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Comment by LauraMedia | Hacker News Reader

I fail to see a useful usage for AI in this case.

Couldn't you just print the product number as a barcode/qrcode and let a "dumb code scanner" read it, instead of having to download a multifunctional LLM?

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The author works in Google developer relations, and while devrel aren't quite marketing they will use the latest and greatest Google hammer.

His demo is pretty slick, though. Less than 100 lines of code to get “the box I want on literally every customer service site.”

Yeah maybe it is overkill but this would be a semi hard computer vision task not too long ago, it is pretty amazing you can get it that easily nowadays

Less than 100 lines of code to give the overwhelming majority of consumers "LanguageModel is not available." and a free snipe hunt for 0.5% of them to try to figure out how to enable it via chrome flags or snapshot browsers.

Provided one is using ChromeOS "standards".

So now marketing is working through the disgruntled-at-stupid-tech HN bait (as someone who works on the built-in AI team)? Or wait, how long have they been doing that?

They could, that very qr code is on there and contains the product number and serial number inside a URL query that links to qr.electrolux.com.

The page loads but doesn't offer to register the product, which is probably for the best.

Yep.

When the only tool you know is the hammer you're going to hit inappropriate things with it.

I was thinking just have it included in the QR code, so the URL the QR points to is prod-reg.example.com/pid/91234567 or whatever.

Why even have to register the product in the first place? When I buy a Lenovo laptop from any store, it just has a warranty associated with the serial number, and if I need support or repair, I can just contact Lenovo, and get service under the warranty.

The author's own AI demo falls on its face with "Identify product number LanguageModel is not available" too.

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