Live data from Hacker News

Do You Love Me? [video]

youtube.com

311–320 of 478 posts

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#311
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, and I've been working with some of the latest and greatest collaborative and industrial six-axis and SCARA robots. There's definitely a back and forth between innovation and legacy in this industry. For example, FANUC famously refuses to deprecate or drop service for any of its equipment, you'll pay through the nose for some of it but they're willing to keep you supplied with parts, service, and bug fixes for 4…

Please tell me you have a blog

I don't, but I do have a domain that's sitting idle except for a mail server. Maybe a blog could be a theme for 2021...

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WW2 was bigger. The lack of mobilization is the hallmark of this crisis. The vaccines are the only bright point in sight.

To me, the hallmark of this pandemic was people’s (and Americans’ in particular) unwillingness to act collectively and cooperatively for everyone’s benefit. It was a gigantic game of Prisoners Dilemma, where we could have won with everyone cooperating (masks and staying at home) but people instead chose to defect and go out protesting, refusing the masks, and buying khakis. Here we are a year later , hoping the vacci…

Mask use in the US is practically identical to mask use in Europe.

http://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/Projects...

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#313
I think it’s time to actively challenge the meme of “robots must eventually kill all humans.” The comments are loaded with it. People discuss the singularity as a grave threat. I don’t buy it. I think a truly super intelligence would be more naturally interested in finding ways to work with humanity toward some shared goals. Maybe even care taking obviously otherwise unable creatures. The “kill humans” meme seems like an artifact of human psyche.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to pick one point in the abstraction chain of human technological progress and create a threshold of unethical behavior. Technological progress will gaurantee this scenario of military use. If not BD, it will be another company. If not now, it will. If not the US, it will be someone else - China, Russia, etc. I don't see anypoint in feeling sad about just some geeks making robots as much as we didn't becom…

ah the " If not us, it will be someone else " argument. Let's replace that with other things to show how incorrect this logic is. "If we don't enslave these people, someone else will" "If we don't bomb these schools, by golly, someone else will!" The potential hypothetical existence of others acting immorally simply isn't a valid ethical argument to act immorally. In the same way the response is "how about if instead…

That’s not even a remotely close analogy, no offense meant. Robots can be used for many good purposes. Intel makes processors, they can be riding on a missile or used on a CT Scan. Bombing schools is only horrific, how do you come up with this?

I kind of wish we would just enjoy this stupid video of robots dancing. It’s getting tiring to fend off AI-doomsday crowd.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sister used live next to the Boston Dynamics facility in Waltham. She'd walk her on the nearby river path and generally disliked the way Boston Dynamics would periodically take over the path and keep her from using. Part of the reason the robots evoke little excitement is because after a short look, you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. The reason Bos…

I got a dog a year ago and one of the things I'm most impressed with is how well he understands context and adapts to new situations. Granted, the first time I took him to a rocky riverside all four paws fell into cracks between the boulders like some early Boston Dynamics prototype (he's from Texas and I guess never encountered terrain like that before) but he's a pro now. And he's mastered "soft human interaction"…

I adopted a then-8-week-old kitten less than two months ago, and it's been an eye-opening delight watching him adapt just to things in my home.

During his first week he managed to hop onto a window sill, and then fell off when he tried to turn around to walk along it the other way. Less than a couple weeks later he was effortlessly walking along the edge of a pillow stood on its side, a much narrower, unstable surface.

It's amazing to me that a tiny creature like that can learn to adapt in that way with so few days of life under his belt.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human in India or China can be had for a couple of hundred dollars a month. These robots probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and maintain. And they aren’t as adaptable.

$35 a month, according to buzzfeed https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alison_killing/xinjiang...

as low as $6.79 /month according to Wistron and Apple

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#317

So what's the main barrier to using these industrially? Is it reliability? Did this video a zillion takes? Is it manufacturing? Maybe it's hard to scale them up? Is it battery life? Maybe it can power itself for just a few minutes? Is it object manipulation or sensing/world understanding? Maybe it can't apply the right forces to a soft thing or a flexible thing or know what it can step on vs over or what will move or…

A human in India or China can be had for a couple of hundred dollars a month. These robots probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and maintain. And they aren’t as adaptable.

Now teach that human weapon control, tactics, chain of command. Make sure he is healthy, strong and has high endurance. 1-2 years should do it.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#318

So what's the main barrier to using these industrially? Is it reliability? Did this video a zillion takes? Is it manufacturing? Maybe it's hard to scale them up? Is it battery life? Maybe it can power itself for just a few minutes? Is it object manipulation or sensing/world understanding? Maybe it can't apply the right forces to a soft thing or a flexible thing or know what it can step on vs over or what will move or…

A human in India or China can be had for a couple of hundred dollars a month. These robots probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and maintain. And they aren’t as adaptable.

I don’t think this is it. US farming is vastly more productive than in India or China. It has less to do with the cost of labor but the nature of labor, ie these robots don’t have a niche.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even prior to the pandemic, real wages were stagnant for decades. Wealth inequality has been a growing problem since before many of us have been alive, at this point. We are definitely making progress in absolute terms, but there is plenty of good reason to be concerned about the benefits spreading in general, and particularly when we're talking about technologies to replace labor.

>Even prior to the pandemic, real wages were stagnant for decades. This is not true from a global perspective. In addition, there has been significant immigration, where people are are entering the economy at the bottom (increasing inequality in a country, while they are making more than they would where they came from). This is not to say things couldn't be better, but the economy is global, and nationalistic perspe…

Any data on this? It’s true for many individual countries, but global population growth has been dominated by poor countries for a while which should dramatically drag down wage percentiles.

In the last 30 years UK’s population for example is up 19% where India’s is up 58%.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#320

As someone who is on record saying this wouldn't be possible, I'm pretty amazed (I believe the technical term is gobsmacked) :-). That said, the ability to manage this with essentially "shadow mode" is somewhat less impressive than having the kinematics "built in" so to speak. As I understand it (and correct me if you have more recent data!) the robots are programmed by using a person wearing an articulated sensor ne…

I'm going to take an educated guess that using mo-cap data wouldn't work, simply because the weight distributions of people and the BD robots are completely difference. If I had to take a guess, I'd say that they were given a timeline of locations of extremities and chest/trunk and the magic sauce took care of how to distribute the weight to make it work, like a footprint chart

You can run a solve on animation to accommodate physical artifacts like vibrations and other weights.

Disney have a paper on this for their robotics: https://youtu.be/Z1jgaEO9aRs

Though of course Disney have very different constraints, however it does illustrate that you can map from mocap to robotics motions by running solves and reversing out the artifacts.

Those can be encoded into timed poses and combine that with their real time compensation to achieve this motion

Post reply on HN