I've noticed teens using snapchat to just send quick videos. Just one sentence and then send. Is there anything like this for work, maybe where I can do a really fast screen recording?
Worked at a large global financial company 10 years ago in tech. It was well known that the bonus pool was finite per division, but it was also allocated on ratios based on performance reviews and retention. Everyone knew the more people, the smaller the pool -- but then again, tech was a "cost center" so it wasn't like adding technology people (with the exception of quants) earn the bank more money.
I suspect if you incentivized managers to keep their teams small, through a bonus pool, it would definitely result in smaller teams, but also with the danger of overworked ones. That seems self-fulfilling though, if you're overworked but you know there's a reward with it.
That all being said, most places don't have bonus pools so it's a mute point.
Did you ever do a school project where yourself and maybe one other person did all the work, and everyone else (2-3 folks) mostly just tagged along on the ride because they were assigned? Or maybe even made it worse?
And everyone got the same grade?
That happens in corp land all the time too, and it’s extremely demotivating.
thats usually called a 'profit share' (though I've only seen it based on net profit and not gross revenue). It was quite nice on Wall Street back in the 80s...Especially since everyone got an equal share rather then the managers favorites getting the bulk of 'discretionary' bonuses.
Paired with a nice xmas bonus and year end review/raises, it basically meant no-one quit because you were never more then 6 months from a fat check.
The quote: `I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering’ really hits on the nose for me.
My Dad had a successful business after a rough childhood, failing high school. He worked hard and built a successful business. He also really did wish ample doses of pain and suffering on me. And he got his wish.
He always thought it was good that I was bullied, that I also failed school, and that everything in life was generally hard for me. He told me this so much that I also believed it, well into my 20s. That is was good I was a failure and suffering.
It took a decade to build my life to a point similar to my classmates that did not suffer the way I did. And I'm not ahead of them even now.
I really wish my Dad would have gotten therapy instead of internalizing his anger, and believing that is what made him successful. It would have saved me a lot of time.
This maps almost 1:1 onto my experience, except for the fact that my father achieved some measure of success having never gone into business.
I almost didn't graduate high school and made a mess of my time at university, dropping out entirely my senior year (drugs and alcohol fueled by deep self-loathing made this an easy choice at the time).
Like you, I wish my dad had realized what he was doing in raising his children the way he did. His circumstances were deeply cruel. My relationship with him now continues to be marred by my understanding that he doled out the same punishment to his children and justified it by telling himself he was making us tougher.
In the end, it also took me nearly a decade to reach some level of parity with my peers. If that resilience is what got me here, then fair enough. But the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
Intergenerational trauma echoes, and the kids spend their lives putting themselves back together and finding their blind spots.
I was gobsmacked today by Rod Nordland's revelations on Amanpour that were a degree more intense but strikingly similar to my own childhood, and how I somehow
also share gravitation to extreme sports and dangerous situations.
Heh. I had some of that "character building", and I credit that I don't seem to have as fragile a temperament as some to it. It worked for the Germans and Huns and Mongols. Too bad we can't run the counterfactual and see if we would be the same across different timelines.
Since we only view this at the population level, there is a big question: Is "character building" improving those who need it to be stronger, or just filtering them out of society?
With all the massive life improvements we have with technology we could be investing so much more into our kids. Jobs could be flexible with short work weeks, and we could use that time to invest in kids. Parent, volunteer, mentor. Remote work done on a school site giving even more time to help kids learn.
Having worked remote most of my kids' lives, I'd say there are other challenges. Parents need time away from their kids too, and if every parent in society is working then how are kids supposed to get the adult attention and allow the parents some child-free time?
When I was younger kids played with others in the neighborhood, and there was always a homemaker parent in every household. Now every adult has at least a part-time job. Kids still play in the neighborhood, yet weekly instead of daily. More often they are in daycare, school, or staying home.
how are kids supposed to get the adult attention and allow the parents some child-free time
not everyone is going to work all the time. obviously someone has to be available for the kids but not all the time either. the point is that life improvements, technology and flexibility makes this more easy.
Has to be explicitly said, lots of folks expect a village without asking if the village consented towards the effort (n=1). Managing and openly communicating expectations derisks disappointment and suboptimal outcomes.
Not wanting to be a parent is one thing, but people who don't want to be involved with kids need to work on themselves, that's a deeply antisocial trait - your own existence depended on everyone around you being involved with you to some degree.
That is an opinion, not a fact. Freedom of association and to be happy can include not interacting with children you choose not to, and optimizing for happiness is important (versus a social contract requiring otherwise). No one will optimize for your own happiness besides you.
I have kids, but fully respect people who don’t care for or want to avoid time and interaction with kids. I respect their boundaries, that is what I advocate for here.
I’ve had over a decade of therapy, so I’m fairly confident in my position on the topic.
it is one thing to ask someone who doesn't want to deal with kids for help taking care of them, but quite another to expect them to tolerate kids and behave in a manner that gives the kids space they need. (like not smoking near kids, etc)
in a city i can't choose my neighbors, but some neighbors don't like kids and will complain if they are to noisy because they are playing soccer in the yard, to the point that they force the building management to disallow it, which then takes a lawsuit from the parents to remove that rule because such a rule is in fact illegal since kids playing is natural had has to be tolerated.
if someone feels that kids playing infringes their boundaries then they do need an attitude adjustment.
Agreed. Kids need the space to develop as you mentioned, and it’s somewhat trivial to determine where to live to avoid children using granular census and school availability data if desired.
it’s somewhat trivial to determine where to live to avoid children
given the discussions of how much more housing most cities need, i actually think this is not trivial at all. not wanting to live near children pretty much comes down to not living near people.
> I have kids, but fully respect people who don’t care for or want to avoid time and interaction with kids
How would this sound:
"I fully respect people who want to avoid time and interaction with black people"
Why is okay to say "I hate kids", we would not think kindly of someone who says "I hate Women/Jews/etc.".
Kids were exploited, historically, just like any other minority - we used to send them into the coal mines and many didn't come back.
Even today, we discriminate against young people all the time. A 17 year old is not allowed to vote, but come 18 and they may be forced into the army and sent to fight a war, without ever having a say in the matter.
They are the last minority that we world does not respect, and has no plan to respect as the world is becoming more geniatric (look at the age of congress) whils moving into a climate calamity.
And I am not writing this as a young person, not any more.
I feel that's why many people, especially families prefer detached homes. Sound proofing is guaranteed by the air gap. And if there is a problem with soundproofing you can solve it yourself by making changes.
Perhaps row houses are best? Good density, and with a solid concrete wall seperating units to stop sound and fire from spreading?
This looks impressive. Much more than even the Boston Dynamics demonstrations.
Flipping a pancake is extremely difficult because each pancake is different. I know that these videos must be cherry-picked but to be able to train a Robot to do this just by demonstrating feels like a massive leap.
Flipping a pancake was done in 2010. What looks impressive for humans is easy for robots and vice versa:
https://youtu.be/W_gxLKSsSIE?si=HDyNXe1Ys_eFXiVU
Another case in point: robot juggling was done in 1990s and to date we do not have a robot that can open any door reliably like a human. Kind of like Moravecs Paradox
To be fair it is far more complex for a robot to grip a spatula and use that spatula on a griddle than to use dynamic motion to flip a pancake in a pan.
Solving any one problem with robotic manipulation isn’t all that hard. It takes a lot of trial and error, but in general if the task is constrained you can solve it reliably. The trick is to solve *new* tasks without resorting to all that fine tuning every time. Which is what Russ is claiming here. He’s training an LLM with a corpus of one-off policies for solving specific manipulation tasks, and claiming to get robust ad hoc policies from it for previously unsolved tasks.
If this actually works, it’s pretty important. But that’s the core claim: that he can solve ad hoc tasks without training or hand tuning.
> He’s training an LLM with a corpus of one-off policies for solving specific manipulation tasks, and claiming to get robust ad hoc policies from it for previously unsolved tasks.
It seems clear that many people do not understand that this is the key breakthrough: solving arbitrary tasks after learning previous, unrelated tasks.
In my opinion that really is a good definition of intelligence, and puts this technique at the forefront of machine intelligence.
Flipping a pancake in a "random kitchen" would be much more difficult and have many of the same issues as the door problem.
It's hard to point to a single thing that would make "flipping pancakes" intractable, it's sort of the other way around, to usefully flip pancakes in the same way as a person takes a lot of skills chained together.
The "door problem" is a sort of compendium of many real-world skills, identifying the door, understanding its affordances and how to grip / manipulate them, whether to push or pull the door, predicting the trajectory of the door when opened, estimating the mass of the door and applying the right amount of force, understanding if there any springs or pulls on the door and how it must be held to traverse through it. Etc. There are also a ton of things I'm missing that are so fundamental one tends to take them for granted, like knowing your own size and that you can't fit through a tiny doorway.
I think you can ramp towards the "door problem" in difficulty by slowly relaxing constraints. A video linked above (not article) shows "can flip a pancake successfully with a particular pan (you are already holding) and pancake with a fixed camera and visual markers". Ok, now do it in varying lighting conditions. With no visual markers. With different camera views. Different pancakes. Real pancakes (which are not rigid, and sometimes stick to the pan). Different pans. Now you have to pick up the pan. Use a stove. Different stoves. Identify griddle vs pan and use the right flipping technique. Find everything and do it all in a messy kitchen... eventually you're getting to same ballpark as the "door problem".
physicist here (so very naive on these topics) - I’m wondering how to compare the steps you mention regarding the door problem (especially the predictive ones, e.g. about the trajectory of the door as it opens, etc) with how humans open doors? Surely people don’t stop in front of a door and begin planning things out, rather they seem to go for it and adjust on the fly, is this an approach that won’t work in robotics? Why not?
So classical robotics yeah, people used to write code for each step of opening a door. Practically speaking you would probably not do motion planning on the door, you would just code it up with a bunch of heuristics like, try to be over here in relation to the doorframe because that's a good opening spot and will probably work. Ok you're in the right place? Now, move gripper towards the door handle... etc. Bunch of hacks. Put enough hacks together and you can kinda sorta open (some) doors. Oh this is a SLIDING door? Damn we forgot to code for that...
The way things are going is sensors (cameras, force, etc) and neural networks. You let the robot try a bunch of ways of opening doors, sometimes it doors itself in the face, eventually it'll figure out good places to stand based on what the door looks like. The more doors you make it try to open hopefully the better it gets at generalising over the task of opening doors. The hacks/heuristics are really still there but the robot is supposed to learn them.
> Surely people don’t stop in front of a door and begin planning things out, rather they seem to go for it and adjust on the fly, is this an approach that won’t work in robotics? Why not?
Yeah, figuring out how to do this is basically "the problem". Most people don't have a sense or feeling of "planning things out" as they open a door because we reached "unconscious competence" at that task. We definitely have predictions of what is going to happen as we start opening the door based on prior experience and our observations so far. If reality diverges from our expectations we will experience surprise, make some new predictions, take actions to resolve the surprise, etc.
Not sure that anyone has ever studied how people open doors in detail, it'd be interesting. I bet there are a ton of subtle micro behaviours. One that I know is, if you hear kids running in the house it is a good idea to keep a foot planted in front of you as you approach the door, because those guys will absolutely fling or crash doors open right into your face.
Thank you, great answer. As soon as I had asked my question I realized that we must have a lot of unconscious behaviours. Very interesting points about surprise/expectations. And top marks for the advice about kids
I was responding to address why the "door problem" is more difficult than "pancake flipping under controlled conditions".
(I also ignored that door opening is generally done by mobile robots of a certain weight class which tend to be more expensive than a stationary arm with enough strength to pick up a spatula or hold a pan).
There is a steep difficulty gradient from "works in the lab" to "works under semi-controlled real world conditions" to "works in uncontrolled real-world situations".
Not just touch but proprioception. Robots in human environments will have to be better at proprioception than 98% of humans. If I bump into you it’s typically anything from annoying to a meetcute. I’m a pretty big guy, but if you had to chose me to step on your foot or somebody else, it’s probably me you want, because I will shift my weight off your foot before you even know what happened (tai chi) because you will barely notice.
If instead your choice is your high school bully or a robot, well for now pick the bully. Because that robot isn’t even being vicious and will hurt more.
> Because that robot isn’t even being vicious and will hurt more.
Rodney Brooks at the MIT AI Lab was a big advocate of something called "series elastic actuators." The idea was was that you didn't allow motors to directly turn robot joints. Instead, all motors acted through some kind of elastic. And the robots could also measure how much resistance they encountered and back off.
MIT had a number of demos of robots that played nicely around fragile humans. I remember video of a grad student stopping a robot arm with their head.
Now, using series elastic actuators will sacrifice some amount of speed or precision. You wouldn't want to do it for industrial robots. And of course, robots also tend to be heavy and made of metal, so even if they move gently, they still pose real risks.
But real progress has been made on these problems.
I think you're probably right, and those non-linear systems are going to make me have to increase my estimate for how long it takes for a robot to go from 5 year old child to ninja physicality. The more complex the feedback mechanisms, the more complexity there is in, for instance, screwing in a screw as fast as possible.
The robot won't take any enjoyment out of it, and won't laugh at your pain. Won't post about it on social media. Isn't going to try and fuck your ex or sister or mom.
I'm pretty sure that if I had never opened a door before and I saw somebody opening a door in a video, I would immediately know how to open doors just by watching the video. And that would be any door, with any kind of door handle. Not because I got superpowers, but because I'm average-human.
So, the moment your system needs this kind of data and that kind of data, oh and btw it needs a few hundreds of thousands of examples of all those kinds of data, that's very clear to me that it's far away from being capable of any kind of generalisation, any kind of learning general behaviour.
So that's "60 difficult, dexterous skills" today, "1,000 by the end of 2024", and when the aliens land to explore the ruins of our civilisation your robot will still be training on the 100,000'th "skill". And still will fall over and die when the aliens greet it.
I think their robot has a way of converting touch to a video input. The white bubble manipulator has a pattern printed on the inside that a camera watches for movement. (see 1:58 of the video).
And here I thought manual labor jobs were safe for a very long time. I really hope people at the policy level are thinking about what it looks like to have a world of people that don’t have any work to do.
We are past the golden age of retirement. Growing up I saw my entire Grandmothers family retire early and live a long time. They would retire in their late 50s. (Mostly government related jobs) I also meet plenty of my friends parents that would retire around the same time from one of the big three auto plants.
At many levels Canada seems to be choking on it's own bureaucracy. We have a complete lack of intra provincial trade, including many intra provincial barriers for experts. Does Saskatchewan with a population of 1 million need its own licensing board for Psychologists? Why Can't I buy an Ontario wine in Alberta?
Quebec was controlled politically and economically by english speakers when Canada was formed. The decentralized political nature was more practical due to Canada's sparse population at the time. It's a blessing and a curse.
You meant not leave the country, Québec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick are the founding provinces and Québec had almost no leverage at the time.
Open office look great! Just like TV. I don't think I've ever seen an office environment that has not been open on TV. A TV show with everyone in a private office would not work, no drama!
But to work in them is a noisy hell. I had a lawyer friend talk about how great these open offices must be to work in. So productive and dynamic he would say. But of course this is coming from a profession where having a private office is an absolute requirement.
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