Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

One of the crazy things about AI and robotics is that in the year 2025, most people still don't use Roombas or other robotic vacuum cleaners.

They're useful in many contexts, but they're not clearly better across most metrics than a human with a vacuum cleaner yet. They've been out for a very long time, gradually improving. And that's one *very specific* task with pretty clear visualization requirements and floor mobility requirements and pretty low safety thresholds with high repetition levels, and yet that market isn't dominated by robotics yet.

That's an example of why I continue to view white collar computer-work AI as being *way* ahead of in-the-field blue collar robotic AI in terms of competing with human jobs.

The moment where it's a joke to buy a human-powered vacuum instead of a robot vacuum, rather than a debatable trade-off, is kind of the canary in the coal mine moment for consumer robotics. We can't even nail that yet, but once we do, it's kind of a floodgate moment, considering how long that task has been in the works for, and it will probably quickly expand to other areas following that moment.

That's kind of my basic test for robot hype. Yes, they're getting better and better. Yes, they do backflips now. Yes, it's a big deal. But in-the-field blue collar skilled work is a really high bar, and we haven't fully cleared the "vacuum carpeted areas of the same house floor area over and over" stage of that yet.

Everything is kind of hype until that stage is fully breached. Then it's off to the races.

What's your view of that heuristic?

They're designed poorly. They aren't easy to clean when stuff gets stuck in them. They're super loud, and why tf is there a camera on it?

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it's kinda sad that the most credulous people for this retarded software are otherwise so intelligent

you know why i don't like the AI? because the media says it's good

and i think the tech behind it is cool, i was an early adopter, my friends on IRC were running a markov chain bot fed by our IRC chat that often aped my text because i was the most prolific message writer

but it was gobbledygook, and the GPTs are still hallucinations but they don't sound as retarded as markov chains, they still read the same way

like, you colud give me 100 texts that were either written by humans or AI, and i bet i can beat 90% accuracy at picking out which is which

they are really obvious to me

This is the first time I've heard of Markov chains.

The robots I've seen on the market are just not impressive. They exist solely because the tech hub around Shenzhen brought the components down in price, so I'm happy we got some progress out of breaking tech out of the wests's bureaucratic stranglehold, but they really don't seem like an innovation.

And the AI hype is so obnoxious. They just regurgitate what humans wrote. If humans wrote wrong stuff, the AI regurgitates errors. And it seems like that's actually how it works - it adds in errors to the point where it looks unique, but that's just tricking people who don't pay attention to detail. If you do pay attention to detail, and correct it, it apologizes programmatically but refuses to violate the ruleset that caused the error.

Its junk. IMO, we should build systems that explicitly exclude AI and anything similar. How to do that... Well, you'd know better than i.

haha, yeah, it would require some kind of gpt thing to recognise gpt things

wasn't it you who posted something, a quote from someone saying that you don't win buy fighting an enemy but by innovating around him? or something to that effect... better to build a new system than to try and destroy an old system

was that you?

Ehhh. Maybe? But that sounds like a typical bitcoiner thing to say, so could've been anyone

sheeit man i would have said the same thing 20 years ago... i live by that it's not unique to bitcoin it's cypherpunk ethic

Never understood why anyone thought a vacuum would be better if connected to the internet especially sending pictures of your household and people in it upstream.

I think its a boomer problem... Like most problems. Why they're OK with cameras being on everything is beyond me. Why my boomer relatives add hundreds of pictures to telegram groups that I don't look at __every week__ is beyond me.

younger generation seems more OK with letting it all hang out and blabbing about everything than older. I am a boomer and I don't do that stuff. I know many others that don't either and think it is nuts.

I guess its a selection bias then. The boomers in my tribe seem to be reversed with the younger people.

It is certainly more likely that boomers you find on here are likely to be more privacy aware and more tech savvy. But many I know that are not techie simply grew up in a time where far more privacy was just the norm before much of the tech that can be used for such deep surveillance and profiling existed. They often have a hard time believing it when I share and outline of the many ways those assumtions are not at all the default case today. Many get overwhelmed and retreat to helplessness or "I have nothing to hide". That is not limited to older people of course.

Keep teaching, they need to hear it