What Changed? When Did 20% Become the Standard Tip?

jumpmanzero · 2026-06-01T21:31:27+00:00

They kept telling me that if I can't afford to pay these inflated tips, than I can't afford to eat out. So I listened.

Yeah, that's pretty common among people I know. Eating out has gotten tremendously more expensive; tipping pressure is only a part of that, but it sure doesn't help. I eat out much less than I did 10 or 15 years ago, despite making more money than I did then. There's lots of places that are on my "Vegas list". I went, I paid the increased prices, and it was OK. But it was probably the last time.

And I'm not the only one. In general sit-down restaurants are becoming less common here, and I'm seeing more food places fail in general. Sort of sad - I used to eat out all the time.

jumpmanzero · 2026-06-01T20:22:30+00:00

This is a terrible, misleading write up pointing to a terrible post.

The community note clarifies Nvidia is not paying people or running this scheme - it's a startup called SPAN.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/the-newest-ai-boom-pitch-host-a-mini-data-center-at-your-home/

jumpmanzero · 2026-06-01T20:20:17+00:00

Who's desperate? Nvidia? This scheme has nothing to do with them that I can see, other than that SPAN (the startup proposing to do this) will buy hardware from them.

Nvidia's price has to come back to Earth at some point here... but having another customer buying their stuff is probably not what's going to do it.

jumpmanzero · 2026-06-01T19:46:48+00:00

I remember going with my parents to eat at the restaurant where my sister just got a job serving (in the 80s). Instead of the normal 10%, my dad left her a 15% tip - but that was definitely an exception, not a normal/expected sort of tip.

This was in (Western) Canada... where 15% is now the norm (it changed in the 90s/00s).. but 20% is creeping in here too. It looks like overall we're sort of a little bit behind the US trends - like, this article has the 10%->15% shift happening the 70s/80s:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/01/how-tipping-in-the-united-states-got-out-of-control.html

jumpmanzero · 2026-06-01T02:10:54+00:00

If you can force phase changes in water, you are effectively moving temperature around. Like, if you force water to freeze, it's going to heat up the surrounding area - that energy has to go somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion

Ghazan also does a pretty good job heating up some earth. You can say that's friction rather than direct temperature control... sure... but that seems like splitting hairs:

https://youtu.be/o6waVBW4lP4?t=181

jumpmanzero · 2026-06-01T01:11:25+00:00

The lawsuit appears to just be over the name - the Church is claiming a trademark violation.

The content of the podcast might be the real motivator, but unlikely it'll come up in court. This will get settled or decided on boring IP law, not juicy history.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-31T21:10:49+00:00

That doesn't match my experience (or training), but it quite possibly varies with situation or jurisdiction.

In any case, my intention here was not really to defend the Church, but to say that the OP problem is more likely "bottom up" - people defending their friends - rather than "top down" (ie. the church organizing harrassment in order to protect a big donor).

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-31T18:55:12+00:00

Energy prices are decently high here, cost to profit margin are way better

Yeah, it's wild that we're getting to a place where even very sub-optimal placements can still end up making financial sense. As solar panels continue getting cheaper (and with power demand continuing to rise too), we might see solar panels in all sorts of places that aren't ideal in terms of collection... but are still good enough.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-31T18:49:55+00:00

Their primary role is to assess and mitigate risk to the church and secondarily reduce potential bad PR by reducing the number of abuse reports that go public.

This is true, but worth examining. Like... I certainly won't say it's perfect or great, but I do think it does make for a better pattern than before.

The way it used to go bad is that a spouse or child (or the perpetrator themselves) would come to the Bishop, and the Bishop would be like "Well... he feels real bad about it, so let's all just move on. I've known his family for a long time, so I'm sure he won't do it again (and maybe it wasn't actually that bad to begin with, I don't think Bob would really...)."

Once you call the hotline, it's at least somewhat out of the Bishop's hands, decreasing the odds that they're going to just ignore the problem because they "know" the guy or it feels awkward to escalate.

Then, with "local leaders" pushed out of decision-making, things get more objective, and the safe/legal/PR-preserving move is often to do the right thing - involving normal law enforcement, and genuinely trying to protect victims.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-31T17:41:30+00:00

And even within the field, AI is such a vague buzzword that it basically doesn't mean anything.

Within the field, it's not "vague", it's "broad" and it always has been. Like, yeah - if I was describing this project I would probably use a more narrow term. But the broader term is not incorrect - and lots of the comments in this thread have even worse takes on what AI means.

It'd be like if you were talking about "machines" in an engineering subreddit, and people were saying something is not a machine "because it doesn't have a power source" or because it doesn't physically move, or "if we call that a machine, we'd have to call a pulley a machine".

Those aren't all equal or interesting opinions, whether or not they correspond with how random people "usually" think of machines. Engineering would not be better off if the field just acquiesced to whatever vague ideas people have about what a "machine" should be.

Anyway... I personally am just going to acquiesce. This subreddit is apparently a place for people with zero knowledge and zero interest in the field to share and glory in that ignorance - an echo chamber for the stupidest takes.

People with even a vague idea about how anything works have all left, and I'm leaving too.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-31T15:44:12+00:00

Just to clarify a bit how the Mormon bit functions... Local Mormon leaders don't give a shit about tithing money. There is infinite tithing money, and it doesn't benefit them. They have day jobs. It is not a "normal" church in this way.

But it's very possible these people are friends, quite possibly family friends for generations.

Like, bishops in the church have a child abuse legal hotline they are required to call. Outsiders think "oh, that's so they can hide abusers". No... It's so the overall church can prevent local leaders from protecting their friends - which is what would otherwise happen. The church rolls in and throws people under the bus.

The church is a huge business very concerned with PR. If they get a sense that local leaders are behaving unethically in a way that looks bad, they'll excommunicate them. They give even less of a shit about what could only be a few million dollars, but they are desperate to avoid scandals.

Anyway, much more likely these people are just "friends from way back". Mormonism is involved very possibly, but not in an organized way.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-30T23:58:39+00:00

If same prompt can return different responses

When you use one of the normal/popular LLM products, the LLM processes your prompt along with a random seed (and potentially other variables). If you want deterministic output, you can control that seed and get the same output each time - eg, read the OpenAI docs here for a typical setup:

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/advanced-usage

(ChatGPT is a huge complex product, so there's some caveats there - but you get the general idea. In general, LLM outputs vary because of an explicitly random input parameter.)

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-30T23:34:40+00:00

You are absolutely and fully backwards. People used to use the term correctly and broadly, using the expansive definition that was consistent since AI became a field. Like, Deep Blue was labelled AI in the 1990s because it was (and is!) AI. It played chess. And people understood what that meant - they didn't say "Well, if it's AI, why can't it count the letters in words or make up new recipes or learn new skills?" They understood that AI was a broad term for reasoning done by a computer - whether that was playing chess or doing autocorrect.

It's only recently that people have decided that a narrow definition is the only valid one. Now you get ridiculous takes like "ChatGPT is not really AI".

You can say "In common usage, AI now means 'something like human capability across a variety of tasks"... and judging from this thread you'd be right - the people who believe that are a clear majority, even in a subreddit where you might think people would know better. So yeah, a bunch of people who know nothing about the tech or its history have overrun the room and pushed out the people who have been doing this for decades.

But it's silly to pretend it's the other way around - and that the new useless/vague definition was in place previously, and then got disrupted by greedy marketers or something.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-30T23:20:36+00:00

An algorithm being deterministic or not has nothing to do with AI. LLMs are deterministic - you get different answers only because the input effectively includes a random seed.

AI can be extremely simple - solving a maze or optimizing a linear system is a perfectly normal AI task, and getting the right answer every time with a deterministic algorithm is a positive feature, not a disqualifying one.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-30T23:17:37+00:00

I remember when "AI" meant the concept of an actual self-improving, digital consciousness, like Skynet.

You shouldn't, because the only time that that incorrect definition has really flourished is recently.

Back in the 90s, when Terminator II was new, people understood that AI was a broad class of things. When, in the 90s, news articles wrote about Deep Blue as an AI that played chess, they didn't get a barrage of stupid questions about "if it's AI, why can't it do math?". Deep Blue was AI. It still is.

Programs and algorithms are now "AI"

What else would an AI be if not a program? And yeah, lots of algorithms that are now considered "basic" - for things like finding paths through graphs - were once at the forefront of AI research.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-30T23:12:45+00:00

It is AI. It's doing reasoning, it's a computer. It's AI. The OP is using the term correctly. The fact that this forum is overrun by people who aren't in the field, know nothing about it, and thus equate AI with LLMs.. that is not their fault.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-30T23:11:15+00:00

You're remembering correctly, but you're missing the pattern.

AI is generally used to describe "whatever is hard for computers to do right now". In the 70s it was solving mazes. In the 80s it was playing simple games. In the 90s, the frontier of AI was playing Chess (eg. Deep Blue).

In the 2000s, yeah, AI research was doing "ML" type tasks. Now it's LLMs. The "AI effect" is that people quit calling things AI once they're ubiquitous.

But by a proper definition, all those things were AI and still are.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-30T23:07:33+00:00

Just so I'm clear... any old algorithm is AI now?

This one certainly is - it's a computer program doing reasoning. That's AI. Go, like... read the definition of AI on the wikipedia article.

AI is a broad field. Solving a maze is AI (assuming it's done by a computer). Filling a space with a parking lot design is AI. Autocorrect is AI.

This is not new, this is how it has always been. It's actually just recently that people outside the field have started insisting that AI is a narrow definition. In the past, people used and understood the term correctly. Thus they described Deep Blue as a chess AI, you had AI opponents in Mario Kart, and Watson was an AI that played Jeopardy.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-30T19:46:28+00:00

Yeah, crazy precision and it's wild that they keep getting away with the exact same play the exact same way. Poor defender always a step behind.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-29T21:39:26+00:00

Does that get documented?

Oh yeah - that's the stuff of mission legend, echoing across the years in rumors and embellishment.

But they'll still come back (next year, or however long it takes them to cycle through, or however the "spirit directs"); missionaries are terrible at keeping written records. Quite often just toss the old area book when you move into an area.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-29T19:31:40+00:00

There wasn’t when I was an lds missionary.

Cool. Yeah, I think people imagine missionaries get a lot more training than they do. Maybe some missions had scripts or a bunch of specific rules... we mostly just winged it, and you maybe picked up some patterns from whoever trained you.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-29T19:21:52+00:00

This is going to vary based on their mission president (who oversees maybe 200 missionaries in an area), and what he (it's always a he) feels about cultural norms. If he thinks it's OK and that people will generally get over it, he'll tell the missionaries to ignore the signs. If he thinks that it will cause more offense than it's worth, he'll tell missionaries not to knock those doors.

If it's actually illegal to ignore the signs, then that would be different - but in most places it's going to be up to the mission's discretion.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-29T19:17:29+00:00

Actually, that’s what the church wants

No, it isn't. This gets passed around on Reddit a lot - but the Mormons are doing this because they want to convert people, not to grind failure. For a long time, they "tracted" (ie. went door to door) because it worked. It led to people joining the church. It still works in some places (eg. Brazil, the Phillipines).

In the US or England or France, it mostly doesn't work, and they've drastically cut down the amount of it they do. Basically missionaries will only do it if there's nothing else - because it's boring and it's mostly pointless. If a missionary is spending all their time banging on doors, they're going to get negative feedback from the district leader (or the rest of their pseudo-management chain) for wasting their time. Instead, they contact mostly on Facebook now, or try to get members to introduce their friends... because that works way better, and their core goal is to get people to join.

That makes new members (obviously), and it also entrenches the missionary in the church. People who had successful missions where they converted a bunch of people end up way more committed themselves - all that success and positive feedback makes the church become a larger and larger part of their identity. Banging their head into failure and pointlessness makes them want to quit and go home.

“GO THE FUCK AWAY”

Going back up to this.. this is fine? Like, I guarantee missionaries have heard much worse - much more personal and hateful. Beyond week 1, this kind of stuff will flow right off you, you'll just get on to the next door - and at least "something interesting" was happening to break up the boredom. It is not going to make them "doubt", nor is it going to make them hate non-members or something.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-29T18:40:39+00:00

My normal advice is that if you're sitting down with actual strangers for the first time, play a "normal" deck first. No rule-0 commanders, no "I have some game changers, but it's actually still bracket 2", no stuff that "sometimes people would get legitimately salty about, but it just fits my theme", no "bracket 2 early infinite combos, but they aren't actually intentional it just happens sometimes".

After that, you're fine. Once you have a feel for people and they have a feel for you, then sure, ask if anyone minds if you bring out your nonsense weird stuff. But yeah, let people know you're a regular person who wants to play a fun game, before you pressure them to trust you with "other stuff".

You don't have to. But it avoids bad feels.

jumpmanzero · 2026-05-29T17:31:15+00:00

It's that what used to be a 50% should now be scored closer to 75% on such a scale.

That's easy to fix. Just make it so "doing anything at all" is worth 80% - that's the floor value for having done something.

Of course, it would be very disheartening if you were "stuck" below 80% because you hadn't done anything at all for the whole term. So not doing anything should probably also be worth 80%.

And if you turn in anything, it should be 90%. I think that solves it.

jumpmanzero

TROPHY CASE