robotresearcher

I’d initialize the semaphore and any other things that could fail in a post-constructor setup/startup method. It’s a little ugly and it violates RAII, but I think it’s worth it on balance. So yes, I’m agreeing with you that’s how I’d do it.

What if the object can be invalidated asynchronously after the constructor has completed and before you get to use the object? For example by a remote connection dropping? You have to check that it still works anyway: you can’t assume it by construction.

I prefer to have constructors that can’t go wrong (except trivially for OOM that ends the whole process), and then manage their dynamic state after construction.

Ideally you’d use the type system to ensure that arguments can’t be wrong.

For example, if arg values can’t be negative, use an unsigned arg type.

The dot com bubble burst in early 2000.

Google had about 200 employees.

How soon we forget.

But Anthropic added people. They exactly have more people around monitoring the robots.

(Folks, this was sarcasm to point out its parent’s logical fallacy.

There’s no need to address it literally.)

Look in a human head and you don’t see thinking either. It’s not a technical term.

When AI makes huge leaps in battery chemistry and motor efficiency, let’s celebrate together.

Fun idea, Simon!

I wonder if the game state could be sent in an analog/continuous encoding rather than as encoding of a digital state. So that the human player could learn to roughly interpret the sounds, or at least figure out that the sounds are correlated with what’s happening.

That might have a different, possibly satisfying feel compared to the current bloops.

State would not be reconstructed bit-perfect but for a model of a physical system like pong, approximate might be ok.

The finding is ‘not guilty’, rather than innocent. It does not mean the accused is innocent. It means they could not be proven guilty.

Long time Vancouver, BC resident. My pre-school daughter would fill a pocket with 5 inch banana slugs. Delightful to discover later in the house.

Then it’s answer number two.

Two different answers:

1. The discussion setup where you imagine a counterfactual is given by magic does not entail that magic can do any other thing you choose.

“Imagine I give you $100, what do you spend it on?”

“A McClaren, since you could have given me $300K”

2. Taking your question directly: because these are not closely related problems.

“Give you for free” is a rhetorical device that focuses the discussion on the remainder that I didn’t give you.

I didn’t make any claims about the relative difficultly.

Boston Dynamics has the best robot mechatronics in the world, and the company is passed around between deep-pocket owners repeatedly because no one can figure out how to make products that pay for themselves. They have been trying since 1992.

iRobot, the company that shipped the most robots in history because they focused super hard on finding a cost-effective subset of cleaning tasks, failed to scale up to other even closely related tasks, went bust and was sold off.

But yeah, it's probably straightforward, right?

Maybe the perfect roadmap says the trash picker needs $600B investment and will cost $4M per unit in 10 years time, if we solve all the problems.

That trash picker may never compete with a human. There's no reason to assume it will.

edit:

> none of those things strike me as any more challenging than the control software

Maybe the difficulties of motors and batteries are not intuitive. Look at their improvement rates over time. It's a far cry from transistor counts or FLOPS. And look at the performance and efficiency of humans and other animals. We are absurdly strong, light, efficient and cheap to maintain. The gap is huge and not closing quickly.

> I'm sure they'll figure that out for us though.

Imagine I give you for free the perfect trash picking robot control AI software. Works great. Benchmark smashed.

Now imagine what the rest of the robot is like, and how much it would cost. I mean really imagine, not just picture C3PO with a bucket and litter spike. How many motors and what are the torque vs. mass requirements? How is energy stored? It goes on, not all of it is solved, and none of it is cheap. Except compute.

AI likely does accelerate robotics usefully - certainly in sensing and control. But there are major bottlenecks that are not software, that AI can only help with as a generic engineering tool, same as it helps planes and fridges.

> So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs

No, we are currently unable to do most tasks that require physical manipulation, independent of what anyone wants.

Later in the video it correctly uses ‘movement in space’ (showing changing (x,y,z)) and ‘orientation’ separately when talking about use of accels and gyros respectively. The ‘position’ in the introduction is glossing over this before getting into details. You could argue with the presentation decision, but it’s not ignorance.

The video talks about accels in a few places, and how they are required for pose estimates.

Yep, that’s a feature of end to end measures, like company revenues, vehicle fuel efficiency, or human life expectancy.

The customer may not care what the internal contributions are to such a measure. Instead it represents the customers’ overall values in some way.

They did, and few people bought them, so they stopped.

Ooh, and tires I hope! Mine eats tires.

Also where people train from.

You also have to just know what program to invoke with the —help arg.

Good luck guessing ‘grep’ from first principles.

Great! Good luck to you with the launch. The main idea of on-device models is a very good one.

Also FaceTime terminal that is always plugged in and in a predictable location. That’s very useful for some people.

It does function as the HomeKit home hub. But the UI is on the iPhone.

Feedback: manually categorizing transactions is a common and tedious task. Your 'for review' transaction list shows the category, but it's not editable. To review and fix the category, you must:

- read the category

- click on the '...' button at the end of the line (not near the thing you want to correct, and not my first guess for settings the category)

- this creates a popup

- mouse into the popup and click on the dropdown for setting the category.

Just have the category label in the list clickable, to show the category dropdown.

It saves one click, two mouse movements, and having to figure out that '...' is the action you need to fix a category.

Roomba (and friends) are the counter example.

> The word, and how we choose to apply it, is entirely a social construct.

As are all words.