I’m citing actual real trials, how is that theoretical knowledge. Please explain how a humanoid robot is actually any use? Because I fail to see it. Your timeline seems very optimistic, given there are currently only very tentative trial projects and they aren’t a big success as of yet. But somehow in 2-3 years there would be a big rollout?

As for your job, I’ve been an embedded systems engineer for over 25 years now, it’s what I have my degree in and have worked in. I’m usually more on the software side, but have in the past been a lead designer on fully automated manufacturing lines. Including the physical layout, electrical, all of the conveyers and robot/fixtures and of course the software. I’ve never worked in automotive, but I do know a lot about automation of industrial processes. These days I’m no longer involved in design, but instead fully on the software side. But I do know automation and I do know robots. And to me the whole concept of humanoid robots is fancy marketing to get investor money, not an actual serious solution to parts of industrial processes that are hard to automate.

You are just repeating marketing. Humanoid robots coming to car manufacturing! For one thing that industry is already heavily automated and further automation will need to be cheap to be worth it. Most of the tasks still done by humans are either very hard to automate, or simply too expensive. Often not because the task itself is hard, but the task can vary a lot, where automation loses flexibility. Another issue is access, where a human can easily snake into confined spaces and even get into the car without damaging anything, this is harder for traditional robots.

However humanoid robots solve none of these things. They are still expensive and have trouble with varied tasks, despite what the marketing says. They are also only slightly humanoid, still being mostly metal, so they can’t get into small places and don’t have the dexterity required. They can’t crawl into the car to get something done as they are large, heavy and those kinds of movement are very hard. The tasks could be automated with some kind of snake like arm with many dexterous manipulators on the end, like the ones used in medical applications, but they are too expensive.

A lot of the hype has been around a pilot program done by the startup Figure and BMW. But if we cut through all the marketing BS and hype for a moment. It was one single robot, in a cordened off area doing a single task. It was picking up large metal sheets and placing them on a welding fixture. Something a regular old robot arm could do easily, cheaply and without faltering. Reports are the robot tripped a lot, misplaced the sheets and was out of commission for a large part of the trial. Which was to be expected, given it’s a prototype. It was the second of three planned trials, which has been retired and I don’t think the third one has started yet. After those trials, it’s yet to be seen if BMW will continue with the program.

Xiaomi is experimenting with their robots in their electric car factories and have done some trials similar to BMW. But they have since shifted away from the humanoid design (although the marketing is still pushing this angle), in favor for wheeled robots with multiple arms. They are optimizing the robots for the more repetitive sorting and internal logistics tasks, which are already automated in many factories by traditional conveyers and sorting machines. The hope for Xiaomi is they can be more flexible in their setup, not requiring the huge machines other factories employ. They also hope to learn and develop their robotics technology so they can sell that tech. Given the low cost of labor in the regions they are located, it is most likely costing them money and the robots aren’t intended to replace tasks currently done mostly by humans in that industry.

Tesla is making a lot of noise, but all of their demos have been human operated puppets, or even a human in a suit. They say internally they are doing a lot and it’s all very wonderful, but have given very little evidence of that. They have had both a bunch of executives leave and a lot of their top engineers have left as well. Rumors are the project is a disaster, with people who used to work on car stuff suddenly needing to pivot to robotics. Those are completely different fields with different requirements and constraints. With Musk pushing the pivot from cars to robots, the people aren’t happy and the project is failing. Even the people that were good at robotics left Tesla to go work at Sunday Robotics.

There are other project ongoing, but the marketing and hype is a far shot from the real world. And like I said, those humanoid robots don’t really solve the main issues why humans are being used for those tasks in the first place. The path Xiaomi is on seems much more promising, with robots designed for the task instead of looking like humans.

Car manufacturing has been at the forefront of innovation and automation for a very long time, but I have severe doubts they will actually deploy humanoid robots in a large scale and have it be useful. Show me a robot who can duck into the car and connect some connectors underneath the dashboard and I’ll reconsider. And then do it in a cheap, flexible and repeatable way, so it’s better than just having a human do it. Because a high end surgical robot could do it and with a couple of years of programming it might even do it all on its own. Until some engineer decides we need a different kind of plug and we need a retrofit. Just having a human do it makes much more sense.

Edit:

And I forgot to mention one of the biggest issues with these humanoid robots, they are extremely unsafe. With a traditional robot it’s very simple, it’s anchored to one place or moving on a rail. This makes the range it can operate in very limited, which in terms of safety is a good thing. We setup physical barriers, light screens, warning light to signify operation, camera surveillance and emergency stop buttons at useful places. Even large physical disconnects which are clearly labeled and visible for use in maintenence. Inside that box it’s a dangerous place for soft squishy things like humans, one unexpected move and the human is gone. But outside that box is perfectly safe.

These humanoid robots are designed to be used in human spaces, that’s the whole point of making them humanoid in the first place. But in terms of safety this a now an issue, as you can’t have humans and robots near each other. It’s fully mobile and can go anywhere the humans can, you can’t have stuff like physical barriers or light screens. Camera surveillance is harder and a emergy stop is difficult as well. These robots are no joke, often weighing hundreds of kg. Easily enough to severely injure someone if they make a wrong move, step on someone or fall over. So the only real way to use them is to have them confined to a small area and treat that the same as traditional robots. This makes the mobility kinda useless, as it can’t go outside the safety zone. It also makes it hard to design manufacturing processes around these. Usually there are parts of the process that employ robots and parts that don’t. For the parts that don’t, humans are free to walk around and do their thing, everything is designed such that the robots do what they can and then leave the finishing steps up to the humans (although stationary robots like inspection rigs are used in the final stages). If we suddenly start mixing robots into those human steps, the whole thing needs to be redesigned, probably leading to efficiency loss.

In other areas, other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical. This would be devastating because factory workers and truck drivers make up like 30% of the US workforce – and again, there are no signs of new classes of jobs that could absorb the out-of-work workers, and no plans for a social safety net or wealth distribution.

While I agree with the sentiment this is happening and no social safety net or wealth distribution is on the horizon, this has absolutely nothing to do with AI. This is a marketing talking point pushed by people like Elon Musk in order to drum up investments. A lot of the automation that is happening in factories is just a continuation of the same automation that already started back in the 80s. Advancements in LLM technologies can benefit some parts of this automation, but often only tangentially. The US has also been lagging behind on places like Europe, where labor costs are higher so automation pays off faster, and China where the tech is cheap and produced locally, so it costs less to automate. The US is now catching up and there’s a lot of AI washing going on.

The biggest issue is the misrepresentation of the technology. LLMs are a very interesting technology and can be very powerful, but also has huge limitations. However anyone claiming it’s actual intelligence is simply wrong. It is marketed as being the AI we’ve known from sci fi stories, but it simply isn’t. It can do what it can (predict the next token based on the tokens that came before) and that’s all it can do. The people behind it will claim it generalizes to actual intelligence and thus will allow for human like robots, actual Star Wars droids, but that simply isn’t true.

Now this isn’t to say stuff like machine vision doesn’t benefit from more powerful GPUs with more memory for example. The investment made by the AI industry in this regard does help a lot, although the increased prices don’t really help. Stuff like machine vision also gets AI washed, just slap the label AI on it and get investments, but it’s basically the same technology that’s been around for a while. A company like Tesla claiming their “AI” “self driving” hardware somehow generalizes to humanoid robots is pretty dumb and just the latest in the long line of Elon grifts.

But like I said factory automation is proceeding rapidly, just like it has since the 80s. I feel like the impact of AI on this is pretty minimal. The warehouse robots used by Amazon for example are extremely capable and are dumb as bricks. Which is a good thing in a warehouse environment where you need stuff to be very reliable and predictable and not prone to random behavior like LLM based stuff almost by definition is. Those warehouse robots are also not humanoid, because that would be very dumb. Often factories and such are limited by their design having to accommodate the human form. Designing such places from the ground up for automation and using robots shaped for the job is much better.

This doesn’t take away from the big issue where automation has been proceeding rapidly since the 80s with no regard to any impact on society. In the past a large amount of the labor force was working in factories. With those jobs either being automated away or just moved off shore, it has pushed the population into the service industry. If that industry is now also automated and off shored, it leaves very little room for regular people to get a job. This should absolutely be talked about as a big issue. But hopefully we can talk about it without repeating billionaire marketing bullshit.

You are 100% correct, there is no such thing as a 4TB SD card. Largest you can get is 2TB. Western Digital has shown a 4TB MicroSDUC and even 8TB SDUC card at shows and events, but I don’t think it has found its way into production just yet. And with the extreme prices of flash these days, I doubt they will release it any time soon. The 4TB card would probably be $1500 - $2000 retail, who is going to buy that? And what is the use case?

The picture is some mockup someone made or maybe AI generated, but not of a real card.

Meh I’d argue journalism has always been this way.

In the past it was more separated perhaps. We had the front page of the paper for breaking news, then the next few pages for in depth articles, there was the whole sports section etc. But there was often also a gossip section with news about celebs, there were the comics, general knowledge and background pieces and often fluff based on rumors. Some papers opted to be more serious and not include such things, often made by a printing house that also made straight up tabloids. Some papers focused exclusively on financial stuff for example. But even back then we also had our magazines and tabloids, some of better quality, most of lesser quality.

These days with websites it’s become more common to just have everything on the same website and have the users figure out what they want or don’t want to read. I’ve seen sites that usually post nothing but fluff and summaries of other peoples work, sometimes put out excellent articles with a lot of own research and sources. Often written by experts in their fields. But in order to fund those pieces, they need a lot of filler to keep the views and money coming in. Having just a little bit of info, like a rumor and writing an article about it has been an important skill since at least the 80s.

It’s easy to point out the lower quality as an example of how shit the world is, but I can tell you from first hand experience we had some shit journalism back in the 80s as well. There were certain kinds of newspapers that were known for that lower quality. What newspapers you were subscribed to said something about you as a person and your place in society. Often people who read only the serious stuff looked down on the common folk with their rag newspapers. And the people who read the more common papers looked at those people who only read the financial stuff for example as boring and stuffy.

Why do you think there has been such an emphasis on hacking with LLMs lately (especially by OpenAI). They figured out all those vulnerability databases were an excellent source for training material. In the past they scraped those, but just for general language training. Now they’ve specifically trained the models on the information within. Some team figured out how to use that data to train a model and have testing scenarios automated so they could write a good reward function. It wasn’t that they figured out the models are good at hacking, they ran out of content and found a new source of good data.

With all the books they’ve been scanning I wonder if the next thing is going to be a writing assistant or editor or something like that. Even though writing good books is an art form and the actual writing down of the words is the easiest part (still not easy tho).

These companies are starving for content and they’ve not just poisoned but absolutely destroyed the content well that is the internet. Given they were already hitting diminishing returns hard, it doesn’t matter too much to them probably. But more compute and storage has also been hitting diminishing returns hard and customers are complaining about the cost. So they are getting a bit desperate on how to improve these things at all.

Be sure to ask it to put you in another time stream or something. Otherwise going back and forward in time does nothing, as going back also rolls back your memory of the future and going forward is just our normal experience every day. Pausing would be bad, since you would not be able to unpause (as you are paused yourself). But even if it were paused and then resumed after something indeterminate happens, you would not have experienced that pause (nor would anything else in the universe), so it might as well not have happened.

You need to be way more precise with your wording, intent and requirements. And then the genie still screws you over, that’s kinda the point of the genie figure in myths.

The A series is pretty limited, I would go for a B series if you can find it. But keep in mind drivers for Intel on Windows are terrible and on Linux even worse. So that would not be a good time.

There’s plenty of cards that would fit in 40mm, but your airflow would be pretty bad. Do you have a pic of the inside of your system? There has to be a way to make something more fit.

But most 6600, 7600 and 9060 cards should be able to fit in 40mm. And with AMD the drivers on Linux are very good.

Look for second hand stuff and something like a 6000 series from AMD. Don’t buy cheap videocards new, they always suck.

Oof, that’s a terrible card. The GP108 chip is a rebatched mobile card Geforce MX 150, it’s a pretty ancient chip at this point. There are no drivers for it, so you’ll need to use older drivers or limited open source drivers. Unless you got it very very cheap that’s not going to work very well for you. It’s newer than a GT 220, but not by much.

I think the one I have is 41mm, so that would be a tight fit. Can’t you rearrange the cards a bit to make some room? With only 40mm that would be hard to fit in any modern card.

Yeah I have a RX 7600. It wasn’t brand new, but lightly used, bought it off a friend who upgraded. Paid around $200 for it, so I think a pretty good deal with current pricing.

Yeah get a simple but recent AMD card, older cards, especially nVidia are a nightmare. I had an old 980 TI which was a really good card still, but I couldn’t use it anymore because everything kept breaking. So I got me a recent AMD card and it has been running perfectly.

It is very revealing how the people rebelling against Flock isn’t seen as the people opposing mass surveillance and data being made available to all the cops without cause, due process, oversight, restrictions or consequences for abuse, but instead as the people being against Flock specifically and the same system with a different label would be peachy.

Either they are monumentally stupid or more likely they are corrupt as hell and/or evil.

Yeah except this is a tiny little plane and a 737 is huge. So those comparisons don’t make much sense.

That’s one of the things that frustrates me most about this whole AI thing. I fucking hate it and I want it to die, I wish it were never created in the first place. But from a tech enthusiast and a maths nerd point of view, it is super interesting.

Like the performance of these models is shit compared to a real person doing actual work. But if we think about what we are doing on a basic level, the performance is way beyond what I would expect it to be. I wouldn’t expect it to be able to form a coherent sentence or scale as well as it does (even though the resources required to run these is still very high).

It could have been really cool shit people did studies on and played around with to explore the math. Cool little play models we could let go on a bunch of data and see what it did and how. Something for a small group of nerds and experts who are into that kind of thing, for the sake of learning and nothing else.

But no, somehow it got transmorphed into “AI”. And marketed like this actual learning almost sentient computer system that can replace all workers. You can ask it anything and it will give PhD level expert answers. Oh and it’s run by a handful of the most vile men imaginable who pour all of the world’s money and resources into it, all so they get to be god emperor of the world. Fucking terrible.

I’m going to guess you have a “Don’t thread on me” flag up, but also a “Thin blue line” flag at the same time?

Even if it were all above board, it’s just gambling and should be heavily restricted just as all other forms of betting.

Or the economy crashes by AI replacing everyone and doing an absolute terrible job, causing stuff like supply chain collapse and communication/power outages.

I have yet to see someone explain how this whole thing actually works out. Just a dozen different scenarios that turn out terrible for almost everyone. The only scenario that works out is if a handful of people like Altman absolutely rule the world, become de facto dictators as they are the ones that control the few AI companies that run everything. And by work out, I mean it works out for that handful of people. For the rest of the world it’s probably just about the worst case scenario. But you just know it’s the scenario scammy Altman is hoping for.

Step 1: Sell data to AI companies Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit

They are now finding out step 2 is getting absolutely destroyed by AI not sending people along to their platform. And the profit in step 3 is for the AI companies, not for them.

These CEOs are so shortsighted it’s beyond belief. Sure Google paid hundreds of millions for the data, but in turn it’s a death sentence for the platform. But hey it was money in the short term right?