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Comment by bitwize

9 days ago

At the Circle K they have the option of doing self checkout by putting all your items under a camera and the register will automagically count 'em up and assess your total. I keep wondering if it's done by AI -- All Indians. Same with the OCR ATMs do on cheques.

Relevant: Uniqlo's self checkout, based on RFID tags with a great user experience:

- https://archive.is/ms1ke

  • Those Uniqlo self checkouts really do fall into that “ indistinguishable from magic” territory for me - on a technological level I completely understand how they work, and yet every time I use them I’m a little surprised that it works so well and filled with joy anyways

  • Ah man I remember the RFID hype when the idea was you'd just shop and walk out and the items would all be automatically scanned by an RFID reader and charged. A tough lift in a grocery store but a single source store can build all the tags into their own products.

This vibes with my multiyear theory that Tesla self-driving is someone in China driving your car for you like a racing simulator. Perhaps the graphics are even game-ified so the work stays mysterious.

  • There's a car company that runs in vegas that does exactly that. You rent the car for a few hours and it will be driven up to you by a remote driver and then when you're done it'll drive off remotely. No AI needed.

    • Doesn't latency make this dangerous?

      At a BAC of 0.08 (legal limit in US) drivers have reaction time delayed by only 60-120ms but crash risk is 10x compared to sober

      Lack of depth perception probably compounds this?

      4 replies →

    • > driven up to you by a remote driver

      This is hopefully illegal and not actually what is done, because I have learned from Waymo that it is not permissible or even possible for the CS reps to remotely drive the car. They merely push "suggestion" commands to be considered by the onboard Waymo Driver.

      Remote human drivers have too much latency and not enough realtime information available to "drive" a vehicle on public roads.

      11 replies →

  • > someone in China driving your car for you like a racing simulator.

    while sleeping and connected by NeuraLink. Before Musk/NeuraLink gets to me though, judging by the content of some of my dreams, i've been driving a space-folding spaceships for some aliens.

  • There were scenes from Black Panther in which Shuri drives a car in Korea remotely from Wakanda. I thought, wow, she can do that from thousands of km away with zero latency! They must have super advanced tech to have solved the network latency problem.