Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pollen Robotics is a French company Acquired by HuggingFace, a French-American company. Acquired by Nvidia, an American company.
All roads lead to uh… America I guess?
The number in your username checks out.
Microduck
151–160 of 415 posts
Re: Microduck
#152I think in the future we'll have robot pets and look back in horror at how we enslaved animals out of their natural habitats and normalized (even glorified) it.
Interesting how all of the replies so far to your comment assume we’d just release the existing animals into the wild instead of just not breeding more.
> instead of just not breeding more
As one might guess, the "just" there is doing a lot of work.
Common pets reproduce just fine without our intervention - in practice it requires costly maintenance programs just to keep their population under control (not to mention the massive and ongoing eugenics program required to produce only the desirable breeds/attributes).
If your neighbourhood isn't overrun with stray cats and dogs, that's because someone is funding a spay/neuter program, and someone is funding animal control to round up (and ultimately euthanise) the rest.
All animal husbandry systems have to be maintained via regular culling, and "eliminating" pets would require orders of magnitude more killing
Re: Microduck
#153i wonder if this is the reason why those little dynamixel motors have been out of stock for months. (i use them in my robots at tapster.)
Re: Microduck
#154Tried out the simulator and was surprised to find that the movement keys are ZQSD; then realized that's the equivalent of WASD on an AZERTY keyboard. Checked and sure enough, Pollen Robotics is a French company. They may want to at least add a preference for keyboard layout, pretty sure that QWERTY and QWERTZ are much more common worldwide than AZERTY.
Interestingly, the 10-lines-of-basic competition, which has been running the last 15 years (https://itch.io/profile/bunsen), has this covered in the rules:
15. If the game is controlled with the keyboard, use "O" for left, "P" for right, "E" for up and "D" for down if possible; this takes into account the most important keyboard layouts (no disadvantages for emulator users with QWERTZ, QWERTY or AZERTY keyboards)
Re: Microduck
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't believe that all pet animals are having a great life. Many people with a dog don't get that as a pack animal it's cruel to leave it alone indoors all day, they overfeed them and keep them alive well beyond the stage where some hip/back/joint pain issues would keep it in constant pain. Cats are the opposite, people get them "a companion" so it doesn't feel "alone", yet in reality, in addition to also being way o…
Naw bro. These pets are domesticated. They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild. Also the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all and which is what will happen if you replace it with AI. You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
> Naw bro. These pets are domesticated. They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild
Natural selection has little to do with how pets are bred. The criteria their genes are being selected for by breeders have nothing to do with optimizing their happiness and more with what maximizes profit (which only losely relates to owner happiness).
Incidentally, lots of domesticated cats could survive in the wild just fine, just like lots of somewhat functional dog breeds. But that has nothing to do with whether the conditions keep them in are still painful to them.
Most humans can't survive in the wild. Put any of them in solitary confinement and you will see how much natural selection has done for them. We are social animals, just like dogs.
> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.
No, because it is a human that has human rights. Which include the right to live. (Arguably they should have the right to decide the end of their life too, but religios groups are still having a strong grip on laws about that.) Animals don't. A friend of mine is a vet for farm animals and she always gets angry about how people treat their suffering pets. Cow has a painful broken leg? Bolt through brain, suffering ends immediately. Same with similarly injured sheep, goats, etc. No point in letting them suffer unnecessarily. Already horses are special because people get attached and sometimes they are worth tons of money so people rather pump them full with antibiotics. But dogs and cats? Man, people attach wheels to the lower end of dogs so they can keep their beloved buddy for another 2 years, even though that poor thing can't even go for a pee anymore. You can see owners drag their terminally ill dog through the streets which has clearly lost all will to live. We let pets suffer much more than cows or goats and it's cuel.
Re: Microduck
#156Oh so this is why Nvidia (edit: trying to buy)/bought Hugging Face, $1B for all the ai sharing and stuff, and $12B for the duck!
Follow the money!
Re: Microduck
#157Why not foster a dog instead? I have enough things to take care of in my life through training and reinforcement learning, but if you don’t - this might be for you! :)
Robots don’t die if you forget to feed them, and don’t get depressed if you don’t get around to taking them for walks. They also don’t need to be trained not to pee or poop in the house, not to bark at the mailman, etc.
Re: Microduck
#158This is a dust magnet after the first few days of excitement. An expensive dust magent.
Re: Microduck
#159It's either this or https://mondorobotics.com/ and I'm torn. Obviously it's for my daughter and I will just be safety checking, definitely, 100%.
Both are expensive e waste, companies come up every 5 years with these "house robots for kids", they're used for about 5 days, I've seen the cycle many times already
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 very, very hard to make valuable outside of manufacturing /warehousing/weapons.
Re: Microduck
#160this looks 100x better than Casio's https://www.casio.com/us/moflin/
“I have no mouth but I must scream” is a Harlan Ellison story about an AI that tortures humans for revenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...
I suppose Moflin is preemptive revenge against that scenario. “How do you like them apples, future torturing AI?”