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Do You Love Me? [video]

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Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#421
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The animations look so fake. Let’s talk about why it looks fake. I think it comes from the use of hydraulics. Biological muscle is way less linear (it works more like a second-order control system, where things often overshoot their target before dampening). But one part of it may also be algorithmic: the robot’s Kalman filter (?) may correct for errors from sensor fusion much faster than a human would. I would lov…

It looks like 'fake' and animation because it _is_ an animation. The dancing was likely motion captured and/or hand animated and superimposed onto the robots basic balancing control system.

> onto the robots basic balancing control system.

I don't think "basic" is the right word.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Now imagine the toilet came as a subscription service, with DRM restricting you to premium brands of toilet paper and cleaning products, and built-in sensors that secretly analyze the chemical composition of your excrement, collecting data which the vendor sends to advertisers. Oh, and the toilet is always connected, which means it'll stop working if you lose power, Internet, or if the vendor abandons it or goe…

> All new inventions come with some degree of this bullshit. I'm no longer excited about any new technology - because the businesses productizing it will almost surely ruin it. Then you could consider company Purism, https://puri.sm/products , who offers lifetime updates for their devices, FLOSS, no DRM.

I love Purism with that stance. There are a handful of other companies that I consider "sustainable businesses", based on proper ethics and values and following humane practices. They are hard to come by, and often struggle to get enough revenue. I would like to do ever more biz with these type of companies, prefer and consume their products to the other BS.

Where can I find lists, directories and such that keep track of these sustainable businesses? Any good resources around?

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My sister used live next to the Boston Dynamics facility in Waltham. She'd walk her on the nearby river path and generally disliked the way Boston Dynamics would periodically take over the path and keep her from using. Part of the reason the robots evoke little excitement is because after a short look, you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. The reason Bos…

> you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. This is hugely understating just how difficult it is for a biped/quadruped robot to move around in the world without continuously falling, getting stuck, etc. Like seriously, seriously underestimates it. Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watc…

> Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s1sr4JdlI

Where's the terrain humans struggle with? At the most extreme it climbs a small mound of rocks and gets stuck.

It's cool we can build something that can do that semi-autonomously but it's lightyears from being as capable as anything biological.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#425
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All new inventions come with some degree of this bullshit. I'm no longer excited about any new technology - because the businesses productizing it will almost surely ruin it. Then you could consider company Purism, https://puri.sm/products , who offers lifetime updates for their devices, FLOSS, no DRM.

I love Purism with that stance. There are a handful of other companies that I consider "sustainable businesses", based on proper ethics and values and following humane practices. They are hard to come by, and often struggle to get enough revenue. I would like to do ever more biz with these type of companies, prefer and consume their products to the other BS. Where can I find lists, directories and such that keep trac…

https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/

https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide

https://ryf.fsf.org

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#426
post #87

I love how there were people in the upper floor just walking by without even looking. "Oh, the robots are dancing again." In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing. It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously…

what if the boston dynamic robots are taught how to assemble themselves.

We have had all of history to learn how to control intelligent serfs who know how to assemble copies of themselves. I'm sure many lessons will transfer to robots.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#427
post #380
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any data on this? It’s true for many individual countries, but global population growth has been dominated by poor countries for a while which should dramatically drag down wage percentiles. In the last 30 years UK’s population for example is up 19% where India’s is up 58%.

Google “elephant graph” or go to ourworldindata and you should find it. Population growth has been dominated by income increases. The average person in China in particular got much richer.

Interesting that 0% growth at the 80th percentile and minimal growth at 90% is exactly the stagnation I was expecting.

Though, sub 50% growth from 1980-2016 for the 60th to 95th percentile is more interesting. With the top 1% capturing 26% of all growth and the top 0.01% having 200+% growth. It’s clear arbitrary starting and end points can shift these graphs around dramatically. Ending now is probably going to make a graph like this look really bad.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#428
post #4

If I didn't know who Boston Dynamics was, I would have said that this is just CGI. The animations look so fake. I think the issue is that they're aggressively smoothing the motion since mechanical systems don't have the ability to accelerate & jerk as fast as biological systems. Cheap mocap animation has the same problem because the frame rate of the capture system is too low. They interpolate between captured keyfra…

You might be interested in a couple of videos by an indie vfx group called Corridor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjCWfuvYxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3RIHnK0_NE

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#429
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the hallmark of this pandemic was people’s (and Americans’ in particular) unwillingness to act collectively and cooperatively for everyone’s benefit. It was a gigantic game of Prisoners Dilemma, where we could have won with everyone cooperating (masks and staying at home) but people instead chose to defect and go out protesting, refusing the masks, and buying khakis. Here we are a year later , hoping the vacci…

Mask use in the US is practically identical to mask use in Europe. http://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/Projects...

How do you conclude that from that PDF? It shows almost all of the states in the US in yellow (low mask usage). While almost all of Europe (except for the UK and Scandinavia) in blue (medium mask usage)

There's even a special call-out in the PDF about the US being such an outlier:

"US states and Canada stand out for their low levels of mask usage compared to many countries in Asia and South America. "

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. This is hugely understating just how difficult it is for a biped/quadruped robot to move around in the world without continuously falling, getting stuck, etc. Like seriously, seriously underestimates it. Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watc…

> Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s1sr4JdlI Where's the terrain humans struggle with? At the most extreme it climbs a small mound of rocks and gets stuck. It's cool we can build something that can do that semi-autonomously but it's lightyears from being as capable as anything biological.

Indeed, people struggle with? Adam Savage (53 years old) navigates that pile of rocks without problems, while controlling the robot. Never even needing to use his hands.

The work Boston Dynamics does is extremely impressive, but they've been at it since 1992. Each year they make small and incremental changes. But its still a century away from a human, dog, or cat. Not a revolution, just slow and steady evolution of knowledge, software, and hardware.

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