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> 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?

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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

The file drawer effect, except this one maybe should have stayed filed.

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.

It’s the load-bearing argument

scanned through pretty much the entire post. Still waiting for the funny part.

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.

Also, eating say a Big Mac and fries isn’t that unhealthy when done occasionally, there’s a lot of salt and fat but nothing horrendous. Compared to the load on your liver and pancreas etc of consuming literally about 1/2 pound of fructose that’s in a big soda. The soft drinks are by far the least healthy 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.

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?

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.

> 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.

> 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 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.

> 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 :)

I admit I had the same thought as GP, though without the unnecessary kink-shaming.

I guess GP and I are both actually part of that "terminally online" group they're complaining about.

Some things should be shameful. Not because they’re bad, but so they remain private.

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.

I mean, I laughed. Soo...

yeah the idea of "funny" seemed pretty puerile to me

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.

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 has less to do with age and more to do with mental state.

If you are happy, in the flushes of love, feeling safe, many things, even ordinary things will feel amusing, funny, worthy of a belly laugh. On the other hand if you are stressed, under pressure, depressed or angry, then not so much.

Often times I am very easily amused by the most prosaic things and I am not even stoned in anything of external chemical source. It feels good to be that way.

For example, I react very differently to Thurber based on my emotional state. Identical external stimulus, very different reaction.

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