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> an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. A printed sign can do the same. Try harder, A"I".
by chrisjj 1y ago
> an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup.
A printed sign can do the same.
Try harder, A"I".
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoYes but… As an example In some cities, the signs specifying whether parking is allowed can be impossible to decipher. Sometimes feels like an AI would be needed to tell you “can I park this particular vehicle here right now, and for how long?” Not that I’d trust an AI to get it right - but people already don’t.
- chrisjj 1y ago> the signs specifying whether parking is allowed can be impossible to decipher. In UK, works as designed... to maximise penalty earnings.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI get your point, but I confess I have sometimes had to pause for some time to decide if I was holding a recyclable, a compostable or landfill — looking at the little pictures in fact, hoping I can find the thing I am holding. Yeah, but otherwise, the whole MIT Media Lab thing is increasingly tasting a little bitter, not the glamorous, enviable place it seemed like in decades past. Rather than looking for the next internet-connected wearable, for some reason, increasingly, I keep thinking about Bruce Dern's character in the film Silent Running.
- doix 1y agoIt's much worse in South Korea, I think there were at least 5 different bins with different signs. Most things you bought had a label on them and you could try to match the letters to what was on the bin. Except it wasn't perfectly matched up, and we didn't have some bins with signs that matched up with whatever was written on the package. I eventually gave up and only ate to avoid having to deal with it.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoUntil you realize there are more objects that people aren't able to sort correctly, than there are space on signs to put next to the bins.
- chrisjj 1y agoRecycling labels are a thing.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoNot everything people throw has those labels on them, now what?
- chrisjj 1y agoMIT switches to labelled cups, is what.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoSuper helpful and generalized solution, good job.
- raincole 1y agoIf figuring out which used item belongs to which category is easy, it means your community/city/state/country is doing recycling wrong.
- rsynnott 1y agoThis is one place where I think our friends the magic robots might actually be useful (though it's more CV than LLM stuff); people are really _amazingly_ bad at this, and will happily ignore a printed sign, and even quite low accuracy would probably be better than what happens now, which isn't that far off random.