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Funny item co-occurrences in 3.2M Instacart orders
- NDlurker 2mo agoWhere is the comedy?
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food? > Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time! Funny to who? Was this rated "for sure funny" by a LLM or what's going on? Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? I could understand "contradictions" or something like that (like buying weight loss pills + loads of candy/sodas) could be fun I guess, but just cookies and rubber? Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?
- zem 2mo agoyeah the idea of "funny" seemed pretty puerile to me
- archerx 2mo agoThe kale and enema one makes sense, they get so much fiber they get blocked up and need an enema. The parsley and condoms I don’t get but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”. Oreo’s and lube I don’t get, it could be the absurdity that has the writer thinking it’s funny.
- jll29 2mo ago> The parsley and condoms I don’t get Note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness involved in this association game. For instance, if a household regularly is in need of both parsley and also condoms, the fact that they are purchased together may be a result of the pure coincidence that both were empty/used up at the same time (which is also a function of the package sizes of both items). We would be much less surprised at the mined associations if we took a longitudinal, per-household look. Furthermore, a shopping basked is per-household, but not per-person: the parsley and the condom may be used by different members of the household, or be shared, or be part of a gift to someone outside. The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.
- onion2k 2mo agoParsley is used by people who don't cook often as a garnish to make a meal look more fancy. The sort of thing you might do if you have a date coming over and want to impress...
- malfist 2mo agoHey, parsley has it's place. Especially in a butter or chimicuri sauce. I believe the listing was for flat parsley which is not the fancy garnish one.
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- thomascountz 2mo agoBaby food is often just puréed fruits and vegetables. Adult diapers are only funny if you've never considered that being able-bodied is temporary. It is more likely that the person purchasing adult diapers and baby food is the caregiver of an adult. Perhaps of themselves, or an aging parent, or their spouse who is recovering from surgery.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”. My mind went to "A fairly typical household where grandpa/grandma lives in the house and you also have at least one baby, or someone (maybe same grandpa/grandma) have troubles digesting food". Funny how different our casual links can be formed in our head :)
- nkrisc 2mo agoBaby food and adult diapers sounds more like someone suffering from some kind of gastrointestinal illness, not something funny. Or perhaps more likely, a woman with a young baby who is still suffering from pelvic issues related to pregnancy and childbirth.
- LilBytes 2mo agoI mean, I laughed. Soo...
- Hnrobert42 2mo agoYes! This is how you do humor. Demand precision. Dissect all the things!
- embedding-shape 2mo agoNah, but sometimes a bit of thinking, reasoning and editing can make things funny, doesn't mean you need to create a thesis about it. But in my mind, just stating "Someone bought Oreos and lube in a store" isn't exactly the epitome of humor, maybe I'm just getting old.
- srean 2mo agoIt has less to do with age and more to do with mental state. If you are happy, in the flushes of love, feeling safe, many things, even ordinary things will feel amusing, funny, worthy of a belly laugh. On the other hand if you are stressed, under pressure, depressed or angry, then not so much. Often times I am very easily amused by the most prosaic things and I am not even stoned in anything of external chemical source. It feels good to be that way. For example, I react very differently to Thurber based on my emotional state. Identical external stimulus, very different reaction.
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- fragmede 2mo agoIt's "funny" because sex is taboo in puritanical cultures like the US. Obviously you're not going to use the lube on the Oreo's, but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something? It's unexpected and the mind laughs, even though theres a perfectly normal explanation that doesn't involve those two things being together. Same for adult diapers and baby food. They have an elderly parent and a baby in the house, but the terminally online brain jumps to "it's a weird sex thing".
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something? This sounds like what someone/something that never actually been in a supermarket would think and imagine. You go to the store, buy a bunch of stuff, why would all the things be related? Feels like a typical mistake a LLM would make.
- fragmede 2mo agoWhy would an LLM make that mistake? It depends on why you went shopping. If you are blessed with a surplus of executive function, you can make a list and then get everything on that list when you go shopping. If you are not so privileged, you find yourself having to go to the store in pursuit of a specific mission. Get all the thinks to bake a cake for the birthday party that's to tonight, and don't get laundry detergent while you're there, even though you're running out. Feels like a typical misunderstanding that a neurotypical would make.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoBecause after a couple of visits in the store, you realize that all the items you buy aren't necessarily related to each other, either by observing your own behavior or others. Not sure having a list or not is important, jumping to conclusions based on "oh, they bought oreo AND lube, they must be related" is exactly what you see LLMs do, and why you generally don't want to tell them unrelated stuff, because of how they work they end up being part of the context and kind of "pollute" the rest.
- mritchie712 2mo agohere's how this likely went down: 1. they found the dataset and thought "i bet there are weird order combos i could write a blog post about" 2. they did all the analysis and found nothing all that interesting 3. posted it anyway
- stephantul 2mo agoThe file drawer effect, except this one maybe should have stayed filed.
- andy99 2mo agoThey did it interactively with Claude, it’s possible that it played up the significance and humor of the findings in a way that the interaction left the user feeling like they were really on to something.
- apathydinosaur 2mo agoThat's the smoking gun.
- duzer65657 2mo agoscanned through pretty much the entire post. Still waiting for the funny part.
- lukewarm707 2mo agoi enjoyed the author sense of play and enthusiasm. with play they surely gained much domain understanding and source of new ideas. bad for company and society to enforce the oppressive conformity.
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- speedgoose 2mo agoHaving to wear adult diapers after giving birth is not unexpected.
- fecal_henge 2mo agoNor funny.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- randycupertino 2mo agoReminds me of when I would get clowned for getting Diet Coke at McDonalds or Taco Bell. "You're eating fast food, why even bother with a DIET coke, har har har..." I just like the taste better. :-/ but so many people have thought that was soooo funny.
- andy99 2mo agoAlso, eating say a Big Mac and fries isn’t that unhealthy when done occasionally, there’s a lot of salt and fat but nothing horrendous. Compared to the load on your liver and pancreas etc of consuming literally about 1/2 pound of fructose that’s in a big soda. The soft drinks are by far the least healthy part.
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- tclancy 2mo agoSimilar reaction. After reading the previous piece, https://rogerdickey.com/in-defense-of-996/ https://rogerdickey.com/in-defense-of-996/, I am left wondering if this is just a very clever bot.
- neonstatic 2mo ago> Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube? It implies SEX but without saying it out loud, haha, so funny, am I rite my fellow 16 year olds? > Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud? You don't get it, it's about the ASS. So funny! Some people just remain adolescents.
- jayd16 2mo agoHave you ever played Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples? Its not so much that the juxtaposition on its own is hilarious. You have to build a scenario. It's fun to imagine funny scenarios. Is the cart for a person who wants to treat themselves and these are their priorities? Is it a very specific mating ritual? It's a writing prompt for your imagination. In reality almost all of these are surely very mundane repurchases but that's not the point.
- disillusioned 2mo agoTime for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post: Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart. Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to make a highly educated guess about their purchasing activity and, thus, to project volumes for products. But bananas defy that wisdom, except that people in aggregate buy a lot of them. Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason. Bananas aren't seasonal purchases like berries or corn or other fruits or vegetables. Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores. Bananas have to be effectively "tricked" into continuing to ripen after being prematurely picked green and then refrigerated for transit. So there are banana ripening centers that pump ethylene through a chilled chamber to get them to ripen.
- anonu 2mo agoBerries are most certainly not seasonal anymore. They should be but we thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them. They're always on the shelf. Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore? Probably something that can be found in this dataset as well.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore? Depends on the store I'd wager. We have a store here (Ametller Origen) that sell things they cultivate/make themselves "nearby" (in the same region, and among other things they sell too) and sell in their own retail stores, I'm guessing most of their customers do indeed follow the habits of seasonality as lots of stuff isn't available outside of the seasons.
- jkahrs595 2mo agoThe pricing of berries are certainly seasonal. Bananas are cheap year-round.
- brendanfinan 2mo agoWhich one of these was supposed to be funny?
- callmeal 2mo agoAll of them. Don't you know you're supposed to make fun of people that a "different" from you? Get with the program already. (/s if it wasn't already clear.)
- darwinwhy 2mo agoUsing LLM embedding cosine similarity to classify products into larger categories (bricks) wasn’t something I would’ve thought of. Last I heard of word vectors was back when word2vec came out, I guess in the back of my mind I knew LLMs have something similar and it makes sense that open weight models reveal that information easily.
- thrance 2mo agoReminds me of that time Netflix made fun of its customers that watched bad Christmas movies over and over. It's in poor taste.
- amelius 2mo agoMy conclusion: there's nothing funny about groceries, no matter how you order them. Counterexamples welcome. (Makes sense as I never felt the urge to laugh after looking in someone else's shopping basket. Anyway, perhaps that's why I'm not a data analyst.)
- lionkor 2mo agoSome combinations could be funny, like a pregnancy test and something really mundane but odd like a whole pineapple and a large bag of lettuce
- zem 2mo ago> Counterexamples welcome. I mentioned "peas and honey" in another comment. zucchini and lube if you wanted to go for "haha weird sex practices", though just having condoms/lube in there doesn't make things intrinsically funny the way the OP seems to imagine. baby food and wine/headache pills/earplugs, for more sitcom-level humour ("haha, yeah, having a newborn is hard, we've all been there!"). knife and large garbage bags for a darker turn the basic idea is "these two specific items suggest a funny image of them being used together, with the added context that it was likely just a random coincidence". it's not laugh-out-loud humour, but it can be amusing.
- manwe150 2mo agoA few I’ve seen in person are someone buying about a dozen pallets of water and a half dozen of a vegetable (it was cabbage or leek if I recall). But that was more about the absurd looking quantity while only wanting just those two items. I assume most of the “funny orders” I see are restaurant owners who already got most of their items delivered, which makes them a large deviation from the expected family purchaser. This is something I have only seen at specific stores (similar to costco) in specific cities.
- tangsoupgallery 2mo ago[flagged]
- akoboldfrying 2mo agoThis idea sounded like it had lots of humour potential. Unfortunately, if there is in fact humour to be found in this dataset, it appears to be beyond the reach of current data science techniques.
- zem 2mo agosearch for peas and honey!
- card_zero 2mo agoI wish they didn't know this. I wish all the stores could agree to mind their own business and sell their products ingenuously, in blissful unawareness of what any customer buys alongside what other thing, instead of following us around taking notes.
- xg15 2mo agoAre there any "funny" combinations in that list that don't involve toilet humor?
- jyounker 2mo agoAre there things in that list that involve toilet humor and are funny?
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- fecal_henge 2mo agoHere is a likely scenario for the baby food/ adult diapers combo: Someone who suffered so much damage during childbirth that they are still struggling with their bowels by the time their baby is on solids. Hilarious! Edit: obligatory single down vote on author post to author content.
- esafak 2mo agoAnalyzing substitutes and complements was a mainstay of data scientists 10-20 years ago. Too mundane to mention now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_rule_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_rule_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_analysis
- pluralmonad 2mo agoI like to think I have a sense of humor, but if this is funny, maybe I don't.
- jyounker 2mo agoYou have nothing to worry about.
- armchairhacker 2mo ago"Banana" and "Extra Fancy Unsalted Mixed Nuts" only occurred once? They go together.
- jaredandrews 2mo ago> The other day I was idly wondering what are the strangest combinations of items people buy at grocery stores. The kind of shopping cart that makes the cashier snicker and later tell his friends, "Dude, can you believe this guy came in and only bought condoms and apples?" When you are a cashier, customers make comments like this all the time, preemptively defending themselves to you for their "eccentric" purchases. Truthfully, as a cashier you are on auto pilot and scanning things as quickly as possible and trying to not make mistakes. We are a store that sells these items and I do not find it surprising or strange that you are buying any of them. The fact that you can buy condoms and apples here is what makes this market "super". It's my job, I'm here to sell it to you. Paper or plastic?
- wildfireday2 2mo agoDifferent experience at small town independent grocers that greet their regular customers by name and are summoned with a bell.
- furyofantares 2mo agoOnce you get to the LLM judging them, you've given up, and might as well just prompt the LLM to make up funny item co-occurrences. Nothing wrong with giving up though, it's a hard problem for all the same reasons recommendation engines are.
- jorams 2mo ago> So what happens if we look only at small carts, where the entire order is just 2 or 3 items? How is this the last thing in the article? The sole example given of a "funny" combination (apples and condoms, weirdly bad example) is only remotely funny because those are the only items.
- jyounker 2mo agoWhat a lame article. Even I can do better: one cucumber, vaseline, and a box of ultra-thin condoms.
- kaikai 2mo agoThe AI still can’t understand that Armenian cucumbers should have a MUCH higher potential humor value than milk.