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Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

mturk.com

151–160 of 177 posts

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#151
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already robotics models that can fold shirts and similar just fine. Progress in VLA models is good, I don't think this would form the foundation of a business. Humanoid robots are going to be another ChatGPT, it's going to seem to happen almost overnight because people aren't paying attention to the underlying research papers.

Any papers you'd recommend?

Most progress in data-driven robotics nowadays are done either in unicorn startups or corporate research labs - so you should follow the industry more than academia. The path to good robot performance isn't really in the models themselves - it's highly dependent on how much you can gather high-quality real-life data.

Specifically for laundry folding, Sunday Robotics is probably the state of the art, where they were able to obtain 99.1% success rate and call it "done": https://www.sunday.ai/blog/act-2-preview#solve-standard

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#152
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter what you want though, only what CEOs want and that's low costs. I can see a combined shirt folding/traffic merging platform taking off.

CEOs are loser nobodies. Real influence is with owners, boards, investors.

Mostly they don't care as much as CEOs think they care

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

our of curiosity, can you say what your use of it was?

Initially the annotation of biomedical literature ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/ ) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space My favori…

> My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals,

That is hilarious! Was it a semi-random discovery due to interaction with the system and people, or did you intentionally looked to game the algorithm?

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#156
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any papers you'd recommend?

Most progress in data-driven robotics nowadays are done either in unicorn startups or corporate research labs - so you should follow the industry more than academia. The path to good robot performance isn't really in the models themselves - it's highly dependent on how much you can gather high-quality real-life data. Specifically for laundry folding, Sunday Robotics is probably the state of the art, where they were a…

If their hero image video and the side by side at (5x) with a human at quote "1x" are "solved" I'm not impressed. I'm faster and more accurate and I am the worst folder in my house (kids included). The human looks like they are doing it slow mo to show children how to.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#157
That's crazy I remember doing work on there a long time ago. It was sus work like manipulating Google SEO rank by looking up and clicking links. But still it was real money even if it was pennies.

I think the weirdest thing I had to do was scan through social media images... so weird seeing into random people's lives.

I did it in the late 2000s or early 2010s.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#158
post #69
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/

“ General Research combines coordinated operations to identify and neutralize foreign actors using technological advancements, international covert operations, and networking analysis as an Internet Service Provider.” What is so hard to understand????

This makes it sound like they kill spies.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#159
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you can sell a product that doesn't work and become a billionaire proves capitalism is broken.

Yes. Much better to leave these decisions to the Dear Leader who is infinitely wise and cannot be misled. Or to the People's Central Planning Committee, where they decide all the allocations and strip rich people's wealth if they aren't on board with the correct ideology. Such systems are non-broken and have yielded unmeasurable prosperity throughout the world wherever implemented.

... What?

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#160
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you missed the point of the story. But whatever. I'm sorry my dire financial situation didn't tie up in a nice enough bow for you.

I honestly don’t see what you don’t understand about “Nothing wrong with your story”. It’s literally the start of the first sentence. It seems pretty clear to me the mild criticism is directed solely at the summary (you know, the quoted part), not the story. Ironic that you’re accusing someone else of “missing the point”, considering.

The point of the story was that I built a thing about Mechanical Turk to promote its money-making capabilities, and ironically made more money from it indirectly than I ever did directly. Considering that point was implied by my framing, you did in fact miss it.

I’m not saying that you have to like a story, but your framing felt unfair, which is why I responded that way.

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