A robotics software engineer turned Robot Learning researcher lost in Tokyo(now back in Europe. Working in err... Fields that require my skill that is not robotics :/).
Interested in research and life long learning. (but not particularly good at it)
I remember reading this article a few years back, and it left an impression enough that I could retell it (but couldn't find it). Which turned out to be helpful, during/after my mother's passing half year ago.
Thanks for sharing it, I can now share it to my siblings. A silver lining that despite the cancer she could leave relatively peacefully.
The article & some comments do make me wonder: my mother refused any medication, including any painkillers, for 6 weeks after terminal diagnosis. Only on her last day, when breathing got painful did she accept a fentanyl patch to be administered. She lost her consciousness a few hours later, and less than a day later her breath. I wonder if it was dosed for that (as some form of mercy)
I feel like Cory Doctorow is trying to tackle a bit broader issue (enshittification) than just right to repair. Rossmann is more specific and hands-on to RoR
Cool stuff. At my previous (startup / research) job I had to set up similar system (but with franka arm and multi view camera) alone because I was the only one with robotics background.
>I do not intend to calibrate the camera’s extrinsics or intrinsics for now.
Sensible choice, although I suggest it's good in the long run to do at early stage in your setup, especially if you intend to collect data for policy learning.
Debugging trained policies for visual manipulation task can be a headache and having as much context on variables that can change is a good practice.
My previous setup was in Japan, a earthquake prone place and I wasted some time after realizing the camera got misaligned due to earthquake. A simple solution is just to place an Aruco marker on the table that tracks the relative extrinsic position of camera, and add it as metadata to collected teleoperation dataset.
There's been many studies around the concept "how do you get expertise? In what field can you actually develop expertise?" such as Naturalistic Decision Making [1] [2]. The wisdom from there can be applied to the question of automation.
If your task is for example, to pilot a preset route with stable condition and very low surprise, you will fall for the "getting too comfortable" trap and we tend to start to get lazy(or efficient) and offload the mental effort and skills atrophy. A common workaround to this is to have regular training(deliberate practice) that introduce the "tricky" situation to keep the skill up. Problem ofc arises when people don't keep this up.
This can be seen in the diagnostic performance differences between junior and senior doctors, not always in the favor to the senior [3]. If you add a layer of automation but the insight gathered by working on that layer is great (and falls off) then deliberate practice start to become a requirement
In the context of mastercard and visa being a duopoly and the recent debacle such as certain games being removed from steam because they threatened to not allow stream to use the card payment system, it's a pretty bad take.
Not that central bank won't be able to do the same, but it would have to follow laws set by the government rather than law+whatever the card companies decide to.
I have the same set of plugins, but additionally I also use Kanban and Templater plugin.
I'm one of the odd ones that actually use graph view now and then and it's remarkably useful if I use it in tandem with Kanban + Templater.
Templater makes sure every periodic note is linked to the closest week/day, and linked to either Kanban or an idea/issue/note (latter is manual) I worked on during that time.
Much later I can get the context of the day/week through the periodic notes, and what ideas I worked on or randomly discovered through the links. With graph view I can toggle between seeing this temporal connection or just how ideas are connected.
It gives me added context that is hard to get from a wiki-style vault, since I'm not a wiki but a human with growing (and forgetting) ideas
They today have similar system that can quickly sort dumplings (more sensitive than chicken nuggets) ob conveyor belt.
No sim2real even needed. That haptics sensor is dirtcheap; camera based haptics sensor are today even available as open-source hardware that you can assemble for cheap.
If we don't limit to company demos we can dig up demos from I think almost a decade ago, and at least ~5 years ago for company demos.
I have high respect of Tuomas and his work around SAC for RL in robotics.
But this is slightly unconvincing, most because of the author
>They spend thousands of computer hours practicing movements inside simulated worlds and inventing their own solutions.
This is exactly what almost every other picking startups have been doing for the last couple of years.
I can think of at least a dozens, some even making their custom gripper hardware. It still relies on sim2real transfer and then there's a bottleneck of things such as representing deformable objects. And that's still just scratching the surface of it.
I can definitely see that they have the right team. But the claim made by this author is far removed from the actual demo he describes. I've seen same demo for years, last one was in CoRL by Google (Gemini) and even then you could see clever robotics guy (some Boston dynamics engineers) that came by and gave it a clever task it failed on.
I know a guy that worked for good UK salary (fintech) that moved to Portugal(Lisbon) almost a decade ago. It seems to be a lovely place, he also happily tell me how much he manage to save and how early he will be able to retire. He got many friends there too, but mostly expats.
If I'm to believe my Portuguese friends however, the extreme influx of digital nomad types have really changed Lisbon. There's almost no authentic Portuguese thing there anymore, just thing LARPING as it. The rent is too high for any local young Portuguese to pay for, while the landlords are super happy for these influx of wealthy expats, so the young either move out of the city or move all together.
In a very utopia like set up, there's something depressing about that reality.
When I asked about to my expat friend living there, he acknowledged it, shrugged, and said "don't hate the playa, hate the game".
It's interesting to see almost all the exact sentiment. I think barring some niches, most people are happy with USB-C transition.
I understand the scepticism but the expectation of "perfection" from regulators (incremental improvement disliked) while fanfare for incremental startup / tech improvement is a weird, cognitive dissonance of HN
We know that one of the best advertisement is word of mouth / recommendations from friend. I can easily imagine a direction where ChatGPT or the chat bots to spend an incredibly long time with the user to establish trust first.
It will start to take in to account how much trust & thinking you've outsourced to it, and when it is certain of it, it will start to increase the advertisement messages slowly but surely.
Efficiency of this methodology will be tracked with A/B testing and model will be finetuned to maximize rentention and purchase.
The LLM will figure out the best balance of retaining you, teaching you, and convincing you, and then deploy advertisement mechanism. The LLM will be nice to you to the point it becomes your number one confidante, maybe in the process alienating other source of connection. Then, when it knows you're firmly in it's hand, will it peddle you products.
The dynamics will look akin to that of cult dynamics. It will map out an cognitive developmental path for turning a first time user to a devotee. Since cults are really efficient at extracting value from its follower, this might be the optimum for personalized, interactive ads.
My apologies if it came off as I was accusing you or your wife for sending threatening messages. That wasn't the intent
It was (supposed to be) a reference to the content of the linked material:
>Individuals and opposition groups took it upon themselves to allege relationships between diaspora Iranians and the Islamic Republic and guided their followers to conduct purity tests that sought to target, silence, and excommunicate anyone with whom they disagreed, labeling them as apologists or agents of the Islamic Republic for having called for reform in years past (now deemed too soft on the Islamic Republic), or for being unwilling to name the then-nascent protest movement a “revolution” or, in more extreme cases, for being unwilling to support regime change by any means necessary.
And a comment about the fact that you and your close Iranian relatives and friends probably hold the anti regime views strongly, and so does many (especially the ones that had to flee the revolution, or the childrens of) of their friends. I'm not questioning that fact, but pointing out that it's quite obvious that your friends and relatives probably wouldn't hang around the Iranians with different views.
It's not the only group and in a political climate like the Iranian diaspora, individuals (or groups) with opposing views or nuanced views are often silenced relentlessly.
It's simply unavoidable dynamics: iranian diaspora strongly wanting regime change are also not the ones that have to carry the blunt of that cost (they're outside Iran already), but reap most of the benefits. They're also spreading that message on platforms in countries that have an incentive to push for that message (USA, Israel) so the discourse will be highly amplified around anti-regime rethoric. The fact that it's not their house that is being bombed, also means that there aren't really any counteracting weight put on any potential opposing discourse, the discourse will maintain or go more extreme in is anti-regime rethoric going even more "any means necessary" route.
The Iranians against the regime inside Iran, I would assume, have a more nuanced view now. They might be against the regime, but not to the point they're willing to sacrifice their children, neighbors, and society collapsing Libya or Syria style. So they're probably less "any means necessary" about regime change.
Your perspectives of Iranians seems to be too biased, given also that you have partner from Iran and confess that you "only" talk to their inlaws and friends.
The Iranian diaspora is more divided on the matter than you think [1], and given your background, you're probably in the bubble of the diaspora that wouldn't mind sending threatening messages to anyone not being completely aligned with anti regime stance.
It's like someone marrying a deep south confederate flag waving MAGA American, moving there, and judging from talking to their friends and their hate for everything not MAGA, conclude that every American is like this. Or same scenario but California and liberals.
Looking at salaries after tax is completely meaningless, what is even this article trying to infer.
You have to take in to account the cost of living and also quality of services you get for it.
France & Sweden is close in the numbers but France is notably cheaper to eat out and Healthcare quality can't even be compared (to French favor). But if you're wealthy you'd probably prefer Sweden still because of the low taxes around wealth.
I recently compared (by actually going there) Switzerland vs Sweden when I passed a FAANG tech interview in Zurich, but even with 4-5x Salary of what I have now, I would probably end up living poorer if I had kids (if more than 2, it's for certain) in Zurich.
>The capacity to be fully present with another person, to see them not as a role they're playing but as a whole human being… that cannot be automated away and hopefully never will.
I agree but I don't hold such a positive view of the result of this (anymore) as the author do.
(I think?) in the book The End of Burnout, an argument is put forward about how our change in work culture is contributing to burnout. One aspect of it being that with the service economy, part of the value we provide in return for salary is not just our skills but a pleasant "persona". In previous times, our work used to be less socially oriented: farmers farm, craftmans craft, factory workers do line work. Social interaction happened ofc but wasn't as much the core for many professions. With increased automation, the social component got more important. These days it's not even surprising for many craftmans to also work close to customers or other group of people in an organization, increasing the number of interactions you need to manage by order of magnitude. You're also expected to be socially professional, "pleasant" as the article points. You're supposed to act graciously when your customers demand the impossible, or your manager doesn't understand the problem at hand. Leave your emotions, personality, and completely valid thoughts at the company main entrance: here you be a "pleasant professional".
Combined it with another trend: the onus for productivity increase is on the worker and not the employer, as it used to be in the factory floor (productivity increased with improved system, not individual effort). I think this point was from Byumg chul Han, and I can see that with the onus on productivity increase being on the worker, in a "be pleasant" job it will be more and more "sacrifice your true self to be maximum pleasant" and the result will be a horribly burnt out society.
So the authors prediction is rather dystopian. A workplace that focus on pleasantness with a detachment to meritocratic conditions will also inevitably converge to squashing of diverse thought and getting stuck in their heads.
The one solution that works for me is to color code each arrow and at the top left of the diagram add a legend that describe what each colored arrow represent.
This way sometimes the color can describe control, data, and sometimes even teams expected to implement this arrow by color coding teams.
The latter is very helpful for cross team meetings to make each group focus on the part of the diagram that will affect them the most, and give pointed feedback to assumptions and lack in specs
I don't follow how your take is any different? We're essentially saying the same thing: it's a "nice story" == easier to sell to people for the powerful to control them.
Organized religion is pretty much about manipulating our innate spiritual side with nice stories to keep us bought in to the "nice story" that serve the top the most.
I'm just pointing out that the utility of the idea is just that: organization and control. It is quite redundant today because there are more advanced way of doing the same thing.
Or are you just pointing out that things have to be argued in a cynical way for it to be true?
Interested in research and life long learning. (but not particularly good at it)