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Comment by digitalsushi | Hacker News Reader

I saw a demo of some software that can scan at 24 frame per second all of the workers behind a cafe counter, and classify them by which products they are working, their throughput, and special states such as using their phone, talking to a coworker, looking at the window.

what's something this thing could do in that same tier of hardware but would make people generally feel happy to see a demo of it? i know there are a thousand use cases that would feel good to hear, just literally spread a tiny drip of cheer with an anecdotal application for this

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Hard to imagine a more pressing case for legal protections for workers against continuous workplace surveillance thaan the prospect of its being automated to this degree.

Also how do you throw your body onto the cogs and gears in the machine when they are this abstracted?

Something like this is illegal in Switzerland and most likely many European countries.

> I saw a demo of some software that can scan at 24 frame per second all of the workers behind a cafe counter, and classify them by which products they are working, their throughput, and special states such as using their phone, talking to a coworker, looking at the window.

jeez. when the guillotines eventually come out I hope nobody is actually surprised by it.

We are all camgirls under surveillance capitalism.

Some positive uses from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40535636

(Funnily enough the post those comments are on used a Hailo accelerator and Pi cameras, but not actually a Raspberry Pi - it was before this kit was announced.)

somehow "classify employees by their productive behavior" doesn't seem sympatico with "spread a tiny drip of cheer" in my brain. maybe just me.

I think they were asking for a tiny drop of cheer because they saw the dystopian demo. As in, "please tell me there are ways this will do good and not just make life worse"

It’s not even a good demo. Even if someone is dumb enough to do this, they could do it offline on a recorded video feed.

Seems like there would be applications in sports.

It's nightmarish

Probably a bird classifier. Aim the camera at a bird feeder, log what kind of birds are in view, save clips sorted by species. Make a graph of how many of each species there are each day over the year.

Coral has a smart bird feeder as one of their demo projects for their similar product: https://coral.ai/examples/

A smart lawn mower that navigates without fencing lines.

Gesture recognition integrated with Home assistant.

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