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Comment by drew-y | Hacker News Reader

This is appalling. There is no world in which an industrial robot like that should be operating next to a child. Their force sensors are not nearly sensitive enough to stop before causing serious injury. Going fast enough, they can absolutely kill you. This just screams negligence to me. Cannot believe they tried to blame it on the child.

There are robots, called Cobots, designed specifically for this type of environment. They are highly specialized and extremely sensitive to unpredicted forces. Even then, you'd likely have a light curtain to stop the motion when anything crossed over into the table.

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> This just screams negligence to me.

This is very much a default mode for ex-USSR countries, especially russia. While russian bureocracy is extremely procedural, it has nothing to do with efficiency or safety (most of the regulations and laws in post-soviet countries are written not to increase safety or utility for population, but for controlling power and money flows and benefeting someone on the top).

Let’s keep this generalisation to specific countries as this is not true for Baltic countries at all.

Let's not generalize about specific countries at all?

This public will probably be able to understand mode (type), median and average - in general.

Well I heard conflicting info on this one from Baltic states citizens. On one side they are clearly working much more efficiently, as long term economy shows and align more with western approach to things and values.

On the other side, every single person from there I've asked this specifically agreed their country is utterly corrupt mess, government after government, with tight coupling to big brother russia and mafia.

Its not unique to Baltics, I come from former V4 (poland, czechoslovakia, hungary) and we have some variant of that. Legacy of our fucked up russian tyrannical overlords from cold war is still running strong through very fabric of our societies (plus last 20 years of very effective FSB/GRU psy-op to sow hatred and division all around EU to weaken it, allowed by weak politicians like Merkel).

As someone from the Baltics, this is so out touch with reality that it's outright laughable.

> On the other side, every single person from there I've asked this specifically agreed their country is utterly corrupt mess, government after government, with tight coupling to big brother russia and mafia.

No, not really. For example, Estonia has been very well governed, including deep digitalisation of the economy, one of the best educational systems in the world and a complete and utter dislike/hate for all things Russian.

I gather you don't know what you are talking about but painting broad strokes so wrongly over 3 States who have been peacefully revolutionised in the past 30 years is offensive.

I would defer to the background checks the U.S. military and federal government is doing in consideration of selling those Baltic states a lot of weapons. They will definitely do a better job that I ever can.

The story you got told is just plain wrong

> specifically agreed country is utterly corrupt mess, government after government, with tight coupling to <bad people>.

Isn't that (citizens thinking that) the same for most countries in the world?

Like I'm pretty sure many US citizens would say the same.

Or UK citizens.

Or German citizens.

Or <insert EU member state> citizens.

Or Singapore, Australia, china, japan.

etc.

through they might mean different thing when they say "corrupted mess".

And yes, all the mentioned states are corrupt to different degrees in different way. But I think finding citizens which would describe their country as "corrupt mess" isn't a problem (except if they are afraid about repercussions).

I understand that a whole lot of people are upset with Russia right now, but this is completely unsubstantiated.

May I ask how did you come to this conclusion?

A robot designed to move chess pieces should never have enough power to break anything. Could be run from as little as 2 AA batteries. This is simply bad engineering.

I think that’s challenging to achieve if you also want the robot to play well under time pressure.

Even if you manage to build an actuator that can grab a piece quickly but can’t break anything, the required rapid movement of the arm still can break things.

How about a magnetic base on each piece and a table built on top of a pair of xyz movements holding two magnets. That way the brain can at any time grab its piece and make a move while nudging any obstructions out of the way temporarily. It could probably made to filp the polarity on the lower magnet causing the opponent piece to topple gently when appropriate.

Seems very human proof and also exciting to watch in action.

It doesn’t even need to be that complicated. The moving pieces can move between other pieces.

For example: https://youtu.be/JhoLEbUOYlk

Neat, and very cool that they're open sourcing design and software elements. The video had me thinking that this kind of thing must have been made before. It's exactly the sort of thing they used to sell in the skymall catalog. Sure enough: https://youtu.be/mrDy0dF8aQw

A small plastic tube sucking air in to lift a piece would also do well.

The Milton Bradley Grandmaster had that in 1983: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kEV7WRGYwGI

> How about a magnetic base on each piece and a table built on top of a pair of xyz movements holding two magnets

Cheap chess playing devices like this have been available on the consumer market at least since the 80s.

My parents got me one from Toys R Us about 40 years ago.

The problem is that such devices are not as much of a spectacle as a big robot arm that moves by itself.

Yes, and some countries even allow car sized robots to operate next to pedestrians. That level of carelessness is something I can't understand. Almost as if they want to explicitly kill people.

I assume you are referring to driverless cars. Those aren't inherently unsafe. Neither are six axis robots. As I mentioned, cobots are well suited for this sort of situation.

Just to reiterate, I am not trying to make some any sort of statement about the country. I'm just expressing my disgust in how this specific incident was responded to and the multiple failures in oversight leading up to it. Mistakes like this happen everywhere.

I'm genuinely curious, because I don't see it. What's the property that makes these robots "inherently unsafe" while driverless cars aren't?

The poster has not stated that robots would be inherently unsafe. (And if they were judged so, it would also be in consideration that humans also are.)

Anyway: the difference is in explicit projectual intention. Some systems are created with a dimension (contextually, safety) as a key performance indicator, some other as just a factor to be sensibly taken into consideration. If you are drawing the project for a plane, a main thing you'll keep in mind is that it will have to stay up; if a toy, safety is required but not part of the function.

> The poster has not stated that robots would be inherently unsafe. (And if they were judged so, it would also be in consideration that humans also are.)

But he has. The statements

> This is appalling. There is no world in which an industrial robot like that should be operating next to a child.

> I assume you are referring to driverless cars. Those aren't inherently unsafe. Neither are six axis robots. As I mentioned, cobots are well suited for this sort of situation.

Together form a very easy to interpret implicit argument that "industrial robots" are "inherently unsafe" (since that was used to distinguish them from driverless cars) and that cobots are, by virtue of not being "inherently unsafe" (like "industrial robots"), well suited. Even just the choice of words for "industrial robots" lay bare a moral judgment of using them for entertainment purposes near children. Is there anything less "industrial" about the 500KW motor on a tesla?

If you want to claim that he didn't _directly_ and _explicitly_ state that argument outright, then you're right. It doesn't take a lot of reading between the lines to come to the conclusion that he considers there to be some difference.

> Anyway: the difference is in explicit projectual intention. [...]

So what's the argument here? That driverless cars were made to be safe and this chess playing robot wasn't? With how driverless cars have been pushed onto the roads with over the top promises and negligent safety features, how do you even begin to substantiate that argument?

Cars (period) are not inherently safe to begin with.

Perhaps it would help if you applied your argument to good old regular cars and see where it fails.

I'm not trying to make an argument, I'm trying to examine the argument made by someone else.

Personally, I believe that neither driverless cars nor "industrial robots" are "inherently unsafe". In fact I think the whole notion of "inherently unsafe" is flawed. An "industrial robot" playing chess with children can be fine if it's engineered well, which this particular robot evidently wasn't. Driverless cars can be fine if they're engineered well, which I would argue has not always been the case.

> reading between the lines

Don't do it. You have been here for years, you should have noticed: do not read between the lines. Do not overread what other said. Do not attribute intentions. Do not paint ideas that come from you on the expression of others.

In the past very few days I had posted about the buffers of undetermined positions¹, and hours before I had a post of mine literally re-translated in ideas that certainly were only in the mind of the "translator", parallel with other interventions that surely had skipped the duly operation of understanding where possible and stopping inventing statements otherwise. It is really to be avoided.

You exercise doubt on your interpretations just like you exercise doubts on all your ideas - and more, on your habit of forming ideas.

¹https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32205085 (and following, for clarity about them "buffers")

Contextually: notice that formula, '«like that»', that the poster wrote.

> So what's the argument here

Yes, the chief point in engineering a "driverless car" is that it does not crash on things. I «substantiate that argument» - which a difference is there between KPIs and constraints - beyond the beginning because nobody told you that the engineers succeed.

I think it’s an inference from domain specific common sense in robotics.

“Inherently safe” is a technical term. It’s an ideal form that almost never materializes, so “functional safety” substitutes it and arguments are made as to what risks exists or how they should be mitigated.

“Inherently unsafe” as reverse of that means an object cannot be safe no matter what; A bomb next to a person can be an example. Had a driverless car inherently unsafe, it cannot be placed on public road.

The original argument therefor means, that it is established that cars and robots can be safe-fied with functional safety standards and measures such that only tolerable risks exist, so they cannot be inherently unsafe, so generally they can be let be on public roads or around people with conditions.

Those cars have an emergency stop. These robots did not.

Blaming something on the user is very very common everywhere. For example with car accidents (drunk drivers), guns (mentally ill people), etc.

Car accidents and guns are not the same as an automatic robot. You could compare this to tesla. Users are blamed when it's the sole responsibility of user on how that thing can be used.

Eh, even Tesla blames the user and their shady EULA lets them get away with it.

It's the law and courts that let them get away with it, not EULA.

Well, as a company you can choose to do the right thing, or you can choose to weasel your way out of uncomfortable situations using lawyers and the fact that the law is always lagging behind technological development.

Musk has been talking about self driving cars for over a decade. Law has had enough time to catch up.

That is not the user's fault.

No, but it is the government's.

Exploiting the sloppiness of the government and using it against the user is not what I would call good behavior.

Still, the situation at hand is primarily fault of the government - which should've taken care of it at the very least 5 years ago, or sooner. It isn't a problem exclusive to Tesla, Mercedes has a very similar feature called Drive Pilot (introduced in 2013 IIRC) and except for the most recent model year a malfunction is a problem of the user just like with Teslas.

BTW this isn't even about any lawyers and EULAs, there's simply no legal way how a company like Tesla or Mercedes could take responsibility for a crash, so IMHO Tesla is at least nice enough to spell it out, unlike Mercedes.

> there's simply no legal way how a company like Tesla or Mercedes could take responsibility for a crash

This seems unlikely to be true, unless of course they weaseled themselves in this position.

Read through the laws about deciding blame in car crashes. There isn't a single word about transferring blame to the manufacturer, and thus it's not possible - and the law specifically says that the driver has responsibility. Nobody had to specifically weasel themselves into it, just the states kept sleeping a decade too long.

I'm not going to read through law texts, but I'm sure that there are provisions for the case where the manufacturer made a design error and is responsible for a crash.

This isn't the case though, the car works as advertised and licensed, the problem here is that the law makes the driver responsible for something they shouldn't be.

In Russia, losses up to 4% are fine.

There is a quote attributed to Zhukov, Stalin’s army general:

“No sparing soldiers, women will give birth to more of them!”

This is a falsely attributed quote. There's zero record of Zhukov (or anyone, particularly none of the various people this quote has been attributed to) saying this. It's a lazy stereotype of the CCCP's strategy during WWII and absolutely incorrect.

Yet it is still valid for their strategy during the invasion of Ukraine.

They don’t need sophisticated weaponry or artillery. Just a slow push until the opponent is exhausted.

Losses are irrelevant: they can always be hidden or denied because you control media.

Bigotry is against hn policies.

Any reference?

This is a common saying or trope with the number varying to a degree. The original version I know of is that in the Soviet military it was an acceptable loss to lose two people out of a hundred during a regular training operation.

Some may have put a number somewhere, but the general idea is not unique. And of course, there is that """detail""": «during a regular /training/ operation». This is the humour of Crock (Bill Rechin, Brant Parker and Don Wilder): «Losing fourteen men on patrol bothering you Poulet? You are thinking of bettering it, but we do not have twenty-eight to spare».

More to the glacial reality, it is said that the notorious dictator who made the move in '39, once presented with a report of particularly heavy losses, after a pause said "After all, this is what the young are for". Some people can have so debatable ideas.

> Cannot believe they tried to blame it on the child.

Whut. What makes you think anyone did?

"moved a piece on the chessboard earlier than he should"?

Guess what, that's not blame, but en explanation of the bug.

Thank you, reasonable stranger.

Use of 'Should' suggests he shouldn't have. Which suggests he made the error rather than the robot.

At best you can read it neutrally. But you could also read it as blaming the child.

> The child moved the figure, then the robot must be given time to react. But the boy was in a hurry and the robot grabbed him. We have nothing to do with the robot,” commented Moscow Chess Federation President Sergey Lazarev.

You are trying to read tone into something that has already been translated.

Maybe it is a feature and not bug? Do we know if kid was cheating?

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