I agree this is a legitimate goal. I guess I’m just thinking they need to be transparent about it. The representative should be clear what they are doing and not insinuate they are only identifying the presence of a human and that’s it. They probably should even have a sign on the machine to notify people they are being videoed. When I get into my Ford Escape the touch screen tells me I’m supposed to notify my passengers of privacy concerns because I have location services turned on. This sort of privacy notification seems standard these days.

They need to recognize a face because they explicitly state in their FAQ they are estimating purchasers’ age and sex. This isn’t just adjusting lighting. I would not be so quick to say there is nothing problematic here. I’m highly skeptical.

Based on the quotes from the vending company, at first I thought this was just a dumb way to detect when a human is standing there. But it’s worse than that.

So first we get this from a company representative:

The technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces, so the machine knows when to activate the purchasing interface

Ok, fine. Overkill, but fine. But then their company’s FAQ tells us this:

only the final data, namely presence of a person, estimated age and estimated gender, is collected without any association with an individual.

So they ARE collecting data, and they are trying to obfuscate that fact by saying they are just “activating the purchasing interface”. This isn’t just turning on a lighted display when a person is standing there. “Activating the purchasing interface” means activating the algorithms to analyze my appearance. They are trying to figure out who is buying their product. That’s different.

So they are being shady about their true intentions. They aren’t being up front, and they expect us to trust that they aren’t storing or transmitting anything other than estimated age and sex. Hmm, maybe. But their actions don’t build trust.

Plus, now I have to worry about VENDING MACHINES getting hacked and being used as surveillance devices now too?? Can I just buy a candy bar without being reminded we live in a dystopia?

Really? Interesting. I thought he was miscast. He’s got too many Jim Carey vibes for my taste.

You can make this a macro and trigger it with just a hot key.

Select Start Recording in the Macro menu. Open the search dialog, in the “Find what” field just type three characters: “:.*” (that’s a colon, period, and asterisk). In the “Replace with” field enter just a single colon. Switch search mode to “Regular expression”, and make sure “matches new line” box is not checked, and hit Replace All.

Now Stop Recording in the Macro menu, and then Save Current Recorded Macro. Give it a name and optionally a hot key, and note you can run it from the Macro menu or the hot key.

I agree. I bought Apollo instantly because the value was there. At $30 I’m going to hang back and see how the app fleshes out, but if I’m not getting features like GIF scrubbing in the meantime, I’m probably going to find an alternative. At $10 I would have hit the buy button immediately.

Oh, and I hate subscriptions. I’m never going to subscribe to an app. Just tell me what it costs and I’ll buy it if it’s worth it.

I want to be excited about this, but I just don’t believe I’ll actually be able to get one for retail price. For much of the RP4 lifecycle they prioritized corporate sales, and regular consumers were out of luck. I don’t have a lot of faith in them right now.

I’ve been a Prime member from the very beginning, but I’m seriously reevaluating whether I should drop it. The value proposition is decreasing for me. At $99 I thought it was pretty good considering the perks like video and music. But then they crippled Prime Music a few months back so it’s a shadow of what it once was (pushing you to subscribe to Unlimited). Now Prime Video is getting ads. Those “extras” are becoming less compelling. So I’m paying $140 annually for just free shipping? Hmmm, these numbers don’t add up anymore.

So you’re using Markdown cells for notes and not using code cells at all? This is a strange choice. It seems like just writing Markdown in a text editor, Markdown editor, or even an IDE with Markdown rendering would be better options. If you want to output the Markdown to other formats, pandoc is all you need. I’m not sure what advantage Jupyter gives you in this use case.

This was the most baffling statement. They literally just took control of some subreddits weeks ago. Do they really lack any self awareness?

Over 17 years, my cake day is December 2005. I deleted all my posts and comments and came to Lemmy. I haven’t deleted the account yet simply because I still pop in to read stuff occasionally, but I’m done posting over there.

Okay, now that’s a plausible explanation. Some of those subs may have been private and coming back online over several days. Thanks for the insight.

If it isn’t on purpose, then they have a bug that is restoring comments. My main account is 18 years old. Cake Day is December 2005. I deleted it all, and then I checked from multiple devices to ensure when I logged in it was all gone, and it was. Until it wasn’t. I had about 100 random comments from 2013 to 2022 come back. So I manually deleted them all… again. And then a few days later, suddenly different comments are back. I must have repeated this deletion process 4-5 times. Each time, Reddit’s interface (not a third party script or app) showed me everything was gone… until it wasn’t.

They have some automated recovery going on whether they want to admit it or not.