The lower middle class, Walmart's key demographic, in general is pretty jittery about automation making their jobs obsolete. Reminding them via a baker-bot is not good for business.
It's the kind of thing say Burger King should pursue, not Walmart. While Burger King may lose some customers to the mentioned spook-factor, it can carve out a niche by using the automation to be cheaper than competitors. You'd gain enough customers by being cheaper to compensate for those lost due to the spook-factor. You'd be trading one kind of customer for another, more or less.
Walmart cannot take the same risk, being it's not in the food business. People generally don't come to Walmart for food such that cheaper food is not a significant selling point, it's only a side perk. Burger King can afford to switch its target audience via such automation, Walmart can't.
I'll try to explain this with numeric examples using rough values.
Burger King (BK) before bots: - Typical purchase amount: $10
BK after bots: - Typical purchase amount: $8 - Customers lost due to bot-spook: %30 - Customers gained due to lower prices: %30 (Profit margins could be the owner benefit.)
Walmart (WM) before bots: - Typical purchase amount: $80
WM after bots: - Typical purchase amount: $79 - Customers lost due to bot-spook: %20 - Customers gained due to lower fast-food prices: %5
Because people don't buy as much store-cooked fast food at WM compared to BK, they are not saving enough to be persuaded by the price difference, both in total difference, and compared to their total purchase.
But because the baker-bot is fairly obvious, or will make news, many will pay attention. Thus, the bot-spook is almost the same amount as BK. WM would have most the spook but a fraction of customer wallet benefits of BK.
Thus, having bots in your store may only make sense if it lowers the prices and/or improves the quality of your main products. Customers will tolerate bot-spook more if they get a significantly better deal because of it. Don't waste jitters on side items.
[Why new tech results in staff reduction] They are going to be making significant capital expenditures. In order to do so without impacting cash flow, they're getting rid of payroll expenses.
Newer tech usually requires more staff during the adjustment and learning curve for it. A nearby message suggested 5G itself may lead to staff-reducing automation and factoring. Perhaps in the longer run, but in the shorter term it likely will require babysitting and tuning. They should wait until such efficiency & automation actually works before ditching staff. "Don't count your chickens before they hatch."
scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with [living biomass] hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet.
We must compete with the mass of this life or be overwhelmed. We can make more humans, or eat more pizza and burgers. I have more experience with the second.
and the general consolidation of power that's been going on for about 30, 40 years now.
Between roughly 1996 and 2006, I tried 4 different dot-com start-ups. Two were big flops, and two were minor flops that hinted of promise if I had spent more time on them. But we had young kids and I thus had less time to spend on uncertain startups. One also starts thinking more practical when family comes: you need money here and now.
I also worked for a startup. Their "pay" was partly in stock-options, which were worthless after the crash.
There was a "wild frontier" vibe back then. Friends and colleagues discussed all kinds of "dot com" start-up ideas at lunch. We considered a dating site, real-estate catalog, custom horoscopes/fortunes, naughty chat-bots, category-specific auction sites, fee-based programming components, and so forth. There seemed to be a "first to market wins" pattern such that if you are the first in category X, then you can get enough funding and search-engine results to dominate X, or at least be bought out for millions.
Those days are mostly gone. There are already established competitors in almost every category you can think of. Maybe some new technology will create another "mass garage-startup billionaire" era with the same feel one of these days. YouTube star? Perhaps, but that's not where most geeks feel competitive. Plus, our cats are lazy and ugly, and would rather code Python than sing and dance.
I admit "lacked" is vague, but it was made clear in the quote below it. How would you rework my statement & quote context so that such was clear yet brief?
If one's neighbor asked, "Do you have a hammer", but one only had a broken hammer that was likely beyond repair, typically they'd simply reply, "Sorry, I don't".
I more thorough answer would have been, "I only have a broken hammer". Would the neighbor want the fuller second answer? It depends on the audience. If you are both retired and have all the time in the world to chat, then the second may be more appropriate. Working people usually prefer the shorter. Slashdotters usually prefer compact statements, based on my experience, even if such may be more ambiguous as a trade-off.
Pointing out a few anecdotes from the USA doesn't make it remotely the same.
Note that I am responding to a post that was supported with only anecdotes. Why should one person's anecdotes override another's?
"Continuous Improvement" exists in America
Often it's only on paper; a Dilbertian exercise in buzzword compliance.
I will agree that more autonomy is probably tolerated in US companies, but the level and proportion is hard to objectively measure. If anyone wishes to provide an objective study on such, it would be welcomed.
Also, Japan does quite well economically despite having very top-down and seniority-oriented corporations. However, they do specialize in precision and quality more so than start-ups and being first-to-market. Maybe China will end up doing something similar.
Startups also are common in China. If a boss is holding one back there, they too can leave and form a new company.
The most compelling evidence of Voyager 2's exit from the heliosphere came from its onboard Plasma Science Experiment (PLS), an instrument that stopped working on Voyager 1 in 1980, long before that probe crossed the heliopause.
Doing better than your boss results in you losing your job - and thus it's implicitly discouraged to try to innovate.
How is that different in the USA? HP turned down Steve Wozniak's desktop computer idea, and he had to quit to pursue it. The most successful startups begin in a garage, loft, or dorm, not a regular company with suits.
One can relatively easily go off and start a company in China also. Perhaps the idea of challenging the boss or elders is somewhat more accepted here, but you usually have to kiss up to those who control your paycheck in any business. Take it from an American boat-rocker.
Lack of competition? Google Maps is also going to shit. They have all these pop-up panels that block the map itself, and no "X" in the corner or equivalent to close them. It's often not even spam panels, it's just shit in your way, like somebody at Google is being paid by panel quantity and graded on their hard-to-close-ness. I've been turning to Bing Maps, gulp.
From the article: "That Alibaba's voice assistant can do so suggests it's more sophisticated than Google Duplex, judging from similar sample calls demoed by Google. It's worth noting, however, that Alibaba's demo call is designed for onstage presentation; the experience could differ in reality. Currently, the agent is used only to coordinate package deliveries, but Jin said it could be expanded to handle other topics. He wouldn't fully reveal how the assistant was trained..."
A domain-specific bot, such as package delivery, is much easier to tune and perfect then a general assistant which has to handle a wider array of topics.
one thing the Title-II regulation did do is saddle ISP's with a lot of paperwork and regulatory hurdles, increasing costs. For a carrier like the large companies which dominate the landscape this wasn't a big deal. For those smaller companies trying to bring another option to the mix, this was much more difficult...
One partial solution is to have many of the regulations only apply to ISP's above a certain market-share % in an area. This would allow upstarts to gain market-share before being subject to regulation details.
I think [web ui's] have already taken over. Native programs often feels like clunky squared dinosaurs when compared.
Decently-built native apps are usually more responsive (act faster) because they are not JavaScript emulations of real widgets. HTML doesn't define combo-boxes, data grids, clickable trees, dialog boxes, and has a crappy/useless multi-select that requires the friggen Ctrl key. Thus, they all have to be emulated. And the JavaScript versions of these widgets often degenerate or break as later versions of the browsers come out.
Why the hell the HTML standard hasn't defined such GUI widgets after 25 years is a crying shame. Fire somebody already.
apple; the company that lies, cheats and steals tells its employees to lie. I always figured being dishonest was a requirement to work at apple.
If you think that behavior is limited to Apple, you are naive. I've been paid to lie and cheat at multiple companies. I usually try to leave such dirt-bags, but such had not been easy during recessions.
You like Notes which is clearly against the current
Every org has systems, projects, customers, etc. for which they need to track unstructured or semi-structured info about. For highly structured stuff, RDBMS or domain software is often used. For lightly structured stuff, file systems or email are usually used. File-systems and email don't cross-reference attributes/categories very well.
But there's not much in-between these high-structure and low-structure tools. That's where Notes-like products come in handy. It's "soft structure", or incremental structure.
Notes had warts, but it worked at that one org. Maybe it needs like-minded people to work well. Many don't like communicating that way and/or don't like documenting their decision steps for others (or future self). Perhaps holding "secrets" closely gives them a sense of job security?
As far as Factor Tables, I suspect when layered, they are or can be made equivalent to neural nets, but I'm not smart enough to prove it mathematically. Keep in mind that which filter-table is applied and how much can also be controlled by factor-table(s) also. Keep on tinkering with them; it's an under-explored niche. $Billions are flowing into neural net R&D, why not investigate their cousins a bit?
even for normal surveillance footage, generally auto-focus on lenses will adjust so that the most interesting item in an image will be the item with the highest frequency distribution as the lens will blur the image surrounding the object
Do you mean movement, or albedo (brightness) contrast? I'm not sure people have more contrast than say parks or desks. There are diff algorithms for auto-focus. The simplest is usually to maximize the sharpness of edges (gradients) near the center of the image; being that's where the user usually points the camera.
the company I worked for used Lotus Notes. What an absolute disaster.
I used Lotus Notes at one place I contracted at years ago and loved it! I even started building an open-source version (got side-tracked by life, though), and it inspired an idea for "Dynamic Relational" so that columns (attributes) don't have to be hard-wired in RDBMS ahead of time. We have dynamic programming languages, why not dynamic RDBMS also? Create-On-Write, no DBA.
One can make quicks forms in Notes for tracking projects and systems. You could then look up details based on different parameters (query-by-example). Every message (form instance) had a unique ID, and you could refer to other forms via that ID alone. "See #12345 for more..." It's what SharePoint could have been if they didn't F it up.
Our implementation did have a glitch whereby it occasionally lost messages. I don't know if the product was outright buggy, or if the system admin didn't bother running the cleaning step often enough.
One of these days I may finish my open-source version. There are already some out there, but I don't like their feature set and UI.
The US in general needs stronger worker protection laws.
Warning: rant ahead.
Part of me wants to allow red states to go ahead and [bleep] their constituents as punishment for voting for deregulation of slimy corporations.
They were not happy with ACA keeping them alive, bitching that premiums kept them from buying a new snowmobile. Cadavers like snowmobiles also. Ride on, Deady Reddy!
(Boy, I hated that "default avatar" fad. Every big tech co tried to be social media and have everybody upload their ugly mug. The default gray head is still in many products.)
Slashdot Mirror
The lower middle class, Walmart's key demographic, in general is pretty jittery about automation making their jobs obsolete. Reminding them via a baker-bot is not good for business.
It's the kind of thing say Burger King should pursue, not Walmart. While Burger King may lose some customers to the mentioned spook-factor, it can carve out a niche by using the automation to be cheaper than competitors. You'd gain enough customers by being cheaper to compensate for those lost due to the spook-factor. You'd be trading one kind of customer for another, more or less.
Walmart cannot take the same risk, being it's not in the food business. People generally don't come to Walmart for food such that cheaper food is not a significant selling point, it's only a side perk. Burger King can afford to switch its target audience via such automation, Walmart can't.
I'll try to explain this with numeric examples using rough values.
Burger King (BK) before bots:
- Typical purchase amount: $10
BK after bots:
- Typical purchase amount: $8
- Customers lost due to bot-spook: %30
- Customers gained due to lower prices: %30
(Profit margins could be the owner benefit.)
Walmart (WM) before bots:
- Typical purchase amount: $80
WM after bots:
- Typical purchase amount: $79
- Customers lost due to bot-spook: %20
- Customers gained due to lower fast-food prices: %5
Because people don't buy as much store-cooked fast food at WM compared to BK, they are not saving enough to be persuaded by the price difference, both in total difference, and compared to their total purchase.
But because the baker-bot is fairly obvious, or will make news, many will pay attention. Thus, the bot-spook is almost the same amount as BK. WM would have most the spook but a fraction of customer wallet benefits of BK.
Thus, having bots in your store may only make sense if it lowers the prices and/or improves the quality of your main products. Customers will tolerate bot-spook more if they get a significantly better deal because of it. Don't waste jitters on side items.
They didn't name the company. *coughcast*. I wonder who could possibly be that slimey. *coughcast* *coughcast*
Newer tech usually requires more staff during the adjustment and learning curve for it. A nearby message suggested 5G itself may lead to staff-reducing automation and factoring. Perhaps in the longer run, but in the shorter term it likely will require babysitting and tuning. They should wait until such efficiency & automation actually works before ditching staff. "Don't count your chickens before they hatch."
Sounds fishy.
We must compete with the mass of this life or be overwhelmed. We can make more humans, or eat more pizza and burgers. I have more experience with the second.
Turns out we kind of did; the probes we sent were perhaps not sterilized well enough.
You didn't use the GoogleWebs properly. I found about a dozen.
Slashdot is OCD school.
Between roughly 1996 and 2006, I tried 4 different dot-com start-ups. Two were big flops, and two were minor flops that hinted of promise if I had spent more time on them. But we had young kids and I thus had less time to spend on uncertain startups. One also starts thinking more practical when family comes: you need money here and now.
I also worked for a startup. Their "pay" was partly in stock-options, which were worthless after the crash.
There was a "wild frontier" vibe back then. Friends and colleagues discussed all kinds of "dot com" start-up ideas at lunch. We considered a dating site, real-estate catalog, custom horoscopes/fortunes, naughty chat-bots, category-specific auction sites, fee-based programming components, and so forth. There seemed to be a "first to market wins" pattern such that if you are the first in category X, then you can get enough funding and search-engine results to dominate X, or at least be bought out for millions.
Those days are mostly gone. There are already established competitors in almost every category you can think of. Maybe some new technology will create another "mass garage-startup billionaire" era with the same feel one of these days. YouTube star? Perhaps, but that's not where most geeks feel competitive. Plus, our cats are lazy and ugly, and would rather code Python than sing and dance.
(Warning: Pedantic wording discussion ahead)
I admit "lacked" is vague, but it was made clear in the quote below it. How would you rework my statement & quote context so that such was clear yet brief?
If one's neighbor asked, "Do you have a hammer", but one only had a broken hammer that was likely beyond repair, typically they'd simply reply, "Sorry, I don't".
I more thorough answer would have been, "I only have a broken hammer". Would the neighbor want the fuller second answer? It depends on the audience. If you are both retired and have all the time in the world to chat, then the second may be more appropriate. Working people usually prefer the shorter. Slashdotters usually prefer compact statements, based on my experience, even if such may be more ambiguous as a trade-off.
Note that I am responding to a post that was supported with only anecdotes. Why should one person's anecdotes override another's?
Often it's only on paper; a Dilbertian exercise in buzzword compliance.
I will agree that more autonomy is probably tolerated in US companies, but the level and proportion is hard to objectively measure. If anyone wishes to provide an objective study on such, it would be welcomed.
Also, Japan does quite well economically despite having very top-down and seniority-oriented corporations. However, they do specialize in precision and quality more so than start-ups and being first-to-market. Maybe China will end up doing something similar.
Startups also are common in China. If a boss is holding one back there, they too can leave and form a new company.
Voyager 2 has an additional instrument that Voyager 1 lacked during its crossing:
How is that different in the USA? HP turned down Steve Wozniak's desktop computer idea, and he had to quit to pursue it. The most successful startups begin in a garage, loft, or dorm, not a regular company with suits.
One can relatively easily go off and start a company in China also. Perhaps the idea of challenging the boss or elders is somewhat more accepted here, but you usually have to kiss up to those who control your paycheck in any business. Take it from an American boat-rocker.
Lack of competition? Google Maps is also going to shit. They have all these pop-up panels that block the map itself, and no "X" in the corner or equivalent to close them. It's often not even spam panels, it's just shit in your way, like somebody at Google is being paid by panel quantity and graded on their hard-to-close-ness. I've been turning to Bing Maps, gulp.
From the article: "That Alibaba's voice assistant can do so suggests it's more sophisticated than Google Duplex, judging from similar sample calls demoed by Google. It's worth noting, however, that Alibaba's demo call is designed for onstage presentation; the experience could differ in reality. Currently, the agent is used only to coordinate package deliveries, but Jin said it could be expanded to handle other topics. He wouldn't fully reveal how the assistant was trained..."
A domain-specific bot, such as package delivery, is much easier to tune and perfect then a general assistant which has to handle a wider array of topics.
One partial solution is to have many of the regulations only apply to ISP's above a certain market-share % in an area. This would allow upstarts to gain market-share before being subject to regulation details.
Decently-built native apps are usually more responsive (act faster) because they are not JavaScript emulations of real widgets. HTML doesn't define combo-boxes, data grids, clickable trees, dialog boxes, and has a crappy/useless multi-select that requires the friggen Ctrl key. Thus, they all have to be emulated. And the JavaScript versions of these widgets often degenerate or break as later versions of the browsers come out.
Why the hell the HTML standard hasn't defined such GUI widgets after 25 years is a crying shame. Fire somebody already.
Anything that might kill Windows gets my attention.
If you think that behavior is limited to Apple, you are naive. I've been paid to lie and cheat at multiple companies. I usually try to leave such dirt-bags, but such had not been easy during recessions.
"Well then, we have an opportunity to embarrass ourselves big-time and make our customers leave to participate in opportunities at our competitors."
Every org has systems, projects, customers, etc. for which they need to track unstructured or semi-structured info about. For highly structured stuff, RDBMS or domain software is often used. For lightly structured stuff, file systems or email are usually used. File-systems and email don't cross-reference attributes/categories very well.
But there's not much in-between these high-structure and low-structure tools. That's where Notes-like products come in handy. It's "soft structure", or incremental structure.
Notes had warts, but it worked at that one org. Maybe it needs like-minded people to work well. Many don't like communicating that way and/or don't like documenting their decision steps for others (or future self). Perhaps holding "secrets" closely gives them a sense of job security?
As far as Factor Tables, I suspect when layered, they are or can be made equivalent to neural nets, but I'm not smart enough to prove it mathematically. Keep in mind that which filter-table is applied and how much can also be controlled by factor-table(s) also. Keep on tinkering with them; it's an under-explored niche. $Billions are flowing into neural net R&D, why not investigate their cousins a bit?
Do you mean movement, or albedo (brightness) contrast? I'm not sure people have more contrast than say parks or desks. There are diff algorithms for auto-focus. The simplest is usually to maximize the sharpness of edges (gradients) near the center of the image; being that's where the user usually points the camera.
This video will play in your head every time you see Mitch on the news:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I used Lotus Notes at one place I contracted at years ago and loved it! I even started building an open-source version (got side-tracked by life, though), and it inspired an idea for "Dynamic Relational" so that columns (attributes) don't have to be hard-wired in RDBMS ahead of time. We have dynamic programming languages, why not dynamic RDBMS also? Create-On-Write, no DBA.
One can make quicks forms in Notes for tracking projects and systems. You could then look up details based on different parameters (query-by-example). Every message (form instance) had a unique ID, and you could refer to other forms via that ID alone. "See #12345 for more..." It's what SharePoint could have been if they didn't F it up.
Our implementation did have a glitch whereby it occasionally lost messages. I don't know if the product was outright buggy, or if the system admin didn't bother running the cleaning step often enough.
One of these days I may finish my open-source version. There are already some out there, but I don't like their feature set and UI.
Warning: rant ahead.
Part of me wants to allow red states to go ahead and [bleep] their constituents as punishment for voting for deregulation of slimy corporations.
They were not happy with ACA keeping them alive, bitching that premiums kept them from buying a new snowmobile. Cadavers like snowmobiles also. Ride on, Deady Reddy!
Lock up the faceless gray PowerPoint avatars!
(Boy, I hated that "default avatar" fad. Every big tech co tried to be social media and have everybody upload their ugly mug. The default gray head is still in many products.)