Probably Drawing

“Who are you to stand so fearsome

With your wavy locks of auburn hair and eyes of emerald green?”

For example, you set up a kettle of water to boil for your tea. Quick! Wipe down the whole counter before it’s done boiling, for the love of god you’re running out of time! Wipe it down! The water is almost boiling.

The water is boiling and your counter is clean. Now set your timer for your tea for three minutes and of my god there’s cups in your room! Quick! Get all the cups from everywhere in the house! Run! You’ve only got three minutes! Get all the dishes into the kitchen!

Oh would you look at that. You got all the dishes in the sink and now your tea is ready. Nice. Now you can chill with your tea.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.