As a European, I can safely say that tipping in American restaurants is one of the most unusual things I remember about America. The amount of tips is huge and they are demanded of you everywhere
While we used to have "rounding up" tipping here as well (closest 5 or 10, depending on where you lived), it's sadly becoming norm to ask for percentage based tipping in europe as well, especially in the more touristy places.
This is what I don't get about tipping percentage based. It makes no sense to me. The serving effort is exactly the same between a 10$ salad and a 100$ steak. Take plate, bring plate, place plate on table, smile and check back. That's it.
It gets even more obnoxious when dealing with drinks. A 20$ bottle of wine requires the same effort as a 200$ bottle of wine. (well, except that pretentious bs about breaking the glass, but that's ridiculous anyway)
Same goes for drinks at bars. 5$ shot of your cheapest whiskey takes the same effort as a 50-500$ of a top shelf / ridiculously rare whiskey. Tipping a percentage of that makes absolutely no sense at all, and people defending it with "you get better service" really should visit high end restaurants in London / Paris etc. and see what "great service" really means.
>This is what I don't get about tipping percentage based. It makes no sense to me.
Of course it makes sense and I think you understand it even if (very reasonably!) you don't like it: it's a rough but effective effort at a progressive taxation/extractive pricing scheme. They're trying to extract the maximum amount of money from each customer for each individual transaction [0], orthogonal to effort or value. They aren't a government of course though and don't have full visibility of anyone's exact income or personal psychology. But as a simple proxy somebody buying a $200 bottle of wine is more likely to either have a lot more money or (just as good here) simply be in a mood/occasion to splash out and due to how humans tend to judge relative expenditures they're a lot easier to convince a $30 tip is acceptable if it's 15% of the price instead of 150% the price. Even if they aren't rich and/or are typically value-oriented, on a "special occasion" it's probably going to be easier to squeeze them harder while not framing it as getting squeezed. Once people commit to paying higher numbers that frames the rest of their economic decision making for the transaction.
And clearly it does work for a lot of places, at least in the short term, same as other exploitive human economic hacks (like the predatory rise of microtransactions in video games). It lets the businesses (including not just owners/managers in this case but many employees as well) make a lot more money.
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0: Ie, treating it as a non-iterated game theory situation, which probably is rational for a lot of restaurants and particularly tourist ones where odds may be that they will only ever see any given customer once (or perhaps single digits, close enough) in a lifetime. In an iterated game, where a large/critical percentage of business depends on local repeat customers, it can make more sense long term to build loyalty by not feeling exploitive and have lower-per-transaction profits that are steady over years/decades. And I have seen that play out to some extent. Some places may also split the difference, such as by offering special local discount scheme sort of things, or having very different pricing/offerings certain days of the week when statistically very few tourists are there vs locals.
As a European have you noticed a recent increase in tipping in Europe as well?
In Switzerland a lot of the restaurants that have moved to tablets for payment, and the payment screen pops up a "suggested tip" window with a few options. They might be a bit lower than the standard American tips but it's still there and it never was before.
As an American, may I suggest you Europeans start a social media movement to boycott all businesses in Europe which have that tip screen on their card terminals, before the cancer solidifies its foothold in your home? We won't get rid of tipping here until we get a superdepression for a number of years and no restaraunt operates anymore because literally nobody can afford it.
Sometimes it's ridiculous enough that the waiter is the one pressing "0%" to switch directly to payment, e.g. when you get your order at the bar yourself and the amount of service is minimal.
There's no custom of tipping that much at any of these places, but I feel cheap just clicking the lowest (no tip) of 4 options. Maybe all the time I've lived in the US plays a role here but it seems like it might just be the decoy effect [1] applied to tipping. It will be interesting to see if consumers see this as a dark pattern and push back.
I haven’t noticed such thing, but maybe you are right. I think that Switzerland is completely different than other parts of Europe and it is hard to compare with.
For me ridiculous is the fact you are tipping only person who brings the plate.
You dining experience is affected more by other people: person who actually prepared the dish and person who cleans the toilet. Their poor work can easily ruin your dinner experience, but tips are expected to the person walking with plates.
>you are tipping only person who brings the plate. You dining experience is affected more by other people
A lot of restaurants have "tip sharing", "tip out", "tip pool" where the waitstaff share some portion of their tips with the hostess, foodrunners, cooks, etc. So the customer is really tipping all the workers except the managers.
You will no doubt have noticed that with the proliferation of mobile Epos, tipping is increasingly being crowbarred into daily life over here too. For godssakes Just Say No
It's weirdly named. But it's all because the person servicing you is pretty much not paid by their employer. Instead they are "hired" and paid by you directly to service you. You don't have much control in this business relationship between you and your server, however you are expected to pay for it. Look at servers not as employers but as freelancers and it'll be easier.
It is such a relief to go out to eat in Europe versus the USA where you have to negotiate a fair wage for the service employees at what seems like every food service business at the register. I prefer the solution other countries have where the price already includes a fair wage, I don't want to have to think about it with every meal or snack.
That and disappearing with your card, swiping it with only some kind of implicit authorisation, doing some kind of pre-auth (?), which is then released/finalised once you add the tip and sign the receipt ? (If I understood it correctly)
And European tourists are notorious for not tipping, because they have not taken the time to understand our bizarre customs which we don’t even like.
Combine that with the fact that tourists everywhere are more difficult and time-consuming to deal with and it’s a recipe for resentment.
Just last week I saw a group of Spanish visitors to NYC create a confusing maelstrom of orders at a coffee shop and then override the tip to zero, all while shouting across the room to each other.
I frequent a bar in a tourist area with many international tourists. They finally just by default added an 18% service charge and a line for an additional tip.
The servers and bartenders are always very explicit about the tip being included.
Here in the UK, it's common for a "service charge" to be added to bills which is the equivalent of a tip, but considered mandatory for large groups. I think the next step is to just roll the tips/service charge into the food prices and thus not be pushing employee wage issues onto customers.
That is simply a markup and should be reflected in the price. Euro style tipping is annoying enough but percentages in the US are huge. It is really not an afterthought to the whole transaction. Imagine you bought a car and the dealers profit would be totally optional for you to decide. The situation is frankly ludicrous
If they say up front on every menu that the tip is included and the servers/bartenders are up front and you can actually remove it (I guess you can put less on the bottom line), what’s the issue?
Taxes also aren’t included in the menu price.
I can’t imagine any of the servers who don’t like the status quo or that would come out better even if they made $20 an hour.
>>If they say up front on every menu that the tip is included and the servers/bartenders are up front and you can actually remove it (I guess you can put less on the bottom line), what’s the issue?
Nothing. Some restaurants in London started doing this now, the menu says a service charge of 10% will apply unless you ask to remove it and very few people have any issue with it.
Because if one restaurant or retailer in general added taxes and no one else does, it makes their prices seem higher. Everyone in the US knows that taxes aren’t included.
This is funny how bad UI is on some of websites which are considered the best. Today I tried to find prices for Mistral models but I couldn’t. Their prices page leads to 404…
Just in case you're still interested in their pricing, it's towards the bottom of [1], section "How to buy", when changing the selection from "Self-hosted" to "Mistral Cloud".
I have a good story related to the topic of discussion :)
I am the author of one site - a dictionary of the English language, which, in addition to the definition of a word from several dictionaries, shows the use of words in different contexts. One of the contexts is news - so for example for the word "window" it shows several news headlines containing the word "window".
So, about 10 years ago, I received a very rudely written email demanding that I remove a reference to a certain person from the text of a news story. The news story was about a misdemeanor that a certain person had committed.
Since the email was very rudely written and since I hadn't broken any law, I just ignored it and forgot about it. Over the course of about six months, this person bombarded me with dire threats and also wrote complaints to my hosting provider. The hosting company forwarded these letters to me and asked me to look into it, but did not demand anything because no law had been broken.
One day, after many e-mails with threats of legal action, and about 6 months, I received the first normal message, in which the person asked what he should do to make me delete the information he wanted.
Here I need to mention that for all this time this person has parroted me quite a lot with his threats and I had no desire to meet him halfway.
I wrote that I would delete the necessary information as soon as I received a request from him, written in the form of a short (!) verse.
Another month or so passed, during which this person argued and tried to change my mind (instead of sending a short verse)
…
As soon as he did, I connected to the database with a smile, deleted the entry he asked for and wrote him an email wishing him good luck. I hope he is doing well now :)
FWIW, I'd advise against template caching. It's awkward to cache bust, and a network round trip to your cache will almost certainly be more expensive than the Python operations to render the template, even with stock Django templating which is slow.
The only place it's possible worth it is if you do a lot of database queries from your template rendering, and you're therefore caching database results (as rendered text). In that case, it's an easy patch. However a much better solution is to fetch all database results up front.
In my previous company we had a very significant Django codebase with plenty of templating, and found that using the templating system for (lazy loaded) database queries or caching was more hassle than it was worth and avoided it as much as possible. Treating template rendering as a pure CPU bound function was always better.
My point was that you shouldn't be doing DB queries in the template. If you're doing the DB queries before templating then you should also be doing the cache queries before templating too.
I've noticed that my son spends way too much time on YouTube or playing Minecraft and one of the few offline activities he enjoys doing on his own is coloring. And since he comes to me every time he wants a new coloring book and we spend about 10 minutes together searching for each picture, I made a website with a collection of coloring books for him. The site is very simple, but to be honest, I haven't had so much fun with the process of creation for a long time.
At one pre-funding startup (in the days when 14400 was an excellent remote connection) we had a LAN set up in the basement of the founder with the largest house. Their daughter liked to "work" alongside us, so (partly to protect our unattended keyboards!) I bought a colouring-book program for her to use.
One evening, when her mother called down that it was her bedtime, she replied:
One of my 1000 unfinished projects was a e-reader app for android that generates coloring book pages, or illustrations for young kids who are in that weird age group where there are no more pictures in their books, but they still enjoy illustrations. I have a gifted niece who is way ahead for her age at reading but still enjoys pictures/coloring so I planned on making it for year. Don't know if I'll have the chance to finish, but I'm sure Kindle will integrate this into their new color kindles (and probably every other e-reader) at some point.
I also recommend printing out puzzles, mazes, riddles from https://krazydad.com/
You can download pdfs, staple them together and let your kids sink their time in.
Interesting, what AI are you using to generate these? Are these straight from the net or is there a post processing pipeline? If so, what are you doing?
Not the GP, but inspired by your question I tried asking ChatGPT to create similar coloring sheets. The results seem suitable for coloring. Here's one prompt: "A simplified line-drawing coloring sheet of a dog flying an airplane. The drawing is in clean black lines on a white background, with minimal details and clear, bold outlines."
Later: The prompt worked with Imagen 3 on Gemini Advanced, too:
damn I wish u did it 10 years ago! I really struggled with it, was so hard to find coloring images for my daughter. now shes 14 so I don't think she will care much :)
Is it possible to get all PDFs at once? Hopefully per section? That will really help to print all at once and get her a single book to go on for couple of weeks.
I thought I could do `curl | grep | xargs curl`, but the site returns 520.
My niece tends to finish a book start to end within a week or so, hence why I thought of asking. Another reason is I don't get to see her too often, and it is easier to hand over a book a visit, color a page together to get her started, and then she does the rest.
20 years ago I met a young woman in her mid 20's. She's setup coloring book pages with google ads by the thousands, in pretty much every language. Her income from that was around $8K a month, and this was late 90's?
Similar story, but for the mobile era: I knew an indie app developer who built a portfolio of early mobile apps. His top-earners were a coloring book app, bead animal patterns, and a no-essay college scholarship app. Those three allowed him to pay himself and a partner salary and drop contract/client work.
Amazing! My son also colored a lot but he'd pick only a few pages out of every coloring book so I got the idea to find some online; one-page things to print but the ones I found at the time claimed to be "coloring book pages" but were actually more black-lines-on-white-background actual artwork. Much too complex for simple coloring. Your site would have been the find of the decade!
The hands and feet on some of them are downright disturbing. I would not want my child coloring in AI generated slop, there's something fundamentally disconcerting about that.
Great news !
It would be interesting to see performance comparison for IO-bound tasks like http requests between single-threaded asyncio code and multi-threaded asyncio
I can't imagine how toxicity in a LLM can be harmful. Can't we write stories with toxic characters, for example?
It feels like the greatest minds of our era are creating an amazing piece of technology. And we are hindering it in the name of corporate cover ass and bullshit jobs.
if you read the large theory papers on human-computer LLM interfaces, the people who build these are genuinely worried about "harm" . Impolitely, it appears from the outside that the kind of researchers that they have attracted over a decade to do this fantastically tedious and abstract work, are covered in emotional illness symptoms personally, and developed a culture of incessantly declaring "harm" in every shadow of every corner; at the same time, corporate black-hearts have money on the mind, and are genuinely worried about "harm" in the form of consumer retaliation in the marketplace, massive legal liability for civil rights blunders, and losing the sweet spot to a competitor; then government at the executive level, at the Nation-State, are obsessing about obtaining and implementing AI for competitive advantage against just about every other group of people you can name -- as long as no one can prove that they implemented "harm" while getting unprecedented competitive advantages at scale over populations of unwitting civilians, their geopolitical rivals, and probably other political types of a different stripe.
That's another point, but I agree. The government's incentives are to become bigger and more powerful. LLM control could be a fast lane to become a totalitarian state. Governments around the world might not do that by choice, but the incentive is true and is present.
If you think that you want to live in a world where your life is heavily influenced by machines that were trained on the idea that you don’t deserve to exist, then yes, “toxicity” isn’t a problem.
But you don’t think that. Even if you think you do.
But instead, they are trained on what some corporation or government thinks is good for me. How's that any better? Do you trust them to be neutral and act in your best interest? Who defined toxicity?
A "neutral" policy here is probably a still unsolved philosophy problem.
You can't even define toxicity in an objective and verifiable way, because it's inherently subjective.
Trying to make rules for a machine to behave in a decidedly nontoxic way is a fool's errand, then.
You're also assuming that AI is going to be used to heavily influence people's lives, but there's a good chance that all it's good for is ripping off copyrighted material and generating clipart that's good enough for powerpoint presentations.
AI is probably going to change the world in the way that NFTs did. And self driving cars. And the Alexa.
This is the new “we could put a man on the moon, yet…”. No, “the greatest minds of our era” are not working in adtech or building LLMs. It’s easy to forget, but there is a whole world outside of computers, and being good at it does not equate to being “a great mind”. It is absurd to believe the greatest minds are all working around the same problem spaces.
It was trained on content from the internet. I'd be massively surprised if it somehow wasn't toxic. Humanity (or a small portion of it) is full of assholes. As much as that sucks, shouldn't the embeddings reflect the reality of the training content? If you want fluffy bunnies and flowers and happy people holding hands, shouldn't you just train it on that content?
I asked GPT-4 to rewrite the refrain from Eminem's "Forgot about Dre" but change it to "Forgot about Tay" and make it all about chatbots... this is the best one it came up with:
Nowadays, every bot wanna chat
Like they got something to say, but these LLMs
Are too toxic to use, just a waste of GPUs
And the programmers act like they forgot about Tay.
