> Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”?
Whether you're born in Moscow and named Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, or born in Pretoria and named Elon Reeve Musk, or born in Hyderabad and named Satya Narayana Nadella, born in Frankfurt and named Peter Andreas Thiel - America has a place for you. Maybe even your own government department.
In America a man can find acceptance regardless of the circumstances of his birth, and irrespective of race, creed and colour, so long as he has a billion dollars.
When people are trying to justify ads, they often lean on "our servers cost $X per month and we have Y journalists paid $Z per month, therefore we need revenue from ads" which makes it sound like they need to raise a fixed, finite amount.
That sounds much more persuasive than "our billionaire owner paid a lot of money for this for-profit business, and he'd really like a return on his investment"
But you're right, of course - the fact someone pays a lot of money for something doesn't mean it won't be plastered with tawdry ads.
I've worked on much less expensive, much smaller humanoid robots.
These robots are certainly running through a scripted set of poses which has been extensively tested for the conditions (Humans would also be choreographed and have to hit certain marks at certain times). If you covered the stage in loose gravel or a thick carpet they'd all start falling over. The things the robots hold are almost certainly taped into their hands.
Despite that, this is a very impressive demo. Those robots are $40k+, they've got 20+ of them. And not a single one fell over. They're fast too - and there are a load of corners they could have cut, but they didn't.
The floor has two textures, it would have been easier without that. The humans right alongside them? Much less safety paperwork without them. The robot wearing trousers and a cape? Much easier without that. The fewer robots you have, the lower the chances on falls over landing their backflip. Lose the audience and record it in multiple takes. Hell, you could have human acrobats in robot costumes and it'd cost far less and be much easier.
So this demo is very much a costly signal of confidence.
With the poles at the 1 minute mark, the robots enter holding them and their left hand never moves on the pole. Also note the stationary hand is matte grey while the moving hand is metallic silver.
Likewise with the wine gourds (?) at 2m30s and the nunchucks at 3m40s.
It’s a completely sensible design decision, much simpler to do cartwheels and vaults if you don’t have super delicate fingers fitted.
Why do you think it would be the case about e.g. swapping to thick carpet would throw things off? Intuitively it seems like they must have a tremendous amount of dynamic adjustment going on. For instance think of how much variance, driven by dynamics, that there's going to be in the scene at 2:48 [1] where the robot [intentionally] falls over and then aerobically picks itself back up.
The motion is certainly scripted, but the exact mechanics in play there almost certainly vary radically from take to take. Imagine something simple like a pool/billiards break. Even if you set up a machine to rack the balls and break them in as close to identical as possible, you'd get wildly different results each time. And the dynamics in this motion is going to dwarf that.
To be more precise: I think they have a fixed repertoire of moves that they can blend together and slightly tweak on the fly, but only within certain limits.
This would also be normal for human performers - touring ballet companies travel with their own flooring the dancers are used to pirouetting on.
At the 40 second mark every robot does a backflip then when landing hops their supporting leg while pointing the toe of their working leg. Which works fine and looks great! But they arrive in that pose with a certain amount of momentum and needing a certain amount of grip on the floor.
So this is a rehearsed, tested performance - not proof we’ll have firefighter robots doing parkour through burning buildings any time soon!
> To be more precise: I think they have a fixed repertoire of moves that they can blend together and slightly tweak on the fly, but only within certain limits.
Human acrobats do the same, they know a few fixed tricks and practice them often in order to stay in shape. The point here is to compare the dynamic abilities of bots vs those of humans, not vs some pink unicorns - the latter comparison isn't informative because there aren't any jobs for pink unicorns just yet.
> So this is a rehearsed, tested performance - not proof we’ll have firefighter robots doing parkour through burning buildings any time soon!
A bot assisted by humans can do better than them in a burning building, the lack of need for heavy SCBAs would allow the bot to perform acrobatics scripted by a human at the time of action.
An Aldebaran Nao can fall over with no damage because it’s only 5kg and 58cm. And you can use relatively low power motors, so nobody can lose a finger to crushing in the joints.
But you miss out on the benefits of being able to operate in a human centric world - you’ll never get a Nao to climb stairs, open a door, or carry a cup of coffee.
They were overpriced, hard to repair, and the university lab would lose one every few weeks. The consumer grade internal ribbon interconnect harness would usually tear eventually.
Those 3kW to 5kW brush-less servos in the biped dance video are often only 12:1 planetary reduction, and are almost certainly backdrivable. As long as the platform has a safe-fall canned pose, than damage should be limited to shear pins in the worst case falls.
About half of road deaths involve drivers who are drunk or high. But only a very small fraction of drivers drive drunk or high - 50% of deaths are caused by 2% of drivers.
A self-driving car that merely achieves parity would be worse than 98% of the population.
Gotta do twice the accident-free mileage to achieve parity with the sober 98%.
> Almost every organization has software it can’t easily automate: specialized systems and tools built before modern interfaces like APIs existed. [...]
> hundreds of tasks across real software (Chrome, LibreOffice, VS Code, and more) running on a simulated computer. There are no special APIs or purpose-built connectors; the model sees the computer and interacts with it in much the same way a person would: clicking a (virtual) mouse and typing on a (virtual) keyboard.
I think that tonnage is for all textiles, not just high-end clothing.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/the-destr... says "Based on available studies, an estimated 4-9% of all textile products put on the market in Europe are destroyed before use, amounting to between 264,000 and 594,000 tonnes of textiles destroyed each year."
It's good for shoppers (if they're informed), the recycler, and the environment. It's bad for the original maker.
Imagine a factory mix-up means some ExampleCo jeans are made of much lower quality materials than normal. They'll wear out much faster. But ExampleCo's quality control does its job, notices the inferior quality before they hit store shelves, and sends them for recycling.
If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then:
1. Some people who would have paid ExampleCo for jeans instead pay the recycler - leading to lost sales.
2. Some of the customers complain online about the bad quality, damaging ExampleCo's reputation
3. Some of the customers ask for replacements, which are provided at ExampleCo's expense.
>If the recycler sells them on ebay as 'never worn ExampleCo jeans' then
the recycler will have undoubtedly violated a contract they have with ExampleCo and will lose in civil court and pay significant penalties greater than the money they made selling never worn ExampleCo jeans and also, undoubtedly, suffer from not having ExampleCo as a customer for their services in the future.
But the recycler has all the papers and documentation that they lawfully contracted an overseas company for wholesale recycle of the product. What's your civil court's jurisdiction? You might be able to play wack-a-mole with ebay, temu, alibaba express sellers through civil court in your jurisdiction assuming you have the money of course.
I'm supposing ExampleCo's civil court's jurisdiction covers the recycler's location, otherwise ExampleCo would have really stupid management.
I'm supposing the contract with the recycler would hold the recycler liable, and whatever third party contracts they made with another company would not matter one bit. If ExampleCo contracts with RecycleCo to recycle pants and they do not get recycled then RecycleCo is liable to ExampleCo, yes RecycleCo has contracts with OverseasRecycleCo and it is up to RecycleCo to sue OverseasRecycleCo to recoup the losses they had to pay to ExampleCo; ExampleCo will probably not be suing OverseasRecycleCo, they will take their pound of flesh out of RecycleCo. All of this of course implies that they have some way of verifying that pants they find out in the world are in fact pants that should have been recycled.
What jurisdiction will the suit between RecycleCo and OverseasRecycleCo be taking place in? Depends on the location of the two entities, and possibly also on contractual conditions.
I totally admit that it is not ideal to sue over breaches of contract, it is almost always preferable that breaches not happen because when breaches don't happen it means that things are going the way you specified that they should go and you should be happy.
But let's go to another point here:
what is it about recycling that means that clothes will be taken and resold instead of recycled in greater numbers than clothes that were supposed to be destroyed? Nowadays clothes that are meant to be destroyed are sometimes not, and sold and ExampleCo suffers in the same way as they would with recycled clothes. I suppose ExampleCo must be able to tell if clothes that they find out on third party sites are among clothes that should have been destroyed nowadays otherwise this whole thing is moot and exactly the same as it is now.
Sometimes clothes are stolen from trucks and trains and sold, will this stop happening because of all these clothes that were supposed to have been recycled destroying the market for stolen clothes?
Most non-authorized sales of ExampleCo pants are not actually lower quality ExampleCo pants destined for destruction but fake ExampleCo pants, because ExampleCo as a brand is just so exciting that there are lots of fake ones made, because most pants that are sent for destruction are destroyed and only some are diverted to resellers.
Will the surplus of pants from ExampleCo that were supposed to be recycled but for some reason are not because "oh no, it is impossible to sue people in this new world with recycling going on" going to be so great in amount that instead of completely fake ExampleCo pants there will instead be only ExampleCo pants of lower than normal ExampleCo pants quality?
Why exactly will lower than normal quality ExampleCo pants destroy the brand value of ExampleCo more than counterfeit ExampleCo pants? Are counterfeit ExampleCo pants better than real ExampleCo pants that failed some part of QA process?
Frankly a lot of the argumentation as to how recycling opens up the doors to destroying the value of ExampleCo seems specious, in that it seems like it would not damage ExampleCo any more than it can currently be damaged by breaches of contract where destruction of inventory is concerned or other civil and criminal acts.
What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels? Or why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?
I suspect this will need to be a cultural change. If ExampleCo does it but not RandomCo, of course your reputation will suffer. But if the law is for all of EU, it gives everyone an equal footing.
> What stops ExampleCo from asking for a receipt and limiting replacements only to legitimate channels?
They can. Doesn’t help with the reputational damage though. People who think they bought an ExampleCo jean will still think that the company quality has slipped. They will still tell all their friends that the “new jeans made by ExampleCo are not like they used to”. Not all of them all the time, but some of them some of the time.
> why is ExampleCo directly dealing with the consumer, and not Macys or Goodwill?
Especially since EU laws are announced 5-10 years in advance, manufacturers have time to actually design this. For example they could make easily removable labels.
Human hands have absolutely crazy performance. Human hands have 15+ degrees of freedom. Sub-millimeter precision, no backlash. Strong enough to lift 100 lbs. Gentle enough to catch a thrown egg without breaking it. Rigid enough to hammer a nail without dropping the hammer. A compact forearm for reaching into tight spaces. Water- and dust-proof. Oh, and it'll last for decades without maintenance.
Even a $100k robot hand like a Shadow Hand can't compare.
The problem here isn't the DoS, it's the fail open design.
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