Yes, there is a pattern. Most of my relatives are very quick, those tested all come out 120+. Two of my sons have absurd IQs like me. My second is about my level (170+), and my youngest is some kind of megamind mutant. His brain scares me. He's very very clever.
So you're paying someone to operate your robot on top of the cost of the robot?
I'm very skeptical, even if this technology worked flawlessly, that this would scale towards a profitable business. I understand that not every robot would require 24x7 human assistance, but still - this is a very optimistic business model.
Robotics has always been in competition with minimum wage labor. How long could you hire a maid before making a return on the cost of the robot? And that's assuming the robot isn't worse, which it is pretty much guaranteed to be.
Their thesis is that you cannot get the training data for a robot in the home from a lab or a simulation. You have to actually put a robot in real homes with all their messy details.
But, how to do that safely? First they build a robot with low gear ratios, low weight, pinch points covered. So, if it literally falls on you it’s low risk.
Then they have humans teleoperating it in first-person VR with 1:1 hand control.
The more times humans do any particular task through the robot, the more the robot learns to do that task in real world situations.
It’s the most thoughtful plan for robotics I’ve seen yet by far.
Considering the slew of warehouse automation robotics companies I've watched fail, trying to do much simpler tasks in highly controlled environments where they can be surrounded only by trained individuals, "ambitious" would be an understatement.
I get what they're trying to do. I'm pointing out that it's probably an order of magnitude harder to do than many other things that have consistently failed. This is like Elmo coming along and saying The Boring Machine will replace cars and trains. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the space and how to disrupt it while selling ambitious ideas under the guise of being clever.
Teleoperation could be useful with geo arbitrage. Whats the cost difference of hiring welder, plumber, cook, maid, taxi driver, security guard, receptionist in US comparing to LATAM or SEA countries? You could pay someone 3x market price of those cheap countries and probably still this would be 2-3x cheaper than in US. I think this is still a huge market even if those robots won't be autonomous.
I've always thought of how weird it is that YouTube even exists, as much as I love it. I have tried many times to figure out how it could exist independently of Google or some other tech giant, and watched many competitors try and fail.
I'm not sure YouTube can exist outside of being a monopoly. I'd actually argue YouTube is the strongest evidence in existence in favor of monopolies, far better than anything Thiel has suggested.
I want to be wrong about this but the evidence suggests it's so.
I have to guess it's some kind of uber situation, where the core business is only possible (let alone profitable) at enormous scale. Free video hosting for everyone, accessible to everyone at any time, is a heavy lift that doesn't make sense without videos that people watch millions of times.
Another political post got bumped off the front page again.
Not that anyone gives a shit what I think, but it seems like there should just be a filter for politics on this site. That way the people who want to talk about it can, and the people that don't can ignore it. Clearly the upvotes suggests people are interested in these topics, not to mention the actual debates in comment sections about how they're being moderated.
Would need category tags for each post, but actually would be an awesome feature applicable to all sorts of posts.
For instance AI speculation threads are really, really tiresome. It's easy to get tricked into reading such threads because the discussion is often off topic to the linked article.
I get what you're getting at, but that's not actually what I'm advocating for here.
I'm pointing out that multiple times a day a political post gets bounced off the front page, and it's frustrating that the conversations are being quashed. I'd just like to be able to talk about the stuff we know people want to talk about (upvotes are the simplest metric we have for this). And there's a very simple binary filter we can apply that costs very little overhead in terms of UX and engineering.
If I wanted to go somewhere else I would. I'm suggesting how we make this site better for users, or at least a sizable amount of them. And it would make almost no difference to the users who'd like to just ignore it. You can even have it off by default so only logged in members are able to see political posts and even then only opt-in.
The silent ideological and political battle of flagging uncomfortable truths is trampling curiosity. Interesting how they get a way with violating the guidelines, and yet people who want to have a conversation are accused of and sanctioned for it.
The small mistake you make is assuming the users doing the flagging merely want to ignore it. They don't want anyone participating in it. The very topic is persona non grata. The guideline itself is written in newspeak.
At sometime yall have to stop pretending that this is something that will just go away if you ignore it long enough. This administration wilm have surely life altering consequences that will persist for decades. This isn’t reasonable people disagreeing. This is insurrection.
YCombinator is probably involved in this stuff to some degree; Peter Thiel was part of of yc for a while and Garry Tan has been pushing stuff closer to Thiel/Moldbug's ideology in SF and worked for Palantir.
Then combine that with all the election interference we know Elon was doing, and previous years of being concerned about the security of voting machines.
Proving it will be hard now - I'm certain if there was election interference, that evidence is all gone now. For my money though, I find it hard to imagine that something this widespread across so many states was executed without any whistleblowers.
I guess if someone comes up and shows these same discrepancies everywhere where a particular manufacturer had a footprint, I'd probably be more on board with screaming election interference.
> I guess if someone comes up and shows these same discrepancies everywhere where a particular manufacturer had a footprint, I'd probably be more on board with screaming election interference.
The fact this anomaly only happens in swing states under commonly identified conditions for foreign elections with widely accepted interference isn't suspicious enough? You can recreate the Russian tail yourself with the available data. A commenter in the HN thread I linked even posts the code to do so.
I feel like suspicious voting patterns should be investigated, not that I have any belief that will happen. We already have proof of a consistent statistical anomaly.
We definitely should investigate. No argument there. It just won't make a difference. At this point, they have gotten away with it, and the opposition did not put up a fight. They are not all of a sudden going to start putting up a fight, when there's no way they win that fight. (But realistically: they are bad at putting up fights over things in the first place, which is how we ended up here - the party with no moral qualms about much of anything ran roughshod over them)
I agree with you it's likely pointless. I'm not arguing that "this information will change the election." That said, I do care about election integrity and the more evidence we have of fraud the more we can (theoretically) correct for it in the future.
I'm very much of the opinion there's going to be a violent civil war before the decade is over.
I think it depends entirely on what the military does. People seem to think the military will just fall in line with the president. I think a military coup is far more likely than that.
It may be our only hope but I hear they play a lot of fox news on military bases. Everyone I know who are in the services voted for trump and with loyalists installed in top leadership I don't see who would organize any resistance let alone a coup.
Granted, I think I used a somewhat different sense of the word "perfectionist" than the usual one, in an effort to contrast it with "incrementalist". I'm not sure what the better wording to contrast those things is; "incrementalist" vs. "full-solution-ist"?
If you really think you're fighting evil in a war for global domination, it's easy to justify to yourself that it's important you have the weapons before they do. Even if you don't think you're fighting evil; you'd still want to develop the weapons before your enemies so it won't be used against you and threaten your way of life.
I'm not taking a stance here, but it's easy to see why many Americans believed developing the atomic bomb was a net positive at least for Americans, and depending on how you interpret it even the world.
In this note: HIGHLY recommend “Rigor of Angels”, which (in part) details Heisenbergs life and his moral qualms about building a bomb. He just wanted to be left alone and perfect his science, and it’s really interesting to see how such a laudable motivation can be turned to such deplorable, unforgivable (IMO) ends.
Long story short they claim they thought the bomb was impossible, but it was still a large matter of concern for him as he worked on nuclear power. The most interesting tidbit was that Heisenberg was in a small way responsible for (west) Germany’s ongoing ban on nuclear weapons, which is a slight redemption arc.
Heisenberg makes you think, doesn't he? As the developer of Hitler's bomb, which never was a realistic thing to begin with, he never employed slave labour for example. Nor was any of his stuff used during warfare. And still, he is seen by some as some tragic figure, at worst as man behind Hitler's bomb.
Wernher vin Braun on the other hand got lauded for his contribution to space exploration. His development of the V2 and his use of slave labour in building them was somehow just a minor disgression for the, ultimately under US leadership, greater good.
Do any AI companies actually turn a profit? I feel like the only real winner is Nvidia because they are selling shovels to the gold diggers, while all the gold diggers are trying to outspend each other without a business model that has any consideration for unit economics.
I love a prudent take on company money – but given how investing works and how young this entire thing is and the (to me) absolutely real value, I find it hard to be very worried about that part right now.
I can literally run a ballpark model on my MB Pro, right now, at marginal additional electrical cost. I will be the first to say that all of this (including GPT4) is still fairly garbage, but I don't know when there was the last time in the history of tech, where less fantasy to get from here to what will be good was required.
The thing is that the bigger business giants like MSFT or Amazon are probably profit quite nicely from AI. Smaller companies, not aligned with any big giants - probably not.
I wish more of us would run for Congress. I'd much rather have a government of technocrats of various stripes than ex lawyers and rich business types.
IMO governments, like websites, should be boring but effective, focused on small day to day improvements, not all flash and empty marketing chasing cultural trends...
You’re always gonna have a ton of lawyers in congress and state legislatures because if you were interested in law enough to become a lawyer you are disproportionately likely to want to write laws.
I don't know about the US, but the simple answer in the UK IMO is that politics doesn't pay enough. So you get egos, old money, and people with concurrent business interests.
But try convincing a democracy that politicians should be paid more.
I believe the basic pay is £86k. They're not brain surgeons or rocket scientists, so even that is not that bad.
But I believe the average gravy train bumps this up 3X with extras.
It's a literal gravy train of subsidies and expenses and allowances! Sure the basic pay is, well, it's arguably not that bad ... but the gravy on top is tremendous. Not to mention the network contacts which plug their gravy train into the more lucrative gravy superhighway later.
Yeah, voters don't want to pay MPs more. Yet when voters are asked, they want highly intelligent, motivated people. They want them to have technical expertise, which means time spent in higher education. Then they want them to work a full time job in Parliament during the week, but also be open to constituency concerns on the weekend. And once all of this is pointed out, voters concede that maybe MPs deserve to be paid on par with professionals like doctors. (It's a different matter that UK doctors are underpaid).
> But I believe the average gravy train bumps this up 3X with extras.
Citation needed. They're on a shorter leash now with expenses. Don't go citing one or two bad apples either, show us what the median MP claims as expenses. According to you, it should be around £170k a year.
In general, politicians and their aides in the UK are underpaid. Most capable people find they're better off working in Canary Wharf or elsewhere in London. An example is the head of economic policy for the Labour Party earning £50k while writing policy for a £2 trn economy. (https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/01/19/british-politic...)
Your first point has always interested me, as it's unclear how much technical expertise these people have. They just employ Special Advisors to do the 'difficult' work for them (again, something not included in their expenses but, of course, is a benefit). And the manner in which reshuffles happen when the Education Secretary suddenly becomes the Enviroment Secretary whilst having no experience of either.
Anyway, I'm very sure there are good MP's, but I'll not go so far as to say these people are underpaid.
I plugged the question into AI ... see below. Not to mention the subsidised "everything". Holidays in mates villas (and what mates, eh). The "director" positions on various companies, and, and ... it's not just the monetary value of these things. It's an absolute gravy train.
Generated Hypothetical Answers:
we can provide some hypothetical scenarios based on varying levels of responsibility:
Scenario 1: Backbench MP without additional roles:
Remember: These are just hypothetical examples, and the actual value for any individual MP can be significantly higher or lower depending on their specific circumstances.
Voters want people representatives that will work out of civic duty. but is H.O.A.'s have taught us anything its that the people who claim to be acting out of civic duty to make a better place are mostly petty tyrants.
sure it would be nice if we could have Aristotelian philosopher kings style politicians but that's not human nature.
Congress pays great because you can ignore your job to be courted by lobbyists, get paid to rubber stamp laws from ALEC, and insider trade based on foreknowledge of what laws are about to occur.
I don't discount the value of having expertise in law among those who write our laws. That said, I think that lawyers have their own significant blind spots as well. A lawyer is an expert on the law, but also will often be out of touch with the actual lives and needs of the people. Ideally, Congress should have lawyers - but also plenty of non lawyers (from diverse backgrounds), who can bring their own experiences and perspectives that lawyers lack.
Well, that's how you get "laws by lawyers, for lawyers", like "software by engineers, for engineers".
Maybe Congress needs the equivalent of UX and product types who actually care about what the people want... and can explain how it works to us in fancy how-to videos.
> Maybe Congress needs the equivalent of UX and product types who actually care about what the people want...
Members of Congress have plenty of support devoted to both what people say they want and what they actually positively respond to. That’s...the entire political side of the operation.
I don't know, while lawyers and MBA's are not who I would choose to run the country, I am not sure the I would pick people with the motto "run fast and break things" in charge either.
If you like this idea, read the Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis (he also wrote the Big Short which you may have seen). The book essentially argues that this is already the case in many (crucially not all) government departments. I like to TL;DR the book to other people as "the deep state is good, actually". Of course, the government itself is absolutely not helmed by technocratic politicians.
You consistently score 175+ on IQ tests?