Robots that sort your laundry don't really exist and to the extent that they do, I am suspicious they will ever be cost-effective. (Although DRL roboticists keep talking about the dream of a robot that can fold your clothes, which is closer than ever, even the ultra-cheap robot arms are still thousands of dollars for the hardware, so how does that compete, with their overhead and breaking down, with a human doing it? Like an immigrant.)

There are a lot of sock subscription services (I shouldn't've been surprised) but I wasn't sure whether to mention them. My attitude is that such services tend to come with a lot of hidden drawbacks when your goal is to save time/effort, which was the point of my XKCD links: it's very easy for automation to backfire and become part of the problem. You sign up for a service, and then your package goes missing. Or you have to return it. Or a year in, the service folds, before you've even amortized the time it took to research which service you wanted. Or you get socks you don't want. Or the socks are just awful expensive (as the services I looked at were). Or... It is hard to compete with what I did, which was just buy a big batch of socks to solve it for a few years.

I was recently burned by a subscription service. My cat loves the Purina salmon pate canned wet cat food more than any other wet cat food I've tried, and others will be a bit wasted. I can buy the seafood variety pack locally no problem, but not an all-salmon pate. Online, all-salmon packs exist but are easily 2-3x the cost. Finally, after a good deal of hunting online for alternatives, I found Petco.com offered them at hardly a 10% markup and as a monthly subscription as well - perfect! I was pleased with myself. I signed up, set up a subscription, and got a shipment once a month with no additional effort, my cat was much happier, less food was wasted, and it cost about the same. And it did indeed work perfectly for about 3 months. Until you know what Petco decided to do? They banned all Purina products from their store, on the grounds of banning "all dog and cat food and treats that contain artificial ingredients". So instead they shipped me a package of 'organic' salmon pate which cost like 50% more and my cat instantly hated and would eat only after starving overnight. (Fuck you and your virtue-signaling pseudo-science bullshit, Petco, and catering to the ignorant masses. Is there even a single real study demonstrating all-cause mortality changes? I doubt it. And you know what's worse for my cat than 'artificial ingredients'? Eating food he hates.) So after all that, it wound up being an almost total waste of time: I then had to go and cancel, and find some alternative. No one else has stepped up to the plate and offered something as cheap, so currently I'm going to my local Walmart and simply buying every single salmon pate they have in stock. (Last time I managed to score 70 cans, so I'm good for under 2 months.)