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Comment by jldugger | Hacker News Reader

> You're telling me we've finally got robots that can do our laundry?

Did you watch it actually fold that shirt? Super slow and bad at it.

Is a Chinese robot vacuuming and mopping my floor every day? Yes it is. Could I do it better manually? Absolutely. I still prefer the robot to do an ok job than to do it myself.

The difference is that vacuuming seven times as often can compensate for a less effective process. Folding 7 times doesn't eliminate wrinkles.

No one cares about wrinkles anymore. Come on let's be real.

Apparently not given how many comments in opposition I got.

Most people in software misunderstand how physical goods work. When making machines you don't care about getting everything perfect all the time, you care about staying within tolerable limits all the time.

How bad do the folds in your laundry need to be for them to be no different then just being dumped in a pile? As long as we are above that point the robot is useful.

I think there is a stark contrast between the plus or minus micron level tolerances, and whatever is being churned out of LLM ('not getting it perfect all the time')

My dishwasher is also super slow and bad at it. But you know what? I still prefer that over doing it myself.

Your dishwasher shouldn't be 'bad' at cleaning.

Here are some tips:

https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0?is=B_CGi4shCuiwQLvR

It dulls sharp knives, and is very agressive to other materials too.

It's kind of crazy what goes on in that machine. It basically turns into a mini-Venus in there.

I don’t need it to do it faster than me, I just need it to do it instead of me.

Plus it’s obvious it will get better.

> Super slow and bad at it

Eh, this still has value for me if it can do it reliably. Leaving a robot to badly fold my t-shirts overnight and then badly put them in my closet the next day is fine. I don't need my casual wear beautifully folded. But I do need it organised, and that's apparently a chore I'll just never learn to like doing.

Absolutely!

Also if this scale anywhere close to LLMs in 2 years they will fold at super human speed and much better than me.

The real question is whether a hardware platform today would be good enough.

The model is software on a server or in the cloud, so the real question is are there any show stoppers from the hardware for going faster?

Physics. Right now the clothes folding is computationally limited, but assuming we get faster computers to get them folding faster, gravity and air resistance are still going to take their time.

Exactly. I will pay money for a robot to take laundry out of the washing machine and hang it to dry and then fold it and put it away or just sort it by size. This is a chore that my wife and I have to do several times every week.

My solution: stuff the clothes from the washer into the dryer, then stuff them into my wardrobe. I buy clothes that don't get wrinkled much even if simply shoved in the wardrobe and if they do, I tolerate it and wear them anyway.

Ha! You remind me of something I used to tell my colleagues back when I held a regular job. They would compliment me on my highly patterned shirts (eg. A very small floral pattern repeated). I would explain that a shirt like that just requires low spin in the washer, and then drying on a hanger. Whatever wrinkles are left are almost invisible due to the pattern. With collars and cuffs I’d just literally manually stretch/tension them while they were still wet. Bada bing bada boom.

Sorry, but if you're buying clothes that have manual drying steps, it's gonna be a hard sale to the general public.

I was referring to shirts specifically. If you put any kind of cotton shirt in a dryer it’s almost certainly going to need ironing. Waiting for a shirt to dry naturally shouldn’t be a big deal.

This is a mostly American perspective that I find endlessly amusing. I only have a handful of clothing items that say that tumble drying is fine on the tag, and most of my clothing is very casual wear (t-shirts, jeans, sports clothing). Dryers eat up clothing like it's nobody's business. Plus, electricity costs money while the sun is free. And while yes, the time to hang laundry has value, it takes 10 minutes to hang a load. If it rains, I hang the clothes indoors with a dehumidifier which is cheaper to run than a dryer and dries clothes in a matter of a couple of hours.

> Plus, electricity costs money while the sun is free.

Paradoxically, wholesale electric costs are negative during the day here in California[1], especially in the Salinas region. In theory you could get paid to tumble dry clothes.

[1]: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/prices

To be fair, I have quite a few of these, and they inevitable just get shuffled over to the dry cleaners.

The very first car was absolutely awful. Super slow and bad at it.

Slower than a horse even, why even bother

Xiaomi's first car, on the other hand https://youtu.be/KGW8bQtcpJg

So what? it can take hours to do it and I can focus on something else. If these robots actually become available on affordable price I would buy one without blinking. It would totally free up my weekends, no more hours wasted doing laundry, cleaning the apartment etc.

I can also vacuum my floor 3x faster than a robot vacuum. But so what, I'm not there when it happens.

You're missing the forest for the tree.

I am worse than the robot and I don’t mind if it takes 3 hours to do it.

It can do it over 8 hours while you're sleeping though.

and cost more than a maid

Sure but that holds true for most new tech. Expensive and slow but it can only get better or stay the same. I'm thinking it's only going to get better.

"Did you see the output of that Chat GPT 2? It's super lame code"

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