The great disappointment is that the humans submitting these just don’t care it’s slop and they’re wasting another human’s time. To them, it’s a slot machine you just keep cranking the arm of until coins come out. “Prompt until payout.”
I would disagree to a certain extent. "Law enforcement is not your friend" is a good mindset as a citizen. You should never hand them information without a lawyer and you should always push for oversight.
I agree that the "same at it ever was and always will be" attitude isn't great. It's defeatist and I choose not to live my life that way, even if it would be much easier mentally.
I think part of the reason I see this attitude so often is that, especially since 9/11, a large portion of the US population has decided that the police and military are infallible and should be trusted completely, so any large-scale attempt at reform runs into these unwavering supporters (and, in the case of the police, their unions).
I don't agree law enforcement is not the problem. Its the people in the system that are making these problems worse. You start blaming systems and then its a catch all that does nothing.
I won't disagree that the people inside the system are making it worse but the system is currently setup to incentivize bad behavior.
- Overly broad qualified immunity
- The power of the police unions
- Lawsuit settlements coming out of public funds
- Collusion between prosecutors' and the police
These are all issues that need to be resolved to restore the sanity in policing.
At the federal level, the FBI needs to be reigned in...somehow. They all to often work outside the bounds of their defined role and powers. This isn't a new problem and one could argue it has been an issue since the beginning.
The best part is that, in trying to comply with this guidance, the government chose Telemessage to provide the message archiving required by the Federal Records Act.
The only problem is that Telemessage was wildly insecure and was transmitting/storing message archives without any encryption.
Why would they face consequences? Every store has video surveillance that can be reviewed.
They trusted their tech enough to accept the false-positive rate, then worked to determine / validate their false positive rate with manual review, and iterate their models with the data.
From a consumer perspective the point is that you can "just walk out". They delivered that.
If the stock price goes down, I won’t be surprised if there’s a shareholder lawsuit claiming that they misrepresented their level of AI achievement and that lead to this write-off by keeping operating costs and error rates high. The whole business model really assumed that they could undercut competitors by lower staffing.
Their initial advertising claimed near full automation by their "AI" system when, in reality, they had people manually handling around 70% of the transactions.
I get that this is a message board for YC, so lying about your company's tech is considered almost a virtue but that is an unreasonably big lie to tell without getting your hand-slapped by some regulatory body or investor backlash.
I don’t remember Amazon claiming “near-full automation” by AI. They said that you can checkout automatically and that AI/computer vision is somehow involved.
If they didn't say it they heavily implied it to the point that journalists were fooled. For example you can read about it in this very quaint 2018 article that went with a woke "it's your fault I'm disfunctionally paranoid" angle: https://www.cnet.com/culture/amazon-go-avoid-discrimination-....
No one cared what I was doing. Is this what it feels like to shop when you're not black?
Well that's because, again, it was indeed algorithms doing the work, and the people were only used to verify / train the system, after the fact. People keep, intentionally, conflating the two things, doing everything in their power to say (or strongly imply), that the people involved were managing the orders in real time, which is a lie. You are the one pushing misinformation here.
In my country they have 16 year old kids working in the supermarket. They are pretty cheap to employ and these jobs train the boys and girls into becoming adults.
It would be a shame if this shared experience was taken over by third worlders.
Meanwhile the distinction between the US and the so-called "third world" seems to become less apparent and less relevant every day. Indian teenagers need jobs too, don't they? More power to them.
I think investors like Amazon taking shots like this? It was never a broad roll-out, 43 stores is micro-scale for Amazon.
Still, would love to see a breakdown of why it didn't improve. Regardless of the accuracy at launch, I'd think that advances in AI would have been massively to their advantage. I wonder if security degradation hit them hard.
The entire system depends on a level of social trust that doesn't exist in American cities today. Similarly, the "Dash Cart" seems like a cheaper and easier way to accomplish the same thing.
At the end of the day, there's also a mismatch in the use case. If I'm going to a smaller format store, like they had, I'm not buying a ton of stuff. Self checkout is great, and minimal friction.
I'd think that improving the UX of self-checkout gets 80% of the way there with way less fraud, way less theft, and way less technology.
Still, I think it's wicked cool they took a big shot.
I know someone that worked on the project in the early days. It was always incredibly difficult technology, they were always behind on their accuracy targets, and the solutions were increasingly kludgy as they layered more and more complex systems on top. An honorable failure.
A lot of smart people really tried to make it work.
That's great but they could have been honest up-front and said "The plan is that this is eventually fully-automated but we estimate that it needs supervised training for X amount of time in order to handle Y% of transactions automatically".
But this is tech and you just lie because hardly anyone in the investor class knows enough to call you out on it or they are just going with the lie to make a buck off of other rubes.
Privacy concerns aside, I thought it was a cool project. I agree that “convenience store” was probably not the best target but I think it was an effective enough proof of concept (creating a decent sized chain of them probably wasn’t the best idea) . I’ve seen the system used more effectively in smaller situations like stadium concessions, where the duration of the transactions needs to be very short to facilitate throughout.
It's also pretty par for the course from Amazon automation initiatives. Like Glacier being marketed as robotic tape drive loaders, where in reality it is mostly just regular old S3 running on the outdated server clusters.
It only takes 1 employee to staff 20 self checkouts for comparison.
For a full fat grocery store. With zero change or adjustment to the rest of the grocery store. And customers weirdly like self checkouts even when they are a dramatically worse outcome (compared to the highish bar of well trained cashiers)
We like self-checkout because there's hardly ever a line.
An idle self-checkout machine costs the store almost nothing. An idle cashier costs the store wages. So the stores will always skimp on cashiers, leading to lines, wasting my time.
What exactly is the point of a well trained cashier, what service do they provide. I guess I appreciate what the bagger does and the cashier knows the codes for the loose vegetables but those are minor benefits in my opinion.
AI is not unique in this regard. We just saw the same thing with the crypto/blockchain nonsense.
Regulation lags so far behind that you can get away with bad behavior long enough that, by the time regulation catches up, you can buy your way out of consequences.
I will do what it takes to defend my country and the countries of others that are attacked, from within or without. And take into account that I'm really a pacifist at heart, absolutely abhor war and do not believe in the kind of idiocy that war stands for. Even so, there are limits to what I'll let happen before I will reluctantly become an active participant.
You are all over this thread spouting your crap, I highly doubt that anything at all will change your mind. But you sound scared of protests, and you seem to believe that the attackers are the defenders and the other way around. One day the attackers will come for you, and by then there will be nobody left to defend you.
You mean the ones that we had the ability to remove in previous administrations without the need for harassing and assaulting non-criminals and citizens on the street?
As for the list, do you think this DHS compiles a list of its fuckups and publishes it? I can get you some news articles if you’d like.
And their list of fuckups is longer than their list of successes. It's like shooting with a machine gun into a random crowd because you think there might be a criminal in there somewhere. And that's when we for the moment pretend that their stated reason is their real reason, one that becomes increasingly less plausible.
This really is just domestic terrorism, only the government is the one doing the terrorizing.
Here's the problem, from what I've been hearing most of the actual criminals they've been "catching" are turned over by local and state law enforcement agencies with the rest are either in the process of criminal proceedings (that pesky "innocent until proven guilty" thing) or are involved in the immigration process as dictated by law.
They are literally pulling people out of judicial hearings, where the people are trying to comply with the law, and throwing them on airplanes without due process. Or just randomly snatching people off the streets with no probable cause including the occasional US citizen based on their (ancestors) national origin.
Seriously, my step-father's family became US citizens as a result of the Mexican-American War and the federal courts say it's probable cause to detain them based on their physical appearance. Like, WTF???
--edit--
Just remembered my grandmother saying she didn't teach her children Spanish because she didn't want them to grow up with and accent because she was literally beat if she spoke Spanish in school. True, this was 100 years ago but still...
No, blue state sanctuary cities do not turn over illegal alien criminals to ICE. They release them back into the community even though they have a ICE notice on them. ICE is then forced to track down these criminals themselves while being tracked and harassed by crazy far left agitators that do everything in their power to protect these criminals.
You know, for all my flaws I've always tried my hardest to be on the right side of history.
One can both believe that immigration policy is broken and also that the current way it's being enforced is immoral and unlawful. I took the same oath to the constitution when I joined the military as they did when they went into federal service and can see when when things are going off the rails.
My eulogy should be: "U.S. Paratrooper, Decorated Combat Veteran, Crazy Far Left Agitator"
This is a great paper but, in my experience, most people in tech love this paper because it allows them to say "To hell with pursuing reality. Here is MY reality".
>@dang and other mods - when ICE abduct your kids on the way home from school, kick in your door and shoot people in your street will you feel proud of your cowardly behaviour here?
It won't happen to them because their boss (Garry Tan) is associated with the power behind the thrown (Peter Thiel).
If I submitted this, I'd have to punch myself in the face repeatedly.