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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • It’s faster until you need the human operator to keep coming over because the anti-theft sensors keep getting tripped up by false positive readings. Or you need to find some vegetable code that a normal cashier has memorized.

    Self checkout is great when it’s done well, and total shit when poorly executed. And unfortunately, it’s not always just a matter of technology (which normally keeps improving); it’s often a matter of business model: sometimes customer convenience is really important, other times loss prevention (which creates frustration) is more important.

    I’ve seen countless good self-checkout experiences backslide into crap experience because the business felt that a controlled client is more profitable than a convenienced client.


  • The carbon sequestered in the earth in the form of coal, oil and gas hasn’t always been in the earth. After all, hydro carbons are in fact hundreds of millions of years of dead trees buried under mud sequestering atmospheric CO2. Which implies there was a time with all that CO2 in the air yet still trees to capture it. By releasing it all, we reset the biosphere’s clock to about a time when earth supported a different kind of life (one without us in it), but life nonetheless.

    Frankly, the comparisons to Mars and Venus seem a bit overblown.


  • Cataloging individual DNA data casually at a massive scale opens the door for massive genetic discrimination of all kinds, from discriminatory health insurance premiums and hiring discrimination to aparthied, eugenics, and genocide. “Don’t be silly that’ll never happen here.” Is the height of affluent arrogance.

    Humans have proven themselves to be fully capable of these horrors, it is just a matter of time until it happens again, and when we create tools of consolidated power-- just like IBM created machines that enabled Nazi concentration camps–we only increase the chance of enabling some deranged element of society oto repeat these catastrophic horrors.

    All that downside just so we can consume 15 minutes of dopamine.





  • SkyNTP@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldEuropean Union Presses Ahead with Article 45
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    11 months ago

    It’s stupid shit like this why regulation is not the answer to big tech. But then we wouldn’t need regulation if big tech didn’t ruin all that was good about the Internet to begin with.

    People are the problem. At large scale they turn everything to shit. Both in the private sector and in the public sector. Both meddling, making decisions on your behalf. In all cases taking your power away. It was better when we were just small communities, suffering and learning from the consequences of our own actions.