341–348 of 348 posts
No product had such a fast transition from novelty to "omg i never want to interact with a human again". I feel about 100% less stressed and happier using a waymo or riding motorbike or bicycle next to a waymo than with human drivers. I hope this next phase will bring availability and prices down. We need this in europe.
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Making a driverless car "driver" is clearly much harder than manufacturing cars though. Many companies manufacture cars and have done for decades. On the other hand Waymo is the only company that has actual driverless cars on the road. It took them a very long time. Tesla have been trying for a very long time too and still have a long way to go. So IMO Waymo has something far more valuable than Tesla. (Obviously the…
Tesla has geofenced self-driving taxis operating in Austin as of Jan 2026. I wouldn't say they have a long way to go to achieve functional parity with Waymo. They do, however, need to prove reliability and safety, which comes with time and rides.
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I don’t even think that’s rational, but it may be what’s propping them up. Last earnings call Musk said Optimus wasn’t doing “meaningful work” at Tesla and as far as I’m aware they haven’t done meaningful work anywhere. I think they’re behind the curve there. Figure AI recently finished an apparently successful feasibility trial of their humanoid robots with BMW and Boston Dynamics has a deal with Hyundai for their A…
Our world is adapted for humans, so humanoid robots will fit in most places. They might not be the best choice, but the universality has a good chance of making it worth it through economies of scale. Building a custom robot that can stock shelves at a supermarket won't be worth it for a long time, but programming an existing humanoid platform might work. Find a couple hundred tasks like this (including household use…
This feels inverted to me, but perhaps I’m reading it wrong. A lot of the core challenges are shared, but the humanoid has to solve a bunch of additional challenges. Eg balancing is difficult with moving loads of various weights. Humanoids have to deal with that, while something more forklift-like practically opts out of that issue by just being designed with a high mass and low center of gravity.
I don’t see a universe where a humanoid is ever cheaper, but I could maybe see it generalizing well enough for usage to make it worth it. I’d still be a bit surprised, because operating costs would surely be higher (way more servos or hydraulics to fail, higher power usage hauling around unnecessary parts and weight).
This seems doubly true for factories where opex is so much more meaningful than capex. It’s worth spending $4M on custom tooling rather than $2M on generic tooling if it drops your opex by $500k/year on a factory with a 20 year lifespan.
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I don’t even think that’s rational, but it may be what’s propping them up. Last earnings call Musk said Optimus wasn’t doing “meaningful work” at Tesla and as far as I’m aware they haven’t done meaningful work anywhere. I think they’re behind the curve there. Figure AI recently finished an apparently successful feasibility trial of their humanoid robots with BMW and Boston Dynamics has a deal with Hyundai for their A…
>I’m not even convinced humanoid robots are going to pan out in general. I want one personally, so it can rake the leaves, mow the lawn, tend the garden, do the laundry and dishes, replace the roof, etc., when I'm old. But they should also be used to pick up litter along the highway, paint over graffiti, etc..
Eg lawn mowing robots already exist, and have for a decade or so. Garden tending also exists, though I think only commercial prototypes at the current moment. Roofing feels very possible, but I only roofed once so ymmv.
Is the future going to be buying a humanoid robot with a thousand servos for $100,000, or texting a number to have a self-driving car drop off a bladed roomba made from bargain bin brushless motors and plastic to mow your lawn for $0.50?
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I feel like the humanoid form is getting in the way for that, and that a "Spot" like design with a hand on top is better suited for that. Also i think laundry and dishes are already 95% automated since about 50 years.
It'd almost certainly need at least two hands, and I'm sure there are a lot of people who would pay to automate the remaining 5% of the dishes. And the two-handed spot will have a hard time grabbing something under the sofa.
A buddy demo-ed something from work doing exactly that like a decade ago, but it was commercial and designed for an assembly line.
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Parking garages in HCOLs are expensive, they definitely aren’t free. You can’t build a new multi family without planning for one or two levels of garage underneath. But you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways.
Right, I specifically called out that I agree with you on that. They aren't cheap. But then most places around here charge $50 or even $150 per month per parking space so it's not like the spots are being given away either. > you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways. That isn't what I said. I claimed that the amount of space dedicated to parking, if con…
In HCOLs places, parking garages, usually basements, are the solution to this problem. If you want to argue that they wouldn't solve the housing problem in SFH neighborhoods...well, SFHs aren't going to solve the housing problem anyway that you look at it, so...
> We badly need to build much farther upwards but it is not permitted to anywhere near the extent necessary.
You are also right. You just need to add your budget of the garage into your housing projects costs, or not, since people of the option to buy condos in buildings that do not mandate you also buy a parking spot (which can pay for the underground garage construction).
> Another way of looking at it is to ask, if every unit of housing in a major city added additional square footage equal to a single car, would that make or break the market?
OMG, yes, if you mean major cities in China. How the heck would you even build enough underground garage space to even think about doing that? The US is nice because our cities are small and not very dense, so we aren't talking about adding parking for every unit in a 40 story...heck, the road infrastructure alone to get that many cars in and out of the garages would bankrupt Beijing or Shanghai.
> This is the same problem with reducing setbacks. Unscrupulous developers keep lobbying for that (and often getting it). We don't need to reduce buffer space. A few extra feet around the perimeter of a lot is nothing compared to doubling (or 3x, or 5x, or ...) the height.
More first world problems and American exceptionalism I guess. No, I disagree, but you should really visit Tokyo.
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I don't think $50k LIDAR sensor suites are disposable like that and the computer integrations is pretty sophisticated I'd imagine. These cars will take a beating.
> In China, the cost of automotive LiDAR has plummeted due to aggressive manufacturing scale and the shift toward solid-state designs, with mass-market ADAS units now priced as low as $150 to $200. Leading Chinese suppliers like Hesai and RoboSense have reduced the average selling price of LiDAR in China to between $450 and $500, significantly lower than the $700 to $1,000 global average. While high-performance, robo…
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Right, I specifically called out that I agree with you on that. They aren't cheap. But then most places around here charge $50 or even $150 per month per parking space so it's not like the spots are being given away either. > you are correct that sub-basements, at least in the USA, wouldn’t have been used for living space anyways. That isn't what I said. I claimed that the amount of space dedicated to parking, if con…
> That isn't what I said. I claimed that the amount of space dedicated to parking, if converted to housing, would not meaningfully reduce the housing shortage. It's a simple numbers game. In HCOLs places, parking garages, usually basements, are the solution to this problem. If you want to argue that they wouldn't solve the housing problem in SFH neighborhoods...well, SFHs aren't going to solve the housing problem any…
I am arguing that anyone who blames the presence of parking for housing supply issues has failed to understand both the geometry and scale of the problem (or more likely imo is actively attempting to push an anti-personal-car narrative).
> the road infrastructure alone to get that many cars in and out of the garages would bankrupt Beijing or Shanghai.
I wasn't talking about traffic engineering problems. Only raw square footage for living space. You can generalize the question I posed as - in an alternate reality where every housing unit in (say) Beijing were precisely 10% larger, and total stock were reduced proportionally to accommodate that change, but everything else were exactly the same (improbably, I know) would that make or break the housing market in terms of supply and demand? The answer is that it would not. Housing supply problems are not due to a mere 10% shortage.
> More first world problems and American exceptionalism I guess.
I don't follow? What about my objection to reducing buffer space comes across as "American exceptionalism" to you? And why do you disagree?
It's simply a matter of geometry. Expanding the footprint by a few feet versus duplicating the entire structure upwards multiple times. Obviously that doesn't apply to places that already build upwards to the extent physically possible but since approximately nowhere in the US does that it's neither here nor there.