4 ms·

Flood Fill vs. The Magic Circle

100 points by tobr 8mo ago

Dylan16807 8mo ago
This assumes very slow AI progress. I'm not one to hype up LLMs, but I would never claim it'll take 200 years before an AI can untangle a sewing machine with robot hands. Stuffing an envelope and applying a stamp? My bet is less than 20 years. That's a level of tactility that can do a tremendous amount of real-world activity. And the capability of a high end robot controlled by a human keeps expanding, so in the hypothetical "AGI" scenario the flood fill gets pretty big.
- dandellion 8mo ago
  Self-driving looks like a much easier problem, it has gotten a massive amount of investment in the last decade, and it's not fully solved yet. Compared to that your 20 years estimate sounds way too optimistic.
  - Dylan16807 8mo ago
    I don't think driving looks easier than untangling. You can untangle nice and slow with little outside involvement. When it comes to self-driving at 25mph without traffic, it pretty much is a solved problem.
    - jagged-chisel 8mo ago
      I think this untangling problem gets underestimated because people aren't consciously aware of what they're using to analyze and address a tangle. The input is not all vision - you've got sensation in your fingers giving you feedback with which you update your model of the problem as you progress. The operation varies in strength depending on so many factors. At the point you have enough sensor input, enough force application variability, and the power to process this in the ballpark of real-time (comparable to a human brain), you now have a being who's going to advocate for the removal of slavery and the application of rights.
      - Dylan16807 8mo ago
        On the other hand a dumb computer can figure out the exact topology of the threads. Edit: Oh wait I forgot I actually said the 20 year number for doing mail. If that's the comparison to driving a car there's really no contest at all. Mail is so easy in comparison to comprehending traffic.
    - dandellion 8mo ago
      > When it comes to self-driving at 25mph without traffic, it pretty much is a solved problem. So is untangling an untangled sewing machine. Did you pick the worse possible example on purpose?
      - Dylan16807 8mo ago
        You seem to have missed why I said that. Let me try to reword. Being able to go as slow as you want with no outside interference makes most problems a lot easier. It's not an analogy, it's literal. Untangling has that huge huge benefit, self-driving doesn't. It's the low-pressure version of self-driving that potentially looks like an easier problem. And that version is solved, so that undermines the argument of "this easier thing isn't solved after tons of effort, so what makes you think your thing would get solved in 20 years". High-pressure self-driving doesn't look like it's easier than untangling. So it being unsolved isn't really evidence for anything.
- card_zero 8mo ago
  I guess it's time to bring up "Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922
throwawaymaroon 8mo ago
[dead]
Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
Overall, I love this essay. However, the entire argument hinges on one assertion, buried about halfway through: > Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon. Is this correct? I don't feel qualified to say. But if it's wrong... well, then there's a missing pixel in the magic circle, and flood fill will make the whole thing unrecognizable.
- juancn 8mo ago
  The sensing part is really really hard. Hands, mechanically are fairly simple to mimic, touch? the way skin feels micron-level shifts and subtle temperature changes is plain tough.
  - michaelt 8mo ago
    > Hands, mechanically are fairly simple to mimic I can assure you they are not. Human hands have absolutely crazy performance. Human hands have 15+ degrees of freedom. Sub-millimeter precision, no backlash. Strong enough to lift 100 lbs. Gentle enough to catch a thrown egg without breaking it. Rigid enough to hammer a nail without dropping the hammer. A compact forearm for reaching into tight spaces. Water- and dust-proof. Oh, and it'll last for decades without maintenance. Even a $100k robot hand like a Shadow Hand can't compare.
- card_zero 8mo ago
  Like Rodney Brooks says, "No one has managed to get articulated fingers (i.e., fingers with joints in them) that are robust enough, have enough force, nor enough lifetime, for real industrial applications." Here, I'll link to that piece directly, it's long and detailed and illustrated, and it also counters the idea of just throwing AI at the problem until robot dexterity emerges from whatever physical parts. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... "there have now been fifteen different families of neurons discovered that are involved in touch sensing and that are found in the human hand" ... "a human hand has about 17,000 low-threshold mechanoreceptors" ... "These receptors come in four varieties (slow vs fast adapting, and a very localized area of sensitivity vs a much larger area)" You might ask, do robots that interact with the real world need such complicated bio-mimicking physical tech, or can they cut corners? But they can't cut all the corners, anyway. Somebody has to make a high-bandwidth robot hand with flexible strength and a self-repair ability. Or, hey, cyborgs maybe? Reanimate cadavers with AI, that could do the trick.
akoboldfrying 8mo ago
A robot that automatically untangles a rope is pretty much the coolest project idea I have ever heard of. It hits all the right buttons: extremely technically difficult with many design possibilities, completely novel, and of marginal utility. You cannot say that it would never be useful!
aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
Does anyone know how this works? I wanted a way to track letters sent via First Class mail. USPS doesn’t provide this directly, a la parcel tracking, but it does scan those letters — all of them — and the data is available, but you have to wire everything up yourself, jumping through a few hoops along the way.
- lordgrenville 8mo ago
  I asked AI and it found me this repo: https://github.com/1997cui/envelope https://github.com/1997cui/envelope The linked site has a nice FAQ section: https://envelopetracker.com/intro https://envelopetracker.com/intro
  - aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
    thanks! :)
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
aleksiy123 8mo ago
it just me or are all these arguments in this essay sort of not convincing? It doesn't work now, and it's hard so it can't be don't. Printers don't perfectly connect digital and physical with no issues? "So what?" Better than doing it by hand or any other solution we have. That's the only thing that matters, relative value. Maybe I'm just not getting how they connect with the current reality? Or how they even make an argument against it? The world can exist without humanity, but humanity cannot exist without the world. "Ok, so what?"
arjie 8mo ago
Well, applying a new tool to an intractable problem is certainly something that will take skill. Someone who finds a general purpose way to do it will become very rich. For my part, I was sufficiently thrilled when Claude Code could self-iterate on a simple device to hold board game cards for me. The more sophisticated modeling isn't so easy with it, but the fact that I could use a machine intelligence to construct surfaces for me is amazing to me. 5 years ago if you had told me this I would have called you a bullshitter. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_With_Claude https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...
foota 8mo ago
I've been having much the same thoughts. What will work look like, say, 10 years from now? I'm beginning to think that we might have all the knowledge worker type jobs largely filled, or filled with significantly less workers, (hopefully) more free time for everyone, and the remaining people working in more physical positions. In many ways, I think this is probably better for society than the opposite, since in general there are fewer knowledge workers than not.
- program_whiz 8mo ago
  It will only in the same way computers and machines that automated past work such as farming and textiles has created lots of free time for today's workers.
lemoing 8mo ago
I’ve taken the last year off from software engineering and have worked a mix of jobs that primarily exist outside the magic circle of the internet. I think one thing that surprised me was just how little computers were used; there was some basic scheduling and retail management software, but the meat of the job was in the real world. Not only that, but most of the community was similar: their jobs were based in the physical world and computers were kept at an arm’s length. Even bookings were made over the phone, not online. It was eye-opening coming from my service-based economy bubble just how little computers (and because of that, LLMs) affected life in certain pockets of the world, some of them very large. A step further than that is to realize that all the value we extract at the software level comes from value produced in the real world at some stage. What the article says about sprinkling in a bit of the physical world into your work was one of my takeaways from my year off as well; even without worrying about AI and job security, it just feels more rewarding.
- enricozb 8mo ago
  What sorts of jobs, out of curiosity?
  - lemoing 8mo ago
    I worked at a family-owned bike shop, at a fancy hotel as a valet/porter, and picked up a few shifts at breweries/events. I’ll be jumping back into software in a few months but it’s been a refreshing year of doing something different.
bananaflag 8mo ago
> Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon. Well, the one and only thing which is constantly improving robots is human ingenuity, and if that is replaced by (yes, symbols-in, symbols-out) artificial superintelligence, I expect that improving to improve quite fast.
- emil-lp 8mo ago
  Someone has been sipping from Tegmark's cool-aid.

100 points by tobr 8mo ago

This assumes very slow AI progress. I'm not one to hype up LLMs, but I would never claim it'll take 200 years before an AI can untangle a sewing machine with robot hands. Stuffing an envelope and applying a stamp? My bet is less than 20 years. That's a level of tactility that can do a tremendous amount of real-world activity. And the capability of a high end robot controlled by a human keeps expanding, so in the hypothetical "AGI" scenario the flood fill gets pretty big.

dandellion 8mo ago
Self-driving looks like a much easier problem, it has gotten a massive amount of investment in the last decade, and it's not fully solved yet. Compared to that your 20 years estimate sounds way too optimistic.
- Dylan16807 8mo ago
  I don't think driving looks easier than untangling. You can untangle nice and slow with little outside involvement. When it comes to self-driving at 25mph without traffic, it pretty much is a solved problem.
  - jagged-chisel 8mo ago
    I think this untangling problem gets underestimated because people aren't consciously aware of what they're using to analyze and address a tangle. The input is not all vision - you've got sensation in your fingers giving you feedback with which you update your model of the problem as you progress. The operation varies in strength depending on so many factors. At the point you have enough sensor input, enough force application variability, and the power to process this in the ballpark of real-time (comparable to a human brain), you now have a being who's going to advocate for the removal of slavery and the application of rights.
    - Dylan16807 8mo ago
      On the other hand a dumb computer can figure out the exact topology of the threads. Edit: Oh wait I forgot I actually said the 20 year number for doing mail. If that's the comparison to driving a car there's really no contest at all. Mail is so easy in comparison to comprehending traffic.
  - dandellion 8mo ago
    > When it comes to self-driving at 25mph without traffic, it pretty much is a solved problem. So is untangling an untangled sewing machine. Did you pick the worse possible example on purpose?
    - Dylan16807 8mo ago
      You seem to have missed why I said that. Let me try to reword. Being able to go as slow as you want with no outside interference makes most problems a lot easier. It's not an analogy, it's literal. Untangling has that huge huge benefit, self-driving doesn't. It's the low-pressure version of self-driving that potentially looks like an easier problem. And that version is solved, so that undermines the argument of "this easier thing isn't solved after tons of effort, so what makes you think your thing would get solved in 20 years". High-pressure self-driving doesn't look like it's easier than untangling. So it being unsolved isn't really evidence for anything.
card_zero 8mo ago
I guess it's time to bring up "Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922

throwawaymaroon 8mo ago

[dead]

Wowfunhappy 8mo ago

Overall, I love this essay. However, the entire argument hinges on one assertion, buried about halfway through: > Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon. Is this correct? I don't feel qualified to say. But if it's wrong... well, then there's a missing pixel in the magic circle, and flood fill will make the whole thing unrecognizable.

juancn 8mo ago
The sensing part is really really hard. Hands, mechanically are fairly simple to mimic, touch? the way skin feels micron-level shifts and subtle temperature changes is plain tough.
- michaelt 8mo ago
  > Hands, mechanically are fairly simple to mimic I can assure you they are not. Human hands have absolutely crazy performance. Human hands have 15+ degrees of freedom. Sub-millimeter precision, no backlash. Strong enough to lift 100 lbs. Gentle enough to catch a thrown egg without breaking it. Rigid enough to hammer a nail without dropping the hammer. A compact forearm for reaching into tight spaces. Water- and dust-proof. Oh, and it'll last for decades without maintenance. Even a $100k robot hand like a Shadow Hand can't compare.
card_zero 8mo ago
Like Rodney Brooks says, "No one has managed to get articulated fingers (i.e., fingers with joints in them) that are robust enough, have enough force, nor enough lifetime, for real industrial applications." Here, I'll link to that piece directly, it's long and detailed and illustrated, and it also counters the idea of just throwing AI at the problem until robot dexterity emerges from whatever physical parts. https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dexterity/ https://rodneybrooks.com/why-todays-humanoids-wont-learn-dex... "there have now been fifteen different families of neurons discovered that are involved in touch sensing and that are found in the human hand" ... "a human hand has about 17,000 low-threshold mechanoreceptors" ... "These receptors come in four varieties (slow vs fast adapting, and a very localized area of sensitivity vs a much larger area)" You might ask, do robots that interact with the real world need such complicated bio-mimicking physical tech, or can they cut corners? But they can't cut all the corners, anyway. Somebody has to make a high-bandwidth robot hand with flexible strength and a self-repair ability. Or, hey, cyborgs maybe? Reanimate cadavers with AI, that could do the trick.

akoboldfrying 8mo ago

A robot that automatically untangles a rope is pretty much the coolest project idea I have ever heard of. It hits all the right buttons: extremely technically difficult with many design possibilities, completely novel, and of marginal utility. You cannot say that it would never be useful!

aaronbrethorst 8mo ago

Does anyone know how this works? I wanted a way to track letters sent via First Class mail. USPS doesn’t provide this directly, a la parcel tracking, but it does scan those letters — all of them — and the data is available, but you have to wire everything up yourself, jumping through a few hoops along the way.

lordgrenville 8mo ago
I asked AI and it found me this repo: https://github.com/1997cui/envelope https://github.com/1997cui/envelope The linked site has a nice FAQ section: https://envelopetracker.com/intro https://envelopetracker.com/intro
- aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
  thanks! :)

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

aleksiy123 8mo ago

it just me or are all these arguments in this essay sort of not convincing? It doesn't work now, and it's hard so it can't be don't. Printers don't perfectly connect digital and physical with no issues? "So what?" Better than doing it by hand or any other solution we have. That's the only thing that matters, relative value. Maybe I'm just not getting how they connect with the current reality? Or how they even make an argument against it? The world can exist without humanity, but humanity cannot exist without the world. "Ok, so what?"

arjie 8mo ago

Well, applying a new tool to an intractable problem is certainly something that will take skill. Someone who finds a general purpose way to do it will become very rich. For my part, I was sufficiently thrilled when Claude Code could self-iterate on a simple device to hold board game cards for me. The more sophisticated modeling isn't so easy with it, but the fact that I could use a machine intelligence to construct surfaces for me is amazing to me. 5 years ago if you had told me this I would have called you a bullshitter. https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_With_Claude https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-01-11/Modeling_Wit...

foota 8mo ago

I've been having much the same thoughts. What will work look like, say, 10 years from now? I'm beginning to think that we might have all the knowledge worker type jobs largely filled, or filled with significantly less workers, (hopefully) more free time for everyone, and the remaining people working in more physical positions. In many ways, I think this is probably better for society than the opposite, since in general there are fewer knowledge workers than not.

program_whiz 8mo ago
It will only in the same way computers and machines that automated past work such as farming and textiles has created lots of free time for today's workers.

lemoing 8mo ago

I’ve taken the last year off from software engineering and have worked a mix of jobs that primarily exist outside the magic circle of the internet. I think one thing that surprised me was just how little computers were used; there was some basic scheduling and retail management software, but the meat of the job was in the real world. Not only that, but most of the community was similar: their jobs were based in the physical world and computers were kept at an arm’s length. Even bookings were made over the phone, not online. It was eye-opening coming from my service-based economy bubble just how little computers (and because of that, LLMs) affected life in certain pockets of the world, some of them very large. A step further than that is to realize that all the value we extract at the software level comes from value produced in the real world at some stage. What the article says about sprinkling in a bit of the physical world into your work was one of my takeaways from my year off as well; even without worrying about AI and job security, it just feels more rewarding.

enricozb 8mo ago
What sorts of jobs, out of curiosity?
- lemoing 8mo ago
  I worked at a family-owned bike shop, at a fancy hotel as a valet/porter, and picked up a few shifts at breweries/events. I’ll be jumping back into software in a few months but it’s been a refreshing year of doing something different.

bananaflag 8mo ago

> Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon. Well, the one and only thing which is constantly improving robots is human ingenuity, and if that is replaced by (yes, symbols-in, symbols-out) artificial superintelligence, I expect that improving to improve quite fast.

emil-lp 8mo ago
Someone has been sipping from Tegmark's cool-aid.