I think one of the biggest gaps in current grocery store is the lack of a "over 30 items line". I mean there are express lines for people with 5 items, but why not the reverse?

Like it should be a double-staffed / double-conveyor belt line to process those that have lots of items....I mean on the surface its kinda crazy this hasn't developed.

The guy with a six pack of beer and sandwhich bread gets to zoom thru the line, but the mom with a $350 basket of goods waits the most.....

Any >50 users probably remembers the "Clipper Chip" fiasco in the mid-90s. Right when internet was gaining in popularity there was this US Gov sponsored idea that "security chips should be installed in all phones and internet devices".

There was lots of push back on the subject and it was defeated. But the push to de-anonymize users never really went away and is now just bundled up in these age-protection laws....which it appears that they are successful.

The problem I see is the security issue.

Yeah, like all engineering challenges its just a series of tradeoffs. They would need more security staff to watch cameras of what was placed into carts vs what was scanned in app....so its just reshuffling staff around.

Another huge issue is: You have just placed your entire checkout process into the hands of Apple / Google for no apparent gain to your organization. Your entire business is now intimately bound up with them "approving each app version" and dealing with new iOS/Android versions, etc....

Its one of those ideas which sounds clever on the surface but the more you dig into it you realize why the world came up with the current solution.

Thanks for the clarification. I think they added the "encrypt backup feature" after the first version was unencrypted. There was a dust-up about it on HN at the time, so likely they were pressured.

But as you said, I don't really trust the E2E encryption anyways....

One thing I know is true about WhatsApp is that they constantly nag you to "backup your chats" as if its some wonderful security feature they are offering you.

In reality when you "backup your chats" you are saving them encryption free on their servers. So meta gets to advertise "end-to-end encrypted chats" and then separately disclose "backups are not encrypted". So they can still data-mine you under the theater that your chats are secure.

All these things need to be solved:

1. Not everyone has a phone (ok boomer)
2. Some people will refuse to install / use app
3. Weighing things
4. Receiving / Dispensing Cash
5. Activating Gift Cards
6. Receipt and Voucher printing
7. Loss prevention (monitoring how many things are bagged vs scanned)

You may not live in an area that tried exactly what you describe, but its never worked. I think the Walmart app actually allows you to scan-as-you-go like you describe but like 0.1% of users do that. The biggest hassle is separately having to weigh things at approved weigh stations, and print a ticket for those and then scan that ticket..etc and probably most importantly lack of cash processing.

The biggest issue you are going to have is once the CP and snuff film people find it. The simple truth is, there isn't much reason for "normal / non-illegal" people to use it, thus its going to solely become a tool for the most evil aspects of humanity.

You need to decide if you want to deal with that.

Net worth Scale:

$100M - $999M = Fuck this place, I'm going to buy these politicians to do what I want

$1B - $99B = Fuck this place, I building an underground city in new zealand and 400ft solar/wind powered yahct

$100B - $1T = Fuck this place, I'm going to mars....

There was also the case of Brian Armstrong's Earning Call (https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/01/coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-trolls-the-prediction-markets/)

They had bet what words would he mention during his call. At the end of the otherwise normal earnings call, Brian said:

And I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call

These just happened to be the exact words that polymarket betters were betting on.

From a larger view lots of this unironically points back to George Soros "reflexivity thesis" of markets. Which is that market bets influence real world behavior, which influences market bets....etc.

Rerum Novarum

Very interesting that you post this....Rerum Novarum was primarily a response to Industrialization. That is the church was trying to navigate humanity moving from primarily agrarian society towards a more top-down capital controlled society.

Just like today, there was widespread fear that the coming Industrialization was going to unleash huge unemployment and uncertainty....so the Church was trying to strike a balance between reminding everyone that we have a need to be charitable and that humans aren't "units of production" while simultaneously quell the nascent socialist calls coming from people like Marx.

I mention all this because our latest Pope Leo is set to release his encyclical next week named Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) which will be his response to the coming AI wave. It is thought he is trying to strike a balance as well....in fact people online have mentioned that they expect this to be his own Rerum Novarum moment....

I bought my AMD Strix Halo system (128GB RAM) in 2025 for about $1800 at the time. So was very lucky timing.

However I would say realistically its only been in last 6 months that it has been "paying for itself" due to local model improvements. Qwen3-Coder-Next was the real local model I found that was usable... and now Qwen-3.6 and Gemma4 have both made it for "routine coding" task can be done locally.

For doing really entailed work I still use SOTA models, but my job is mainly sys-admin so lots of python, ansible, bash, sql scripts, etc....and for those things local models are very very helpful.

I've even moved my accounting system to beancount (beancount and ledger are both text-based accounting systemsm so perfect for an a LLM)....I simply fed the CSV files from my bank into local model and asked it to create a parser to parse those from csv to beancount format...

The real advance of local models really makes me question is these multi-billion dollar data centers are going to be used to the degree they imagine....I think its very possible that local models get "good enough" for 90% of usecases

Wha?!? But Bibi told the stable genius that it was going to quick, easy, and consequence free!!

Oh well, only the average american will suffer and pay the price, so I guess its ok.

I don't quite understand what it is about the mesmerizing screens that somehow, via messing with our minds and desires, result in a) having fewer kids, b) coupling up less.

I don't know either, but anecdotally a rejoinder I always heard growing up in 80s to a couple announcing their 4th or 5th child was: "Don't you two have a TV?"

I guess now we need to upgrade it to "Dont you two have a tiktok account?"

bootc or other "immutable distros" are the best overall solution.

All apps should be installed as flatpaks and/or containers, where as the base OS layer moves at a much slower pace.

That could be the next $1B industry, but the next $100B industry is the people that own the bots who will use that secret information to sell you products, influence your decisions, and farm your engagement based upon the psychological profile they've built around you.

AI is going to become the best advertising platform ever built because it will be nearly be both invisible and deeply personal.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

I had always heard that line was a reference to Abby Hoffman situation during the Who's set at Woodstock....(Hoffman was a leftist political agitator who basically commandeered the mic during the Who's set to turn it into a political speech)....I think Townshend saw that all the politico types were the same...given an inch the peace-preaching leftist would become tyrannical in their own way....

Economists and historians have estimated that medieval laborers often worked far fewer hours annually than modern workers. Economist Juliet Schor found that during periods of high wages, such as in 14th-century England, an average medieval laborer might only work around 150 days a year
Medieval Peasants Had More Vacation Time Than You

doesn’t need to sleep or eat.

Not related to the interpersonal aspects, but this is why I reject the AI-salesmen ideas that AI is going to shorten the working day.

Has any technology really done that? Do people actually have shorter work days in 2026 rather than in 1926? I bet not by any meaningful amount....

If AI increases productivity then the natural economic push will be to just work on more projects at the same time, letting AI do the heavy lifting and the human do the orchestration.

I fully can see that more people will work from home in post-AI scenario, but there will be 10x more people orchestrating their AI labor pool on their phone....just as you are ready to turn out the lights in bed....bing ahh look claude is asking me a question on how to handle this customers request.......

Feel like reporting nominal values is pretty misleading. Would probably need to be percentage of income and/or net worth to provide a true measure of debt. (ie. if you earn $150K per year and have $75K in debt is much different than earning $12K per year and having $12K in debt).

One aspect that has flown under the radar of this proposed deal is Game Stop stores are generally classified as "second hand dealers" in all states they operate in. That is legally the same classification as pawn shops (same regulation, just that game stop has a different business model).

The point being, is that this deal would transform eBay into basically being an online reseller + pawn shop network in 50 states.

There is something there that is interesting....Facebook Marketplace has basically devoured a huge part of eBay's business and the 'local first' aspect of Facebook Marketplace is the biggest thing that eBay is missing....

Well, in a sense we already have it. The latest CVE if you removed some specific modules form being loaded it mitigated the attack....so one option would be that as much as possible becomes modules.....