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I wonder if this is like dishwasher usage. As a kid growing up we never used the dishwasher. It was just the drying rack. The reason was you had to rinse off the big stuff anyways, and then the resulting quality of dishwashing was poor in it. You'd often get a fork with rice stuck between it still, which was unacceptable.

As a grown up now I use a dishwasher for everything that is permitted to go in it. I still have to rinse off plates first, and occasionally I do see rice between a fork that I have to then clean manually. But I'm not comfortable knowing that it won't clean as well as I could by hand, but it does a good enough job -- and in some ways a much better job (it uses much hotter water than I do by hand). I don't know if my mom could ever really be comfortable with it though.



This is a funny example since, for a long time anyway, dishwashers have been much better at actually sanitizing dishes due to the much higher temperatures that can be used vs hand washing. I don't feel like hand washed dishes are truly clean. Oh you rubbed it with a nasty dish rag and water cool enough to touch? greeeeaaaaat


You don’t need to pre-wash dishes before they go in the sink, beyond a basic scrapping of the plate into the garbage.

Pre-washing dishes degrades the performance of the dishwasher. This is due to the use of enzymes in modern detergent formulations.

I’ve sent dozens of people the Technology Connections video on this topic to rave reviews: https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0


Imagine if the advice for Dishwasher usage mirrored the advice for AI

"You have to iterate on the output to get good results"

Just keep running that dishwasher until they're clean! If you run it and they're still dirty, load it up with soap and try again!


That's all new technology though. Dishwashers _were_ like that.

What's seemed to change are people's expectations of technology that "just works". When in reality, we are in the infant years of AI/ML and LLMs

We're so spoiled by the pace of innovation we're upset it requires a bit of hand-holding while they figure things out.


It's still egregious because the main theme is "Learn how to work with AI so you won't be left behind in the future!" The analogy in that case is to waste time pointlessly learning the quirks of old dishwashers while new dishwashers won't have them in the future.




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