What you describe is not at all my experience in Europe (mainly UK and Portugal, plus a bit Germany).

Small tills with not enough room for a big shopping, pushy and badly designed software, the whole “check your age” for alcohol with a single employee handling 20+ self-checkout tills, the thing bitching and moaning if you bring your own bag, different quirks for self-checkout tills in different stores, not taking cash payments and so on, are incredibly common and what’s rare is the ones which work smoothly.

I mean, I would love those schemes some people describe (in Scandinavia?) were you basically check things in as you pick them up, but I have yet to see anything like that myself in the countries I lived in during the self-checkout era.

So far all I’ve seen in Europe are shit cheap implementations which only ever beat the manual checkout in speed if all you have is a handful of things (so, not a weekly shopping) or the store itself purposefully closed pretty much all manual tills and caused huge queues in order to push people to use self-checkout.

PS: By the way, in my experience in Europe, it’s always you that pack your own bags, which actually makes the manual checkout even faster since at the same time the cashier is doing the checkout you’re doing the bagging, so the whole thing can go twice as fast whilst in a self-checkout it’s only one person doing both.

Not only that - wiretaps have Judicial Oversight in that they require a Court Order (well, in most of the World, not sure if that’s the case in present day America) which a Judge supposedly only issues if there’s reason to suspect the person whose lines are tapped of committing or preparing to commit a crime, whilst Antrophic’s surveillance of people’s conversations with their chatbot has no Judicial Oversight at all and has no minimum legal threshold that must be reached before it is allowed to happen.

Yeah, I had a similar experience getting my Orange Pi 5 Pro to just allow me access to I2C (though once you figure it out, it’s a lot easier to also get stuff like GPIO, SPI and so on to work).

In fact that’s the general problem with the chinese SBCs compared to the Raspberry Pi devices - their support software, documentation and general support out there on the Internet from other users is a much weaker, at least in English - to get that stuff to work I actually on my Orange Pi I actually had to get an Ubuntu for Rockchip and then figure out how to manually add a device tree overlay with the required devices enabled whilst I believe the Raspberry Pi just has a utility that does it for you.

HOWEVER, the user who had asked for advice higher in this thread only seems to care about hosting, for which you just need “normal” Linux functionality not the embedded side of things, in which case those things work just fine even with just ARMbian - as far as I can tell all those manufactures do make available a Linux distro for their devices which supports the built-in peripherals (most relevant for hosting, wi-fi and when present ethernet) and does the normal things a desktop Linux does. That said, they quickly stop pushing out updates to it, which might be a problem.

This is why I mentioned Orange Pi and in another response suggested general Chinese SBCs - if all you need if run-of-the-mill Linux server functionality in a cheap platform, those probably suffice.

I just checked and at least the Orange Pi ones are maybe 50% up in price.

Buy now! Quickly! Things will only get worse if you wait! I’m telling you this because I’m such a nice guy!

– Salesman