Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

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I suppose ice cream isn't high on the list of services they feel they need up and running all the time, but if the machine is determining this I would think there would be some level of predictability that would allow them to schedule sanitizing and etc.

It's funny that the machine tells them there's no ice cream. I visited my local library for a tour. They have an automated system that collects returned books, sorts them, scans and processes them, then puts them in boxes to be shipped to other libraries if they need to go there. Or puts them in carts and labels them with instructions about the efficient path to travel to return books...

The humans just take orders from the machine when there is a cart ready with books to be put on the shelf or boxes to be sent to other libraries.

Interesting times.

There's a great short story called Manna that builds on this idea: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

This is such a great short story!

It's about ten years since I've worked with an ice-cream machine, but in my experience no matter the model they never forced you to try not to serve ice-cream.

They would enter their self-pasteurisation cycle, and the display at the front would tell you that is what it was doing, but it wouldn't prevent you from pulling the handle, if you so wished.

The problem, though, was that the barrel of the machine where the mixture was normally frozen was now at some 60 degrees C, it would be much much higher pressure than usual, and since the entire staff of a McDonald's tends to consist of teens who don't exactly take pride in the precision in which they carry out their jobs, at least once a night you'd have some poor kid blast a fine mist of hot sugary milk over themselves and the surroundings. Sometimes twice.

Sometimes I miss working at McDonald's.

demonstrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0ZxgI59_Ak

> I suppose ice cream isn't high on the list of services they feel they need up and running all the time

Depends on the country, here it is hot 9 months of the year. People queue up for ice cream every day. McDonald's has mini stores only selling ice cream.

Maybe it's the same in hotter parts of the US (which the article is about), for example Florida.

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