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@shannonigans98 / shannonigans98.tumblr.com

Art Blog: shannon-does-art.tumblr.com . . . . . An 19 year old Canadian cosplayer just trying to get by in the UK.
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sorry for trying to kill and murder you its just that my laundry wasnt dry even though i put it in for a full cycle and it sent me into an apoplectic haze :/ you know how it is

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I don’t want to end Amazon, because it provides an incredibly useful service to the disabled community, the elderly, and those who simply don’t have time to go shopping due to working three jobs and the like. There currently isn’t a major alternative on the market that is the same level of cheap and accessible.

What I do want to do is enforce some goddamn antitrust laws on major web-based companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook, and roll back their attempts at monopolizing entire industries, and make them pay their lowest-rung workers a fair wage and stop running their warehouses like a scene from a dystopian nightmare.

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sindri42

So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.

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