georgefrowny

An interesting downstream effect of hypothetical highly-effective robotic AI labour would bring is the ability to strip, sort and test e-waste down to the component level.

She also has Icelandic citizenship.

What would a radar constellation look like that could see everything on earth to a metre or so resolution? Thousands and thousands of satellites all with big phased array radios and solar panels and batteries.

What do you need to distill a 24/7 stream of everything on Earth in roughly 1m^3 voxels into data like humans and vehicles? Bearing in mind the data torrent is gigantic and can't always be reliably downlinked: co-orbital AI.

All UK conveyancing solicitors are in this picture too. 90% of what they do is shuffle standard paperwork and chase other solicitors for their standard paperwork, all incredibly slowly. I would be entirely unsurprised if in a typical transaction, N clients' £1000*N of solicitors could be replaced by £10 of AI and a couple of hours of human time in total.

The thin line between them is also really tenacious (only the punk one dropped it)

I wondered to what extent they know the size and shape of the cavern at any given time and what they use to monitor it. The answer is apparently sonar, and there are some pretty pictures here:

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc840493/m2/1...

I tried browsing bookstores on the mainland but found basically all the books are shrinkwrapped in plastic.

Very boring indeed (but the covers are nice I guess).

Is Taiwan similar?

I do actually like the "concrete jungle" style like the Barbican and Salk Institute (by all accounts a pleasantly human place to work despite the famously stark-looking courtyard).

I think the biggest problem with them is that the minute you stop maintaining things like gardens in contrast to the concrete and let it get dirty and scarred, it looks apocalyptic and stressful very quickly. Whereas even quite dilapidated neo-classical-ish buildings look innately reasonably pleasing.

My theory is they end up preferring buildings that are easy to draw in AutoCAD.

Akin's Law 38: "Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say."

Good, I'm not buying an X4 without either USB-C or a backlight, and it might already be too late relative to the Boox Picco (but CrossPoint support can pull it back).

Prosperity gospel for the non-religious, basically.

Why do the AliExpress ones lock the firmware? They have analytics in it or something?

Yep. Someone is surely going to do something at some point if we continue on this course. Hand-wringing from relative safety of above-sea level places at high latitude is cheap. If you're in charge of millions of people in peril, even if it's a horrible idea, if you don't actually know its a horrible idea, well...

Also it does annoy me when people say "well it went badly wrong in the Matrix/Snowpiercer/etc., therefore we should not even talk about it, as it is clearly stupid. It may be stupid, or it may not be, but that should be determined on its own (de)merits, not because fiction used the idea as a plot device.

And is on PNAS Nexus.

I dunno, I think there's one better use and that's funding a federated framework for this so any transport network can just plug into the system as a source and any client can plug in as a consumer.

That's basically @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark).

However, we should go a step further and provide a framework of UI elements that can be used consistently to create a uniform and accessible interface and they could even be pre-compiled into native controls for more efficient...hold on a gosh darn minute...

> Despite spending hours a day looking at her phone, she literally had to check it to find out what her default color theme is; it’s that invisible to her.

Sounds like a good reason to make it automatic then, because if users have to find your state toggle in some hamburger menu, they're not going to use it if they don't even know the system has a theme applied.

Kaitai Struct is also pretty good and will generate code in several languages.

Reminds me of a Cylon hybrid.

Yes, indeed all are far below the next one (hydro, 1.3, dam failures, I imagine).

And brown coal is sitting pretty at 36+, i.e. ONE THOUSAND times worse than nuclear.

Solar and nuclear are comparable: 0.02 vs 0.03 deaths/TWh (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...)

Depending on what kind of solar, it can have quite a high death/TWh ratio because people fall off roofs while installing them. As a ratio is far better now that so much new solar is ground level solar farms and not installed by amateurs or professionals who have a van, a ladder and watched a YouTube video that one time. Some older estimates based, I think, on generic roofing accident rates, were up to 0.44 deaths/TWh.

Wind is more dangerous than nuclear (0.04), I guess also from falls and accidents during construction and maintenance.

Edit: All are incredibly safe compared to the next worst, hydro (1.3, or 30 times worse than wind).

If a general-purpose humanoid robot has the strength to perform human actions at human speed, it will have that much torque in the motors. If it didn't, it can only move very slowly and/or jerkily. You need fast, high-torque feedback to stabilise the physical control system, especially if the robot is supposed to be able to lift and manipulate objects.

The idea here is Optimus-type robots that can do everything like a human and therefore don't need special infrastructure, as opposed to dedicated, immobile low-torque, low-velocity robots specifically for, say, laundry.

You can layer a safety system on top of the raw motor control but it's very complicated to define what is and isn't safe, especially when you consider what the robot is holding (and what it THINKS it is holding), where the robot is (or thinks it is) at the time, what is around it (what it thinks is about it) and so on.

Which isn't a robot-specific problem. Humans spend years learning how to subconsciously safely interact with their environment and even then fuck it up sometimes. What is robot-specific is being made of metal and having the "safe hand velocity within 10cm of a human head" function bypass be one bug or OTA update away.

Giving out control of industrial machinery that interacts in the human environment without the physical interlocks (i.e. humanoid robots in a house) to random internet people seems like a problem.

I can imagine a carefully orchestrated plot to assassinate someone by having an embedded agent in the task delegation pool command the laundry bot to punch the target's head off their shoulders.

They call it "goal orientation".

I think there's a reason they fret so much about the paperclip optimisers, because they recognise them.

I thought CXMT is selling DDR5 now?

I've literally heard someone say that we should remove the protection circuits because it's two dollars of parts protecting under a dollar of amplifiers.

Yes, the amplifiers are cheap, but the rest of the board isn't and if the amplifiers get blown up that's 1000 dollars in support costs and RMAs, bad customer opinion and a line stoppage to boot.

There's a whole class of software people who think the rest of the world is a bunch of pitiful and sadly ignorant apes stuck in the past who just need the loving administration of the clarity, vision and genius of the software engineer to fix all their problems.

Just another reminder of the absolutely massive public benefit that the Internet Archive represents.

Just wish they'd make the metadata crowd-sourced, maybe a tie-up with Wikidata.

> Great, now calm down and go build stuff, and show me the stuff.

Also sounds like Reddit where there are whole communities around what seem like part of the process - keyboards, knife sharpening, etc, rather than what you actually used your Handmade Matcha 65% MX Mechanical Collector's Edition or your Organic Kyoto 6500 diamond stone-honed knife for.

Like, yes, I get that people like to talk about their processes, and that's fine, but it seems like you can easily get sucked into making it the whole game by a sufficiently "supportive" community.