• she/they

pdx queer dev, now an Old


bruno
@bruno

building this type of mechanical turk really should be regarded as a form of fraud


micolithe
@micolithe

If investors understood this process as RFID chips which is how I remember reading about it initially then yeah it 100% is fraud.


blaurascon
@blaurascon
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micolithe
@micolithe

Actually thinking about it again I think my understanding of this might come from Ben Pack explaining it on the Giant Bombcast and I don't think he counts as a definitive source on the matter BUT they did this exact same shit with Ring and sold it as AI when instead it's people staring at video footage and drawing rectangles around objects, so I mean, I'm going to assume it's the same case here.


estradialup
@estradialup

People are almost always cheaper than even solved, midranged computing if you have sufficiently-peripheralized people. Most "bot farms" are just a bunch of underpaid workers somewhere that the first world doesn't give a shit about, in front of a desk of secondhand office computers or mobile devices. Same for "automatic" image-labeling stuff.
If something is advanced, cheap, automated, and vaguely-futuristic, it almost certainly runs on blood, even if it could be invisibly done in a "better" way. Most people are already invisible.


aune
@aune

So one of the things having an rfid chip in your hand makes you very aware of is that the range sucks, so I was suspicious of people saying rfid originally in the first place.

But this is still shocking.


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in reply to @stu's post:

I was thinking about this and I think part of the reason is that self-checkout already exists in stores, so it wouldn't have gotten them press coverage about how "weird" it is to shop there if you had to stop and tap your bag/items on an NFC tag reader, but I bet another part is that people steal from self-checkout all the time. If you know how the system works, you can figure out how to get around it, but a "magic" system that just knows what you're carrying out of the store and you don't know how, then you can't figure out how to trick it.

i'd never been to one of these places so i always just assumed it was like, scanning things as you go along and getting it charged to your card when you leave or something. the reality of it being some guys in india watching you on cctv and tallying it up by hand is such a uniquely dystopian and stone age solution to the tech magic sales pitch we got you can't help but laugh at just how absurdly bleak it is

yeah i also assumed it was something like "self-scanning as you go", which according to the article is apparently the backup plan for stores who want to use something like this in the future. Insane that this wasn't the idea from the get-go.

"Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped."

Oh my god just end me

in reply to @bruno's post: