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Comment by chrisjj | Hacker News Reader

> an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup.

A printed sign can do the same.

Try harder, A"I".

I get your point, but I confess I have sometimes had to pause for some time to decide if I was holding a recyclable, a compostable or landfill — looking at the little pictures in fact, hoping I can find the thing I am holding.

Yeah, but otherwise, the whole MIT Media Lab thing is increasingly tasting a little bitter, not the glamorous, enviable place it seemed like in decades past.

Rather than looking for the next internet-connected wearable, for some reason, increasingly, I keep thinking about Bruce Dern's character in the film Silent Running.

It's much worse in South Korea, I think there were at least 5 different bins with different signs. Most things you bought had a label on them and you could try to match the letters to what was on the bin. Except it wasn't perfectly matched up, and we didn't have some bins with signs that matched up with whatever was written on the package.

I eventually gave up and only ate to avoid having to deal with it.

Until you realize there are more objects that people aren't able to sort correctly, than there are space on signs to put next to the bins.

Recycling labels are a thing.

Not everything people throw has those labels on them, now what?

MIT switches to labelled cups, is what.

Super helpful and generalized solution, good job.

This is one place where I think our friends the magic robots might actually be useful (though it's more CV than LLM stuff); people are really _amazingly_ bad at this, and will happily ignore a printed sign, and even quite low accuracy would probably be better than what happens now, which isn't that far off random.

Yes but… As an example In some cities, the signs specifying whether parking is allowed can be impossible to decipher. Sometimes feels like an AI would be needed to tell you “can I park this particular vehicle here right now, and for how long?”

Not that I’d trust an AI to get it right - but people already don’t.

> the signs specifying whether parking is allowed can be impossible to decipher.

In UK, works as designed... to maximise penalty earnings.

If figuring out which used item belongs to which category is easy, it means your community/city/state/country is doing recycling wrong.

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