Can they change the title to say "Amazon walks out ..."
Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
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Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#152I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I go. I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan a…
It's like a gift-registry, but you take all the stuff with you when you're done instead of letting other people buy it for you later. We've got Barcode guns at self-checkout here, and I've begun to arrange my items barcode-up in the cart, so I can just get everything rapidly. I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway.
That's become a thing at Home Depot, and I do exactly the same. I wish all the self-checkouts would use guns. Once you get used to just putting things in the cart code-up, it makes checkout pretty painless.
Heck, I even do the 'leave the bags in the car' trick too. I'm going to be using the cart anyway, so why do the extra step at the checkout instead of just loading it directly into the bags in the car.
Glad to know I'm not the only person who thinks this is a good way to do it.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like a gift-registry, but you take all the stuff with you when you're done instead of letting other people buy it for you later. We've got Barcode guns at self-checkout here, and I've begun to arrange my items barcode-up in the cart, so I can just get everything rapidly. I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway.
Interesting, it works the other way around here. You get a portable barcode gun that you carry around the store or put in a sort of cup holder on the cart. So I always bring a bag or a foldable crate, throw everything in while shopping and then put that in the car.
I'm in the US, and we have both. It varies by store. Some have scan-as-you-go, some have self-checkout with fixed scanners, some have gun scanners. My personal preference is gun scanners at self checkout.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like a gift-registry, but you take all the stuff with you when you're done instead of letting other people buy it for you later. We've got Barcode guns at self-checkout here, and I've begun to arrange my items barcode-up in the cart, so I can just get everything rapidly. I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway.
>I often don't bring my bags with me, because I'm going to have to load everything into the car anyway. Thats an interesting optimization. Don't bag your stuff in the store just walk out with a cart of loose groceries. Especially for someone who simply MUST bring all the groceries inside with one trip, I can just load up a crate.
Back in the days when we got plastic shopping bags, I considered it an art form to see if I could get an entire trunk load of groceries into the house in a single trip. Without squishing the bread.
You can get a lot of bags on your arms, and one or two jugs of milk in each hand depending on how long your fingers are.
It just isn't as fun with the reusable folding bags. Or the paper bags some retailers use -- the ones with handles are the worst, they rip a good part of the time. Actually easier to carry a normal paper bag than one with handles.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Of course, my colleague and I (who were working on computer vision at the time) did stuff like take our bags off, put them in the middle of the floor, and roll a can of soda into the bag, just to see what would happen." I'm many jurisdictions this could be enough to get you prosecuted for shoplifting if it evaded payment.
After advertising "Just Walk Out"?
Yeah, the author is trying to see what would happen if they roll a can into the bag. This is meant to conceal the act from the computer. The act of concealing merchandise is all that is required in many jurisdictions. If they walked out without the concealing act, then I would think the error should be on the store.
There have been some cases of self checkout prosecution too. They don't need any proof of intent. Even regular errors can be prosecuted.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the supermarkets where I live (English Midlands) have scan as you shop. I stopped using it after they required using their loyalty cards/apps to use it.
I'm not a fan of the data tracking that I know those loyalty programs are for, but at least in the US most stores overcharge you if you don't use them (they present it as giving a "discount" if you use them but really you are just getting the fair price denied to non-members) so you would need to have deep pockets to resist them out of principle.
Around here the main difference is lower pricing on some items, so I mostly just buy those items somewhere else.
I also use one loyalty app only when I get an offer.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if GPT-4's performance has degraded in recent months because there are less human data contractors on standby to answer questions GPT flags as low-confidence. GPT might be "refusing to answer questions" because it's not able to escalate tough queries to a human.
Not plausible, even when it's on slow mode it's too fast to be contacted out to humans
To be clear: ChatGPT-4 is in general both far too fast and far too stupid for humans to be answering any more than a tiny fraction (But last year I repeatedly saw ChatGPT-4 respond token-by-token much more slowly than a human would! E.g. several seconds between words. It was clearly not a human responding: at least a few times I was testing on preschool counting questions and GPT-4 was not able to answer them. I interpreted the slowness as GPT's poor quantitative reasoning. But what you're saying is simply not true, sometimes ChatGPT-4 is (or was) extremely slow.
Regardless, if OpenAI was running this con it probably wouldn't have been real-time humans writing. First of all it might be enough to have a human in the "mixture of experts" who decides the best of multiple responses when GPT-4 is unable to come to an automated conclusion. But humans could be writing ChatGPT responses due to a quirk in their UX:
- ChatGPT errors out on a certain question and asks you to try again later, as it does (or used to do) frequently
- the response is prepared by the human contractor while the user waits patiently for ChatGPT to resolve its technical difficulty
- when the user asks again ChatGPT can largely read off the answer, using its (genuine) language-processing abilities to handle variations in phrasing/etc
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They likely had this workforce to train a system that they hoped would eventually operate autonomously. That being said, it sounds like it never panned out. And this is why I think current “AI” technologies are a dead end. Once the rest of the market realizes that maybe we’ll finally get past this “AI” hype bubble.
That's an interesting point. Amazon tried an AI application where errors were a cost to Amazon, rather than to the consumer. They failed to make it work well enough to use. What AI applications are in use where the error cost is imposed on the company using them, not the consumer? Reading paper checks and mail envelopes come to mind. Those are automated and work well. Waymo's automatic driving, but not Tesla's. What…
> Those are automated and work well. Waymo's automatic driving, but not Tesla's.
If Tesla geofenced their FSD applications as aggressively as Waymo, I suspect the two would be near peers. You can hide an incredible lack of a capability by artificially limiting the scope of your application.
> This is a useful metric for gauging real progress.
Sure, cost / benefit analysis is always useful. I would propose a broader analysis for grading “AI” disruption though.
1. Are humans involved at any step?
2. What is the probability of success?
3. What is the consequence of failure? (Profit loss / property loss / personal injury, etc…)
4. How many variations on a domain (think winter driving, summer driving, driving in a tropical storm, driving dirt roads in a jungle, etc) can the application work in while maintaining consistent performance?
5. Can the model leverage its “learnings” to solve problems / reason about new domains that it hasn’t been trained on?
That’s just a few metrics I can think of off the top of my head that would help to distinguish a true disruptor from the hype.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
But I don't want to interact with the cashier. The store near me is almost the thing I actually want. I walk into the store, I wander about picking items I want off shelves, and scanning them with my phone, I put them in a bag I happen to have with me, or my pockets, or my backpack, or whatever, it doesn't matter, then I walk to the big graphical terminals near the exit and scan that too. That's the only place where…
> because almost nobody stands in a line to have somebody else scan your shopping, why would you? A decently trained human can scan & bag far faster than I can at the self-checkouts. The self-checkout machines are also sometimes buggy. Our local Safeway's self-checkout was extremely particular: if you scanned the next item prior to the computer registering and processing the weight from the previous item being set do…
That and I also just like interacting with a person instead of a machine, especially if the machine is yelling at me.
Re: Amazon ditches 'just walk out' checkouts at its grocery stores
#160I think that the scan-as-you-shop style systems are definitely the next realistic step for grocery stores. I really like using them, as they allow me to put stuff directly into my bags as I go. I think a further improvement on a system like that would be to use the cheap RFID tech (UHF EPC) so that when you walk through the anti-theft barriers, the system knows exactly what you got, and then there's no need to scan a…
Weigh each customer/cart going in and going out. Make sure the weight of each item is a prime number. And... remove any restrooms from the store.