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in a sea of endless anecdotal reactions to this thoroughly-discussed situation, why, exactly, is this random blogger's lament of note? and why is the main image of a young woman's ass?

oh right. because this is blogspam.

Maybe Amazon changed from scanning palms to scanning ...

NEVER MIND.

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Agreed, blogspam indeed!

Anecdotally, I have been impressed by the RFID system the the Decathlon sports store uses. Used it myself and it works a treat. Throw all your items into a bucket, tap your payment card on the normal card machine (or use apple or google pay), collect your stuff and walk out.

The technology isn't even that fancy. Each item has a very cheap radio frequency id tag in it which has a unique number. If that doesn't work there is a handheld barcode scanner (which I've never had to use). A successful payment marks the specific item in a database (probably in-store) so the scanners at the entrance don't set off an alarm when you leave. You don't have to download an app or have an account with anyone. It doesn't need AI, special cameras, weight scales or offshore workers to run.

Here is a random article about it: https://www.nfcw.com/2019/03/19/362056/decathlon-adds-rfid-t...

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how do people thing data gets labelled in the first place? of course there were humans involved
The report that Amazon employed so many people for annotating training/validation data was surprising, but that story has seemed to morph into the idea that Just Walk Out was entirely "fake" - just people "staring at cameras all day in a room playing live video [...] clicking boxes whenever a customer picked a product" which I don't think is well-supported.
I don't really understand the consternation about this. AI was still providing initial labeling and confidence intervals on every interaction, tagging a feed of questionable/unsure situations for humans to verify. The goal would have been to drive down how many of these edge cases needed human verification over time.

During this time range they substantially expanded, including massive Amazon Fresh grocery stores that also offered the just walk out tech. These each would have required model improvements and additional training, meaning they need to keep some amount of human staff on hand. Sure, you can argue this is misleading marketing, but its still a pretty impressive achievement.