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jjk166 commented on RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes   phys.org/news/2025-12-rob... · Posted by u/smurda
iancmceachern · 10 hours ago
They're the same thing, in practice.

Edited to add the in practice part.

jjk166 · 9 hours ago
They are very clearly not. Humans are good at some things, like recognizing fruit in clusters. Robots are good at different things. Shifting from easy for a human to harvest to easy for a robot to harvest is both in theory and practice a radical change.
jjk166 commented on Formula One Handovers and Handovers From Surgery to Intensive Care (2008) [pdf]   gwern.net/doc/technology/... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
PaulRobinson · a day ago
There's actually a bit of crossover. This paper is quite old, but I know that other teams and other surgeons have visited each other plenty since this was published, and there's this cross fertilisation of ideas.

F1 is "important" in the sense that it is competitive, and so teams want to iterate and improve constantly. I think the fastest pit stop in the 2025 season 1.91 seconds, in which: the car is jacked, four tyres are removed, four new tyres are placed and secured into place, the car is dropped, the lane is checked for traffic, and then the car can move. There are thousands of permutations of how to get this right and that fast. And accuracy is important: get it wrong there is a risk of injury at worst, or a fine for an unsafe release at best.

ICU is obviously important in a different way. You can't really "experiment". Iteration needs data. So you need to go out and learn what good looks like from different disciplines, and then carefully plan the changes you want to make and get buy-in. Get it wrong, and people die. Best case scenario you're struck off, worst case you're going to prison for murder.

In dev speak, F1 can afford to be agile, ICUs need to be waterfall.

But because F1 needs to be precise and they perceive the dangers of imprecision so acutely from a monetary perspective (where you finish in the Worldwide Constructors Championship directly affects the profitability and viability of the team), they want to borrow ideas too.

It sounds ridiculous that surgeons and F1 garages would have so much to talk about, but it turns out, they really do feed ideas off each other sometimes.

jjk166 · 9 hours ago
> ICU is obviously important in a different way. You can't really "experiment". Iteration needs data. So you need to go out and learn what good looks like from different disciplines, and then carefully plan the changes you want to make and get buy-in.

I would think test runs with simulated patients offer plenty of opportunity to experiment.

> Get it wrong, and people die. Best case scenario you're struck off, worst case you're going to prison for murder.

Get it right and people may still die. The whole reason for the improvement effort is that the current practice is excessively risky. No one is getting fired, nonetheless going to prison for trying a sensible improvement to reduce the odds of a child dying which they were approved to attempt.

jjk166 commented on RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes   phys.org/news/2025-12-rob... · Posted by u/smurda
zzzeek · 4 days ago
> In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots.

This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized.

So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue.

[1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprof...

jjk166 · 10 hours ago
Nope, it's a technological issue. Increasing immigration might address some of the symptoms of the issue, but it does nothing to address that a human being still needs to do this labor. Frankly even if you were to liberalize immigration laws, convincing people to upend their lives and move to a high cost of living country where cultural integration is difficult at best just to pick tomatoes is not exactly a trivial task. Even if you do get people to come for menial labor, as you say there are plenty of other areas like healthcare where labor is in high demand, so you're likely still going to be faced with labor shortages in less desirable fields. Immigration is a treatment, automation is a cure.
jjk166 commented on RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes   phys.org/news/2025-12-rob... · Posted by u/smurda
iancmceachern · 3 days ago
"At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability"

This has been happening for hundreds of years already with every food crop.

jjk166 · 11 hours ago
Presumably they mean robot harvest-ability as opposed to human harvest-ability.
jjk166 commented on A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him for It   404media.co/a-developer-a... · Posted by u/markatlarge
pixl97 · 2 days ago
Ah, yes, the assume everyone is guilty and let god sort them out method. Authoritarians love it.
jjk166 · 11 hours ago
Everyone in this case meaning "people demonstrated to be in possession of child porn who took no action". And they are not assumed guilty, they are exactly as innocent as anyone with a dead body in their fridge that they also "had no idea about."
jjk166 commented on String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof   quantamagazine.org/string... · Posted by u/ArmageddonIt
xqcgrek2 · 2 days ago
A few hundred people working on String Theory for about four decades is about $500 million. Hope this proof was worth it.
jjk166 · 2 days ago
Or roughly the cost of producing Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Kinda wish that money had gone to string theory.

Deleted Comment

jjk166 commented on A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him for It   404media.co/a-developer-a... · Posted by u/markatlarge
pixl97 · 3 days ago
No, it should be law enforcement job to determine intent, not a blanket you're guilty. This being Actus Reus is a huge mess that makes it easy to frame people and get in trouble with no guilty act.
jjk166 · 3 days ago
Determining intent takes time, is often not possible, and encourages people to specifically avoid the work to check if something needs to be flagged. Not checking is at best negligent. Having everybody check and flag is the sensible option.
jjk166 commented on A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him for It   404media.co/a-developer-a... · Posted by u/markatlarge
wang_li · 3 days ago
So it is able to correlate an image as porn and also correlate an image as containing children. Seems like it should be able to apply an AND operation to this result and identify new images that are not part of the data set.
jjk166 · 3 days ago
No, it found elements in an image that it tends to find in images labelled porn in the training data. It finds elements in an image it tends to find in images labelled child in the training data. If the training data is not representative, then the statistical inference is meaningless. Images that are unlike any in the training set may not trigger either category if they are lacking the things the AI expects to find, which may be quite irrelevant to what humans care about.
jjk166 commented on A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him for It   404media.co/a-developer-a... · Posted by u/markatlarge
boothby · 3 days ago
LLMs don't "know" anything. But as you say, they can identify correlations between content "porn" and a target image; between content labeled "children" and a target image. If a target image scores high in both, then it can flag child porn, all without being trained on CSAM.
jjk166 · 3 days ago
But things correlated with porn != porn and things correlated with children != children. For example, in our training set, no porn contains children, so the presence of children would mean it's not porn. Likewise all images of children are clothed, so no clothes means it's not a child. You know it's ridiculous because you know things, the AI does not.

Nevermind the importance of context, such as distinguishing a partially clothed child playing on a beach from a partially clothed child in a sexual situation.

u/jjk166

KarmaCake day7309April 26, 2017View Original