As far as I’ve seen when airspace is restricted, it’s restricted, there are no “levels of restriction”. If a spaceship is launching, no one can fly - if the president-elect is there, no one can fly. Also, I believe star base is over two miles away, so I doubt this was a concern.
Security is having a bit of a hay day as everyone fights to build a moat against smart kids and AI. SOC2 and friends are a pain in the ass, but are a moat more than most these days. Security theater? The answer is at least “mostly”, but a moat nonetheless. You can feel the power swinging back into the hands of the customer.
When all software is trivial, the salesman and the customer will reign again. Not that I’m hoping for that day, but that day may be coming.
I think it should be obvious that Elnur Soltanov should be dismissed immediately, and that this is totally unacceptable.
However… conflicts of interest are an interesting problem. There’s some similar discussion regarding Russia on the UN Security Council: “how we can let the source of our insecurity discuss/control our security?”. The issue is that an organization that does not, well, deal with the problem, cannot deal with the problem.
Oil executives probably should be involved in these conferences as much as possible. To that extent conflicts are inevitable. A room full of climate activists and politicians with no stake in major industries sounds strictly less effective than one which includes them.
Life is tricky, diplomacy trickier. I’m not sure there’s a good answer here, except publicly shaming and dismissing this executive and then continuing to invite powerful oil industrialists to the table.
I figured the Security Council wasn't created for cooperation, but as a place where diplomacy/verbal arguments can be had, rather than (nuclear) violence.
There was an opinion piece a few years ago that said, "soon the 5 permanent members of the SC could be lead by Xi, Putin, Trump, Johnson and Le Pen".
At least Johnson can be ruled out. (Famous last words?)
Execution is everything. Not to drop a link in someone else’s HN launch but I’m building https://therapy-forms.com and these guys are way ahead of me on UI, polish, and probably overall quality. I do think there’s plenty of slightly different niches here, but even if there were not, execution is everything. Heck it’s likely I’ll wind up as a midship customer, my spare time to fiddle with OCR models is desperately limited and all I want to do is sell to clinics.
Wittgenstien would like a word. Words always mean whatever the hell the speaker thinks they mean, which is always unverifiable. We should always endeavor to understand what people _think they mean_ instead of insisting on some (faulty) denotation.
The inflation argument is always frustrating. In a vacuum, inflating the _supply of money_ would delate the _price of money_ which inflates the _prices of goods_. Most people say "inflation" to mean the price of goods, but it does no good to insist that one definition means you can't use the word in other ways!
So I can use the word 'dog' to mean a cat? Nonsense. The purpose of words is to communicate meaning. Therefore we must agree on what that meaning is beforehand in order to communicate effectively.
What's a dog? Is a child's plastic toy in the shape of a dog a dog? Maybe. Is a cross-bread wolfhound a dog? Maybe. Language games! Meaning is "fuzzy around the edges".
If you insist a cat is a dog, we're not playing a fun game - but that's up to me and up to you - Maybe someone in an undiscovered tribe doesn't know these words and wouldn't balk. If you say "dog" when you mean to insult someone, I might know what you're saying. But there is no mechanism to verify internal meaning.
I _strongly_ suggest reading some Wittgenstien if you're interested in this topic! If I say I speak Swedish fluently but refuse to ever utter a word, do I speak Swedish? Only our actions can vaguely point at our meaning. Language is a game we play with each other which does not and cannot communicate ultimate meaning. All we can do is agree or disagree to play games - animals dancing around a fire.
This is my main beef with "inflation" being used differently now from what it had been historically. Going back to the roman empire it was always about money supply increase, Keynes and crew decided that didn't sit well with them since money supply manipulation was their whole game.
You're just parroting the same thing again and again without providing any evidence. For a start, the amount of money in circulation is an unobservable quantity. It's extremely unlikely that the Romans had a word for it.
In antiquity[0], debased coinage would be equivalent to inflated currency today.
Each time the Romans debased their currency, they could be fairly confident that previous more valuable issues had a tendency to be hoarded if possible from that point on, and with a precise measure of the exact amount leaving the treasury could get a reasonably good estimate of how much was actually needed to be in general circulation. Perhaps the minimal amount to get by, perhaps not, maybe just depending on how generous Caesar felt at the time. And by offering a slightly more-than-fair exchange for the silver content, when issued, the amount that can afford to be hoarded can be deduced. While still turning a little bit of a "profit" from fractional percentages of silver that the general public can not measure accurately. Their central bankers were as shrewd as any existing today, equally as gifted mathematically as modern man can be.
Further inference can also be made about the resulting state of affairs by later following the private trading of recalled issues at "inflated" (previous) values.
If you were the one setting monetary policy risky enough that the chance for collapse was not as slim as it could be, you would want to know how close you were cutting it and the best way would probably be to get as good a handle on the money supply as you could, even if you could not gain full control. Nobody can anyway. But all effort always will be toward gaining more control.
This is basically the variable you could call _value of money_.
Not exactly the same as _price of money_, which is manipulable somewhat differently, but directly related to it in terms of _prices of goods_.
Which seems to be directly related to any type of inflation you can imagine :\
No telling if the ancients acted on the information that was available if they wanted to, this is just one of the ways to do it that is not in conflict with their habit of gradual debasement of their coinage as reissues took place over the years.
I’m never sure how to feel about arguments that take the form of “it’s obvious, just compare to <thing a statistically vanishing number of people could possibly be in a position to evaluate>”. I’m not sure how many Americans in an average group of 100 are aware of the average union negotiation time of a specific German union, but I’d guess between 0 and 1? I asked my German wife and she looked quizzical and asked if I needed her to Google it.
I’m not disagreeing with you but I’m not sure this form of argument-by-esoteric-fact accomplishes your goals. Maybe I’m just uninformed, but as an uninformed reader, I’m not inclined to believe you. Present it as novel information and not something hilarious obvious, and you would probably have won at least one supporter.
I understand you sentiment. I was trying to offer an outsider's perspective.
It's like talking a Swede about what happens when you don't have health insurance. They will look at you confused. "What do you mean 'don't have health insurance'? That is impossible in Sweden."
Also, according to Wiki, IG Metall is <<the dominant metalworkers' union in Germany, making it the country's largest union as well as Europe's largest industrial union.>> I did some Google searches to find last few negotiations. It normally takes a couple of months. 2.5 years (NYT) is just... well... insane.
As a regular old “platform engineer” I fight to ignore “data platform” tasks. There’s no target to hit, it’s just moving sand around a sand box.
If you want an answer to a specific question, we can spin up a read replica and a Metabase and write a query in an afternoon, cool. I’ll get you a chart, we’ll move on. If you want “a data analytics platform to enable blah blah blah” I’m out, I can’t do it. My eyes won’t focus, my hands stop moving.
Developers sometimes tell me stuff like “Kubernetes is too complex”, “jeez React is a pain”. I send those quotes to my friends stuck writing 195 step DAGs to transform log files from s3 into s3 so they can eventually land in s3 - ah yes but they’re parquet somewhere in between, and that matters for some reason. We laugh together, but I can see it hurts them more than I intended.
Life is too short to faff about doing nothing. Go join a company with less than 100 engineers and learn to be happy again. Let the enterprises burn, we’ll all be better for it.
Anyways this was a fantastic piece, I hope this person writes their book after all.
The effectiveness of any political system (and a large corporation is a political system) comes down to its porousness. Too rigid and it breaks, too porous and it's not a coherent system at all.
Whenever you hear "it means whatever it has to mean at a given time", they're approaching a Wittgensteinian truth: language _always means_ whatever it has to mean at a given time. We do not judge each other by measuring a persons understanding of our words: it's immeasurable. We judge each other by the outcomes of their actions. Microsoft's revenue and valuations are up, thus the ideas "work" in the darwinian sense. Nothing else matters. Words are fundamentally meaningless, and communication of truth is fundamentally impossible.
It almost feels easier to disassemble and resew the shirt from recycled fabric. I’m mostly joking, but my point is that physical AI probably implies a complete rethink of every individual routine from first principles: why fold the shirt at all? Why not just-in-time-ironing? We’re focusing on the hard problems because we’re imitating how a human with limited resources would approach the issue.
If you asked a robot to provide you with a fresh and clean shirt every morning - would a home washing machine come into the equation? My best answer is “maybe”, which implies some huge portion of our normal routines will disappear instead of being automated.
If restaurants require no staff, why even have a home kitchen? We’re heading towards a cultural revolution as much as a technology one.
It’s time to find out what value our values really have.
That could just as easily be turned on it's head too - if you don't need skilled (or any) staff to shop, cook, serve, and then washup, why would you ever NOT eat at home?
Especially if it can operate very quietly, one fairly slow robot could do probably all the housework, and could do it at night when it's literally out of sight and out of mind. It would feel like magic. You'd wake up every morning to a clean house and hot breakfast.
Most people go to restaurants because of the social benefits, not the labour savings.
The idea of people or groups of people siloing themselves into their ultra-convenient homes and never interact with others is a dystopia and a sure sign of an already broken community.
Well, that feels like a rather extreme jump to conclusions, and was certainly not something I thought the GP comment was even suggesting.
I don't see any reason why people couldn't adjust from meeting friends at restaurants to hosting friends at home instead. (Unless, of course, your living space is limited)
If you aren't cooking and cleaning up after, what's the difference between that and meeting someone at a restaurant?
> If you aren't cooking and cleaning up after, what's the difference between that and meeting someone at a restaurant?
I wonder if you realise how dystopian your life already is to consider this question reasonable.
There is a difference between a co-located set of siloed people and a community. The inability to recognise this means your community is already broken.
I suppose our restaurant-going experiences must significantly differ. If I'm going to a restaurant with friends for social interaction, it typically doesn't involve the other people in the restaurant who just happen to be there at the same time as me.
If I wanted that, I would go to a bar instead, which is a separate conversation from the one we were having.
However, I don't think I would be so bold as to call either of our lifestyles 'broken'. That feels like a needless attack.
> You are an idiot narcissist, unable to comprehend that other people might not hold the same values as you. This defect in you, the inability to recognize that other people might want different things than you, will forever render you unable to connect with people at large.
I wonder if you see the irony?
Ultimately, my comment refers not to individual values, but truisms of the human condition, backed by decades of research by sociologists and psychologists.
> Your judgemental attitude combined with your deep conviction that everybody else is in the wrong, rather than you, guarantees that you will die a lonely misanthrope.
I wonder if the reality would disappoint you? Or if you're hoping for this outcome?
> Your abrasive, insulting communication style ensures that nobody will ever truly love you.
Again the irony is palpable. I wonder how you react to disagreements in person if this is your reaction to a well-reasoned but provocative comment that offends you.
> Also, you are, in general, a shit person.
Are you of the calibre of person to judge others?
> All of this might sound over the top and a mean attack, but it’s not. Instead, it is accurate and sympathetic.
It may in fact be accurate, if the subject is the author.
I don't understand the distinction you are making: two couples (4 people) meeting at a restaurant is, to me, equally social as one couple going to another couple's house to eat dinner.
With respect, you're making your own feelings clear. I'm not ascribing any emotion to you.
However, it is clear you lack the perspective to understand how globally unusual or fundamentally broken your community and your interactions with it are.
Perhaps that's true in your country, but not in the US. That said, the logic doesn't fully hold up. I can see it making sense if the goal were purely for the restaurant experience, but if I could replicate the food at home using a bot, I'd be inviting all my friends over to eat at my place instead.
In the US, I think it would be hard to say that most people go to restaurants for social benefits.
> I'd be inviting all my friends over to eat at my place instead.
Ironically, this reads to me like a rather American thing. Simply based on typical dwelling size. There's a lot of nights at a restaurant (or cheaper: some venue specializing in space + some catering for groups instead of the full restaurant experience) I could buy for the cost of keeping a dining room able to host a non-tiny group of friends around all year. In American sprawl, with those hardly-more-than-cardboard construction standards? Sure, no problem.
> "hardly-more-than-cardboard construction standards"
You are a silly person, what does this even have to do with cooking? Sorry America has got you so upset.
Do you even have a counterpoint to what I said beyond your weird hate for America? Most of the places I have traveled and lived in around the world, most people are not going out to eat for socializing but for the elimination of the labor and time it takes to cook the same meal at home. Sure socialization can play a role but thats not the prime value.
Alternatively the idea that people don't entertain at home is a sign of a completely broken housing market where you get a human storage unit rather than a home.
It's a dystopia all right, but one that is already very real. WFH is a reality for many, groceries to the door hasn't become mainstream yet but the supermarket might well be on the trajectory taken by book stores two decades earlier and people who don't attend outdoor or team sports can have surprisingly few occasions to leave home unless they go out of their way to find an excuse.
Just because I can order everything I need for home with a couple of taps (which I can, BTW), work from home time to time, and can cook and clean by myself doesn't mean that I don't need to leave home.
Taking a long tour along the neighborhood, to see what I want to buy first hand before pulling the trigger, or seeing an old friend and getting a nice coffee at that café are all valid reasons to go out.
Getting fresh air, regularly walking, seeing a couple of different and unknown faces are regular maintenance tasks for the body and brain.
I don't think humans should hole up at their homes and work/doom scroll/eat/doom scroll/sleep/repeat just because they can. That's unhealthy for every aspect of your body and life to begin with.
That's why I called it a dystopia. After a year of working fully remote I now have the option of walking to an office and I haven't skipped on that a single day. The WFH had its benefits, but all in all it felt like COVID lockdown going into overtime. As in enjoying those few seconds of interaction at the supermarket checkout.
Although this is your reality most of thr time, people need to go out with family/friends, from time to time. So when they disappear where people are going to go?
I'm in this dystopia: WFH, delivery groceries, delivery meals when I'm feeling lazy. If I didn't have a dog, I'd probably only leave my house on the weekend.
IMO it's not so bad. I don't miss grocery shopping. I do miss walking to work up Powell St.
I do know my neighbors though, and talk to them on a pretty regular basis. I don't like sports especially, but I also do have some recreational hobbies that get me outside.
That's more or less my life, except that I don't live somewhere walkable, and do still buy groceries in person (although I will, especially when my mobility/fatigue/general health issues acting up, use their curbside service), but that store is a 2 minute drive from my house. As I mentioned, I have medical issues that are currently rather sucky and limiting, and being chronic, largely irreversible conditions, well, they aren't gonna get better. Maybe with stem cells one day... Anyway, point being that these sort of services (which, in my case, can also be stuff like... buying the pre-cut fruit rather than whole) can be a pretty big deal for the disabled.
Having a mop-capable robotic vacuum myself I have a completely different experience. It is simply too stupid(despite being a smart model with camera and room mapping LiDAR) and get stuck at carpet edges and under chairs.
If I want to use it on schedule I need to perpetually have all areas I want it to clean adapted to robotic vacuuming. Which I don't, meaning I have to manually go over the entire area and pick up objects, move chairs, move the small carpets and then empty the all too small storage bin on the robotic vacuum after it have done its rounds.
And don't even get me started on the mopping function.
The end result being that if I take a regular vacuum in my hand and do the pre-robot screening round, I've managed to already vacuum the entire flat with a much more powerful machine in less time than the robot vacuum process would've required.
Yeah, I demand more info about the mop from the OP. What model do you have and are you completely satisfied? I was under the impressionthat most of wet mop models just smear dirt everywhere instead of really cleaning a dirty floor.
> It’s time to find out what value our values really have.
Which is exciting, as long as the net results are better for human beings. I really don't want to see us make human experience worse to ensure that AI is able to be more successful. That defeats the purpose of any technological invention.
I think that saying this phenomenon is change "for the sake of tech" or for "progress" elides the fact that it is good for some people. Specifically, it is good for auto executives and their shareholders (in their capacity as executives and shareholders, though presumably many of them are drivers as well). It's a cost measure that makes customers' lives worse (and more dangerous) for the entire life of the car in exchange for pennies in their pocket now. This isn't technology getting its way or anything, but people using their power to further their own interests with indifference to the interests of others. That's not new, just the details are.
Personally I really love the combination of both. I want to use physical buttons for things like signalling, lights etc. And I want to use software on screens for things like navigation, music, analytics etc.
That's a marketing issue "look OUR car has this shiny big touchscreen now!" which car manufacturers think -- or thought -- users would prefer and buy (with Tesla leading the way). That may change if there is user blowback. (Just drove a new BMW Series 4 the other day and it had the big touch screen but retained the buttons/controls because they're better for settings you change often or while driving. Touchscreen is better for settings you change less frequently or while not driving (like charging).
I’m sure for _some_ people there’s _some_ truth to what you say.
Why fold clothes? Because they take up less room when you fold them.
Why have a home kitchen? Because some people actually enjoy cooking at home.
I think the bigger point here is a robot that conforms to the way humans work. You seem to be implying that if we just had better focused processes, we could do away with some vestiges of our old way of living, which seems to be the exact opposite point of building an AGI robot.
>we’re imitating how a human with limited resources would approach the issue
in particular the robots with only 2 hands when it could be 3 or 4 and not necessarily the same - say 3 of the same from 3 directions in the horizontal plane and one from above, with probably different "fingers". More hands allows say pipelining the tasks execution, like staged clothes holding or shooting an RPG while one of the hands already ready to put another warhead into the barrel (generally 2 persons job for RPG or mortar) - again our imagination is severely limited by 2 hands and even in such case we've evolved minimal specialization, ie. right/left-handedness.
>If restaurants require no staff, why even have a home kitchen? We’re heading towards a cultural revolution as much as a technology one.
that seems already underway, with Uber[Eats] drivers being the "robots".
>It almost feels easier to disassemble and resew the shirt from recycled fabric.
shred and 3d reprint in a new style. Again, we are already having it in the 0.3 version - the "fast fashion". So we already can preview and project how it would look like in the version 1.0. No kitchen, no washing machines, flat displays or better AR glasses - small urban apartment is enough, a cell like in 5th element, basically a cell in beehive, ... a cell, still more than in Matrix :)
> that seems already underway, with Uber[Eats] drivers being the "robots".
One of the primary benefits of automation is actually a reduction of costs. Uber eats did reduce delivery costs a bit, but probably not to the same order of magnitude true automation could achieve. Historically, you could always "automate" by having some guy do it, but the difference between having a bunch of people copy a book and a mechanical printing press do it is revolutionary.
> shred and 3d reprint in a new style. Again, we are already having it in the 0.3 version - the "fast fashion"
Or bioengineering living clothes.
I've heard several hypotheses for which evolutionary pressures took away our natural body fur and how we got clothing in the first place, but for all the ones I've heard, if we are so resource unbounded that any of the other options makes sense then we may well also be so unbounded as to return to the absence of clothing entirely.
> I’m mostly joking, but my point is that physical AI probably implies a complete rethink of every individual routine from first principles: why fold the shirt at all?
You may have skipped over how clothes are stored and organized in your first principle exercise. Clothes are folded because it saves space and makes it easier to find and select an individual piece of clothing.
It likely depends on the quality of the clothing. If we are talking about a fairly standardized and utilitarian outfit like a t-shirt and straight leg jeans then that would make automated sewing easier.
On the other hand, if someone wants to wear clothing that flatters their body type and sense of style, then the robot is going to need to be able to make different patterns. Things like different types of yokes, pleats, princess seams, collar types, etc.
The next step is clothing that is tailored for an individual. In this case the robot would need to be able to add darts and other modifications in order to adjust the fit. Note that this and the previous step may need to take into account the behavior of the fabric; e.g. how does it stretch.
Finally, in the realm of high end tailoring you have features that are used precisely because they must be done by hand.
That being said, there is precedent for what you are suggesting: traditionally kimonos are unsewn when they are washed and then reassembled.
So long as the robots didn't eliminate their job (and make it very difficult to get another job), in which case they'll have a smaller kitchen (or no kitchen).
Washing and folding clothes won't become obsolete. But washing machines might. The robot can "hand" wash your clothes while you sleep. You can reclaim the space that your washing machine took up. Same with the dishwasher. No need to save labor means no need for labor saving devices!
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