Originally published at: The worst gadgets at CES 2024
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I guess they couldn’t wait for the Augmented Reality grocery shopping hellscape imagined in this short film:
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No mention of the AI Catflap:
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This is something I was legitimately thinking of kludging together myself with a raspberry pi; it’s not the worst gadget I’ve seen.
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As someone who has had to chase multiple chipmunks around the house, because my cat brought them in still alive, this sounds great.
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“they shall blare ads at you while you walk around stores.” I encountered one of these a few years ago at an upscale market in D.C. Over half of the screens were not working already, most either physically broken or just dark and silent. They must have required charging, which might have explained the dark screens, but I got the impression that a lot had been sabotaged, probably by irate shoppers who just wanted the thing to shut off.
There’s a little contraption I made years ago, which lives on my keychain: it’s a device I made for testing laser tubes, just a piezoelectric starter from an old gas bbq, with some convenient wires hooked up to it so I could direct the ~10,000 volts where I wanted it. When my cart started making noises about “Welcome, have you considered buying this item . . .” I believe my little push-button device must have accidentally fallen out of my pocket and somehow activated as it hit the display’s charging port. The cart was silent and dark the rest of the shopping trip. Weird how that happened. Freak accident, must have been.
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Maybe they can repurposed into entertainment centers for the homeless?
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When was Max Headroom supposed to be set?
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“20 Minutes into the Future.”
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Right, but they never gave a specific year? I looked, but could not find one…
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I don’t think it’s one of those sci-fi settings that necessarily needs a precise place in our world’s timeline. Kind of like how the Transmetropolitan comic intentionally avoided pinning down exactly when it was supposed to take place. Same deal with Brazil.
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weird when it turns out “annie” is about a future more distant than max headroom…
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The Vegas Loop (Elon Musk’s tunnel for Teslas) has got to be a contender.
https://nitter.net/RM_Transit/status/1745261043767493049
It is remarkable how much worse than . . . a subway this is. No next train screen, no auto opening doors, no level boarding for accessibility, and the wait is . . . pretty long! Definitely more than 2 - 4 minutes a subway can do!
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That would be quite a crossover.
“It’s a har-har-har-har-hard knock life!”
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Yeah, i got the same feeling. Even that it could be the present day if things were just a little different.
I haven’t seen that show since it originally aired and remember really like it. I have a few scenes in my head that I remember from all this time. I should track it down streaming somewhere.
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It’s notoriously hard to pin down what century Matt Frewer lives in. Especially since he once stole a time machine.
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That has been a favorite project for a lot of people for a while now. Long before the current incarnation of “AI” they used OpenCV and face recognition.
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Yikes! That was plausible. 
