My local LIDL in Ireland just installed a self-checkout / gate system. Curiously there is an ALDI not far away with self-checkout and no gate. Near to that is a Tesco which has self checkout and another lane for the bar code reader devices. I hardly ever see people with bar code readers. I don’t believe anybody likes those - not staff, not customers.

I don’t see any evidence they’re “pulling back”, at least not in Europe. More and more are self service checkouts than ever before. That said I think stores prefer the kiosks where people scan their items than the kind where people have barcode readers and wander the store scanning (or not scanning) goods.

Fish apparently needs money and has a safe & dry place to store it. And is also capable of constructing signs & writing messages in English on them.

It wouldn’t be dumb if ICE vehicles were also taxed the same way but they’re not. There would be nothing to stop the UK government abolishing fuel tax and slapping 6p a mile or whatever on ICE vehicles

I own an EV (in Ireland). I would not say by any stretch I save that much as running a petrol car. It’s probably in the order of a third perhaps and that’s with a nighttime electricity plan where a kWh might cost 20c which works out about €4 at 15kWh/100km. A petrol car doing 6L/100km would cost about €12 at the moment. If somebody was using public fast chargers they would see very little savings.

There are other expenses like motor taxes, wear & tear (tyres, brakes), servicing, oil changes etc. which might affect the cost. The UK also has a really dumb excise on EVs where they get whalloped with 3p per mile of extra tax. So 100km (62.5miles) is £1.87 of tax to add onto the charge bill. Luckily Ireland doesn’t get it but most other expenses are comparable.

EVs cost about the same as petrol cars these days. The two cheapest cars on sale in the UK are actually EVs. Not good EVs, but still capable of being city runabouts.

And sideways vaginas. Even the men.

As for the service, it doesn’t look very expensive to run, 1 or 2 new clients a year is probably enough to sustain it. I would expect it to run so long as the owner is alive, ironically.

I doubt blockchain will be permanent either. At least it’s distributed I guess which is less fragile than a website. Maybe it would be better if somebody just embedded a (very small) obituary and picture into an RFID or something and epoxied it into the granite.

Anyone could set up a website and point a QR code at it. The issue is one of longevity - what use is a QR code if the site/domain goes down in 5 years? It has to be something which lasts a period of time into the future guaranteed. Or the QR code is just self-describing - 2kb of information about the person.

As for this service, it looks like BS. I see no evidence on their website that they will even try to hold the server in perpetuity or even guarantee it will be up a year from now. I expect the service to last as long as they can convince people to fork out £200 for a link, but that’s it.

And then some asshole in the mould of Erich von Daniken, Graham Hancock will make a career selling books to the credulous proclaiming the signs are from aliens or ancients under the North Pole.

Why do you need glasses at all for a version with no camera? Can’t someone just wear earbuds in that case? Can’t someone’s regular bluetooth (or even tethered) earbuds just talk to the phone in their pocket to do everything?

The easiest way to regulate the AI industry - and any industry for that matter - is to make the board personally liable for any crimes committed by their product. Not liable in a corporate sense with a fine and a slap on the wrist, when their AI hacks into a water reservoir and causes 500 million of flood damage, but in a 20 years in federal prison sense. Same goes for self driving cars, or any other computer, machinery or combination thereof where humans are placing trust in its safe and legal operation. There should be a corporate negligence law of sorts that says if a company is not following the law, industry best practice, including auditing and implementation of all safeguards, safety and other mitigations then they are exposed to criminal liability.

If they’re going to televise you going for a shit, might as well shit right where you stand.

A symptom of homelessness being a thing although it’s a quite understandable mitigation too.

Sadly most open source software is a usability disaster zone, filled with buttons and menus which have nothing to do with what the user is trying to do.

It’s amazing that anybody would waste time trying to ban this or think a ban could withstand the inevitable challenge.

I really want one or more of these AI companies to fail hard. I think their only strategy is literally to burn through billions hoping it’ll be another company that goes to the wall first and they’ll somehow reap the rewards by hanging on longer.

I will happy when this bubble bursts. OpenAI, Grok and several other companies offer nothing substantive and if they’re burning cash and disrupting economies then just die already.