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The inReach is basically indestructible. A cell phone, not so much.

this is how i feel. especially in the cold. for a lot of the stuff i do, i'm not gonna trust my life on a glass screen with a battery that doesn't work well in the cold.

There's no need for a variant-specific booster. The vaccines are still very effective at preventing severe disease with Omicron. Just like they were with Delta.


If facial recognition were 99.9% accurate, it would confuse someone with at least 350,000 other people in the US.


Sort of but not really because it's 1/1000 times the chance that they shop at stores in the same geographic location. So yeah I might have a couple dopplegangers but they're likely spread around the US and can be filtered out relatively easily.

It only becomes a problem if I (1) have a doppleganger, that (2) likes to steal, and (3) lives in the same area as me. It'd still be a kafkaesque nightmare but probably a pretty rare one.


Additionally there's other identifiers that when coupled with the 1/350k, they can figure it out pretty quickly.


A better way to think of it: if the system only has a 0.1% chance of an incorrect match and at least 700 people regularly shop there, each of them is more likely than not to be misidentified as somebody else.


Think of it more like browser fingerprinting & bits of entropy instead of a one-shot classification. E.g. cross-reference with other data to get near-100% accuracy:" digital fingerprints being emitted from your phone, tracking movement, checking out with a credit card, license plates entering the parking lot, home address vs store location, etc.


If it's not useful, companies aren't going to pay money to use it. As Rite Aid put it, "companies seem to be scaling back or rethinking their efforts around facial recognition given increasing uncertainty around the technology’s utility."


The companies don't care about a few false matches here or there. But if you're one of the people it keeps incorrectly identifying as a criminal who needs to be escorted out of the store, it will matter to you.


Companies do all sorts of insane, crazy things that waste inordinate amounts of money with very little return on investment.


I wonder if it's simply not working as well now that everyone is wearing masks.


Throw in a face mask and this tech is all useless. Especially now that we’ve normalized mask use in the U.S. for probably any cold and flu going forward.


They can just do gait recognition as well.


That's why you always shop at Walmart with a roll of pennies in a shoe.


Not if you ride the mobility scooter.


You don't have to be walking. I recently met someone that I had not seen for a long time, recognized them by their pattern of small head movements.


Ok just brainstorming here: mobility scooter, neck brace, leg braces, surgical mask and gloves, sombrero (maximum coverage) and aviator sunglasses.


add on the ill fitting clothes and perhaps those funky sunglasses with the eyeball holograms.


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