South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots • Hacker News Board

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#221

Post by dyauspitr » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 8:20 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #140

dyauspitr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We said the same thing about Waymo, that it was perpetually in the future. It took them less than a decade. The robots today are functionally capable, they don’t have the right fuzzy intelligence yet. It’s purely a data problem (lack of) and a lot of people are working on it.

Are you saying autonomous driving is a solved problem, even at scale? I haven't seen any Waymo in my small town in Southern Europe yet.

If they can pull off year round driving in Manhattan, and they have, it’s a solved problem. Rollout it slow due to bureaucracy, appetite for progressiveness and catering to entrenched business interests but it will show up everywhere it’s profitable eventually.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#222

Post by taneq » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 4:11 AM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #212

taneq wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our hands are actually amazing, to a degree that’s hard to comprehend unless you’ve tried to build something equivalent. Our finger tips can discern features down to around 10 microns, detect a wide range of vibrations and single shocks, manipulate objects two orders of magnitude smaller than them, grasp an incredible range of weird shapes and materials reliably, repeat pre-learned motions remarkably quickly, and wit…

Completely agree. My point is more that even though our hands are amazing and even if we decided we want all the features of hands, there's no reason why you'd design such a device with 5 fingers and an oddly placed opposable thumb. There's no reason you'd have more than 2 joints per finger. That's what I'm calling a grift of the humanoid robots. They are focusing pretty heavily on making manipulators shaped like han…

I get your point about strictly anthropomorphic robots. There's definite scope for improvement there - I think Boston Dynamics' recent videos on their design process for the hands for Atlas is fascinating, and the way the fingers (in fact most/all(?) of the robot's joints) can flex both ways is a definite improvement. I also think that pure legged locomotion is dumb in an urban environment, compared with wheeled legs like a lot of recent robots are using.

Re: South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots

#223

Post by fennecbutt » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

Schiendelman wrote: post #39

fennecbutt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really a gotcha, because my train doesn't need a TB of dram.

Heavy machinery is starting to. Computer vision for robots is a big deal, and takes quite a bit of processing power. Robotic mining, earthmoving, and even construction equipment is exactly where Germany will innovate. Not to mention drones - Rheinmetall needs DRAM...

I've been involved in the train industry before, not heavy industry yet unfortunately.

And I can tell you that it doesn't matter how many advancements are made, thr hardware on the trains will be at least a decade behind. Siemens do be like that.