Not wrong. But the payment provider literally already has the age. Just force them to tell the shop whether the potential buyer is an adult or not. The solution is literally legally and technically trivial with basically no privacy impact.

So yeah, this is probably yet another case of not actually being about child safety at all.

The idea of the self-checkout was that you literally just pass by some scanner with a full cart and it instantly displays the list of items with prices and sum. You just need to tap your card or phone on the reader and are done with it.

The implemented reality was very far away from that idea though. That’s why it failed.
Customers are pissed because they have to do the cashier’s job. And they do compensate themselves with some extra price reduction as a system requiring cooperation obviously can’t reliably detect theft. And if you had a detective watching the cams, you could as well just go back to cashiers - which they seem to now do.

In the end this is yet another failed “fake it till you make it” bet on future tech which just didn’t materialize in time. Shops can tank some customer dissatisfaction for a time and then profit a lot from being the first to do the new thing when it becomes actually possible a few months later. But pissing off the shoppers isn’t a good long-term strategy.

Bruh. Attack the actual problems. there really are enough of them. No need to attack the only good point.
I wished every industry would “camouflage” their factories like that.

You can. But like always in life, there are risks. What you say in public is at high risk to be recorded now. What you tell AI can land on the desk of some reviewer who has half the IQ of the AI you talked to. Misinterpretation happens a lot.
Also, where you live matters a lot. Half of what I told Perchance could have gotten me in prison in the UK. But it’s all legal where I am.
And obviously, if you really don’t want your AI conversations to be read by anyone else, you need to use local AI for that.

She clearly didn’t intent to act on it and didn’t intend for it to be read by anyone else than her AI boyfriend. So it’s not matching the criteria of the law. Legally, she did nothing wrong.

Yeah. Not a surprise.

everyone has bet on AI getting good enough to fully replace humans fast. CEOs mandated use of AI. The results weren’t as great as expected. CEOs started limiting AI use to counter the token cost explosion after employees found out how to waste tokens fast.

At the same time, China’s AI development is driven by the party instead of companies. They aren’t so much interested in money as they are in the strategic solution to the demographic problem caused by the one-child policy (which worked a bit too well too fast). The companies there plan on making money by providing the compute (they literally have the power and a two digit number of nucular GW under construction right now).
So their models are almost as good as US ones and freely downloadable to run on whatever hardware you want. That naturally limits the longterm-achievable AI token prices to little more than the cost of just providing the raw compute.

US AI companies are also in a cut-throat competition for customers right from the start. That obviously doesn’t help to keep prices high. Currently, they all burn money so fast that it’s hard for a human mind to comprehend.
None of the US AI companies will survive the next decade if they don’t actually are the only one making AI actually able to fully replace human workers. They will all go bankrupt and might take the whole US economy with them.
Nvidia will probably be the real winner if they don’t fuck this up somehow (not sure if that is even possible) because they are the ones selling the shovels in this gold rush.

In two decades, it will be normal to have the capabilities of current frontier models running locally on your Chinese phone.