- > 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?
- here'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
- 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.
- That's the smoking gun.
- Funnier than the article.
- The file drawer effect, except this one maybe should have stayed filed.
- scanned through pretty much the entire post. Still waiting for the funny part.
- Have 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.
- Having to wear adult diapers after giving birth is not unexpected.
- Nor funny.
- Reminds 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.
- [dead]
- Similar reaction. After reading the previous piece, https://rogerdickey.com/in-defense-of-996/, I am left wondering if this is just a very clever bot.
- 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.
- 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?
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.
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.
- It’s not that deep. The model was prompted to mine for humor in a mundane dataset and it dutifully did its best to find something chuckleworthy. It got OP to laugh out loud for some reason and take the time to post this. Presumably there weren’t system prompts to criticize and refuse to engage with juvenile attempts at banal humor. And why should there be?
After all it’s training data would include a vast corpus of body-function humor, fart jokes, and very old supermarket shopping list jokes that are being tested here.
- Sex is about as normal and pervasive in American culture as it is anywhere. Have you never watched HBO?
- > 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.
- 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”.
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.
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.
- > 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.
- 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...
- Hey, 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.
- 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.
- yeah the idea of "funny" seemed pretty puerile to me
- I mean, I laughed. Soo...
- i 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.
- Time 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.
- 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.
- > 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.
- Depends where you are. I am in Southern England.
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.
Thus I will buy them only in the Summer.
Prices also change over the year.
- I don't get snobby about food very often, but I have to say that these days strawberries and tomatoes are things I never buy any more.
They're so large, watery, and tasteless, that I grow them myself or go without.
A lot of foods are no longer seasonal, as noted above, but I can't say I can taste the difference. Except for tomatoes and strawberries where I think I can - who knows, maybe I'm imagining it?
- I had an interesting conversation with my mom recently when she said don't buy apples. It isn't in season right now. And I didn't know what to say because I didn't even know apples had a season. I just bought the bag of gala apples without much thought to it.
- Apples are kept in cold storage to extend “the season” across the year. No guarantee you’ll get fresh apples in a supermarket even if you see workers harvesting them as you drive to the store.
- 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.
- 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!
- Very interesting!
> Someone who buys bananas reliably every week for months will randomly stop for months, and then start again, for no perceivable rhyme or reason.
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.
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.
> Bananas also tend to be a high volume item at gas stations and convenience stores.
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.
- 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.
- > eg we typically want one a day so want to buy 7 in a weekly shop but the pack size is 5.
Can't you just grab a bigger cluster/bunch and remove N bananas so it has the amount you want? Or remove 3 from the bunch that has five so two 5+2 clusters? Feels like I'm missing something obvious here.
- Yes, because Instacart is ordering for delivery :)
- Oh yeah, of course, guess I kind of forgot the overall context, and I was thinking in-person shopping... Thanks! :)
- Yes, once I can put in the delivery details something like '7 medium size bananas, with no bruising, varying in ripeness from almost ready to still slightly green' and let a robot at the other end sort it out I'll be happy.
- 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.
- No.
- 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.
- This comment is WAY more interesting than the article it is a comment on.
- It is the only fruit that requires no washing before consuming. And also, it makes my tummy hard.
- 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
- > 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?
- Different experience at small town independent grocers that greet their regular customers by name and are summoned with a bell.
- My 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.)
- > 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.
- 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.
- Garlic and wooden gardening stakes.
Tampons and a self-help relationship type magazine, maybe?
Masks and toilet paper, so retro.
Wine, a spirit, and Wine and Spirits magazine.
- 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
- Pregnancy test and a blue marker.
- Baby Food, Adult Diapers
- Counterexample: https://xkcd.com/236/
- Which one of these was supposed to be funny?
- All 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.)
- > 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.
- "Banana" and "Extra Fancy Unsalted Mixed Nuts" only occurred once? They go together.
- 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!
Edit: obligatory single down vote on author post to author content.
- What a lame article. Even I can do better: one cucumber, vaseline, and a box of ultra-thin condoms.
- 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.
- Once 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Where is the comedy?
- I like to think I have a sense of humor, but if this is funny, maybe I don't.
- You have nothing to worry about.
- Analyzing substitutes and complements was a mainstay of data scientists 10-20 years ago. Too mundane to mention now.
- 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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