The Mail Truck Classifier Cried Wolf: Tuning Zero-Shot CLIP With Real Data

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I taught my house to announce the mail truck: Frigate spots a vehicle out front, a small service crops the snapshot and runs zero-shot CLIP against a list of text prompts, and if it decides “USPS truck” or “garbage truck,” Home Assistant says so out loud through Piper. That post ended on an optimistic note — a garbage truck scoring p_trash 0.995, and a line about how a labeled dataset for future tuning would “build itself from real events.”

This is the reckoning with that optimism.

Because the classifier worked, and then it would not shut up. 143 garbage-truck announcements in seven weeks, on a street where the garbage truck comes exactly once a week. The house had become the boy who cried wolf, and my family had — correctly — started ignoring it. This post is about actually fixing that: what 200 real detections showed, why the obvious fix is a trap, and the one idea worth stealing even if you never touch CLIP.

Cron on Linux Colorado

The Mail Truck Classifier Cried Wolf: Tuning Zero-Shot CLIP With Real Data