How a coffee-order chatbot turned into a bank

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Amazing! Code please!

#StillabetterbankthanHSBC

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. Imagine Jim owes you $10, and you owe Bob $10. Well, that's easy. Tell Caffeinator "reassign $10 from Jim to Bob" and suddenly Jim owed Bob $10, and you were out of the picture.

Yeah, except Jim isn’t good for the debt, so you were never going to collect unless you tracked him down and beat him severely… no, not even then, because Jim hasn’t got any money! You not only just stiffed Bob for the $10, you also just gave him the added burden of skinned knuckles and having to listen to Jim’s annoying whining about his inability to pay as Bob larrups the stuffings out of him in frustration.

Congratulations, you have re-invented bankstering - trading bad debt for good. Profit!!

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Oh, coffee, right… At first that photo looked like some kind of many-eyed monster.

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You’ve had either too much coffee, or too many monsters.

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I would think that people bright enough to build that kind of system would be able to handle buying a coffee pot and brewing some coffee right there at the office instead of having to send out for Starbuck’s every day.

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Who knew that coffee could trigger Trypophobia. Bravo!

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People bright enough to build that sort of system might get into roasting their own beans. They definitely would demand an espresso machine.

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At the very least you’d think they’d have better taste than to waste all that effort on Starbucks.

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Debt is a terrifying book. A friend of mine once said of Marx’s writings that the have a lot of good, penetrating observations and analysis of the World, but the conclusions and recommendations are less good. I felt the same way about Debt. It was really eye-opening.

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A previous workplace used to have Joe’s Coffee Money. 10 tokens for $1, and refill the pot yourself at appropriate times of day. It was profit-based rather than debt-based money, and after enough excess profits had accumulated to pay for new pots/etc, Joe would occasionally buy a box of donuts for the lab.

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Coffee is a many eyed monster

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It’s not the banking that worries me. What happens when chat-bot wakes up?

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A skim latte with whipped cream? WTH, man?

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Can you disable the unwarranted bonus routine?

I don’t think so… I’m pretty sure that routine is the traditional way of calling the Pay_Everyone_Else method, and if you don’t run that unwarranted bonus routine, the warranted bonus object gets a segfault later on too…

It’s a monster of spaghetti code.

One of these days someone’ll get around to writing the documentation.

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Definitely Yog-Sothoth, who was supposed to look like “congeries of iridescent bubbles.”

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Listen - sometimes you don’t want the fat of the milk, but you still want a little bit of whipped cream :slight_smile: