Falling Behind

The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
If you're an idiot, you fall behind soon and never catch up.
(courtesy Techno)

Yesterday, MW and me made a discovery at the REAL supermarket which left us completely stunned with a feeling of being somewhat overtaken by reality.



The picture above shows an intelligent scale as they are located next to the vegetables/fruit aisle. You put your veggies on the scale's plate, and automagically the scale's touchscreen offers you a list to choose your veggie type from. The magic, however, comes in the way this list is presented: It is prioritized according to the veggie type.
Actually, there's a camera built into the protruding arm of the scale which scans the plate, localizes the veggies, classifies it into types of known stuff, and presents the user the most probable type. Put a cucumber there - up comes a cucumber button. A bag of tomatoes - a tomato button. A bunch of bananas - well, the camera cannot distinguish between Dole and Tip banana, but you'll get your banana button.
We tried to fool it by putting all kinds of packaged food there, mixtures of veggies, and "non-food" - performance degraded gracefully.

Totally transparent behaviour, totally user-friendly, totally stunning. Incredible. We Computing Scientists are soo yesterday.