'Fish Doorbell' Enters Fifth Year with Millions of Fans

Long-time Slashdot reader invisik reminds us that the "fish doorbell" is still going strong, according to the Associated Press. "Now in its fifth year, the site has attracted millions of viewers from around the world with its quirky mix of slow TV and ecological activism." The central Dutch city of Utrecht installed a "fish doorbell" on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht's Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a website. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through.
"Much of the time, the screen is just a murky green with occasional bubbles, but sometimes a fish swims past. As the water warms up, more fish show up..."

Well, it's certainly more interesting...

[arglebargle_xiv]

... than recent MCU offerings.

Re:

[dohzer]

Microcontrollers aren't that boring, are they?

Re:

[thegarbz]

They are.

machine learning

[sg_oneill]

Seems like the sort of application machine learning out excel at. Train a model up on fish (something like YOLO ought do nicely) hook it to the button, automatic fish door.

Re: machine learning

[toutankh]

Sur but why would anyone do that? People do it for free and enjoy it.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Yeah but can you imagine the GDPR headaches of having an AI model on a doorbell! ;-)

"When they see enough fish"

[greytree]

How do they know it is not many people seeing the same single fish?

How often do they check?

How often is the lock opened?

Is it ever opened outside office hours?

Do they close the website when the lock is not manned?

If I was a journalist, those are the questions I would want to answer in my report.
If I was a GOOD journalist.

Ah: AP.

Re:"When they see enough fish"

[excelsior_gr]

Even more importantly: What do the fish think about the service?

"The lock was a good place to hang out and make new friends. Now it's a wait of just a few minutes and everybody just feels the need to rush through, you know? Transit times are down and stress levels are up."

While others begged to differ:

"I just hate being stuck with a hundred other idiots all wondering why aren't we moving along, is the lock broken again and such nonsense. Yes, it's that time of the year again, the spawn place is up river. Just hang on to your gills and you'll get to release your eggs or your sperm or whatever when we all get there."

Others had more mixed feelings:

"I like not having to wait as much as the next guy, but my species dies after spawning, so I actually don't mind prolonging the journey a bit. In the lock I get some time to reflect, so I may just sit there, watching the lock opening and closing, thinking life through."

Re:

[kriston]

Hysteresis [wikipedia.org] takes care of the multiple doorbell push problem.

suprised there hasnt been amerkin dentist

[Growlley]

gone fishing with dynamite there yet.

An actual use case for our current AI?

[Fly Swatter]

Glorified motion detector with species identification, woohoo non-profit OpenAI will be rich!

It's nice sometimes to not have AI

[froggyjojodaddy]

I realize this is a perfect use case for AI but.... it's a nice thought that a bunch of people are looking through a port hole, watching fish, and then letting an operator know so they can open a valve somewhere. Horribly inefficient but so wonderfully human.