Humanoid robots have advantages industrial robots don’t: they fit where humans fit and can use tools humans use. They’ll fold your proverbial laundry with nothing more than their robot hands, then they’ll unpack your dishwasher and mow your lawn.
Yes, they will unload from the specialized robot(dishwasher). They can be the glue in certain situations that are not common enough to design a better solution for. But rapid prototyping, AI and other tech will also make it faster and easier than ever to produce custom solutions for niche applications. The "human robots will take over" bros are thinking one step ahead but not two.
I don't see these being used outside of high earning households in gated communities. The same humans being exploited for their labor, whose earnings are hoovered up by the ultra-wealthy, barely have the discretionary income for food and clothes.
It's that old tinfoil hat theory that the Jetsons and the Flintstones took place in the same point in history, the Jetsons were in the sky with their mind-bending technology, all their needs met, meanwhile the Flintstones are down on the planet, working menial jobs wearing and eating literal scraps.
The common man will never see a household robot, that is unless they cobble together enough components that have been discarded by the haves to be used by the have-nots.
To the point of your statement, humanoid robots will certainly fill lots of niches, it'll be fascinating to see what becomes prevalent first: menial labor, agentic-type household assistance, tutoring the kids, walking grandma across the busy intersection, sex tasks, etc.
‘Why were they long term?’ is what you need to ask. Code has become essentially free in relative terms, both in time and money domains. What stands out now is validation - LLMs aren’t oracles for better or worse, complex code still needs to be tested and this takes time and money, too. In projects where validation was a significant percentage of effort (which is every project developed by more than two teams) the speed up from LLM usage will be much less pronounced… until they figure out validation, too; and they just might with formal methods.
some long term projects were due to the tons of details in source code, but some were due to inherent complexity and how to model something that works, no matter what the files content will be
This is currently negative expected value over the lifetime of any hardware you can buy today at a reasonable price, which is basically a monster Mac - or several - until Apple folds and rises the price due to RAM shortages.
Part of being in a union tends to be lawyering up and "nailing down" exactly what everyone's duties in detail and what fair compensation might be, and what terms / conditions might be etc.
Personally I don't think they're a great fit for the software industry where the nature of the job and the details are continuously changing as technology evolves.
But what are you negotiating about? What do all tech workers have in common that wouldn't be better addressed with top level regulations like "right to disconnect"?
The outsized pay for software engineers in the US takes into account a lot of this stuff. Would you trade those 100 things for, say, a salary of $75k a year for a senior software engineer, like they have in Europe?
Meh. The rest of the world also doesn't have big salaries for software devs. The US is the outlier.
It's not just the labor regulations holding Europe back, it's the lack of funding due to not having a unified European digital market.
Netflix Europe needs to have 20+ licensing deals. Selling across Europe at a large scale requires interactions with 20+ legal teams. Language and cultural barriers kill a lot of things.
How do US giants thrive in Europe, then?
Because they come in directly giant-sized based on growth in the US. They either ignore European legal compliance until sued or pay peanuts for them to handle all the legal aspects.
All those sorts of protections seem like they make sense for every worker rather than being "tech" specific. I do understand that collective bargaining could help with carving out sector-specific deals, though.
I wonder if there is a difference in context that explains why we might disagree. I'm in Australia where I think it's politically easier to "add" broad top level protections for all workers than it would be in the US.
Yeah, the legal framework (Taft-Hartley) in the US is pretty explicit about banning general strikes and solidarity strikes. A union can organize within a single industry but not beyond that.
Before I get into it: what careers do you think are most compelling? Especially if you think all white collar work is going to be undermined by this technology.
I wrote this up a bit ago in my essay fragments collection. It's rough and was just a thought I wanted to get down, I'm unsure of it, but it's at least somewhat relevant to the discussion here:
LLM or LLM-adjacent technology will never take over the execution of work in a way that approaches human where humans continue to guide (like PMs or C-suite just "managing" LLMs).
The reason is that spoken language is a poor medium by which to describe technical processes, and a well-enumerated specification in natural language describing the process is at-least synonymous with doing the work in skilled applications.
For example, if someone says to an LLM: Build a social media app that is like Tinder but women can only initiate.
... this is truly easily replicatable and therefore with little real business value as a product. Anything that can be described tersely that is novel and therefore valuable unfortunately has very little value practically because the seed of the short descriptor is sort of a private key of an idea itself: it will seed the idea into reality by labor of LLMs, but all that is needed for that seed's maturation is the original phrase. These would be like trade secrets, but also by virtue of something existing out there, its replication becomes trivial since that product's patterns are visible and copyable.
In this way, the only real outcome here is that LLMs entirely replace human labor including decision making or are tools to real human operators but not replacements.
I'm curious how this seed/hash/prompt of an idea relates to ladders of abstraction?
Consider "Uber, but for X"
This wasn't a thing you could deploy as a term pre-Uber.
I'm not sure what this means for your analogy, but it does seem important. Somehow branding an idea reifies a ... callable function in? ???
Maybe something like (just spitballing)
The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?
Which maybe complicates the value story... terseness isn't intrinsic to the idea, it's earned by prior reification work?
Hmm
Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?
> Basically it seems that "Like Tinder but" is doing a lot of lifting there... and as new patterns get named, the recombination space just keeps expanding?
Yeah, this feels right. It's like a process of condensing: new ideas brought to life condense metaphors into more compact forms and so make language more dense and expressive. This idea reminds me of Julian Jaynes's description of metaphor condensation in Origin of Consciousness.
A lot of hard work goes into novel products, but once that work has been proven, it is substantially more trivial for human or machine to copy. Groping around in the darkness of new, at the edge of what-could-be is difficult work that looks simple in hindsight to others who consider that edge a given now.
> The specification-length needed for a given idea isn't fixed - it's relative to available conceptual vocabulary. And that vocabulary expands through the work of instantiation and naming things?
Yeah, I think that naming and grouping things, then condensing them (through portmanteau construction or other means) is an underrated way to learn. I call this "personal taxonomy," and it's an idea I've been working on for a little bit. There is just tremendous value in naming patterns you personally notice, not taking another person's or group's name for things, and most importantly: allow those names to move, condense, fall away, and the like.
I left out a piece of my fragment above wherein I posit that a more constrained form of natural language to LLMs would likely lead to better results. Constraining interaction with LLM to a series of domain-specific metaphors, potentially even project specific givens, might allow for better outcomes. A lot of language is unspecific, and the technical documents that would truly detail a novel approach to an LLM require a particularly constrained kind of language to be successful where ambiguity is minimized and expressiveness maximalized (legal documents attempt at minimal ambiguity). I won't go into details there, I'm likely poorly reiterating a lot of the arguments that Dijkstra made here:
If programmers think they can just learn a trade, they’ll bein for a rude awakening when Elon comes for their jobs next. Optimus will be doing your plumbing by the time you graduate from trade school and get your paper and internships.
Maybe the OP has the hardware and can compare the sound both subjectively and objectively? Does it have to be 100% exact copy to be called the same? (Individual electronic components are never the same btw)
The OP didn't clarify. But if there's a claim of 100% faithful recreation, I'd expect something to back it up, like time- and frequency-domain comparisons of input and output with different test signals. Or at least something. But there isn't anything.
The video claims: "It utilizes the actual DSP characteristics of the original to bring that specific sound back to life." The author admits they have never programmed DSP. So how are they verifying this claim?
Well it's a new project so give it some time. I feel confident that I'm not lying so I can make that claim.
Also its target market is not a technical crowd but people who make music. I'm optimizing more for what they want to see (which are sound demos) rather than what a programmer would want to see.
What it provides is a opinionated configuration management - which is admittedly great which is why I use it as well, but it's nonsensical to say tailscale works in places where wireguard is blocked.
You're likely just noticing the preconfigured nat traversal which tailscale provides and never set one up yourself, as you'd need a static IP for that and it's unconfigured by default.
> it's nonsensical to say tailscale works in places where wireguard is blocked
I have two machines on my desk, I configure a wg service on both. I also configure tailscale on both. Everything works.
I move one machine to another network, at a friend's place.
Wg does not work anymore. Tailscale works. So this is very much sensible to say what GP said.
Now, you can have all kinds of explanations about why wg dos not work and ts does, you know STUN, DERP, ts using wg under the hood, and whatnot but the facts are cruel: I cannot wg to my machine, but I can ts.
Right, it’s that specific person’s Wireguard configuration, which is likely a typical one as a result of Wireguard‘s defaults. Tailscale‘s defaults work better, hence the surface-level impression that plain Wireguard does not work in cases in which Tailscale does.
As I said above - how would you set up plain Wireguard in a place without the possibility of exposing a port, or even that does not have a public IP - and initiate the connection from outside that place? I would love to learn something. Without rebuilding tailscale (or whatever other solutions with STUN or whatnot).
i think youre not hearing what - at least i - was saying.
I never said that running the same connectivity and NAT traversal via 2 nodes which are both inside of a NAT is possible.
Neither did I ever claim you dont need a static public IP which _isnt_ behind a NAT / has an open port.
With Tailscale, these are being provided to you by them.
Without them, you would have to maintain that yourself.
This is a significant maintenance burder, which is why I - as in my very first comment you yourself responded to - pointed out that the service theyre providing is great and that i use it myself for that as well.
Nonetheless, _if wireguard was blocked, tailscaile wouldn't work either_
But its not blocked. Hence tailscale works. Just like wireguard would work, if you configured NAT traversal in some way.
To get that working, you have multiple options, one of these being the STUN server.
Another being an active participants in the VPN which facilitates the connection (not just the initiation, which the STUN server would be doing). easier to configure and maintain, but less performant.
Tailscale themselves actually have an incredibly indepth article on how they've implemented it on their end, its a little aged at this point, but I suspect they havent changed much (if any) since
> i think youre not hearing what - at least i - was saying.
You said " it's nonsensical to say tailscale works in places where wireguard is blocked".
If by "blocked" you mean "blocked at the firewall level through some kind of adaptive block that will recognize a wireguard connection based on its behaviour/nature of packets/whatever" → then yes, of course tailscale will not work either as it uses wg under the hood.
If the OP message "tailscale has a much better chance to work when you need it most. WireGuard is blocked by too much stuff" means "I installed wireguard and it does not work (because whatever) but tailscale consistently delivers" → then it is not nonsensical at all. It is the right tool to start with.
> Tailscale themselves actually have an incredibly indepth article on how they've implemented it on their end
This is an excellent documentation to which I refer people as well.
> even if he's proud of being such, as you seem to be
Of course on Internet nobody knows you are a dog. But hey, I may be someone who wrote a part of the Linux kernel in 1994, ran IT operations for a company that was big (big!) and then almost vanished (not my fault :)) and produces open source that you may have even used if you are "technical" as you say.
And set up WG in so many places, including a frontend that unfortunately did not get the worldwide success it should have :)
With this modest introduction - tailscale works where wireguard does not. I am not sure why my example was not obvious. You can reach the machine at my friend's with tailscale, not with plain wireguard.
Of course if you open ports in the right places then yes! And check a few more things.
Now - how would you set up plain Wireguard in a place without the possibility of exposing a port, or even that does not have a public IP - and initiate the connection from outside that place? I would love to learn something. Without rebuilding tailscale (or whatever other solutions with STUN or whatnot).
many times in public/hotel wifis. it's usually places which blanket ban UDP and allow TCP 80 and 443 exclusively. tailscale somehow manages to get a connection.
In my state uni 75% was normal a couple decades ago, 50% after first year. 99% is extreme, but I can imagine that being true with uni leadership on board.
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