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Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

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Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#171

Post by varjag »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #149
Animats wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very interesting question. Apple was once into design for assembly. The Macintosh IIci was Apple's peak at design for assembly. It was designed for vertical assembly. Everything clicks into place with a straight-down insertion move. No wiring harnesses. The power supply plugs into the motherboard. An automated plant in Fremont CA did the assembly. Then Apple gave up on design for assembly and went to offshor…

Do you, or anyone else here, know how much money Apple saved by offshoring? I sometimes get it. Then when I hear robots were used, I wonder if it's really necassary to always go to the cheapest labor route. For years, I held it against Apple for moving manufacturing, but gave up when everyone followed.

Manpower is a lot easier (and cheaper) to reconfigure between different products than robotic production lines.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#172

Post by themolecularman »

okareaman wrote: post #126

I really dislike this writing structure of "before I get to the point, let me tell you a story about my life" Edit: I'm not alone, https://style.mla.org/dont-bury-the-lede/

I dislike this story in journalism and podcasts too. I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts:

> Before Y was murdered, they lived in X. X is a quiet town, the type of place where you don't need to lock your doors. Y has a happy upbringing collecting flowers along the river at...

Like we get it, this is the first half of every 1-hour long true-crime podcast. Also quite often the first half of every long-form article.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#173

Post by mcintyre1994 »

mchusma wrote: post #138
lanewinfield wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will not be a fan of recipe blogs anywhere on the internet.

Recipe for french toast: Step 1: Learn the history of France Step 2: learn the history of toast Step 3: heat bread, eggs, milk in a pan

You forgot the history of the writer’s family and the impact that French toast has had on them for generations.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#174

Post by SN76477 »

okareaman wrote: post #126

I really dislike this writing structure of "before I get to the point, let me tell you a story about my life" Edit: I'm not alone, https://style.mla.org/dont-bury-the-lede/

"On a cold autumn day in Brooklyn a young child crosses the street with his parents."

How every NPR story about criminal justice starts.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#175

Post by ChuckMcM »

Animats wrote: post #115

Nice. Here's much the same job, being done almost 50 years ago, by a robot at the Stanford AI lab.[1] This robot has both vision and force feedback, and uses them to assemble an automotive water pump. It does the coarse alignment visually, and the fine alignment by feel. [1] https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump

You're just grumpy :-). On the plus side the computer that is controlling the robot isn't a DEC-10 in a climate controlled room so there is that.

The correct feeling here though should be compassion, here is a group that has been safely nestled in the arms of Google X and is now being pushed out of the nest like so many projects before it, which currently has one such company, Waymo, that is currently not yet dead. Statistically speaking, it is unlikely they will be able to pupate into a products company before they run out of time.

That said, it is also a truism that the constraints on robotics 50 years ago are not the constraints on robotics today. Re-implementing those ideas which had merit before but lacked a sufficiently robust ecosystem to be practical might in fact be really useful today. One hopes that they have the perspective of the excellent technical reports that SAIL produced to guide their development.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#176

Post by [deleted] »

joezydeco wrote: post #141
mchusma wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recipe for french toast: Step 1: Learn the history of France Step 2: learn the history of toast Step 3: heat bread, eggs, milk in a pan

Keep going. The ingredient list is on page 12. One time I inadvertently hit print on a recipe like this and the print dialog estimated 45 pages.

[deleted]

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#177

Post by 542458 »

varjag wrote: post #170
justicezyx wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple case is not exactly abandoning design for assembly. The advancement of electronic and metal machining allows smaller and more integrated parts, which allows cheap labor to beat the machine. If the electronics and metal machining did not advance, I am guessing the resultant production cost would not be this low.

Machining is more or less in the same spot it's been since late 1970s.

I don’t think is true at all. CAM is dramatically more advanced than it was in the 70s - easier to use, and better algorithms mean much faster pathing. Costs are way down. Tooling is cheaper and more reliable.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#178

Post by eps »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #134
lanewinfield wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will not be a fan of recipe blogs anywhere on the internet.

Those have gotten way worse. It’s an SEO thing right?

It's viewed as a DRM measure. Recipes are not copyrightable unless they are attached to a story. It's probably an urban legend, but can't blame poor food bloggers from acting on it.

Re: Intrinsic, a new Alphabet company

#179

Post by varjag »

542458 wrote: post #177
varjag wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machining is more or less in the same spot it's been since late 1970s.

I don’t think is true at all. CAM is dramatically more advanced than it was in the 70s - easier to use, and better algorithms mean much faster pathing. Costs are way down. Tooling is cheaper and more reliable.

Of course there's been quantitative improvements, but fundamentally everything that can be designed and machined today could be designed and machined in late 1970s using very similar tools, processes and control systems.
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