So, about 1 and a half hours per European every year? That's pretty good to avoid gifting my data to adtech shitheads

It's interesting that they picked Amazon Go as an example of the power of AI (or ML) when in actuality most of the grunt work in those stores is done by "dumb" sensors AFAIK. The store "knows" that an item has been picked up from a certain shelf and thus it assumes that the item is what is usually on that shelf, it has little to do with either CV or AI in general, just careful placement of the items and weight sensing. I think that if you let a few kids roam free in there picking stuff up and setting it down in an unexpected place the magic of AI would dissolve into thin air.

Have you actually visited one?

I've been a couple times to one of the SF locations with coworkers. We definitely tried to trick system by passing items between us, and putting items down in random locations and then picking them back up later. When we left the store everyone got charged for the items they had on them.

I think you are too dismissive in saying its "just careful placement of the items and weight sensing".

How do you know there aren't humans on the other side of the cameras doing the item-customer matching?

Go has relatively few stores. Seems like the sort of thing you can still do manually, especially if the model expresses doubt.

I went to one of these stores in Seattle on a weekday afternoon with a couple friends. It was literally packed with people. We tried breaking the system by leaving items in random places and exchanging them between us. It still charged me accurately for a couple bottled waters, a sandwich, and some other snacks.

Customer "4201, tracer". Troublemaker. Enable customer-specific pricing increases until resolution.

Again, how do you know there aren't humans on the other side of the cameras/sensors facilitating this?

At the scale they're operating at and the accuracy you point out, to me it's more plausible they're having humans assist.

I think they're saying that humans behind cameras likely wouldn't be able to do this accurately.

Except that cameras in stores have been used for anti-shoplifting for decades. They've been used for more subtle things like monitoring tables at casinos.

I mean, I'm just asking the question how people know for sure Go isn't (at least partly) a Turk. It seems like an obvious thing to ask? But I first came to wonder if there's manual component involved after shopping a few times at Go. When it was busy, it took sometimes well over an hour to get a receipt. When it was empty, it was immediate. How come?

Also, the accuracy is completely anecdotal both ways... at least one person I visited the store with never got billed.

This is the fun kind of Turing test: tasks where only a computer/mechanized system can succeed.

It's also RFID tags, which some other stores use to track product locations.

I can't help but think -- I'll bet if things get tricky they pass the footage to a human to sort out.

Did you forget about the aspect of the store that knows who picked up what? You focused completely on the irrelevant aspect. The store tracks every customer to those dumb sensors and then keeps a running tally of their cart. The dumb sensors are used as double confirmation to handle occlusion.

What the other commenter said is absolutely true, but what's even more important is that 3080 doesn't seem to support SLI so you're "stuck" with one 3090 with that budget (which seems to be the only card supporting SLI this gen).

Not an expert in ML, but I don’t think CUDA uses SLI at all.

SLI is specific to rendering. Depending on the workload, it’s sometimes makes perfect sense to split GPGPU jobs into multiple GPUs. An extreme example of that approach is crypto-currency miners who sometimes use a dozen of GPUs in a single computer.

The only limitation, the working set used by each GPU needs to fit in VRAM of that GPU, otherwise GPUs gonna bottleneck on I/O as opposed to compute, will be very slow. For ML, this means the setup of two 3080 GPUs will be limited to 10GB model sizes.

How can it track social connections when the codes are anonymous by default and can be deanonymized only with an OTP code you generate yourself?

If lots of people are pressured to deanonymize, which they are in this case (it's your civic duty!), that's not a very strong system because a lot can be inferred from "gaps" between people that you are linked to in other contexts.

Just like I can avoid using Facebook but they can still, in principle, keep a shadow profile with lots of details about my life, inferred by putting together knowledge from other people. Just like when I joined LinkedIn it already knew who I knew, without me entering anything except my name and email address (that was spooky, I didn't give it contacts or anything). Just like Google knows your personal interests, even if you delete all cookies at the end of every browsing session.

Are networks of social connections a characteristic that can be fingerprinted just like many other identifying traits (gait detection, location and movement fingerprinting, keystroke forencics, stylometry and linguistic fingerprinting, patterns of timestamps, et cetera)?

Why would it need to account for wall/floors? Two phones will exchange codes when they are less than 1m away, you would have to try very hard to get two people as close as 1m with a wall in between

Also consider the fact that 5 mods control 92 of the top 500 subreddits.

https://www.reddit.com/r/awfuleverything/comments/gjafqw/5_p...

Now imagine if a handful of people controlled 1/5th of the top 500 twitter accounts, instagram accounts, facebook pages

I think you should totally track the .it TLD, it's the Italian one but works wonderfully for word plays in English (and if iirc I've seen a few websites taking advantage of it). Some straightforward examples that come to mind would be buy.it, ship.it, design.it etc., you name(.)it ;)

Edit: also, being the Italian TLD I'm guessing quite a few English words are still available

My fav now is .is, which is Iceland's cc.

It has opened to everyone about a year ago (with some minimal paperwork), it's cheapish ($33 from Namecheap I believe) and makes fun domains (truth.is, acting.is). It is also one of the least squatted cc domains, likely because it isn't available from most places like GoDaddy.

It also doesn't hurt that Iceland is a stable, independent and protective of rights. I worry about .io and wouldn't want to lock a business into that domain space.

Interesting - you're not the first person to recommend the .is TLD! I'll certainly look into it add it if there's enough demand for it! Thanks for letting me know!

Thanks for the suggestion! I've been a fan of the .it TLD especially with products like repl.it repping the brand so I'll definitely consider adding it in my next update!

You have to be in the European Union to register one though. No more English speaking countries in it except for Malta.

Ireland is an English-speaking EU member nation.

Do you need to be, or can you have a "designated person" in the EU? Higher end registrars are happy to supply designated people for address requirement purposes.

Awww, damn it. Got my hopes up for .it tld

Gdpr 100% applies here to any user residing in the EU, and as one I find it appalling that this is opt-out. Further, I couldn't find an option to delete my account, which is another clear violation of GDPR. I wonder how long before they get hit with a juicy fine.

Yeah, my understanding is that if they did not make an attempt to block EU citizens from using the site then GDPR does apply. The problem is that IIRC, when I was singing up they were explicitly serving only few cities in the US. Might be misremembering though, it was a while back.

How is Europe setting itself back compared to other superpowers? If anything, by enforcing privacy by design and default it is setting itself up to become the best place on earth to live if you give any value to your personal information

Tech consultancies need people with certs because usually a client will say 'i want X people with Y certificate on this project or I'll go to someone else'

Also, when a company wants to call them, say, "Microsoft Silver Partner", they typically need at least X people with Microsoft certificates.

Having been in both sides: Consultancy and Client. My experience suggests that this is far from universal.