It is because you as the author can't see how it looks from the outside. There is a smugness[1], and a characterization of the staff as cogs in a machine that you were able to manipulate like cogs in your experiment.
How did you "stop it from working"? You even admit "they didn't mind".
If anything, what you really showed is that your analogy, while interesting and amusing, has limited accuracy. The concept of a state machines is precisely that, about machines. Not humans. The human staff took notice of the unexpected flow, externally manifest their on-the-fly adaptive mental processing of it on their faces, and then adapted. The restaurant didn't devolve into chaos.
The staff didn't freeze and lie down on the floor like driverless cars are doing on the streets[2]. The fact that automation of anything complex and unpredictable as driving isn't built on anything even vaguely akin to a state machine is telling. That would lead to disaster.
In other words, you didn't break anything at all. It was your analogy that got broken.
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[1]: You display this smugness even in your reply, "Language is weird. <fx: shrug />". Just sayin. As an writer who posted his work on HN himself looking for feedback should humbly listen to negative reactions as much as if not more so than seek to bask in admiration and success.
How did you "stop it from working"? You even admit "they didn't mind".
If anything, what you really showed is that your analogy, while interesting and amusing, has limited accuracy. The concept of a state machines is precisely that, about machines. Not humans. The human staff took notice of the unexpected flow, externally manifest their on-the-fly adaptive mental processing of it on their faces, and then adapted. The restaurant didn't devolve into chaos.
The staff didn't freeze and lie down on the floor like driverless cars are doing on the streets[2]. The fact that automation of anything complex and unpredictable as driving isn't built on anything even vaguely akin to a state machine is telling. That would lead to disaster.
In other words, you didn't break anything at all. It was your analogy that got broken.
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[1]: You display this smugness even in your reply, "Language is weird. <fx: shrug />". Just sayin. As an writer who posted his work on HN himself looking for feedback should humbly listen to negative reactions as much as if not more so than seek to bask in admiration and success.
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/technology/driverless-car...