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In 2020, Rachel Maddow began her show one evening with a hillarious look back at the CueCat because the brains behind that device (now operating under the name Jovan Pulitzer) was hired to use his latest tech to prove election fraud in Arizona. Here's a transcript: www.nbcnews.com/transcripts/...

Oh god, I had completely forgotten about CueCat. That was an exciting few minutes.

WOW they really went all in

deep cut!

lol i'm gonna have to make this my profile pic now

Isn't that the Cue Cat?

Wow! I feel you on this one! I still have a CueCat somewhere around here, along with my regularly stalled dream of a perfect catalog of all of my books!

omg same with the lifetime LT thing. My cuecat is probably in my basement somewhere

i salute you

Same! Got it for free at Radio Shack!

That's the version I had stolen like 10 of from an event. I was gonna be KING of the CueCats. In some ways, I guess I am...

That is a really bad comparison, we do actually still use various forms of bar codes (and QR reading via your phone is something you probably do decently often yourself). Yeah not that exactly, but... Most people aren't claiming any one model will be forever either. Merely the basic technology.

Isn't CueCat basically a primitive version of using our phone to open QR codes? Like yeah that particular technology was a dead end, but the basic concept ended up being very successful.

Lion remembers all the articles about hacking them that appreared, 'declawing the cuecat'.. They tried to make them a closed ecosystem by giving the device away free but charging for the software ,if lion remebers correctely. :)

I remember those. Just.

Thank you for the CueCat rabbit hole.

...are you complaining there aren't enough assholes opposed to abortion around here?

Lots of insecure AI fans out there.

me 26 years later: wait the lil kitty thing I use to scan my books into my personal library catalog?? (in my defense, in 2000 I was twelve and not keeping up with tech news)

QR codes seemed to have adoption problems until COVID. Good ideas need the right timing too.

And implementation details matter. 1. The smartphone replaced so many different devices. Everyone has the necessary camera and processor in their pocket now. 2. QR codes store far more than the CueCat codes.

cuecat

I remember those! And all the barcodes in the newspaper. No one wanted that.