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Next also include sales tax in label prices.

We're going in the other direction. In Seattle it's common for restaurants to tack on an extra "service charge" that's not a tip, just because. It's supposed to be declared somewhere.

With tip your bill can easily end up 40% higher.


If I see "service charge" I'm going to assume that it covers the tip. I'm not going to tip on top of that.

This is what I do as well. Then I don't return to that restaurant on the basis of shenanigans.

Simply ask for it to be removed.

Then, if you wish, tip the staff whatever amount you prefer. (Though at this point, any restaurant that tries sneakily adding an additional charge to my bill probably isn't getting anything).


> Simply ask for it to be removed.

No, that's too unpleasant and would put a dour note on the evening. Particularly if I'm there with a date. I'm OK with simply not returning.


I suggest a date is likely to be more impressed with you taking a fair and decent no-nonsense attitude!

Granted, we all vary in our outlook :-)


Or a date would look at it as me being so cheap (or secretly broke) that I'm willing to make a production over something that isn't really that big of a deal, financially speaking.

But, date or not, it's not something I'm OK with doing. It's just not worth it when I can resolve the issue completely with much less bother.


It's pretty common where I live in Asia, and they almost always write it on their menu, too. I don't really see it as shenanigans as long as it's communicated in advance. We don't have a tipping culture, though.

They disclose it in the US as well. It's shenanigans to me because it's sneaky. Rather than being honest an increasing the price of the food, they're using a "service fee" separately to try to trick you into thinking the restaurant is less expensive than it is. I genuinely find it offensive, for pretty much the same reason that I find tipping culture offensive.

Yea, taken to the extreme, I don't think anyone would think it's fair:

Restaurant A's pasta is $14.95, printed clearly on the menu.

Restaurant B's pasta is $13, with a 15% service fee written in tiny letters on the menu somewhere.

Restaurant C's pasta is $2.99, with a 500% service fee written in tiny letters on the menu somewhere.

You're paying the same thing at each restaurant. If you think C is sneaky and unethical (which I hope everyone would), then why is B ok?


Anything where the sticker price is not the full price you pay is "shenanigans" as far as I'm concerned.

That’s also very common in the UK, and shows up elsewhere in Europe sometimes. In the UK, they are legally but not practically or socially discretionary. There are some tax advantages for the restaurant and in the ideal case for staff.

> That’s also very common in the UK

Touristy places in central London maybe. They wouldn't dare try sneaking an undeclared service charge onto a locals bill in Northern England or Scotland :-)

> In the UK, they are legally but not practically or socially discretionary.

Speak for yourself. When entertaining clients at touristy places in London, one routinely asks for this underhand charge to be removed from the bill. (Whether or not we then choose to leave a cash tip is a matter of discretion, but the chances are rather low after such shenanigans).


IME they mostly only appear for large tables in the UK.

Then is should be declared in advance on the menu.

Adding an undeclared "service charge" to the bill only when it is presented to you is what we are talking about here. It is an increasingly common underhand tactic in and around London and an charge which one should ALWAYS ask to be removed ("that wasn't on the menu mate").


welcome to europe, where tips are optional and sales tax is denoted

Somehow the "tip culture" is spreading over here too, especially in touristy areas, even the POS terminals now ask you for a tip.

I often tip generously, but never when they start out expecting one. If the terminal asks for a tip, I don't tip.

It's widespread here in Ireland. POS terminals have 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% tip options with a tiny and hard to reach dismiss button.

I doubt whoever thinks installing this US software on UK/Irish POS terminals has done their homework. Its simply one way to piss off the customers and embarrass the staff.

Dismiss button? From what I've seen, it's a "Custom" button, where you then have to explicitly type in 0.

Just walk away and dispute the charge if it ends up being higher than the menu price.

It is because you are leaving money on the table if you don't ask for more money. The hyper maximizing money is what needs to stop.

The only way its going to stop is if there are consequences for asking too much.

Interesting. What POS terminals are common there? I am curious about culture spreading through technology defaults and wonder if it's effectively driven by whatever Square chose and whomever else decided to ape the incumbent or whatever.

You them everywhere. Most insane are the bars where you have to walk up from your seating to the bar to order, the bartender plops the drinks on the bar and immediately moves on to another customer, and the terminal still displays default tip amounts and you have to do custom → €0. What the hell am I tipping you for?

At this point I'm waiting for supermarket self-checkout to add a default tip amount.


I've seen this (UK), albeit "round up to £x.00 and donate the change to charity", which <supermarket> will use to announce "We've donated £X million to charity".

Ah, the charity donations.

Esso petrol stations routinely ask for this, and the staff member ALWAYS clicks the 'no' button before you can offer your card.

Source: Somebody who drives around the UK a lot for work.


B&Q are on the naughty list too (and the cashier also frequently clicks the 'no' button).

Interestingly I haven't seen the charity thing seen here in Germany for a while. I guess its because they all are asking if you have a customer loyalty card now (sometimes for both the chain-specific one and wider programs) and there is only so much they can ask for before the cost from lower throughput becomes significant.

Self service checkout in some airport shops do have tip option already, unfortunately

Hahaha, I was surprised by one of those in Newark/EWR. I can't believe it's real haha. Who gets the tip? I just tipped the self-service worker in cash ;)

There's a bunch of them, but the tip offers are usually on the newer touchscreen (probably android based) ones.

The old ones (never seen the tip option on those... for now): https://www.simple-shop.si/en/pos-terminal-tcpip-en and eg https://www.unicreditbank.si/si/podjetja/upravljanje-z-denar...

The new ones: https://www.sumup.com/sl-si/karticni-citalec-terminal/ and https://besteron.com/si/pos-terminali/ (both support tips) + many other in similar designs (full front touchscreen)

I don't think square supports slovenia for now, but POS vedors add the tip option, and our restaurant owners enable it, because it doesn't cost them anything, any many (especially foreign) guests "feel bad" for choosing the zero on the screen.


Thank you.

It's configurable on any terminal that supports it — obviously the terminal is designed so it can be used in a restaurant, or for paying in a shop, or paying a fee to the government. (To give an example of where even Americans don't tip.)

I'm not American, but from what I've heard about the wait times at the DMV, I'm sure many would love the option to tip 20% for faster service.

Then they would be shortsighted because before no time you would need to tip 20% minimum to get even the quality of service you get now.

It would be pretty neat to actually have the thing funded through a revenue neutral ticketing scheme. i.e. you just auction off tickets for 4 week blocks. That will allow people who are time-sensitive to appropriately select, and if you make more than you need you can just rebate participants proportional to their spend. Might be a pretty good way to allocate the scarce resource.

The cynic in me would say that's just allowing market forces to set the price by supply/demand.

But obviously, a government service should give fair and proper service to everyone.


Because from the restaurant's POV it seems like free money. If no one tips, they perceive no harm. If someone tips, then free money.

It's also more money to the company providing the payment system so they are incentivized to tell every restaurant to turn on tips.

I hate it. I don't know how to fight it except to try to start a movement big enough that everyone who goes to such a restaurant gives it 1 star and not not return, until it becomes unacceptable for business to do it. Like many things that is unlikely to happen without some major awareness campaign.


Tips are optional everywhere, but the reactions to not receiving one will be different.

Unless it's a bottle deposit tax, then it gets added outside the advertised price ;) 2 Euro bottle of Coke, great, I have 2 euro left, pay 2 euro 20 please... Fawwwwwkkkkkkkkk

It's not a tax, it's a 'loan'. You'll get the money back if you return the bottle later.

It still should be on the sticker price if the rules were consistent.

Depends on country. In Finland that is also part of the price. Separate line on the receipt, but included in any advertised price.

yeah, this one also gets to my bones. and then you cant return every deposit-taxed bottle everywhere - but only in stores where it's sold. then some friends leave bottles at your place which you cannot return anywhere near... what a mess

This is obviously regional too; here in finland all stores that sell "drinks" have a machine for accepting returns.

It doesn't matter what kind of bottle it is, or which company made it, all returns are accepted at every point.

Children, unemployed, and elderly people are often seen hunting for stray cans/bottles, by bins, in parks, and similar places, to return them for the cash.


Green washing variant of that: deposit for reusable plastic cups. You can reclaim it but they're banking on you not bothering.

Edinburgh Fringe special variant: charging extra for plastic cups and then not accepting returns.


how does that work with things like tax free weekends?

Put a sign "10% off today" and then charge less than what it says on the menu. No one is going to complain about being charged less.

I agree, it is easy to miss just because we get used to things quickly. I remember this thought hitting me vividly when I saw this picture during COVID https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/MUBajBy-350E5JAjtntEhAYz...

Funny there the date is April 1985, a lot earlier and almost my birthday!


I think a lot of LLM progress in the last 2 years or so is really from densifying the training data to niches like this and not so much from general problem solving capability. I guess the hope is that the deluge of super specific training data will pay off through better overall competence. cf https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-sample-efficiency-black-hole


This is a pretty stunning result. The time series looks really convincing. Is the way the detector itself is trained orthogonal to this or could there be some "leakage" in that the pre-chatgpt text is in the (positive) training data?


I tried my best to avoid leakage. If you're curious about how I trained the detector I have a writeup on it: https://unslop.run/blog/how-our-ai-text-detector-works

FYI this is all relatively new so there might be lots of issues and iterations coming.


My honest first impressions, since I think the project is well intended: This writeup is itself AI, and I would venture to call it slop. The Calibration section is borderline uninterpretable, and I challenge any non-author who claims to understand it to answer some basic peer review questions about it.


I have to concur, unfortunately. This isn't reliable, reproducible, or interpretable.


For Switzerland, that's only true for the special tourist train panoramic carriages on the route, there are normal trains running on the same routes, too, that don't require reservations.


Or solar geoengineering? Which is scary but becoming more likely it seems.


I think this is a complete misunderstanding of what people mean by taste in software engineering. Taste is more like the System 1 response one builds to code over time, which (ideally) captures the quality of the software beyond surface level, so things like maintainability, composability, readability, likelihood of hidden bugs. This is completely different from the question if the code fulfills the immediate task at hand, but also not the same as pure aesthetics.


Was just going to ask if anyone remembered the name of this one. It was amazing! 15 year old me felt very important/futuristic syncing the news before school in the morning and reading during school break!

Edit: after looking it up with plucker as a starting point I think the one I actually used was AvantGo, same idea though I think.


I worked on a real estate app. We added mobile support by generating a static website from the database, including listing previews and stuff. Realtors were amazed that they could have the entire database that looked like a full website. That was fully offline. Plucker made it possible


Maybe its more like the hash was a well known secure hash but someone managed to extract the salt/private key/signing certificate from the camera?


Most likely is either extracting the private key from the camera or getting the camera to sign arbitrary data. If the signing isn't part of the sensor die itself there's a bus where the image data gets transferred from sensor to signer, so an attacker can inject arbitrary data onto that bus to get it signed, even though they never actually extract the signing key.


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