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Re:Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery S... by baumy on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @08:04PM (#39912189)
I worked for Amazon in Seattle when Amazon Go first launched. As you'd expect, lots of SDE teams made games out of trying to fool the thing in various ways.

A few attempts were successful early on (passing items back and forth, one person moving something to the wrong shelf and another person picking it up, people dressing in identical outfits, etc), but the success rate in fooling the system was very very low. No method of trying to trick it that I ever heard of worked consistently, and it definitely seemed to get harder to fool the longer the store was open.

At the time I thought that whatever algos were being run on the camera feeds were getting better. Knowing that it was basically all manual, I'm not sure what the explanation is for the store seemingly getting harder to fool over time. Possibly just placebo, or people lost interest in trying so hard to fool it.

Re:Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery S... by burntalmonds on Tuesday April 02, 2024 @09:53PM (#39912844)
Thomas Crown Affair at the grocery store.
Re:Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery S... by eyegor on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @12:03AM (#39913497)
Probably fewer patrons and similar number of employees in the sweatshops. More eyes per patron leads to fewer errors. Or maybe they trained the best grocery cv model around from having a big high quality dataset, and you were fighting it. But then I'd think the tech would've been passed to whole foods instead of packing up shop, so final guess is sweatshop singularity theory.
Re:Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery S... by throwazr on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @12:51AM (#39913707)
You underestimated the silicon valley engineers
Re:Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery S... by ilikecakeandpie on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @10:49AM (#39918228)
Seems a little cruel in retrospect considering it was humans watching you, but I suppose there wasn't an easy way to gain this information