the future can be wonderful if we make it so
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An early timelapse video of Alfie, the general purpose teleop robot we've been building at @prosper
Here it cleans a kitchen table, wipes the surface, rinses dishes in the sink before placing them in the dishwasher, throws trash, and puts other items away.
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Just did some weird math... If you take the amount of energy used by humans annually (5e20 joules), the number of joules to increase the temperature of 1kg of air by one degree (700 joules), the weight of the atmosphere (5e18 kg); then by entropy this would give you...
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Nicer video of Alfie cleaning an office.. next up, we’re working with Buck Lewis ( issuu.com/risd/docs/risdxyz_… ) to redesign Alfie to be more ✨🫧⚡️
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Just had a @prosper robot clean up my living room while I was showering, remotely piloted... Feels like having a futuristic friend taking care of you, very comforting. We need a "prosper freeze" voice command though for coming out of the shower 😂
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We decided to rent a warehouse and set up a lost PLA investment casting line ourselves lol — this is the first test part. Surface quality should dramatically improve in the next few weeks with tweaks to the process
Would be cool if someone tried making turnkey lost PLA casting with chemical surface finishing a thing..
3D print part with PolyCast PVA/support, chemical surface finish in a chamber, dip in slurry, dry slurry, burn off PLA in furnace, pour in metal in next furnace, break off clay, post machine in CNC
In theory allows cheap low unit volume metal parts, with casting alloys / nice crystallinity / low porosity, and more complex geometries
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Good question :)
It currently can last 2 hours off of battery, without being plugged in; and then it needs to plug itself in.
Fitting enough batteries for a 8-12 hr shift would take up too much space and $. So the robot is designed to plug itself into the wall while doing tasks, then unplug and move to the next area, and repeat!
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The general purpose robotics race probably comes down to who gets to 10k-100k robots deployed first, to get the data needed
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were you thinking something like this? piped.video/watch?v=gt0dCVlT…
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During teleop, the operator is in VR, manipulating the robot like a puppet master. But this likely changes quite a bit as the system develops
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Governments should probably fund things like Hack Club and Khan Academy as part of their education budget; in general we do such a bad job of funding effective non-profits
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Would be cool if someone tried making turnkey lost PLA casting with chemical surface finishing a thing..
3D print part with PolyCast PVA/support, chemical surface finish in a chamber, dip in slurry, dry slurry, burn off PLA in furnace, pour in metal in next furnace, break off clay, post machine in CNC
In theory allows cheap low unit volume metal parts, with casting alloys / nice crystallinity / low porosity, and more complex geometries
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When I reached out to Coinhive (biggest browser based crypto miner at the time) about this, was surprised to learn nobody had asked them before. In 5-10 hours I sped it up by ~6% ( mobile.twitter.com/coinhive_… ). The diff was less than 10 bytes of wasm, but worth $X million/yr to them
A huge thanks goes to @shariq who helped us to improve Coinhive's miner performance with some hand crafted WASM!
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Generative models (text/image/video) with lots of users could one day be optimised to maximise engagement, like FB/TikTok. Scary thought: our devices are already addictive; how much worse will they get?
I think it's OK if we have System 2 control over our AI's reward function
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If all human+business income in the world was confiscated and equally redistributed, we'd be living on ~$10k/yr
A non-money-stressed humanity needs more total wealth, not just redistribution. The biggest lever to increase overall wealth looks like technology. But how, exactly?
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Made a website to generate aesthetically pleasing names using recurrent neural networks (RNN code by @karpathy):
burgundy.io/
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2k @digitalocean droplets - 1TB RAM, 120GB/s up/down, 10 teraflops - for just $14/hr - this is grotesque
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Self fulfilling prophecies:
- To think you won't do much
- To think your brain isn't malleable
- To think people don't like you for who you are
- Pessimism
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an annual temperature increase of ~0.14 degrees C. That's in line with the claimed measured annual temperature increase of the atmosphere?
But can you assume the earth itself isn't basically a giant heat sink?
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Ultra low latency video streaming into a Quest from a $20 webcam (way harder than expected lol)
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One interesting hypothesis is the prevalence of parasites in people’s guts: that would explain the huge discrepancy
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Probably the most level headed view on where general purpose robotics AI is at today, recommend reading if you’re into that :)
Not sure about the long horizons point, but otherwise all very sensible
There was a lot of good and interesting debate on "is scaling all we need to solve robotics?" at #CoRL23. I spent some time writing up a blog post about all the points I heard on both sides: nishanthjkumar.com/Will-Scal…
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Coming back from a week in a poorer city in the Philippines.. the hope for millions of people at call centres and outsourcing companies is now that they aggressively lead in adoption of AI and benefit from the increased productivity, instead of waiting for eventual decline
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We've added a vacuum cleaner style spooler so the cord won't be laying around so haphazardly -- and we're doing lots of testing to make sure that's safe
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So if you've ever wondered how to have better control over your information diet from all these random sources... I've just stumbled upon a magical solution: RSS-feed-all-the-things. Filter HN on min points; now checking it is boring. Feed of Twitter likes: wayy better.
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That's probably the mistake here, but maybe there's an argument around how the earth itself is warming up more near cities than away from them, showing that the heat has a hard time escaping to the heat sink since there's a small number of choke points? E.g, London underground
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in an automated economy, the special purpose machines get built by increasingly general purpose machines. at the base level you have general purpose robots which make factories
if that happens, let's hope it's good for all and not some crazy scenario - marshallbrain.com/manna1
the form factor which makes sense for a general purpose robot probably differs based on the environment in which it operates. different indoors, in the wilderness, ocean, air, and floating in space. they might also be different depending on the scale they operate at
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general purpose robots make sense for the long tail of tasks which aren't cost effective to build special purpose machines for because the tasks are too infrequent. there's not a lot of ways to build a general purpose robot: humanoids' data, installation, and familiarity helps
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Excitement of today: microcontroller seems to be receiving serial signals when plugged in, for no good reason. Try dumping those to the serial write port, nothing; but they show up on LEDs. Record a video and get this byte sequence: AT^SQPORT?\rAT\rAT\rAT\r~\x00x\xf0~~\x00x\xf0~
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hmm it might not be as expensive as you'd expect 😜 wouldn't make sense as a product if it were crazy expensive!
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Would be so cool.. if it worked, I think the next biggest issue would be: how many turns of a coil can you manufacture and fit in a small volume, while still being structurally sound? With low turns, you would need your power electronics / cables to handle crazy currents (because magnetic field strength is proportional to ampere-turns), which seems unrealistic in a mass market application .
Some manufacturing methods for existing brittle superconducting wire; these all seem to imply it's difficult to fit lots of coil turns in small volumes: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superc…
There seem to be a lot of projects to make very large cryogenically cooled superconducting motors, like this one, which don't suffer from the same issue:
mobile.engineering.com/amp/1…
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Thanks. The latest version has a vacuum cleaner style spooler on it, so we should be able to manage the cable length on the floor better than in this video. And we're adding cameras to better see the surrounding floor, and avoid driving over the cable.
We're still testing that approach.
A really crazy idea is to have the robot have multiple AC sockets onboard, where it unplugs the AC cable from itself, then plugs it in on different sides. So it can spin in place, essentially
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From a hackathon project with new friends: idk why but it feels so electric/visceral/energizing to spin up 600+ servers for a few hours.. maybe it's the insane leverage/speed of increasing compute (as long as you have high limits on your account😝)
code: github.com/shariq/instantapi…
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It's not and that's actually one of the biggest changes we're making in the upcoming version. Currently it's just two driven wheels and two casters. Bad for speed of the system overall
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Google around... and the culprit: ModemManager - a beautiful Linux service which just treats every newly connected device as a 3g/bt modem, saying "hi u up" unless the device is on an explicitly hardcoded blacklist!! And the blacklist often breaks after linux updates!! amazing.
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Weird that we don't have public figures with high approval ratings. Many public figures don't think it's possible, so it's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. Biggest factor in eroding trust in institutions: it starts as trust in people.
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So instead of optimising purely for short term clicks/views (System 1), there should be a way to make a System 2 choice about what to optimise for. Maybe it's how good you feel after; or how much you learned; or how little you regret it. It should be up to the user, and flexible
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Ahh this is soo cool!
The first neural net proofs to join a library of formal proofs; with great feedback from the Metamath folks
Now just need even more compute, and a better way to generate infinite goals to make it really open ended..
Huge congrats to @spolu and @ilyasut 😄
Posted my first paper on arXiv💥🙌
GPT-f is a Transformer-based automated theorem prover. We show that Transformer + Search is suitable to formal reasoning and continuous self-improvement 🦾
arxiv.org/abs/2009.03393
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If you're thinking of working on a side project w/ a GPU: vast.ai
~3-5x cheaper vs AWS/GCP; seamless onboarding onto a Jupyter notebook; getting started from scratch takes a few minutes (vs requesting GPU capacity and navigating weird interfaces on AWS/GCP..)
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Still thinking about when my cousin said "traveling is your hobby? yes I like holidays too, who doesn't like holiday"
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So apparently the Earth rotates around its axis ~366 times in a year, or every ~23h56m. That's called a stellar day, and it's different from a solar day (averages to ~24h) which is the amount of time it takes the sun to rise in a given place from one day to the next
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Used devtools yesterday to book the last international flight out of India for someone stuck there... Customer service was offline; website was buggy - scrolling didn't work for some reason and zooming out wasn't enough; had to delete elements until the submit button was visible
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A display above every fast food restaurant indicating avg wait time before you get your food, especially in a food court. Uses cameras to sense queue-entering and food-pickup events in a general purpose manner, so any fast food restaurant can install the system off the shelf
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They're paying attention to it; but it's still a safety concern which we're working on before a production version
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Femtotechnology: making things with subatomic particles instead of atoms. There isn't much public speculation afaict: Dragon's Egg; the white smooth sphere weapon from 3 Body Problem; what else?
web.archive.org/web/20041025…
Emailed the author of this essay asking for updates...🤞
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Someone keeps suspiciously agreeing with you? Throw them a curveball every once in a while. Say you believe some obviously wrong, slightly crazy thing. see if they agree and BS an explanation 🤥🥺🙃
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A world in which technological development is driven by more and more advanced magic shows, because that's way cooler than economics so all the talented people go into that
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Is your brain being hacked by contagious information streams?
Symptoms: you want it to make you feel better or help you but it doesn't, time slips away, low self control, it's a waste of time
Relief: abstain
Cure: unknown
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The SF story: if soft automation creates mass unemployment, the tech companies would be taxed to fund a UBI
What about the billions of people living in countries w/out taxable tech companies?
Some kind of massive foreign aid program? 😬
They'd probably get shafted TBH
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It's interesting to juxtapose Imagine World Peace, by John Lennon; with today, where idealistic young people don't seem to think much about preventing wars and promoting world peace
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Why don't marketing departments spend more money on 1-off video games?
e.g, Soylent could have a game where you run the company and climb an automation/biotech research tech tree. If players understood the trade-offs, maybe they'd think GM food isn't so bad, and evangelize more
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Another weirdly nice indie game: 1 hour 1 life. You're born a baby to another player who nurtures you, or lets you die. Develop skills and contribute however you want. Within an hour you die, leaving your kids an inheritance. The world is persistent and progress compounds
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You'd also have to check the heat transfer rate between the oceans and the atmosphere/atmosphere and earth, which might have a square/cube ratio thing going. Or maybe hot air goes up and air near the surface is a similar temperature on average but the higher air is hotter
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But what happens to people in countries without gigantic tech companies, if the distribution and taxation of most of the wealth in the world is so US centric?
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I'd thought food pairings were about the combination being nice, but TIL it's more about magnifying the differences: if you just focus on the highlighted differences and magnify those, is that flavor pleasant?
Probably applies to more than just food pairings, like friendships
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A video game where time moves at a pace decided by the player - from real time to thousands of years a second. Can small events impact history, basically
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Interesting to think about memory locality constraints of parallel computers embedded in space. CPUs are ~1D, GPUs can be ~2D, but biological brains are ~3D
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Packaging has a large effect on the perception of flavor (coffee in white mug more intense than black mug, and more) newyorker.com/magazine/2015/…
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Point being the market was in fact extremely inefficient, I didn't do anything super genius, so it probably still is very inefficient
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an external brain which actually does stuff for you; basic software; no need for neural interfaces or fancy AI just code a bunch of scenarios up front
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It has a 2 hour battery onboard! But it uses so much power it's hard/expensive to fit a much bigger battery. So we figured it needs to be in this hybrid mode, where it can plug/unplug itself into any wall outlet as it moves between rooms or goes to tricky spots
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Why don't dryers have humidity sensors and ask for dryness level instead of time? Why don't microwaves ask for what temperature you want your food, then watch surface of food with a thermal camera and use lower power while waiting for the heat to spread? Instead of frickin wifi
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After 10 seconds of googling this is called a "sensor dryer" and a "sensing microwave" and has been a thing for a while
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The thing which did it for me was to go to hackathons with welcoming people and try new things in electronics/software.
Also maybe Twitter osmosis: @Robotbeat @szeloof @jacknasjaq @glitchyowl @divalbanerjee @MachinePix @gustafjt @bunniestudios @MrCatid @DavidSHolz @antimatter15
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Bugs in houses really suck. Ants/cockroaches/flies... Why haven't we figured this out yet. Maybe pest management should be more like plumbing/electric: part of the construction of a home, preventative infrastructure, vs reacting to crazy infestations by poisoning your home?
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Devices need red flashes/annoying sounds 30s before suddenly turning off from low battery... It would give enough of a warning if you're near a charger, preventing an unnecessary interruption. Low charge notifications don't trigger action; but critical charge notifications would
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Anecdotally, debates between strangers on political FB pages seem to be getting a lot more civil 😲
Are ppl finally learning antidotes to toxic online behavior?
What if social media really brings people together?
What if tht makes a big dent in global peace/love/unity/respect?
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From convo with @hibyepie : the best O(n) time published matrix multiplication algorithms look weirder and weirder: is it possible there could exist a problem where the best algorithm is infinitely long, but we can successively approximate its big O? (possible answer below)
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Good thing this isn't going to happen, most people will always be economically valuable enough to do reasonably ok ; mass unemployment would be a choice and not by necessity </hot take>
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3 hours compiling with -O3 instead of -O0... anddd segfault. Now need to try -O2 instead => a movie where the baddies have 10 minutes to speed up some code only a little bit, but their hubris at using -O3 instead of -O2 thwarts their bad plans
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A ventilator without electricity/moving parts, based off of a US military design in the 60s:
armeevent.com/
Not sure why this isn't 1000x more popular... Seems really important for people in less developed countries
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How would you make a better social feed?
Concept: ask "how often do you want to see content like this?" for every post, answer in frequency (all the time/block/5 mins a day/..); model each user. App limits to 1 hour usage per day. Track happiness by asking at the end of the hour
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Imagine a wonderful tribe which has largely been isolated from the rest of humanity for centuries. What would you teach them, if they were interested in learning useful things from you?
That's basically how we'll look to people 100-1000 years from now
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Possibly the nicest place on the internet... in Kind Words, anyone can request kind words from strangers by sharing some context anonymously: e.g, you had an argument with your best friend. The community then sends extremely kind thoughtful letters back 🥰store.steampowered.com/app/1…
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Robotics people are excited by household helper robots, but tbh not excited enough.. Think of the amount of unpaid household work being done everyday, disproportionately by women. Easily a net 10-20% direct increase in people's time globally, if it's cheap enough. That's nuts
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The belief space of an organism or group is a dynamical system with multiple attractor states. We can imagine there is a Hidden Big Attractor region which the most advanced beings who cooperate over long time scales would converge upon. There are other Attractor Regions where death and decay are desirable
(dynamical system just means it has a state and the state evolves over time and you can visualise the system by showing all the trajectories the state would go through depending on where it is in the space; attractor states in dynamical systems are like vortices which suck you in when you get close to them; a very strong attractor state in belief space is also called a “self fulfilling prophecy”)
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