>Heavenly Buffaloes</a>, a chain of restaurants with locations in three North Carolina college towns, would seem tailor-made for QR-code menus. Its customers tend to be young and tech-savvy. Most come in hungry, many tipsy. And the menu isn’t exactly complicated.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">“It’s chicken wings and beer,” said Bo Sayre, the company’s district manager. “That’s what we do. Not a lot of people are asking, ‘What beer pairs well with this chicken wing?’”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Like other restaurant owners and managers around the country, Mr. Sayre put digitalized menus on all his tables in the early, don’t-touch-anything stage of the pandemic, when contactless service was considered essential. But over time, fewer and fewer diners have paid them any notice.

“If they had a choice, I would say, 90 percent of customers would say: ‘I’d just rather place my order with you.’”

Heavenly Buffaloes may be at the vanguard of a shift in the national experiment with online menus, an invention that not long ago seemed like the way of the future. Today, even though many restaurants still have “scan the code” cards tucked into napkin holders or pasted onto the corners of tables, customers seem to be ignoring them. And many restaurants have returned to using only paper menus.

a menu management and printing platform with about 7,000 customers across the United States, has seen a falling off in the use of the QR codes it provides to restaurants, said Mark Plumlee, the senior content manager. From April 1 to May 16 of this year, the total number of scans has dropped by about 27 percent compared with the same period in 2021
Fewer restaurants are creating new QR menus, he said. And about 75 percent of their existing QR codes are essentially dormant, with fewer than 90 views in the last year. (Half had fewer than five.)</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">“It’s not like people delete their QR codes when they’re done using them,” Mr. Plumlee wrote in an email. “They just stop using them.”<
>The menus are still in heavy use at cafes, beer gardens and casual food businesses where speed in ordering and paying is a priority, said Kristen Hawley, the founder of

Expedite</a>, a restaurant technology newsletter.

But for restaurants that deployed them mainly for pandemic hygiene reasons, she said, “it’s gone.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The motivation for the about-face is simple, restaurateurs said: Diners just hate QR-code menus.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">“They are almost universally disliked,” Ms. Hawley said.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">One reason is etiquette. Everyone knows it’s rude to take a phone out at a table, but that’s what a digital menu demands. And having to make a special request for a paper menu is awkward. No one wants to be That Guy.<

>Another drawback to the coded menu is its feel. As the pandemic ebbs, restaurants are trying to coax people to eat out, and the seduction of a dining room is part of the get — dusky candlelight and uninterrupted, eye-to-eye conversation. A QR code can kill the mood: phones up, blue lights on, conviviality off.

The bottom line is: The QR code is the antithesis to romance,” said Richard Boccato, the owner of

in Long Island City, Queens. “It hinders communication and it hinders intimacy.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The bar dropped its coded menus in summer 2021, “the moment that it was OK for us to go back to a proper menu,” he said. His main objection to them? “A menu is a window to the soul of the restaurant, and a QR code has no soul.”<

also remains a mystery to many tech-averse diners. “A lot of our customers were like, ‘What is this? I don’t know how to use it,’” said Luly Valls, a third-generation owner of <

title="">Versailles</a>, the famed Cuban restaurant in Miami. “They’re older. They were like, ‘Give me a paper menu.’”

>Waiters often bear the brunt of the frustration. “The server becomes just like an order robot,” said Jill Weber, the founder and chief executive of

a restaurant group in Philadelphia.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Some servers said QR menus take the joy out of the job. “There’s something a little bit dehumanizing about it,” said Alec Moran, a server at a high-end Italian restaurant in Chicago, which he asked not be named because he feared jeopardizing his job. Customers, he said, tend to stare at their phones and “pay less regard to you as the human in front of them.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Mr. Moran said he can no longer rely on visual cues from diners. Guests used to put their menus down when they were ready to order. Now, their phones are still up on the table, still out.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">“The world gets more digitized every single day,” Mr. Moran said. “It felt like restaurants were one of the few analog public spaces that we have left.”

>Mr. Moran said he thought QR codes also made patrons less inclined to order desserts, another glass of wine or any of “those little extras that you can tack onto the bill.” It’s just a pain to re-scroll, he said.

Michele Baker Benesch, the president of

enu Men</a>, which designs, prints and manufactures menus, said that when her clients switched back to paper menus, “the check, per person, went up. People don’t want to go back on their phones, especially for dessert.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">And customers, she added, may be reluctant to order anything expensive. “It’s very hard to order a $70 steak off a QR code — or a $200 bottle of wine. It just doesn’t feel right.”

Darden Restaurants</a>, which owns the Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse chains, used QR codes

="">at the start of the pandemic</a>. But the restaurants moved back to physical menus in the fall of 2021 “based on guest feedback,” Rich Jeffers, the senior director for communications, wrote in an email.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Benjamin Claeys, the chief executive of <

>Menu Tiger</a>, a global provider of QR-menu software, said the company was aware of the backlash against the menus.

till, he said, more dynamic QR-code menus that allow a customer to order and pay without waiting for a server are gaining in popularity. In the first quarter of this year, the number of businesses signing up and actively using the service grew 37.6 percent over the last quarter of 2022, he said.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">“Our own customer data says QR-code menus are here to stay.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Digital ordering services can be costly for restaurants. Many services offer a free QR-code menu as part of a broader management package, which can cost as much as <a class="css-yywogo" href="https://orderlina.com/best-qr-menu-for-restaurants-and-hotels/" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">$50 to $100 a month</a>. (Paper menus can be costly, too, though prices vary depending on factors like the type of paper and the number of pages.)</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Ms. Valls, at Versailles in Miami, adopted QR menus early in the pandemic. But when she reintroduced traditional menus alongside them, customers asked only for paper. So a few months ago, she canceled her QR subscription.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">“If we only had QR codes always, it would be a huge savings,” she said. “But we always had to have both, so we still had to spend money on making actual menus.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">But some restaurateurs see advantages to using QR menus, especially when working with language barriers.

>Nom Wah</a>, the restaurant group behind the famed dim sum place of the same name in Manhattan’s Chinatown, knows that not all of its patrons, or its servers, speak fluent English. In its Chinatown location, there’s a QR code on the table that links to a menu with pictures, and a paper menu with pencils to check off your order.

I have a picture menu so that no one asks any questions,” said Barbara Leung, the group’s head of marketing and operations. “It just eliminates room for error or miscommunication.”

In some restaurants, QR codes are moving to the end of the meal.<

in Brooklyn, diners order off a paper menu. The check comes with a QR code, in case they want to simply pay on their phones and leave.

Even though Sage Geyer, the owner, believes that phones at the dining table are “conversation killers,” he said they can be useful at the end of the meal.

StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">“You may have other plans. You may want to get away from this date. You may want to go home with this date,” he said. “Whatever it is you want to do, convenience is number one.”</p>

Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice</em>
Amelia Nierenberg writes the Asia Pacific Morning Briefing for The Times.

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 28, 2023, 08:13

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 28, 2023, 08:13

May 28, 2023, 08:13

LucifarGundam @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org

@icedquinn ;

12k VR tv? Gambling Machine? Some other machine that sucks the souls out of people?

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 28, 2023, 08:08

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 28, 2023, 08:08

May 28, 2023, 08:08

LucifarGundam @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org

@hackernews@die-partei.social

I don't feel like parsing this... so here's what I nabbed::

The lawsuit began like so many others: A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and, of course, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, with its learned discussion of federal law and “the tolling effect of the automatic stay on a statute of limitations.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">There was just one hitch: No one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">That was because ChatGPT had invented everything.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The lawyer who created the brief, Steven A. Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, threw himself on the mercy of the court on Thursday, saying in an affidavit that he had used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research — “a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable.”</p></div><aside class="css-ew4tgv" aria-label="companion column"></aside></div><div></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Mr. Schwartz, who has practiced law in New York for three decades, told Judge P. Kevin Castel that he had no intent to deceive the court or the airline. Mr. Schwartz said that he had never used ChatGPT, and “therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">He had, he told Judge Castel, even asked the program to verify that the cases were real.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">It had said yes.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Mr. Schwartz said he “greatly regrets” relying on ChatGPT “and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Judge Castel said in an order that he had been presented with “an unprecedented circumstance,” a legal submission replete with “bogus judicial decisions, with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations.” He ordered a hearing for June 8 to discuss potential sanctions.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">As artificial intelligence sweeps the online world, it has conjured dystopian visions of computers replacing not only human interaction, but also human labor. The fear has been especially intense for knowledge workers, many of whom worry that their daily activities may not be as rarefied as the world thinks — but for which the world pays billable hours.</p></div><aside class="css-ew4tgv" aria-label="companion column"></aside></div><div></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law, said the issue was particularly acute among lawyers, who have been debating the value and the dangers of A.I. software like ChatGPT, as well as the need to verify whatever information it provides.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">“The discussion now among the bar is how to avoid exactly what this case describes,” Mr. Gillers said. “You cannot just take the output and cut and paste it into your court filings.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The real-life case of Roberto Mata v. Avianca Inc. shows that white-collar professions may have at least a little time left before the robots take over.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">It began when Mr. Mata was a passenger on Avianca Flight 670 from El Salvador to New York on Aug. 27, 2019, when an airline employee bonked him with the serving cart, according to the lawsuit. After Mr. Mata sued, the airline filed papers asking that the case be dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">In a brief filed in March, Mr. Mata’s lawyers said the lawsuit should continue, bolstering their argument with references and quotes from the many court decisions that have since been debunked.</p></div><aside class="css-ew4tgv" aria-label="companion column"></aside></div><div></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Soon, Avianca’s lawyers wrote to Judge Castel, saying they were unable to find the cases that were cited in the brief.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">When it came to Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, they said they had “not been able to locate this case by caption or citation, nor any case bearing any resemblance to it.”</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">They pointed to a lengthy quote from the purported Varghese decision contained in the brief. “The undersigned has not been able to locate this quotation, nor anything like it in any case,” Avianca’s lawyers wrote.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Indeed, the lawyers added, the quotation, which came from Varghese itself, cited something called Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines Co. Ltd., an opinion purportedly handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in 2008. They said they could not find that, either.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Judge Castel ordered Mr. Mata’s attorneys to provide copies of the opinions referred to in their brief. The lawyers submitted a compendium of eight; in most cases, they listed the court and judges who issued them, the docket numbers and dates.</p></div><aside class="css-ew4tgv" aria-label="companion column"></aside></div><div></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The copy of the supposed Varghese decision, for example, is six pages long and says it was written by a member of a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit. But Avianca’s lawyers told the judge that they could not find that opinion, or the others, on court dockets or legal databases.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Bart Banino, a lawyer for Avianca, said that his firm, Condon & Forsyth, specialized in aviation law and that its lawyers could tell the cases in the brief were not real. He added that they had an inkling a chatbot might have been involved.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Mr. Schwartz did not respond to a message seeking comment, nor did Peter LoDuca, another lawyer at the firm, whose name appeared on the brief.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Mr. LoDuca said in an affidavit this week that he did not conduct any of the research in question, and that he had “no reason to doubt the sincerity” of Mr. Schwartz’s work or the authenticity of the opinions.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0"><a class="css-yywogo" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/technology/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-bing-bard-llm.html#" title="">ChatGPT</a> generates realistic responses by making guesses about which fragments of text should follow other sequences, based on a statistical model that has ingested billions of examples of text pulled from all over the internet. In Mr. Mata’s case, the program appears to have discerned the labyrinthine framework of a written legal argument, but has populated it with names and facts from a bouillabaisse of existing cases.</p></div><aside class="css-ew4tgv" aria-label="companion column"></aside></div><div></div><div class="css-s99gbd StoryBodyCompanionColumn"><div class="css-53u6y8"><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Judge Castel, in his order calling for a hearing, suggested that he had made his own inquiry. He wrote that the clerk of the 11th Circuit had confirmed that the docket number printed on the purported Varghese opinion was connected to an entirely different case.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Calling the opinion “bogus,” Judge Castel noted that it contained internal citations and quotes that, in turn, were nonexistent. He said that five of the other decisions submitted by Mr. Mata’s lawyers also appeared to be fake.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">On Thursday, Mr. Mata’s lawyers offered affidavits containing their version of what had happened.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Mr. Schwartz wrote that he had originally filed Mr. Mata’s lawsuit in state court, but after the airline had it transferred to Manhattan’s federal court, where Mr. Schwartz is not admitted to practice, one of his colleagues, Mr. LoDuca, became the attorney of record. Mr. Schwartz said he had continued to do the legal research, in which Mr. LoDuca had no role.</p><p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">Mr. Schwartz said that he had consulted ChatGPT “to supplement” his own work and that, “in consultation” with it, found and cited the half-dozen nonexistent cases. He said ChatGPT had provided reassurances.

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 27, 2023, 22:26

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 27, 2023, 22:26

May 27, 2023, 22:26

LucifarGundam @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org

@hackernews@die-partei.social

Was this you @icedquinn ?

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 27, 2023, 18:42

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 27, 2023, 18:42

May 27, 2023, 18:42

LucifarGundam @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org

@niconiconi

My banking subroutine returned a nyan value. Should I meow or submit a purr request?

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 27, 2023, 04:51

**LucifarGundam** @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org · May 27, 2023, 04:51

May 27, 2023, 04:51

LucifarGundam @lucifargundam@social.cleverlibre.org

@hackernews@die-partei.social

.....
Some tech companies are in “Glassdoor crisis management mode” after layoffs.
....
Glassdoor will remove reviews that violate its community guidelines, or terms of use.
......
Paying customers seem to get priority in acting on flagged reviews.
......
There is no way to pressure Glassdoor to remove any single review.
.....
Glassdoor is pretty good at reducing spamming
.......
Companies encouraging staff to leave more positive reviews is a common way to increase the score. Glassdoor itself naturally encourages companies to have more employees add reviews in order to combat negative reviews. In the article “I'm an employer. What can I do about negative reviews on Glassdoor?” the company outlines 4 steps:

Flag reviews. Glassdoor validates if they break its terms and conditions or community guidelines. If they do, they need to be removed.

Respond to them. Responses are shown under the review.

Post more reviews. Glassdoor provides several templates about how employers can do this.

Take legal action. This is always a possibility, but is the most time-consuming approach and the outcome of legal proceedings is uncertain