Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”

“whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out’s machine learning model”

“As of mid-2022, Just Walk Out required about 700 human reviews per 1,000 sales, far above an internal target of reducing the number of reviews to between 20 and 50 per 1,000 sales”

s18e06: Low-Hanging Fruit, Information Processing, and People Problems

0.0 Context Setting

A grey Thursday morning in Portland, Oregon, on April 4, 2024.

For April fools this week, Florian and I switched the homepage of our Do Not Reply cards to an AI version, but don’t tell anyone my secret.

OK, my secret was this: I spent a bunch of time with Chat-GPT4 prompting and tweaking and prompting to generate Bad Do Not Reply Cards and it definitely generated bad ones, but they were not bad enough to be funny, and not bad enough to be good.

What they were, though, was bad enough to make