roboy

You might have seen how Figure has been murdering their old robots by melting them in a furnace, we are SHOCKED, poor robots. Since we also have some decomissioning and announcing to do next week, we did a thing.

I had several PCs with touch screen and this absolutely true. Even intermittent use is not something I did, it’s just too inconvenient to ever become a habit, so the few times it’d be great, I don’t think about it being there because it’s not in my active list of affordances.

I built 2 muskulokeletal humanoid robots with my team. They use tendons to imitate the human muscles. It's also probably the most hugged robot in the world, as we let people hug them at events, which significantly helps dispersing fears of robots. One of them is now a permanent exhibit of the world's largest science museum in Munich. [1] Also university of Oxford has a shoulder using it to grow human tendons.[2]

[1] https://devanthro.com/story/ [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-022-00004-9

Bracelets don’t work, they’re foreign objects - they don’t remember why they’re there so they just take them off. Shoes can work, but they might not put them on. QR tattoos - how do you know if an elderly person you see in the street is lost? Can’t approach everyone „hey you got a tattoo?“ - it’s a hard problem. Imagine your memory reset every few minutes to before the dementia started - that has to be your basic assumption for a solution. Maybe implantable trackers eventually, or prevent them from leaving through humanoid robotic avatars … working on that: www.devanthro.com

Makes sense that this works. It has probably thousands of examples of it working in the training data. The system is trained on human use of language, therefore it is reasonable to assume that it if fallible to all sales techniques that are being taught to humans.

This ignores that the selection of the generated results being published is part of the creative process. AIs will not learn off an iid sampling of AI output, but of one that is extensively shaped by human preference. And because humans like novelty this will never converge as rhose preferences are a moving target.

Yep, in Germany too, hence my surprise.

Q from outside the US: why is capital needed for payroll mid month? Are there some automatic insolvency processes if it is missed by a day? Why do the companies fall apart if there is just a few days of payment delay? (I mean it is obviously a shit situation, and having to tell the team payment might take a few days more than usual is bad, I am just surprised how 2 days of no-cash seem to wreak havoc…)

Time searching is cheaper then time watching is an interesting thought … I do hope this is not a metric where my searching time is seen as positive … because that would be a very short sighted metric

But if there was too much, shouldn‘t I have too many good option rather than too few?

I have seen it getting worse and worse over the last years and also I have watched so much on these platforms that I‘d think the signal should stand out no matter the underlying reason for it.

I find this very interesting that the orgs allow this to go as far as making my experience so miserable that I consider leaving the platforms. I guess it’sa slippery slope and provably also metrics that are chosen to hide my increasing disinterest …

Yeah, but I consciously watch things my wife likes with her on her account exactly due to this ;)

Yeah I’ve noticed this as well, and I have liked quite some of their original content … But if it gets to the point that they’re failing to keep me as a custoner at all, something must be amiss …

I have considered this, and there’s some truth truth to this, that I have watched all from my favorite categories … but then I do discover whole seasons of things I haven’t watched but liked previous seasons of, and whole series when digging around long enough … it just feels increasingly difficult to efficiently dig.

Very cool, just discovered something to binge :) thanks!

Maybe but it’s in their best interest to keep me watching… surfing and leaving without watching should be a very strong sign that something is amiss

It’s reliable for many many use cases (e.g. anything that transforms text into a different representation), but not for a few others (e.g. anything that requires logical reasoning) - a F1 car is great on race tracks, we don’t see people taking them on gravel roads and then complain they’re unreliable …

If you lack the imagination of what an upload could be like, it’s definitely saner not to aim for it. Upload must contain your body as large parts of a „you“ are not in the brain but in the physiology of the body. A full body upload will allow you to transition away from that initial you, like putting on a costume that the brain starts to internalize.

Yes please, Quest should just allow me to lie down and then define this as standing. This should not be an app feature but a headset feature. VR is currently only usable while standing or sitting… why?

I really like the increase in transparency, I found it somewhat disturbing to pay for what feels like a random amount of stuff. How should I know if I need Pro or Pro+ if there is no estimate out there what either might get me. The update does not seem to change that though. I would love to have a distribution plotted of how much compute I might expect. Or at least Min/Average/Max run time until disconnect (rn. only Max is known).

Been leading https://www.roboy.org for the last 7 years, completed third generation robot in Q4/20, now looking to commercialise it. Looking for a BD co-founder. Location: Munich, Germany, Approach: Global, Space: Luxury, Tech: Humanoid Robotics

nice! but why don't you just calculate soft shadows the way they occur physically by sampling an area light source instead of a point light source? You can basically run the same algorithm again and again with light source points in a circle from the center of the light source, then alpha-fuse them together? Am I missing something?

GmbH gives you limited liability, that's its main purpose, to encapsulate risks and create a body on its own. You can just as well just register as a freelancer if there's no significant risk of going into debt suddenly or being sued. The overhead is not that big though, you have to submit tax returns, do proper accounting and you might want a tax consultant for this - that removes most of the headache, and costs you 3k€ a year. The pains start with employees, but I've also outsourced that to an HR company, costs me 30€ per employee per month - removes most of those pains too. Often tax consultants do that too. Bigger pains start at 10 employees, but by then ure hopefully large enough to have a few experienced people around you to take care of those :) All in all, I've found Germany to be less painfull than expected.