Am I the only one who gets to the self checkout and is compelled to finish as soon as humanly possible?

Imagine if there was a speedrun timer on them and a leaderboard

Would make boring everyday life a little more interesting

  • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    Amazon Go’s (“just walk out”) self checkout gives you an elapsed time on your receipt. There was one next door to my old pre-pandemic office. My coworkers and I would complete to see who could get in and out the fastest. My record was 6 seconds buying a single bottled tea.

    • flashgnash@lemm.eeOP
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      9 months ago

      Apparently those are being phased out now because they weren’t really automatic, just outsourced to people in india

      • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        Yeah, it appears that the system was computer-assisted, not computer-controlled. Amazon tried to “fake it till you make it”, but never made it.

        Another L for AI.

        • viralJ@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Was it really AI powered? I’ve never used one (we’ve not had them in the UK) so I’m genuinely curious. I heard it just had chips in every product, so when you leave the shop through a gate, everything you bought got scanned, and you were charged automatically. But in my description there is no AI in the modern sense of pattern recognition based on vast training data.

          • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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            9 months ago

            we’ve not had them in the UK

            I shopped at an automated Amazon Fresh in Bankside London yesterday…

        • flashgnash@lemm.eeOP
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          9 months ago

          Nothing wrong with AI, it’s a tool that’s very good at specific problems

          Tech companies just don’t know what is and isn’t a good use case yet

          • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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            9 months ago

            Honestly “track this person’s movements and figure out what they picked up using this huge amount of sensor and camera data” should be a pretty good ML use case, but Amazon doesn’t really have the right technical talent to make that work.

            • flashgnash@lemm.eeOP
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              9 months ago

              True, you’d think Amazon would have the talent to do it though if they wanted to