> The waiter brings over the bill, in a black rectangular wallet, and walks away.

This is when you pay, just have your card or whatever ready to go. Skip the extra limbo state and leave when you're ready.

I like this solution the best because it is the least intrusive. Before the waiter brings the bill, put your phone on the table so it's ready when they arrive with the bill. No need for the waitstaff to waste cycles or get distracted by having to look for a green card.

In the US you constantly have to beg the waitstaff to stick around. They show up and ask if you want water. If you don’t deliberately say “we are also ready to order drinks” they will then disappear. When they take the drink order, you have to deliberately say “we’ll order food now.” If you order appetizers, they will disappear unless you immediately continue with your main course order. Then of course there’s the whole multiple trip song and dance when you pay. Are waiters paid by the step rather than by the hour?

Speaking as a former wait person…

It is more efficient this way. Often times the wait person may have multiple tables sat at the same time. This way they can greet each table shortly after sitting (you don’t want to know how people react if they wait “too long” for that first greeting). Then take drink orders for all tables, get those delivered, take apps, get those fired. While those are cooking, get the mains ordered, and so on.

Yes, some people want to order all at once. However, that’s not most guests. Most folks want to sit at the table and relax for 1.5 - 2 hours and hate feeling rushed.

I don’t think most people realize how hard a job it is to wait tables. I think everyone would be well served by working as a wait person in their early work years.

Or retail, in some fashion, to see how it is from that side of the store.

A good waiter will ask you if you're ready to order at each stage.

This is exactly what I do. I highly recommend the practice.

Put on a five-minute song and start hyperventilating. You can tell pretty quick.

I love this kind of thing. Something about the font hurts my eyes though, I think there's just slightly too few pixels in it.

This has been my experience as well. I find that the copy/paste workflow with a browser LLM still gets me the most bang for the buck in both those cases. The cli agents seem to be a bit manic when they get hold of the codebase and I have a harder time corralling them into not making large architectural changes without talking through them first.

For the moment, after a few sessions of giving it a chance, I find myself using "claude commit" but not asking it to do much else outside the browser. I still find o1-pro to be the most powerful development partner. It is slow though.

I dunno, can you fill your tank up with bitcoin when you need to get to work?

Do EMPs destroy the ability to use and exchange oil?

This is beside the point but they actually might. Take out the electric grid, and most other stuff stops working, including gas pumps and refineries.

Karma is a number that can go up. Numbers going up is a supernormal stimulus for humans.

They should get rid of the number and change it to be only "low" or "high".

Get rid of karma + get rid of ranking comments at all. Just render them in a tree-format with oldest/newest first, everyone has equal footing :)

True but at least for Hacker News you have to at least click through to the member profile to see how many banana stickers and external validation they've accrued.

This whole thing has felt like the other person in an unhealthy relationship ending things. Maybe a little painful at first, but very obviously, and immediately so, for the best.

On balance this is a very classist reaction. Restaurant staff in general is not going to stick their neck out to assault customers.

It's not a general problem... if 99/100 won't spit in your coffee, that's still gonna cause anxiety.

Not all restaurant workers are rational agents.

The better societal rule is to disallow tipped employees from receiving less than minimum wage. A better step yet is barring restaurant staff from receiving tips altogether. The marginal benefit from letting them accept the generosity of customers is far overcome by abusive employers leaning on the guilt of customers to pay their employees something to live on.

> The better societal rule is to disallow tipped employees from receiving less than minimum wage

This is already the case in California where minimum wage is $15.50 and many localities are higher. There is no exemption for tipped employees, regardless of how much in tips they may receive.

> The better societal rule is to disallow tipped employees from receiving less than minimum wage.

That's already the case. Tipped employees have to be paid the normal hourly minimize wage if their reduced wage plus tips doesn't equal out to minimum. This has been the law for decades.

That's not the same at all, though. All that means is that the employer gets to legally steal tips and convert them into wages.

It is literally exactly what it means. Tipped employees can not legally be paid less than the standard minimum wage.

I believe they meant "minimum wage always, then with any tips they get added to it", not "minimum wage if tips aren't enough to get them there"

But they can be paid that minimum wage in part through the employer stealing the employee's tips. So, not really paying them the minimum wage.

It's not though - the restaurant pays the employee as low as $2.83 per hour. Restaurants should have to pay their employees the same minimum wage as everyone else, and anything the customers decide to give the wait staff should be extra (if tipping really should be legal at all)

A number of years now.