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Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

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Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-checkouts aren’t automation. They just change who does the work (to someone not being paid for it).

I've heard this argument, and I just don't get it. I've never heard anyone complain about having to push their own shopping carts. No one pays you to push the cart. Should they? If you want the cart pushed, you push the cart. If you want to check out, you check out. If either one of those is a hardship for you, go elsewhere.

Two thousand years ago, most authors didn't know how to read or write. The erudite author would dictate their words verbally to a scribe, who had learned these specialized skills. Then other scribes and copyists could copy out the manuscript. When Gutenberg made the printing press, more specialized skills emerged: that of typesetting and publishing and printing and all that.

These separations endured well into the 1960s, as secretaries were trained women who could type and take dictation, and their bosses would generally shout into their ears and/or a tape recording device to get their work done. "Diane, take a letter!" was a common trope in the office of yesterday.

When home computing, personal word-processing, and desktop publishing came on the scene, suddenly we had to learn how to type. Suddenly every high school student who needed to write a paper, we all needed to know how to type in order to produce research papers. This was unprecedented. Then with word processing and WYSIWYG, we needed to know fonts, and bold/underline/italic conventions, and this was also unprecdented, because previously this was done for us, behind the scenes, by professionals.

Ultimately all that page layout, and design and visual aesthetics, even finding clipart and adding it appropriately and tastefully, all of that skilled knowledge and labor fell upon the shoulders of the one who was writing a newsletter for a non-profit, or writing technical documentation, or designing an album/CD cover or something.

Eventually those specializations and skills became so democratized that everyone knew them but we all knew them badly. We could do a half-assed job of desktop publishing, whereas a Gutenberg publication in the 18th century could have been a true work of art that was replicated many times.

Now even the em-dash is vilified as a signifier of low-skill slop, when some of us actually took the time to read manuals of style and understand when/how to properly use hyphens, en-dash, and em-dash. But never mind that; elegant grammar and perfect spelling are now the hallmarks of a shitty LLM prompt and HN commenters can just tear down any article by falsely claiming it was AI-written, and you can sic your fake "AI-writing detectors" on anything and 99% tear it down because of your stupid faulty em-dash hueristics.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this argument, and I just don't get it. I've never heard anyone complain about having to push their own shopping carts. No one pays you to push the cart. Should they? If you want the cart pushed, you push the cart. If you want to check out, you check out. If either one of those is a hardship for you, go elsewhere.

Two thousand years ago, most authors didn't know how to read or write. The erudite author would dictate their words verbally to a scribe, who had learned these specialized skills. Then other scribes and copyists could copy out the manuscript. When Gutenberg made the printing press, more specialized skills emerged: that of typesetting and publishing and printing and all that. These separations endured well into the 19…

I’m not sure whether this is a bit of a joke about the broader thrust of my post, but I actually do think tons of the “automation” computers have given us is fake, for many of the reasons you suggest. I think it’s part of why the benefits of all this alleged automation have been more muted than one might expect (though not trivial, to be clear) and that it’s imposed costs in a bunch of ways that aren’t tracked on a P&L sheet but do make life less pleasant.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard this argument, and I just don't get it. I've never heard anyone complain about having to push their own shopping carts. No one pays you to push the cart. Should they? If you want the cart pushed, you push the cart. If you want to check out, you check out. If either one of those is a hardship for you, go elsewhere.

This was an actual thing (complaining about this) when super-markets started to take over from general stores and butcher shops et c. Having to go get your bag of sugar off the warehouse shelf yourself rather than a clerk fetching it for you is unpaid labor on the part of the shopper (and is also not automation).

Oregon recently eliminated their mandatory gas station pump attendants. It seems most people considered that a good thing. For those that prefer the premium experience of having a human cashier, it seems that for now, they're still easy to find. For establishments that regularly expect to have large orders with dozens of items, they'll probably continue. It seems there's less to gain for large complicated orders.

Or perhaps it will go the way of smoking in restaurants. Some people definitely preferred it, but in the US anyway, it's pretty hard to find, if it's even legal anywhere.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If GuinasEyebrows does not want to drive an appropriately security-hardened armored vehicle, then they should not expect that I will not jimmy the lock and hotwire it. If you see me drive it away, no you didn't . People are responsible for their own actions. If you think shoplifting is morally acceptable, don't try to tell me that I didn't see it.

With about a month of practice you could learn to pick 95% of residential locks. So free everything because homeowners didn't bother to secure their stuff!/s Growing up our house physically did not have a lock. Keys never left vehicle ignitions. A frequent experience was buying a farm machinery part and picking it up after hours out of the back of somebody's truck. Living in low trust societies sucks. I've had friend…

>Living in low trust societies sucks.

It does, but that trust is established top down. If businesses in this country act lawlessly with impunity, why would you expect people, especially if they are suffering because of some company's greed, to be the chump who acts nobly while seeing a society that rewards theft?

That is not a normative moral defense of this behavior, just a descriptive one. Why would anyone expect a normal person to see a company receiving a tariff refund for a tariff that person paid and then view stealing from them as a continuation of the theft that the company itself engaged in by not paying them back?

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#175
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco mandates a maximum of 11% margin on goods in the store and aggressively monitor suppliers on that cost. One of the reasons I like costco actually 10% or so is a fine margin to pay.

That is actually quite nice. I’ve been toying with the idea of mandating this 10% maximum margin for products and services on every for-profit company. Trouble is, how do you prevent them making stacks of companies compounding the 10% profits. And is 10% sufficient to build up a buffer for when hard times hit? This thinking has been triggered by fuel producers and sellers making sky rocket profits because of the incr…

You hit on what, in my opinion, is the actual core issue with this type of thinking -- it doesn't compose.

To make a poor analogy to physics: if you measure something which changes when you change unit/frame of reference -- it's not a well-defined thing.

The best policies have the same effect regardless of the legal structure (within the policy) superimposed on the actual action.

Medium policies can be optimized/gamed (perspective) -- but are designed to be adversarial, in that the gamed outcome is at least OK but potentially in fact the desired one (for example -- if you tax land, then not paying the tax means not using up land, which may be a desired policy goal). These can cause issues, though -- common law is an adversarial system, and "justice" can usually be translated to "access to lawyers," imo.

The connection with the above is that while the solution used is probably not universal -- sometimes, the optimal solution is, so the adversarial policy is just an approximation of "good policy".

Bad policies not only don't compose -- but then bureaucrats go on and insert discretion to try to make them compose. On the surface, this often looks like common sense -- but the result is insiders can keep doing the Bad Thing, but you can't do anything which isn't the Way Things Are Done -- because you need approval, and it Looks Bad.

/rant

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#176
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect this law does not apply in cases of fraud. If not, simple tag-switching would be rampant.

They are talking about the price on the shelf vs the price at the register. The price tag on the shelf has information identifying the product. The price at the register is obviously associated to the bar code on the product. So there's no way for a consumer to swap price tags from one product to another. Source - worked at a grocery store in Massachusetts as a teen

[deleted]

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#177

I was in college when self checkout became a thing and it took us all of about 45 seconds to realize that you could just check everything out as bananas. Steak was weighed and priced at 4011 (banana code) as the stoned teenager cashier paid no attention. Everything on the receipt was literally Bananas

There's a tiktok literally floating around right now where somebody sticks a banana band on a cyberpower PC at Walmart and checks out at the self-checkout.

Then the receipt checker at the door checks his receipt and waves him on through.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was an actual thing (complaining about this) when super-markets started to take over from general stores and butcher shops et c. Having to go get your bag of sugar off the warehouse shelf yourself rather than a clerk fetching it for you is unpaid labor on the part of the shopper (and is also not automation).

Oregon recently eliminated their mandatory gas station pump attendants. It seems most people considered that a good thing. For those that prefer the premium experience of having a human cashier, it seems that for now, they're still easy to find. For establishments that regularly expect to have large orders with dozens of items, they'll probably continue. It seems there's less to gain for large complicated orders. Or…

I'd probably be happier about self-checkout if I had previously been expected to tip checkers.

Re: Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero

#180

Lmao more flipper zero crap. I'm sorry, but I'm so sick of seeing "omg hacker man" mystique surrounding flipper, which is exactly what they want because it drives sales. Ofc you can muck about with open and unsecured stuff...like duh. But it annoys me to no end when I have reasonably intelligent friends parrot claims like "flipper can clone the nfc in your credit card and you can steal people's money wow much hack!"

Influencers gonna influence.
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