7 ms·

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things goi

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now. * Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind. * Flying cars. The scaled-up drone flying cars actually work. First commercial deployment in China. Range is limited, but good enough to get VIPs around congested cities. * Batteries. Solid-state batteries still are not available in quantity, because the manufacturing process is hard. At least five major companies are working on it. Somebody will crack that. They will not be in the US. * Metals. Lots of sources found for rare earths. Electric powered basic steel has been demonstrated. * Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.

woodpanel 2y ago
> Electric cars. For new car sales … 50% in China. This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1] [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-market-share-in-china-ev-sales-report/amp/ https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-marke...
- Animats 2y ago
  OK, "Plug-in vehicles". I considered getting one of those, but it only has 22 miles of electric range. If they got to 50 miles, I could run on electricity almost all the time.
  - underdeserver 2y ago
    This is where the US is the outlier. A very small percentage of people I know in Europe and elsewhere in the developed world drive more than that on a regular workday. Perhaps the hybrid car's batteries just need to be bigger.
    - asjir 2y ago
      Yeah, interesting why there isn't a US version of hybrids yet
  - aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
    Plugin hybrids are great. Electric is used in daily commutes, but there is no range anxiety and no problem with a long trip. Pure electric sales are actually stalling, and multiple car brands (Volvo, and Volkswagen) are backing down on their electric ambitions and pivoting towards plugin hybrids as a better intermediary.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
Those aren't flying cars. Flying cars can drive on the ground. On wheels. Hence the name.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  That's a nitpick on the order of "LLMs are a dead end because they can't reconsider their output before writing it". Duh, run it in a loop. Duh, attach wheels to the "scaled up drone flying cars". If that's the standard, then every plane in existence meets it.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    It is not a nitpick. VTOL aircraft are not cars. Period. You might as well call helicopters "flying cars."
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      > You might as well call helicopters "flying cars." Which is exactly what people do in reply to the question, "where are our promised flying cars?". They exist, they're called helicopters. The one criterion this does not meet, that's often hiding implied in the word "car", is "car as in private car ownership in United States". This will never fly (excuse the pun) with flying vehicles, because not many would be willing to go through enough training to be able to operate an aircraft safely. Most drivers don't even get adequate training to operate their own cars safely (drivers' license requirements are a joke), and piloting takes at least an order of magnitude more than that. (And that doesn't even touch maintenance, which most drivers don't do, and a good fraction of those are willing to spend extra money to get their broken cars stamped as road-worthy.) Which is why human-piloted helicopters and self-flying passenger drones are the closest we're going to get to "flying car" anytime soon; physics and human stupidity precludes anything else.
      - DidYaWipe 2y ago
        Nobody says that. And your assertion about the meaning of "car" is absurd. The meaning, which is profoundly missing in VTOLs, is a vehicle that you can drive around on ROADS, on WHEELS. Nobody cares about the private ownership. They care about rolling it down the street.
BigJono 2y ago
> * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now. How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since. Seems to me like an area that could make use the sensor/3d tech from self driving, but wouldn't need to be anywhere near as reliable to still be a useful product. You could probably charge Apple margins if you cracked it first. I'd pay $5-10k for something that would last a few years and could passively clean a bathroom or kitchen to a reasonable degree.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  > How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Navigating a house requires a level of understanding that we still can't get using a top end GPU and optimal sensors.
  - potatoman22 2y ago
    Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox "It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility
- Animats 2y ago
  Cost vs. utilization is a big issue. About ten years ago, there were Foldmate and Laundroid, robotic laundry folding machines. They worked, but cost too much for home use. Industrial-strength machines which do such jobs exist.[1] They work fine, but you need a hotel or hospital sized laundry operation to keep that machinery busy. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491732
- Izkata 2y ago
  > How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since. This is a great example of "short term improvements are overestimated, long-term underestimated". As someone who jumped from a top-of-the-line robot vacuum in 2014 (not a Roomba - they were already slightly behind) to a high-quality-but-average one this year - those incremental improvements have added up to almost an entirely different product. That's not even counting the experiments out there like SwitchBot's plans (looks like the humidifier is out, but I don't see the dehumidifier on their site).
wg0 2y ago
> Self driving works. No it doesn't. Only in San Francisco maybe.
- kredd 2y ago
  But it works? We only have functional public transit in small amount of cities in NA as well. If we can scale it up, it might be a game changer. I’m as pro-transit as it gets, but unfortunately we don’t have political appetite for it.
  - starluz 2y ago
    Just wait till you see these in action. Driverless is here
  - freehorse 2y ago
    Public transit could scale up with drivers too, as it does in many other places.
  - piva00 2y ago
    > But it works? We only have functional public transit in small amount of cities in NA as well. If we can scale it up, it might be a game changer. I’m as pro-transit as it gets, but unfortunately we don’t have political appetite for it. Rather sad though that instead of implementing what empirically is already known to work in so many cities there's a quest for a solution to a problem that's completely self-inflicted. Self-driving might help a bit with transportation in NA cities but it definitely won't be the solution, there's just not enough physical space on the roads to be a game changer, at worst it will create even more issues with road usage. And my fear is that instead of realising it was the wrong bet (just like the car-centric approach) it will be doubled down into some ever-more-complex maze of solutions to make cars transporting 1-2 passengers to get to their destinations quicker by interconnecting them, and doing traffic management on a network of cars. Those are fun problems to think about and try to solve but completely missing the mark about what actually works for a city and why. Someone will call that "innovation" and sell it to some suckers, just like car-centric urbanism.
iamacyborg 2y ago
> Even obesity can be cured. Eating less isn’t all that much of a breakthrough, but it certainly highlights how hard it is to get people to do something they don’t want to do.
- eastbound 2y ago
  Not having sugar AND salt in every food helps. To lose weight, a trip to the old continent where fruits are cheaper than processed food, does a better job than any diet.
- bordercases 2y ago
  I think he implied Ozempic.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    I assumed that too, but all Ozempic is (as I understand) is an appetite suppressant.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Which is the exact thing that addresses your objection. People, in general, are unable to downregulate their appetite on their own in order to "just eat less". Ozempic does it for them. Honestly, I question the whole idea that failing to "eat less" is a personal problem. Historically, we jumped into obesity epidemic straight from the time when food was scarce and not very nutrient-rich. Ability to manage caloric intake in times of abundance may not be something humans have in general, as long periods of abundance didn't happen until 100 years ago.
      - iamacyborg 2y ago
        > Honestly, I question the whole idea that failing to "eat less" is a personal problem. I guess it depends on what we’re eating less of. Overeating calorie dense junk food isn’t the same thing as overeating carrot sticks and you rarely hear about problems coming from the latter.
jen729w 2y ago
> * Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind. Norway: hold my beer. 94%. https://electriccarsreport.com/2024/09/norways-ev-sales-set-new-record-in-august-taking-94-market-share/ https://electriccarsreport.com/2024/09/norways-ev-sales-set-...
- vidarh 2y ago
  A key element is that Norway has some of the highest taxes on cars in the world, and one of highest VAT/sales tax rates, which created a very politically palatable opportunity for very significant tax breaks, with a perfect confluence of overlap between those who wanted an environmentally friendly policy, and those who wanted less tax.
Gooblebrai 2y ago
What's the effective difference of a flying car with a helicopter?
- isametry 2y ago
  A helicopter cannot drive on land?
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  Noise, energy profile, safety profile, level of automation. If they solve those well enough, it means a lot of the operational restrictions that make helicopters very limited in scope (few landing sites, insanely high operating costs due to needing very specialised, highly trained pilots and maintenance crew etc.) could be somewhat lifted. Fairly big "if" though. Rotary wings are inherently high energy, and heavier-than-air flight has much, much tighter safety and reliability requirements than cars for a good reason.
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured. Would disagree, we have possibly regressed. We have more gizmos (like diabetes monitors) and diagnostics, but no real cures and a significantly more sick people.
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  Counterpoint: " mRNA vaccines " took less than three years to adapt to a new pandemic and scale up to mass production to cover a whole planet's worth of people. The tech and progress within medicine are insane. CRISPR and genetic engineering allow modified bacteria, algae, and yeasts to produce any biological molecule we want in mass. Computer algorithms allow new medicines to be tested and perfected without real medical trials. As for the public healthcare and hospital industry in a few key industrialized countries, going through a bit of a ... "downward spiral" is a separate issue from the technology itself. (USA) As for more sick people... diabetes is going up, and people aren't exercising. I cannot refute that. Perhaps a healthier work culture where people have more time to cook proper food and take care of their health will do wonders, but "who is gonna pay for the loss of productivity" always gets in the way.
- mezzie2 2y ago
  I have MS and an MS diagnosis in 1994, 2004, 2014, and 2024 are all wildly different experiences. A lot of progress has been made in this area very quickly, to the point where you can see the stratification/differences in progression based on diagnosis year very clearly in support groups and neurology practices. I'm about 10 years post diagnosis and in those 10 years a ton of progress has been made. It's to the point where I've moved from considering MS a probably lifelong incurable disease to 'if I can hold on for ~20 more years without significant relapses, it can probably be cured or controlled.'
  - dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    Videos for you to look at closely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJRu8rZxufg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJRu8rZxufg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuFgAjy4gjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuFgAjy4gjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCNMBCu8y9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCNMBCu8y9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpbvX1wsfUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpbvX1wsfUM Contact me if you have success some months/years down the line. Will also take a negative feedback from you. Caveat: you may have to wean off medications. Source for above links: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXPH44VC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXPH44VC
rglullis 2y ago
Except of AIDS, none of the items on your list are things we really need but just a naive attempt of masking the problems of modern society life. Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > none of the items on your list are things we really need This can be said about practically any technology outside agriculture. It’s wild to pretend the items on that list don’t increase quality of life.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    The problem is not of technology. The problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved. - Automation is good. Striving for "100% robotic warehouses" is a recipe to further concentrate wealth around the handful of corporations that can deploy it. - Electric engines are good. Thinking that we would be better off by giving one car to every adult person instead of simply redesigning the overall transit network is a horrible idea. - Finding new sources for rare earths is good. Jumping to the conclusion that this means we can then extract them is absurdly naive. We don't even recycle plastic properly, what do you think is going to happen with all those metals in the failing car batteries 20 years from now? - Improved drones are good. Arguing that progress is "getting VIPs out of congested areas" is absolutely dystopian. - Having drugs to treat diabetes is good. But having these drugs under the control of pharma corporations who worry more about their bottom line than actual health of the population is outright cruel. I am all for developing technology. I am not a Luddite. But we got to ask ourselves "cui buono?". Whenever we see somebody pushing some technology or project to solve "humanity problems", the immediate check should be "if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it?"
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved This has been claimed for everything from writing to the printing press and steam engine. If you want perfectly deliberated technological development, you’re against new technology. > if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it? You’re describing research, not technology.

woodpanel 2y ago

> Electric cars. For new car sales … 50% in China. This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1] [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-market-share-in-china-ev-sales-report/amp/ https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-marke...

Animats 2y ago
OK, "Plug-in vehicles". I considered getting one of those, but it only has 22 miles of electric range. If they got to 50 miles, I could run on electricity almost all the time.
- underdeserver 2y ago
  This is where the US is the outlier. A very small percentage of people I know in Europe and elsewhere in the developed world drive more than that on a regular workday. Perhaps the hybrid car's batteries just need to be bigger.
  - asjir 2y ago
    Yeah, interesting why there isn't a US version of hybrids yet
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  Plugin hybrids are great. Electric is used in daily commutes, but there is no range anxiety and no problem with a long trip. Pure electric sales are actually stalling, and multiple car brands (Volvo, and Volkswagen) are backing down on their electric ambitions and pivoting towards plugin hybrids as a better intermediary.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

Those aren't flying cars. Flying cars can drive on the ground. On wheels. Hence the name.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
That's a nitpick on the order of "LLMs are a dead end because they can't reconsider their output before writing it". Duh, run it in a loop. Duh, attach wheels to the "scaled up drone flying cars". If that's the standard, then every plane in existence meets it.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  It is not a nitpick. VTOL aircraft are not cars. Period. You might as well call helicopters "flying cars."
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > You might as well call helicopters "flying cars." Which is exactly what people do in reply to the question, "where are our promised flying cars?". They exist, they're called helicopters. The one criterion this does not meet, that's often hiding implied in the word "car", is "car as in private car ownership in United States". This will never fly (excuse the pun) with flying vehicles, because not many would be willing to go through enough training to be able to operate an aircraft safely. Most drivers don't even get adequate training to operate their own cars safely (drivers' license requirements are a joke), and piloting takes at least an order of magnitude more than that. (And that doesn't even touch maintenance, which most drivers don't do, and a good fraction of those are willing to spend extra money to get their broken cars stamped as road-worthy.) Which is why human-piloted helicopters and self-flying passenger drones are the closest we're going to get to "flying car" anytime soon; physics and human stupidity precludes anything else.
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      Nobody says that. And your assertion about the meaning of "car" is absurd. The meaning, which is profoundly missing in VTOLs, is a vehicle that you can drive around on ROADS, on WHEELS. Nobody cares about the private ownership. They care about rolling it down the street.

BigJono 2y ago

> * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now. How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since. Seems to me like an area that could make use the sensor/3d tech from self driving, but wouldn't need to be anywhere near as reliable to still be a useful product. You could probably charge Apple margins if you cracked it first. I'd pay $5-10k for something that would last a few years and could passively clean a bathroom or kitchen to a reasonable degree.

KaiserPro 2y ago
> How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Navigating a house requires a level of understanding that we still can't get using a top end GPU and optimal sensors.
- potatoman22 2y ago
  Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox "It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility
Animats 2y ago
Cost vs. utilization is a big issue. About ten years ago, there were Foldmate and Laundroid, robotic laundry folding machines. They worked, but cost too much for home use. Industrial-strength machines which do such jobs exist.[1] They work fine, but you need a hotel or hospital sized laundry operation to keep that machinery busy. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36491732
Izkata 2y ago
> How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since. This is a great example of "short term improvements are overestimated, long-term underestimated". As someone who jumped from a top-of-the-line robot vacuum in 2014 (not a Roomba - they were already slightly behind) to a high-quality-but-average one this year - those incremental improvements have added up to almost an entirely different product. That's not even counting the experiments out there like SwitchBot's plans (looks like the humidifier is out, but I don't see the dehumidifier on their site).

wg0 2y ago

> Self driving works. No it doesn't. Only in San Francisco maybe.

kredd 2y ago
But it works? We only have functional public transit in small amount of cities in NA as well. If we can scale it up, it might be a game changer. I’m as pro-transit as it gets, but unfortunately we don’t have political appetite for it.
- starluz 2y ago
  Just wait till you see these in action. Driverless is here
- freehorse 2y ago
  Public transit could scale up with drivers too, as it does in many other places.
- piva00 2y ago
  > But it works? We only have functional public transit in small amount of cities in NA as well. If we can scale it up, it might be a game changer. I’m as pro-transit as it gets, but unfortunately we don’t have political appetite for it. Rather sad though that instead of implementing what empirically is already known to work in so many cities there's a quest for a solution to a problem that's completely self-inflicted. Self-driving might help a bit with transportation in NA cities but it definitely won't be the solution, there's just not enough physical space on the roads to be a game changer, at worst it will create even more issues with road usage. And my fear is that instead of realising it was the wrong bet (just like the car-centric approach) it will be doubled down into some ever-more-complex maze of solutions to make cars transporting 1-2 passengers to get to their destinations quicker by interconnecting them, and doing traffic management on a network of cars. Those are fun problems to think about and try to solve but completely missing the mark about what actually works for a city and why. Someone will call that "innovation" and sell it to some suckers, just like car-centric urbanism.

iamacyborg 2y ago

> Even obesity can be cured. Eating less isn’t all that much of a breakthrough, but it certainly highlights how hard it is to get people to do something they don’t want to do.

eastbound 2y ago
Not having sugar AND salt in every food helps. To lose weight, a trip to the old continent where fruits are cheaper than processed food, does a better job than any diet.
bordercases 2y ago
I think he implied Ozempic.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  I assumed that too, but all Ozempic is (as I understand) is an appetite suppressant.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Which is the exact thing that addresses your objection. People, in general, are unable to downregulate their appetite on their own in order to "just eat less". Ozempic does it for them. Honestly, I question the whole idea that failing to "eat less" is a personal problem. Historically, we jumped into obesity epidemic straight from the time when food was scarce and not very nutrient-rich. Ability to manage caloric intake in times of abundance may not be something humans have in general, as long periods of abundance didn't happen until 100 years ago.
    - iamacyborg 2y ago
      > Honestly, I question the whole idea that failing to "eat less" is a personal problem. I guess it depends on what we’re eating less of. Overeating calorie dense junk food isn’t the same thing as overeating carrot sticks and you rarely hear about problems coming from the latter.

jen729w 2y ago

> * Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind. Norway: hold my beer. 94%. https://electriccarsreport.com/2024/09/norways-ev-sales-set-new-record-in-august-taking-94-market-share/ https://electriccarsreport.com/2024/09/norways-ev-sales-set-...

vidarh 2y ago
A key element is that Norway has some of the highest taxes on cars in the world, and one of highest VAT/sales tax rates, which created a very politically palatable opportunity for very significant tax breaks, with a perfect confluence of overlap between those who wanted an environmentally friendly policy, and those who wanted less tax.

Gooblebrai 2y ago

What's the effective difference of a flying car with a helicopter?

isametry 2y ago
A helicopter cannot drive on land?
Earw0rm 2y ago
Noise, energy profile, safety profile, level of automation. If they solve those well enough, it means a lot of the operational restrictions that make helicopters very limited in scope (few landing sites, insanely high operating costs due to needing very specialised, highly trained pilots and maintenance crew etc.) could be somewhat lifted. Fairly big "if" though. Rotary wings are inherently high energy, and heavier-than-air flight has much, much tighter safety and reliability requirements than cars for a good reason.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured. Would disagree, we have possibly regressed. We have more gizmos (like diabetes monitors) and diagnostics, but no real cures and a significantly more sick people.

aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
Counterpoint: " mRNA vaccines " took less than three years to adapt to a new pandemic and scale up to mass production to cover a whole planet's worth of people. The tech and progress within medicine are insane. CRISPR and genetic engineering allow modified bacteria, algae, and yeasts to produce any biological molecule we want in mass. Computer algorithms allow new medicines to be tested and perfected without real medical trials. As for the public healthcare and hospital industry in a few key industrialized countries, going through a bit of a ... "downward spiral" is a separate issue from the technology itself. (USA) As for more sick people... diabetes is going up, and people aren't exercising. I cannot refute that. Perhaps a healthier work culture where people have more time to cook proper food and take care of their health will do wonders, but "who is gonna pay for the loss of productivity" always gets in the way.
mezzie2 2y ago
I have MS and an MS diagnosis in 1994, 2004, 2014, and 2024 are all wildly different experiences. A lot of progress has been made in this area very quickly, to the point where you can see the stratification/differences in progression based on diagnosis year very clearly in support groups and neurology practices. I'm about 10 years post diagnosis and in those 10 years a ton of progress has been made. It's to the point where I've moved from considering MS a probably lifelong incurable disease to 'if I can hold on for ~20 more years without significant relapses, it can probably be cured or controlled.'
- dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
  Videos for you to look at closely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJRu8rZxufg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJRu8rZxufg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuFgAjy4gjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuFgAjy4gjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCNMBCu8y9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCNMBCu8y9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpbvX1wsfUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpbvX1wsfUM Contact me if you have success some months/years down the line. Will also take a negative feedback from you. Caveat: you may have to wean off medications. Source for above links: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXPH44VC https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXPH44VC

rglullis 2y ago

Except of AIDS, none of the items on your list are things we really need but just a naive attempt of masking the problems of modern society life. Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> none of the items on your list are things we really need This can be said about practically any technology outside agriculture. It’s wild to pretend the items on that list don’t increase quality of life.
- rglullis 2y ago
  The problem is not of technology. The problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved. - Automation is good. Striving for "100% robotic warehouses" is a recipe to further concentrate wealth around the handful of corporations that can deploy it. - Electric engines are good. Thinking that we would be better off by giving one car to every adult person instead of simply redesigning the overall transit network is a horrible idea. - Finding new sources for rare earths is good. Jumping to the conclusion that this means we can then extract them is absurdly naive. We don't even recycle plastic properly, what do you think is going to happen with all those metals in the failing car batteries 20 years from now? - Improved drones are good. Arguing that progress is "getting VIPs out of congested areas" is absolutely dystopian. - Having drugs to treat diabetes is good. But having these drugs under the control of pharma corporations who worry more about their bottom line than actual health of the population is outright cruel. I am all for developing technology. I am not a Luddite. But we got to ask ourselves "cui buono?". Whenever we see somebody pushing some technology or project to solve "humanity problems", the immediate check should be "if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it?"
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > problem is that we are working to apply technology solutions with no regard to the scale and trade-offs involved This has been claimed for everything from writing to the printing press and steam engine. If you want perfectly deliberated technological development, you’re against new technology. > if this problem is so important to solve, would you still work on it even if you gained nothing from it? You’re describing research, not technology.