robotresearcher

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31.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Just did the fun thought experiment of playing back this comment thread in my head ten years in the past and it's amusingly incomprehensible.
32.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
I have two thoughts simultaneously about the anthropomorphisation of these systems: 1. we should do it less, because it distorts our ability to think about them properly. Calling these processes 'thinking', 'holidays', e
33.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Courts do this stuff all the time. Meta was just fined $18B for making their services addictive, and failing on purpose to keep kids away. That number is entirely made up. How it works is that the complainant makes an argument with an amoun
34.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Your additional explanation does help clarify your meaning. Serving up records with TTLs in the past is so deeply weird that I didn't even consider that was what the grandparent had in mind.
35.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
No, it's using a fridge in the understanding of the fundamental limitations of fridges. You asked ‘why would I want to use a service that serves stale data’. The answer is you don’t want to. But if you have a distributed system your on
36.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Every distributed system serves stale data. You can define away ‘stale’ by picking a consistency model, but look inside the consistency machinery and you will see fresher data you aren’t allowed to have yet.
37.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
This is smart, task-specific caching in front of database.
38.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
The household robot business other than vacuums are a classic way to lose your shirt, sadly. Many, many startups and several megacorps have burned their money. Robots are so fun to make, if you have that spirit in you! But alas they are v
39.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
For me it’s more that you can show them your financial and medical data without BigCo looking over your shoulder.
40.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Humans are not aligned with each other and there is no consensus on what we should align with each other on. So of course, no, there is no ideal alignment specification.
41.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Or good old fashioned privacy. There’s no law or business advantage preventing me giving my financial transaction and medical info to Google/Anthropic/OpenAI but I just don’t want to.
42.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
The form factor of a humanoid is enormously difficult to achieve human level or better performance. This is progress. Just the energy storage and compact high torque motors are very challenging, and that’s before the control problem. Humans
43.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
‘Apple Foundation Model’
44.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
The dominant computer form factor in the world is a smooth slab of black glass.
45.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
You skipped Apple, the megacorp that does have a carefully curated aesthetic. Like the future, the aesthetics are not evenly distributed.
46.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Yes that’s very sanguine. On the other hand there have been many times when tech made a permanent difference. Smartphones, internet, PCs, computers, semiconductors, relativity, antibiotics, telegraph, printing, electricity, steam power, … I
47.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
All these comments saying 'searching for answers is fine, that's what I do all the time', or 'they should just disconnect the internet': you're trivially right, and you're missing the point. Search is a be
48.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
It does take time to build capacity. But if I build a new office building I’m simply not allowed to open it up and park in the neighborhood driveways today because I have a plan to build a parking structure eventually.
49.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Why should supply stay steady? You want to build an enormous energy sink, you should contribute to increasing the local supply! Putting up everyone’s prices is a hard impact on a community.
50.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Can you find language in the ticket contract that says “by a certain time"? It would kinda surprise me if that’s true. There’s an enormous difference in cost to provide a best effort, usually fine service, and a contract to get you the
51.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
> Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Yes. I’d rather compete on quality and customer satisfaction than who can burn the most money on ads. By making it almost necessary to buy their ads, Amazon
52.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
'May guarantee' is an oxymoron I've never come across before. Mangled headline. The article title is "Nvidia scales back funding guarantee for Ohio OpenAI data center, WSJ reports".
53.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
That’s true. But Ukraine wasn’t just babysitting weapons made totally elsewhere, either. There was substantial expertise, research and manufacturing built up in Ukraine during the Soviet era. I think it’s true enough to say they gave up nuc
54.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Here’s a paper by Floreano at EPFL from 1997 explicitly on Red Queen dynamics for creating neural networks for intelligent robot control. There was lots of discussion of these ideas in the 1990s. In those days we trained very small NNs - te
55.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Ukraine also gave up its nuclear weapons, as it regained autonomy with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
56.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
The models are trained on data that encodes hundreds or thousands of years of turf battles and office politics. The model is shaped by the script of ‘Succession’, the history of the English monarchy and the Chinese Communist Party, and the
57.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Yep. And when you get to an actual robot, you find it’s a distributed system with all the attendant challenges, so you build yourself up for that, and then your time, attention, and maybe your soul are crushed by connectors, cables and batt
58.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
What OS and whose drivers are running on all these NVIDIA-equipped computers today?
59.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
People are really good at stuff. I noticed on a bar TV the other day that some of the Chromecast screensaver landscape photo credits were to Peter Norvig. They were really lovely pictures.
60.
by robotresearcher 2mo ago
Let’s put numbers on it. The mean price of electricity for me is about 40c per kWh: about as high as anywhere in the US. There are about 730 hours in a month, and a consumer machine can sustain maybe 500W, so we can spend 0.4 * 0.5 * 730 =

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