Corvos
2mo ago
In the long run yes, but I'd argue that you want to start by focusing on making the telepresence operation as good as possible. Mass data collection has serious privacy implications and tempts you to optimise your business model for selfish objectives (data collection) over customer service. This is a hard-sell as it is, you want to put absolutely all your effort on making it as easy and comfortable and good as you can IMO. As the Japanese say, 「お客様は神様です」(The customers are gods.)
Then, once you have your business up and running, and your tech platform and hardware is in a really nice, mature place, you can offer opt-in discount campaigns for data collection or do what iRobot does and allow your employees to take one home for free if they consent to data collection.
To my mind the economic proposition comes from:
- the fact that one well-trained worker can cover far more ground when they don't have to worry about transport costs.
- they never actually enter your home so you don't have to worry about theft and so on.
- related but there's a lot of people who have never had a maid but would use a remote-controlled robot because it feels less invasive.
Much of the market for labour is somewhat patchy - even my relative with severe mobility issues spent most of a decade only needing 90 min in the morning to get dressed, 30 min (most of which is unused) to warm a microwave meal for lunch, the same for dinner, then some care for bed. In practice this ends up looking a lot like full-time care, but it doesn't have to. Likewise dusting once a week or tidying the desk once a day. Possibly you pay for use time not daily (with a minimum spend to make it viable).
And the robot would have to be designed from the ground up for teleoperation. I would give it some sort of wheel / track arrangement for speed and stability (or maybe something more like HUBO) with a torso that can raise and lower to provide a stable basis for manipulation. Then try and optimise the arms for speed and responsiveness, although I appreciate there's only so much you can get here (speed/forward-accuracy/dexterity pick two).
Clearly this isn't what they're going for (and the design looks like a horror-movie where the big twist is there's a person stuffed inside) but that's how I'd try it.
Corvos
2mo ago
One can argue that countries have no right ever to forcibly intervene in another country based on that country's own internal affairs, and many do, but it is a rule more honoured in the breach than the observance.
Corvos
2mo ago
I can believe it of the Soviets, but I would certainly like to see some evidence that it’s true.
My recollection is that the ‘famines brought about by collectivisation’ became ‘the Holodomor’ at exactly the same time that Kiev became Kyiv.
Interesting. My feelings are the opposite of yours: as someone with AI-robotics experience I’ve been thinking just teleoperate the damn thing ever since I saw the Stanford R1 doing housework.
I can see the problems you mention but I don’t think either problem is insurmountable.
- Have the robot have a clear kill-switch that physically disables vision (via a shutter), and also cuts off power to the motors and other sensors. This also eases concern over abuse of the customer by the operator.
- Lease the robots to the customer rather than selling them. They’ll be cheaper and the entitlement will be less.
- Make it clear in the marketing that the robots are 100% remote controlled and and that you are buying competent high-level service, not your own personal machine slave.
- Have a proper procedure for recording data in cases of harassment. Recorded data is only saved if an incident is reported (no general archiving so reduced privacy issues).
- To the extent economically possible, market at older people who need care rather than at people with a maid or butler fetish.
actively cancel the entire concept of Ukraine and paint it as wrongheaded Malorossian nazi sympathizers
I think this almost never works, it just induces resentment. Spanish culture stayed strong despite centuries of Islamic occupation (the staying-power of bullfighting has a lot to do with the Muslims repeatedly trying to ban it), the Irish are still Irish, and Ukraine went straight back to being Ukraine once the USSR was over. If anything foreign occupation seems to solidify native culture, below a certain level. (That is not to say that being occupied is fun or easy, especially by Russians).
What does seem to cause long-term culture change is demographic change. On an obvious level, America and South America changed almost completely once the Europeans moved in, as did the English when the Normans moved in. I don't really have great examples because mass migration is still quite new, but it seems relevant to me that the statues of Robert E. Lee in the South didn't disappear after Civil Rights but only disappeared when the locals became outnumbered by incomers with no connection to the history. There's just something about 50%+ of your capital city and even increasingly your politicians having no connection with your history at all (or negative ones) that's hard to describe. I look out of the window and nobody looks like me. I can't understand what they're saying. If the Nazis had succeeded and tried to wipe out our culture I think we'd still consider ourselves English, but this is different.
Corvos
2mo ago
A friend of mine from Japan mentioned it. I misread their message and told my dad there’d been a serious stabbing on a Japanese train. He said, “Really?!”
Then I reread it, told him it had happened in England, and he said, “oh, right, that makes sense.”
Corvos
2mo ago
You need some people to drown to show you aren’t overspending on drowning prevention.
I have never heard a human being sound so much like a text-to-speech program.
EDIT: this was re: Kevin Roberts. I haven't come across him before but he has a very peculiar manner of speech to my ear.
Corvos
2mo ago
Right. @Skibboleth says that he concluded that "many (if not most) reports" look to him like cases of
In most cases these people are reporting their own actions positively. Likewise, if you get two twitchy, dominance oriented idiots, it's very easy to get a feedback loop where they push each other towards a violent outcome.
"Many if not most" of 90% is not 90%, and he didn't just call them "unreported assaults" and drop the mike, he backed up that belief.
Personally, I think he has a reasonable point: I doubt that every one of those non-lethal interactions was actually a case of successfully defusing a mugging / home robbery / etc. and I suspect that quite a considerable fraction of them was two people in an argument, one guy escalates by pulling a gun, and then he justifies it to himself later because 'who knows what that guy would have done to me if I hadn't frightened him off'.
Corvos
2mo ago
Personally, I have an intense dislike for non-consensual violence. In my opinion, when an adult makes the decision to assault another person, they are taking their life into their own hands.
But how violent is violent? If (as I once saw) a man refuses to get off a bus because he can't pay for the ticket, and makes it clear that he's willing to stay there for hours if need be, is it violent to physically remove him so the bus can leave? If yes, is it okay for him to resist this violence with lethal force?
Corvos
2mo ago
This is a very hostile paraphrase. @Skibboleth suggested that people who report defensive gun use on a survey are going to believe that they had a good reason to do so. That doesn't necessarily mean that this belief is correct in all cases.
Corvos
2mo ago
AFAIK truly great fortunes are almost always lost on investments and stocks (for lesser men it's the 3 F's). Even the most profligate spender finds it hard to spend more than a few million on cars - where do you put them? And there is only so much Dom Pérignon that a man can shove down his gullet before it comes back up.
From Wikipedia:
Floyd was born on October 14, 1973,[12] in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to George Perry (1949–2002) and Larcenia "Cissy" Jones Floyd (1947–2018).[7][13] He had four siblings.
Starting college before any of his siblings [therefore presumably the eldest]
EDIT: Floyd was his mother's name not his father's, though. Took me a minute to spot that error. Understandable, but definitely not completely trustworthy.
Corvos
2mo ago
Reverse mortgage. And his background, age and personality made it easier for him to pass himself off as ‘liking a flutter’ rather than having a serious problem, so people didn’t go looking.
Gambling can be very, very nasty. An extended family member was a mathematician, very cheerful chap, into horse-racing and various other things long before internet poker started blighting the world. Then when he died, we discovered that he'd lost everything. The house, the car, everything. His wife of 50 years was left destitute, almost literally penniless, so now she survives on the government pension and the charity of friends and relations. Everyone loved him but now it's a bit hard to talk about him without that casting a shadow over everything.
EDIT: this is no reason not to approach regulation with caution, just an indication that a gambling addiction, like a drug addiction, can happen to many people and has a damage radius considerably greater than just the person with the problem.
Corvos
2mo ago
Same way as deepfried ice cream, I think. You cover it in batter and you fry very quickly, before the inside has a chance to melt.
Corvos
2mo ago
No, but it seems quite likely to me that your experiences are filtered through your base nature in such a way that they become really quite deterministic.
Some people are just naturally cheerful, and can take tragedy on the chin without being marked much by it, apart from a brief shadow if you explicitly bring it up. Other people seem to have holes that is waiting for a formative experience to fill it - someone with an addictive personality might end up having trouble with sports gambling, drugs, porn or booze, but something is going to take that spot. The more delicate among us are going to have something bad happen to them eventually. Etc.
Corvos
2mo ago
They did, but the first Llama was basically rubbish AFAIK. I tried it for a little bit as a novelty and gave up in disgust. The first Mistral 7b model you could use and think 'oh... there might be something in this'. Maybe Meta would have kept going, but there's a decent chance they would have given up.
The Chinese would probably have gone on regardless but I think the local scene really kept things going in the long wait between GPT4 and Deepseek, by allowing people to try lots of things that weren't officially sanctioned, and putting together lots of infrastructure like openrouter. I don't think the Chinese stuff would have made nearly such a splash if they'd just been another closed-source API model.
Corvos
2mo ago
Patriotic nitpick: the modern internet (hypertext, URLs, HTTP) was built by a Brit in Geneva: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee. Although I'm pretty sure America gets the credit for Usenet.
Otherwise agreed.
Corvos
2mo ago
To be fair, without Mistral giving Llama a sharp poke with a pointy stick (especially Mixtral 8x7b) local might never have got anywhere in the first place.
Corvos
2mo ago
I recently wrote several pages of documentation at work - in Confluence. Having gotten entirely used to the auto-save features of modern text editing software, I thought nothing of just shutting down my machine at end of day. Come next day, it was of course all gone.
It shouldn't be gone, it should be saved as a draft. Have you looked in your 'recently worked on' and/or clicked Edit on the page you were modifying?
Corvos
2mo ago
Sorry you're having a bad time. Milk might be a good place to start - it's nicer than Huel, has more good things in it and it's cheaper. Get some apples for fibre to prevent gumming yourself up and ideally some decent-quality bread and cheese.
Less delicious than McDonalds of course.
It used to be common for British minor nobility to send their extra sons / failsons to Australia to 'make their fortune'. Possibly also India, I'm not sure.
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