The root cause of all this is that C programs are not much more than glorified assembly programs. Any effort to retrofit higher level reasoning will always be defeated somebody doing some dirty pointer tricks. This can only be solved by more abstract ways to express programs which necessarily restricts the bare metal dirty things one can do. But what you gain is that the compiler will easily be able to do lots of things which a C compiler can't do or only with a lot of headache. The kind of stuff this article is about is really trying to solve the wrong problem IMO.
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jaisio commented on The provenance memory model for C gustedt.wordpress.com/202... · Posted by u/HexDecOctBin
jaisio commented on We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube ksagar.bearblog.dev/vjepa... · Posted by u/alexcos
> Pure vision will never be enough because it does not contain information about the physical feedback like pressure and touch, or the strength required to perform a task.
I'm not sure that's necessarily true for a lot of tasks.
A good way to measure this in your head is this:
"If you were given remote control of two robot arms, and just one camera to look through, how many different tasks do you think you could complete successfully?"
When you start thinking about it, you realize there are a lot of things you could do with just the arms and one camera, because you as a human have really good intuition about the world.
It therefore follows that robots should be able to learn with just RGB images too! Counterexamples would be things like grabbing an egg without crushing, perhaps. Though I suspect that could also be done with just vision.
> When you start thinking about it, you realize there are a lot of things you could do with just the arms and one camera, because you as a human have really good intuition about the world.
And where does this intuition come from? It was buily by also feeling other sensations in addition to vision. You learned how gravity pulls things down when you were a kid. How hot/cold feels, how hard/soft feels, how thing smell. Your mental model of the world is substantially informed by non-visual clues.
> It therefore follows that robots should be able to learn with just RGB images too!
That does not follow at all! It's not how you learned either.
Neither have you learned to think by consuming the entirety of all text produced on the internet. LLMs therefore don't think, they are just pretty good at faking the appearance of thinking.
I think this is the answer. I suspect the exhibit designers had a cool idea for a display, did a rough estimate of the area needed and then commissioned the exhibit builders to make the big metal-framed cube. Either they made an error in their calculation or the innate variability in the size of stacks of used bills threw it off. It's also possible the exhibit designer simply decided a bigger cube which filled the floor to ceiling space would be a better visual. Which would be unfortunate because, personally, the exhibit concept I'm more interested in is "$1M dollars in $100 bills fits in this area" not "Here's $1M in bills." The first concept is mildly interesting while the second is just a stunt.
Regardless of the reason it's off, I think it's most likely there's only $1M of bills in the cube. The folks responsible for collecting and destroying used bills tend to be exacting in their auditing for obvious reasons. So when the exhibit designers got $1M in used bills approved and released, that's exactly how much they got. It also stands to reason that they'd design the cube a little bigger than their calculated area requirement to ensure at least $1M would fit (along with some method of padding the interior) - although >50% seems excessive for a variability margin, so I still think it was an aesthetic choice or calculation error. Of course, one could do a practical replication to verify the area required with $10,000 in $1 bills.
Regardless, it's an interesting observation and a cool counting program to help verify.