lucubratory (u/lucubratory)

lucubratory commented on Experimental surgery performed by AI-driven surgical robot arstechnica.com/science/2... · Posted by u/horseradish

ninetyninenine · 6 months ago

No surgery is not token based. It's a different aspect of intelligence.

While technically speaking, the entire universe can be serialized into tokens it's not the most efficient way to tackle every problem. For surgery It's 3D space and manipulating tools and performing actions. It's better suited for standard ML models... for example I don't think Waymo self driving cars use LLMs.

lucubratory · 6 months ago

Current Waymos do use the transformer architecture, they're still predicting tokens.

lucubratory commented on Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots · Posted by u/codekansas

codekansas · 7 months ago

This is really interesting to read about. To be honest, I know very little about this space, but it's something a few people have approached me about tackling.

I do think that this is a great application of a general purpose robot. I'm not sure what the technical timeline will be, but it would certainly be cool for my parents to have such a robot when they are elderly.

lucubratory · 7 months ago

I spend a lot of time thinking about it day-to-day because of my disability and reliance on multiple disability support workers, as well as living with my husband who is also disabled, so if you ever wanted to talk to someone with disability support workers feel free to ask.

lucubratory commented on Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots · Posted by u/codekansas

lucubratory · 7 months ago

Hey, just chiming in to say that I think this project is really cool even though it's outside the price range of what I can spend on a cool hobby.

I'm disabled, and one thing I'm really interested in long-term for humanoid robots is disability support work. Disability support work involves a huge variety of individual tasks, as many as a typical person will do in their life, so it's a good fit for an extremely general platform like a humanoid robot. Motorised wheelchairs and dishwashers exist, but a support worker might need to push a wheelchair, do sensitive dishes, do laundry, accurately open and place medications without destroying them, weigh & dose powders, help someone with going to the toilet, cook meals, drive a car, control pets, manage the level of noise/light/smells in the environment to stop someone from being overwhelmed, sanitise surfaces including themselves, navigate confusing interfaces on a phone or computer, help someone drink from a bottle, remember what sort of activities helped a disabled person in the past to be able to do them in the future, help someone with physical fitness activities like punching or kicking a pad, talk to people for someone, carry someone safely in the event of an emergency, make coffee in the morning, monitor intake of various drugs/nutrients/macronutrients, be able to reach and catch someone before they hit the floor if they pass out, help someone walk if they're unsteady on their feet, etc etc. It makes sense to me that it would be cost effective to have one platform which can do all of that with similar performance to a human, rather than automating many of those tasks individually in ways that might not be accessible to some disabled people.

In terms of TAM, absolutely huge amounts of money are spent on disability care (keeping in mind that elder care is also disability care), by both governments and private citizens, and this number is forecasted to continue growing as more people become disabled by COVID-19 and demographic changes increase the elderly population relative to working age adults. As well, there are constantly scandals about how bad conditions are in some area of disability care, almost always due to underpaid, untrained, or unmonitored staff, so there's a lot of demand for both more reliable quality & lower prices; that demand is only going to grow with time. Various government bodies are very large sources of funding that are very concerned with value for money and would pursue any option that could do the job without costing as much - in my country (Australia), there's the NDIS, National Disability Insurance Scheme. They are always looking for ways to consolidate care for less money.

I strongly suspect that any humanoid robot which was good enough to do disability support work would be in extremely high demand in the general population for obvious reasons, as well as being useful as a platform for labour automation, but those are much more speculative. Disability support work is a lot of money for incredibly varied tasks being spent right now. Something to think about.

lucubratory commented on Building a Personal AI Factory john-rush.com/posts/ai-20... · Posted by u/derek

ffsm8 · 7 months ago

But if you did become a unicorn, It would suddenly become very easy to replace for anthropic, because they're the ones actually providing the sauce and can just replicate your efforts. So your window of opportunity is to be too small for anthropic to notice and get interested. That can't be called unicorn

That was the point he was making, at least that's how I understood it

lucubratory · 7 months ago

She, but yes.

lucubratory commented on Building a Personal AI Factory john-rush.com/posts/ai-20... · Posted by u/derek

gerdesj · 7 months ago

Crack on - this is YC!

Why are you not already a unicorn?

lucubratory · 7 months ago

An LLM wrapper does not have serious revenue potential. Being able to do very impressive things with Claude Code has a pretty strict ceiling on valuation because at any point Anthropic could destroy your business by removing access, incorporating whatever you're doing into their core feature set, etc.

lucubratory commented on IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites haaretz.com/israel-news/2... · Posted by u/ahmetcadirci25

austin-cheney · 7 months ago

The biggest problem with this isn’t the horror of the actual war crime. The far more serious concern are the lengths the government will go to avoid holding anyone accountable. That is so much worse because it unintentionally endorses future crimes and challenges the offenders to take ever more offensive actions without fear of consequences.

lucubratory · 7 months ago

I do not believe it is unintentional.

lucubratory commented on IDF officers ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near Gaza food distribution sites haaretz.com/israel-news/2... · Posted by u/ahmetcadirci25

lucubratory · 7 months ago

This isn't ambiguous. This is really clear evidence of (at minimum) an atrocious and continuing war crime with full intentionality. Realistically, it is more likely explicitly genocidal in intent.

lucubratory commented on New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/sva_

throwaway290 · 8 months ago

> It wouldn't be enough to just express a political opinion that the US State Department has expressed, like "China is committing a genocide of the Uyghurs". Maybe if you're saying it in Chinese

In 2025 if you are a public person saying it you will get consequences. See Hobhouse case.

There are other people like John Cena apologizing for saying something "wrong" in English but no idea if they were threatened by CCP or by their managers

lucubratory · 8 months ago

>In 2025 if you are a public person saying it you will get consequences. See Hobhouse case.

Yes, if your criticism of China is in the news they might not let you in. That doesn't apply to many people but it's still a helpful clarification.

>There are other people like John Cena apologizing for saying something "wrong" in English but no idea if they were threatened by CCP or by their managers

Managers, and the reason isn't out of fear of legal consequences but fear of boycotts. Chinese have often felt like those in the West are talking down to them or being condescending, and they've never in their life had the ability to affect those doing so. Now that people really want access to the Chinese market, it's the first time ever for many Chinese people that they feel they can have any impact on how Westerners talk about China or the Chinese people. As a result (and because China has domestic equivalents of everything), Chinese people can be very boycott happy. The government can stop Chinese people from organising boycotts & very often does so (once again, they have an issue with any sort of mass organising by default), but the government can't force people to buy tickets to John Cena's movies & they didn't view it as appropriate to censor the videos of him screwing up what he meant to say. An organic boycott by the Chinese market is the worst nightmare of a lot of businessmen because the future of their business relies on selling in China, so they'll be even more strict on their people than the Chinese government would to try to avoid that.

lucubratory commented on New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/sva_

vjvjvjvjghv · 8 months ago

How many foreigners, illegal or not, are committing crimes? And how much could be found out from social media? This seems extremely paranoid.

On the other hand, maybe this will lead to people putting less stuff on social media. This would probably be a net positive.

lucubratory · 8 months ago

It's not intended to detect crimes, it's intended to detect pro-Palestinian political sentiment & deny entry to anyone who has posted that way.

lucubratory commented on New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/sva_

seanmcdirmid · 8 months ago

I've been to China a lot while also being critical of it sometimes on Facebook, and have never been refused a visa, even a work Z visa. Either they aren't looking or can't look because Facebook is blocked in China. My guess is simply that they aren't looking.

lucubratory · 8 months ago

They generally only look on Weibo & other Chinese-exclusive social media, and they do it all the time, not just while you're in customs. For something on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook etc it would need to be something really, really egregious (and you would know about it) like organising or raising funds for the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or something similar. It wouldn't be enough to just express a political opinion that the US State Department has expressed, like "China is committing a genocide of the Uyghurs". Maybe if you're saying it in Chinese it's more likely that would lead to issues because that's what they're used to dealing with, but I think it's unlikely. They care about what their nationals are doing, and they care about what's happening on their own social media networks; that's mostly it.

My general advice for people travelling to China is to not talk about politics on Chinese social media, or if you do just talk about the domestic politics of your home country & keep in mind that Chinese people might disagree with you. That's also my advice for people travelling to any country, but it's more important in China.

All that said, if you must discuss politics on Chinese social media while you're there, the thing the censors really have an issue with is calls for action, explicit or implied. More than one very pro-PRC heritage speaker who went to China has had their Weibo posts raging against America or Japan censored because they thought the criteria were "Posts have to be pro-China", when really the criteria is "Posts can't be a call to collective action that wasn't started by the party". What the party is actually concerned about is just stopping any sort of organised mass movement that they didn't start. The CCP's point of view is that mass movements are inherently unpredictable & could lead to civil disorder (even if they're nominally "pro-China"), so they're too risky a tool to let anyone other than the state use - important context to that is that Chinese culture, similar to some other East Asian cultures, puts way more value than we do on civil order, harmony etc.

Also if your posts do get censored, it's not as big an issue as it would be here. Where I live, the government deleting my social media posts would feel approximately as serious as armed police rappelling through my windows, and if the former happened I'd at least think about the possibility of the latter happening shortly afterwards. Think something like the Christchurch shooting live feed. It's not like that in China; it's completely normal, for example, that you get angry & post something that gets deleted by a censor, & that is literally the last you ever hear of it, a lot like tweeting something against ToS. If you continue posting about it or try to get around the censorship, eventually a police officer will visit you and talk to you over tea about why you have to stop doing that, and if you keep going that's when the actual legal consequences like deportations or arrest start.