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
2d 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
2d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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.
But when I hear someone moaning "it's not fair — I'm just as good at my job as he is, but he'll work for cheaper!", all I can think is "oh, well then he deserves the job more than you."
I'm not saying this is always wrong, but it is the incantation that summons Moloch.
Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art (you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH).
You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.
A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few generations.
In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.
If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be outcompeted by their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.
For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should maintain a comfortably low population. From within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic imperative and the island will end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.
Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.
Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.
Elsewhere on this site, we have @faceh lamenting that every tech product eventually enshittifies and tech innovators build Skinner boxes rather than finding a way to monetize that doesn't wreck user experience. And one of the primary reasons this happens is that people expect a reasonably complete product with a certain amount of polish these days, and the moment you start looking for funding to do so you meet a VC who say, "well, I could fund you, or I could fund one of the 10,000 startups who aren't pre-committing to leave money on the floor". (There are other reasons, including the fact that every founder believes they should be a multi-millionaire if their startup is successful).
And this attitude is slowly poisoning the entire tech market. Customers are skeptical about trying new products, expecting the rug to be pulled from under them. Entrepreneurs are pressured to only start buzzworld-laden unicorns (because that's all that gets funded) and pass over serious attempts to build useful things. There is no slack to take risks, and quality slowly declines as more and more individually-ok but collectively-damning savings are made. It's not just that outsourcing leads to cultural externalities, or even that these devs are necessarily worse. But the attitude of "I can find someone cheaper than you" undermines the spirit that is needed to produce genuinely high-quality products.
There is also the more hard-edged point that paying American salaries is (or should be) the price of having access to the rich American market to sell your product, which is sustained by American workers living in America paying American prices. If you want to situate your company in Vietnam, hire only Vietnamese workers and sell only in Vietnam for Vietnamese prices, nobody will stop you.
Corvos
7d ago
Apparently. Was going off general semantics, sports analytics not really my area!
Corvos
8d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_ice_cream
Where there's a will...
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.
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