1993

Okay, so: there's a local restaurant whose online ordering process involves various selecting various sauces to be included with one's order – so many units of teriyaki sauce, so many units of hot sauce, so may units of peanut sauce, and so forth.

The idea is supposed to be that you can select any combination of sauces you want, as long as it adds up to no more than four units. However, what the app actually required is that you select exactly four units of sauces; it wouldn't let you submit the ordering form if the total wasn't exactly four.

Just today I discovered that they seem to have fixed it... not by correcting the errant validation rule, but by adding a "no sauce" option, which counts toward the required total of four.

Thus, it's now possible to place an order with, say, two units of teriyaki sauce rather than four by entering 2x "teriyaki sauce" and 2x "no sauce". Similarly, an order with no sauce at all is 4x "no sauce".

This is quite possibly the least intuitive ordering process I've ever encountered, and I've literally worked in e-commerce.

Happy New Year 2024 from Korea.

Year of the 🐲🐉!

A gutted iPod turned into a cigarette case

Technophobes need to apologise for "just put it in plain English you stupid machine!" because, well for one the decline in accurate error messages in favour of simplicity has contributed to the rise of tech illiteracy, but also because now whenever an "app" has a net connection error it will pop up a box saying something like "oo ooopsie! Your super duper feed went poo poo. We'll try again soon!" which having said to me by a corporation is about 8 million times worse than having to hear the word "network".

"This smart camera is able to collect information about customers in a coffee shop as well as workers, converting their actions to readable data. Fooling a camera from recognizing the form of a human is easy enough, but what happens when they track actions instead?"

This is how the James Web telescope works