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Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

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Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#421

Post by [deleted] »

ajmurmann wrote: post #419
bruce511 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't sell 60b worth of stock without moving the price. It has to be dribbled out over time. Some buyees of course insist on cash. Which moves the effect of stock sales onto the buyer. Most buyers would prefer to pay in stock as it doesn't impact cash flow at all. So, a all-stock deal already has the future-price of the stock built in. Which probably (but not necessarily) inflates the headline number. In other wo…

Given the company is supposedly worse $2.5T, one would think the impact of selling 2.4% of that would have a fairly small impact on the price.

[deleted]

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#422

Post by kelipso »

addaon wrote: post #420
kelipso wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still doesn't make sense. You were criticizing: "But once a technology like general-purpose humanoid robotics exists, it’s costs are only likely to decrease over time." But the point was currently general-purpose humanoid robots is not affordable by the average person like say cars or washing machines currently are, but it will be because the costs will decrease. There was no argument that the price will forever keep…

> costs are only likely to decrease over time >> There was no argument that the price will forever keep going down It's very hard for me to read the first quote as anything other than a continuing decrease in expected value of cost as a function of time. This directly contradicts the second quote.

Ok, this is definitely a reading comprehension issue that you have that you should fix somehow.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#423

Post by devilbunny »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #417
devilbunny wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you clean a house once a month, it will take longer than doing the same thing once a week. You will end up spending more hours total, but it won't be four hours per visit, more like one or two. You spread the tasks out. Clean kitchen and den one visit. Clean bedrooms one visit. Clean bathrooms one visit. Or whatever. The total cleaning time (and thus price) goes up, but it's not 4x what you're getting now, which a…

Once a month and it’s a different task each time for an hour or two? No one does that - a monthly or bi-monthly cleaning service is $200-$400 and they generally do the whole place in one fell swoop and they’re definitely not going to agree to cutting their pay since you don’t want your full house serviced after taking the time to prep, come out, and maybe say no to another job. I don’t know if you have freelanced bef…

Somehow wires got crossed here. I'm saying that once-a-week cleaning won't be 4 hours each time.

It is expensive, just not four times as expensive as a once-a-month job.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#424

Post by [deleted] »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #41
mlmonkey wrote: post #19

I still think dumping BD was one of the biggest mistakes of Sundar's career. And that's saying something.

There's got to be something wrong at the core of BD. They've been pawned off a bunch of times, and they still don't have products out the factory line like they should. I think the tech community has been impressed by their videos, but the fact that their most sold thing is a toy dog at a luxury car price point says a lot about the company. My personal take is that one of the reasons is their posture against ML. They…

[deleted]

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#425

Post by Forgeties79 »

devilbunny wrote: post #423
Forgeties79 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once a month and it’s a different task each time for an hour or two? No one does that - a monthly or bi-monthly cleaning service is $200-$400 and they generally do the whole place in one fell swoop and they’re definitely not going to agree to cutting their pay since you don’t want your full house serviced after taking the time to prep, come out, and maybe say no to another job. I don’t know if you have freelanced bef…

Somehow wires got crossed here. I'm saying that once-a-week cleaning won't be 4 hours each time. It is expensive, just not four times as expensive as a once-a-month job.

What sort of expenditure are you envisioning on a monthly basis?

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#426

Post by sehansen »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #353
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ICE advancements haven’t materially affected car performance like EV advancements have. Start-stop is considered an annoyance to most car owners, for example, not a feature. It is mostly because ICE tech is mature and has no real place to go for improvements beyond incremental refinement. EVs can ride the wave of battery tech advancements for another decade or two.

Honestly I think the biggest advancements in ICE cars recently have been the development and maturation of hybrid cars. Imagine telling someone in 2006 that your minivan got 36 miles per gallon!

36 mpg is 6.5 l/100km. That's only a smidge better than the most efficient Renault Espace from 1999: https://www.auto-abc.eu/Renault-Espace/g988-1997

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#427

Post by sehansen »

edm0nd wrote: post #231
downrightmike wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Softbank is bleeding money and they need cash, AI isn't shaping up to what they thought it would be

didnt they get absolutely rekt on WeWork? How are they still able to be a thing

SoftBank "only" lost around $10 billion on WeWork. The SoftBank Vision Fund alone invested more than $100 billion in various companies.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#428

Post by BobaFloutist »

sehansen wrote: post #426
BobaFloutist wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think the biggest advancements in ICE cars recently have been the development and maturation of hybrid cars. Imagine telling someone in 2006 that your minivan got 36 miles per gallon!

36 mpg is 6.5 l/100km. That's only a smidge better than the most efficient Renault Espace from 1999: https://www.auto-abc.eu/Renault-Espace/g988-1997

You're comparing diesel to gasoline

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#429

Post by fragmede »

ryukoposting wrote: post #324
ACCount37 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how many times this has to be restated. It's car manufacturing. Everything that could be done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor is already done by a purpose specific robot arm bolted down to the factory floor. What remains unautomated, then? The long tail of tasks that are too minor, too finicky, too open-ended or too reliant on manual dexterity to be offloaded onto traditi…

> What remains unautomated, then? Lots of things that don't require legs. Humanoids are to the 2020s what VRML was to the '90s. A fantasy fueled by the imaginations of cloistered techoids.

VRML may not have taken off in the 90's, but I can, today, go to https://play-cs.com/ and have a have a jaunt in a virtual world. There are tons of other virtual worlds to explore. Second Life is still around.

It took 3 decades to get to where we are today witht that. If it takes until 2066 for humanoid robots to arrive, I won't be around to see them, but it also won't be a fantasy by then. I'm hoping it won't take quite that long, but we'll see.

Re: Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics

#430

Post by ryukoposting »

fragmede wrote: post #429
ryukoposting wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What remains unautomated, then? Lots of things that don't require legs. Humanoids are to the 2020s what VRML was to the '90s. A fantasy fueled by the imaginations of cloistered techoids.

VRML may not have taken off in the 90's, but I can, today, go to https://play-cs.com/ and have a have a jaunt in a virtual world. There are tons of other virtual worlds to explore. Second Life is still around. It took 3 decades to get to where we are today witht that. If it takes until 2066 for humanoid robots to arrive, I won't be around to see them, but it also won't be a fantasy by then. I'm hoping it won't take q…

You might have forgotten some of the most-funded ventures in VRML. It wasn't just "exploring virtual worlds" or whatever, they wanted VR to be the way you interact with the whole of computing. Checking emails, web browsing, chat, spreadsheets. Second Life at al are cool, but a fraction of the vision of VRML as it was presented in the '90s.

Apple quite literally reheated the idea of VRML with Vision Pro, and we all saw how that went.

My comparison to VRML isn't about technical feasibility; sure, on a long enough timeline, anything is possible. The problem is market fit relative to technical complexity.

On a timeline long enough that humanoids become practical, it is almost certain that we will come up with other technologies along the way - technologies that will do the envisioned jobs of humanoids just as well, if not better than humanoids, and at substantially lower cost.

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