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A Florida restaurant chain says boosting pay and offering better benefits helped it end its labor shortage
  • Imagine if everyone paid enough then everyone could afford to buy shit so the businesses would actually make more. 🤯

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    A Florida restaurant chain says boosting pay and offering better benefits helped it end its labor shortage
  • It genuinely blows my goddamn mind that this article is actually considered news and has to even be published.

    Like, what the fuck do they teach people in business school these days?? Just cut costs endlessly? Like "I have this restaurant with no employees that serves nothing and charges $1B per customer. I will be rich!" ??

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    White House walks back Biden comments that he had seen pictures of beheaded Israeli children
  • Its main goal was to make the middle east look like a terrible place for women

    And they thought they needed to lie to convince people of this?

    Like honor killings don't already happen and women aren't already second class citizens, at best, in more than a few countries?

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    A Left That Refuses to Condemn Mass Murder Is Doomed
  • No it's not verified at this time according to this:

    https://theintercept.com/2023/10/11/israel-hamas-disinformation/

    The Israel Defense Forces could not confirm a horrific claim that Hamas beheaded babies during a weekend assault, a spokesperson for the military told The Intercept on Tuesday. The claim went viral, becoming a headline-grabbing aspect of a massacre that left more than 1,000 Israelis dead.

    And Biden was just echoing "news" reports

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna119865

    Two senior administration officials said Biden was referring to reports from Israel about beheaded children and cited several media reports of beheadings.

    NBC News has not confirmed those reports.

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    A Left That Refuses to Condemn Mass Murder Is Doomed
  • Yeah if he believes that then I'm not surprised the article is trash.

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    Goldman is back with a 16-years-later look at the housing market crash of 2008—and finds affordability is even worse right now
  • Well if the studies are correct that will happen sooner than if you own.

    Always a silver lining /s

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    There is no proof Palestinian fighters ‘beheaded’ babies. The only source is a radical settler.
  • Yeah no. That's antisemitic bullshit you see literal Nazis spout off about.

    This recent "story" was only posted in a shitty tabloid, picked up by a couple other shitty tabloids, and gullible people spread it all over social media.

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    104-year-old Chicago woman dies days after making a skydive that could put her in the record books
  • Well.... I guess I've never heard it spoken before lol

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    Business owner 'hires' ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans
  • Agree that other parts of the EM spectrum could enhance the ability of MV to recognize things. Appreciate the insights -- maybe I will be able to use this when I get back to tinkering with MV as a hobbyist.

    Of course identifying one object is one level. For a general purpose replacement for humans ability, since that's what the thread is focused (ahem) on, it has to identify tens of thousands of objects.

    I need to rethink my opinion a bit. Not only how far general object recognition is but also how one can "cheat" to enable robotic automation.

    Tasks that are more limited in scope and variability would be a lot less demanding. For a silly example, let's say we want to automate replacing fuses in cars. We limit it to cars with fuse boxes in the engine bay and we can mark the fuse box with a visual tag the robot can detect. The layout of the fuses per vehicle model could be stored. The code on the fuse box identifies the model. The robot then used actuators to remove the cover and orients itself to the box using more markers and the rest is basically pick and place technology. That's a smaller and easier problem to solve than "fix anything possibly wrong with a car". A similar deal could be done for oil changes.

    For general purpose MV object detection, I would have to go check but my guess is that what is possible with state of the art MV is identifying a dozen or maybe even hundreds of objects so I suppose one could do quite a bit with that to automate some jobs. MV is not to my knowledge at a level of general purpose replacement for humans. Yet. Maybe it won't take that much longer.

    In ~15 years in the hobbyist space we've gone from recognizing anything of a specified color under some lighting conditions to identifying several specific objects. And without a ton of processing power either. It's pretty damn impressive progress, really. We have security cameras that can identify animals, people, and delivery boxes. I am probably selling short what MV will be able to do in 15 more years.

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    Business owner 'hires' ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans
  • All great points. I guess I need to think of this topic more from the "what is possible" mindset rather than the "this is too hard" mindset to get a fair assessment of what is coming. All while still framing it in the sense of improving worker efficiency and automating human tasks piecemeal over time.

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    EU warns Musk that X spreading ‘illegal content’ after Hamas attacks on Israel
  • Somebody let me know when the Artist Formerly Known as Twitter faces any consequences.

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    Seriously... WHY?!
  • Through the wonder of Sci pulling random bullshit out of their ass.

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    Seriously... WHY?!
  • Your comment is every bit as nuanced and informed as I expected it to be.

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    YSK that there is no such thing as an "alpha wolf"
  • I was told earlier today this was due to a transporter accident.

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    Business owner 'hires' ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans
  • Damn... nice work on the research! I will read through these as I get time. I genuinely didn't think there would be much for manual labor stuff. I'm particularly interested in the plumber analysis.

    I think augmentation makes a lot of sense for jobs where a human body is needed and it will be interesting to see how/if trade skill requirements change.

    I'll edit this as I read...

    Plumbing. The article makes the point that it isn't all or nothing. That as automation increases productivity, fewer workers are needed. Ok, sure, good point.

    Robot plumber? A humanoid robot? Not very likely until enormous breakthroughs are made in machine vision (I can go into more detail...), battery power density, sensor density, etc. The places and situations vary far too greatly.

    Rather than an Asimov-style robot, a more feasible yet productivity enhancing solution is automated pipe cutting and other tasks. For example, you go take your phone and measure the pipe as described in the link. Now press a button, walk out to your truck by which time the pipe cutter has already cut off the size you need saving you several minutes. That savings probably means you can do more jobs per day. Cool.

    Edit 2

    Oil rig worker. Interesting and expected use of AI to improve various aspects of the drilling process. What I had in mind was more like the people that actually do the manual labor.

    Autonomous drones, for example, can be used to perform inspections without exposing workers to dangerous situations. In doing so, they can be equipped with sensors that send images and data to operators in real time to enable quick decisions and effective actions for maintenance and repair.

    Now that's pretty cool and will probably reduce demand for those performing inspections (some of whom will have to be at the other end receiving and analyzing data from the robot until such time as AI can do that too.

    Autonomous robots, on the other hand, can perform maintenance tasks while making targeted repairs to machinery and equipment.

    Again, technologies required to make this happen aren't there yet. Machine vision (MV) alone is way too far from being general purpose. You can decide a MV system that can, say, detect a coke can and maybe a few other objects under controlled conditions.

    But that's the gotcha.Change the intensity of lighting, change the color temperature or hue of the lighting and the MV probably won't work. It might also mistake diet coke can or a similar sized cylinder for a Pepsi can. If you want it to recognize any aluminum beverage can that might be tough. Meanwhile any child can easily identify a can in any number of conditions.

    Now imagine a diesel engine generator, let's say. Just getting a robot to change the oil would be nice. But it has to either be limited to a specific model of engine or be able to recognize where the oil drain plug and fill spot is for various engines it might encounter.

    What if the engine is a different color? Or dirty instead of clean? Or it's night, or noon (harsh shadows), overcast (soft shadows), or sunset (everything is yellow orange tinted)? I suppose it could be trained for a specific rig and a specific time of day but that means set up time costs a lot. It might be smarter to build some automated devices on the engine like a valve on the oil pan. And a device to pump new oil in from a vat or standard container or whatever. That would be much easier. Maybe they already do this, idk.

    Anyway... progress is being made in MV and we will make far more. That still leaves the question of an autonomous robot of some kind able to remove and reinstall a drain plug. It's easy for us but you'd be surprised at how hard that would be for a robot.

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    I just need to focus.
  • Can relate. They should call it Attention Control Deficit Disorder. (Or, really, Executive Function Disorder but anyway...)

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