> Much better! Some of these even made me laugh out loud. Kale and an enema? Parsley and condoms? Adult diapers and baby food?<p>> Small orders are less common but we still got some fun ones. Oreos and lube? Sounds like a good time!<p>Funny to <i>who</i>? 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?
here's how this likely went down:<p>1. they found the dataset and thought "i bet there are weird order combos i could write a blog post about"<p>2. they did all the analysis and found nothing all that interesting<p>3. posted it anyway
They 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.
The file drawer effect, except this one maybe should have stayed filed.
Similar reaction. After reading the previous piece, <a href="https://rogerdickey.com/in-defense-of-996/" rel="nofollow">https://rogerdickey.com/in-defense-of-996/</a>, I am left wondering if this is just a very clever bot.
> Why is it funny to buy Oreo and lube?<p>It implies SEX but without saying it out loud, haha, so funny, am I rite my fellow 16 year olds?<p>> Why would someone buying kale and an enema make someone else laugh out loud?<p>You don't get it, it's about the ASS. So funny!<p>Some people just remain adolescents.
Having to wear adult diapers after giving birth is not unexpected.
It'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".
> but it's funny because by putting them next together, one imagines taking out an Oreo, lubing it up, and then... something?<p>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.
Why 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.<p>Feels like a typical misunderstanding that a neurotypical would make.
Because 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.
Sex is about as normal and pervasive in American culture as it is anywhere. Have you never watched HBO?
Yes! This is how you do humor. Demand precision. Dissect all the things!
Nah, 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.
The 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.
> but the adult diapers and baby food is probably some terminally online poor souls who “roleplay”.<p>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 :)
Baby food is often just puréed fruits and vegetables. Adult diapers are only funny if you've never considered that being able-bodied is temporary.<p>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.
Baby 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.
> The parsley and condoms I don’t get<p>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.<p>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.<p>The human brain also tends to make up "causal" connections between any two items, when the real reason is often much more mundane.
Parsley 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...
yeah the idea of "funny" seemed pretty puerile to me
I mean, I laughed. Soo...
i enjoyed the author sense of play and enthusiasm.<p>with play they surely gained much domain understanding and source of new ideas.<p>bad for company and society to enforce the oppressive conformity.
Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post:<p>Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart.<p>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.<p>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.
Very interesting!<p>> Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason.<p>The bananas were cut up or pureed and fed to a child at a particular stage of development. Kid is now eating on their own, doesn’t want bananas or doesn’t have the dexterity to peel them. Parents reintroduce bananas a few months later, kid likes them again.<p>Or someone got a new job and they’re not eating breakfast at home. A few months later, they go back to eating at home to save money or lose weight.<p>> Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.<p>Bananas are often the only fresh fruit at convenience stores. Sometimes there are apples or oranges that look extremely underripe or dried out and starchy. Bananas also don’t need to be washed and don’t excrete juice, so you can eat them on the go. There’s nowhere to wash an apple in most convenience stores, and oranges are more likely to get juice on your clothes or car seats, have a harder peel to remove and neatly dispose of, and may have seeds.
Berries 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.
The pricing of berries are certainly seasonal. Bananas are cheap year-round.
Available year round and seasonal isn't an oxymoron. Something can be both. Just look at potatoes, we learned a long time ago how to store them. Doesn't mean there isn't a time in the fall with they're the freshest and cheapest.
> Do people's purchase habits follow the natural seasonality of the product anymore?<p>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.
Depends where you are.
I am in Southern England.<p>Strawberries are available year round - we get them from Morocco and Spain outside the summer. They do taste differently and during the off season are less reliably red all over.<p>Thus I will buy them only in the Summer.<p>Prices also change over the year.
They are highly seasonal. We have not "thoroughly engineered the seasonality out of them".
We absolutely buy berries (and tomatoes) when in season. The flavor is much better!
When I worked on recommendation systems 15 years ago, I learned about the "banana problem", where bananas are so commonly purchased, they tend to be the top recommendation regardless of other foods in your cart. The solution, of course, was to bias for less commonly purchased items, but it was my first run-in with the weird statistics around banana purchasing patterns.
The initial grouping of 'pack of organic bananas' with individual bananas feels like a wrong number in the pack problem; eg we typically want one a day so want to buy 7 in a weekly shop but the pack size is 5.
I wonder if there is a statistically significant group of people with a mild potassium deficiency, who crave bananas due to it, but then go off them again when their potassium stores are replenished.
I imagine people either buy single bananas as a quick snack or bananas in bulk for breakfast. (Ignoring the "funny" uses here). I wonder if this kind of irregular pattern is a reflection on people's breakfast habits.
much more interesting than the actual article
"Banana" and "Extra Fancy Unsalted Mixed Nuts" only occurred once? They go together.
My conclusion: there's nothing funny about groceries, no matter how you order them. Counterexamples welcome.<p>(Makes sense as I never felt the urge to laugh after looking in someone else's shopping basket.<p>Anyway, perhaps that's why I'm not a data analyst.)
> Counterexamples welcome.<p>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<p>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.
A 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.
Counterexample: <a href="https://xkcd.com/236/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/236/</a>
Some combinations could be funny, like a pregnancy test and something really mundane but odd like a whole pineapple and a large bag of lettuce
Which one of these was supposed to be funny?
Using 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.
Are there any "funny" combinations in that list that don't involve toilet humor?
I like to think I have a sense of humor, but if this is funny, maybe I don't.
Here 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!<p>Edit: obligatory single down vote on author post to author content.
I 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.
This 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.
Analyzing substitutes and complements was a mainstay of data scientists 10-20 years ago. Too mundane to mention now.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_rule_learning" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_rule_learning</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_analysis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_analysis</a>
search for peas and honey!
Reminds me of that time Netflix made fun of its customers that watched bad Christmas movies over and over. It's in poor taste.
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