and sometimes you lose, but I can’t imagine that AI could possibly be less accurate than the real Taco Bell employees I’ve met.