robobenjie

I think this is my favorite suggestion. All of them are super hard, but - Bronze: pillow in pillow case - Silver: Make a bed with fitted sheet, flat sheet and blanket - Gold: put a duvet in a duvet cover

Feels like it would be a good option for a round 2...

This one is really hard for me...

Sorry, this is me communicating like an engineer. In a technical sense risk of anything can only approach zero: never actually get there. I meant that there should be essentially zero chance, similar to holding a baby in your arms or putting it in a high chair, and probably less chance of injury than driving in a car with a baby in a car-seat. Basically zero.

Ooh. I like full body manipulation. Humans use hips & elbows to move laundry baskets. Two robot collaboration is good too. I wonder who I can convince to wear another silver suit.... :)

Interesting. Futurism is super hard, but "decades" too far away to me. I think with strong 2 finger grippers this is probably close to state of the art, especially with a wrist force sensor, like the TRI setup.

This is a great one. The manipulation is hard, but we're probably on a trajectory to be able to do it in 1-3 years if you were tolerant of some risk to the baby, but, of course, your tolerance for injuring babies is basically zero. I think 'risk & reliability' is a good potential category: there is the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that we got a video' and the bar of 'got it to do a task reliably enough that I'd risk an infant in its grippers.

Hey Hacker News. Curious if folks feel like I'm missing categories of challenge.

Yeah, having been there during Andy's firing I can vouch that the thunderdome era of replicant actually intensified after he left (and lasted until boston was sold off and the rest of us moved into X) but nuance is hard and less funny and I did warn folks that the history is mostly wrong... ;)

If I had known... Somehow I missed that story when it happened. Thanks for sharing. :)

There is exactly one joke by ChatGPT. For Stability AI's CEO's prediction that there are no longer any human programmers by 2028 I liked the idea of referencing Stanford's intro to CS class which is semi-famously a bell-weather for the tech industry. My original replacement class was "Growing food for Sustenance" which kind of worked but I thought was weak. I asked ChatGPT for alternates and it gave me about 15, of which "Barter Economics and Goat Management" was clearly the funniest, and annoyingly funnier than mine.

I had a dickens of a time with the ending. Having it end at the present seemed super abrupt (as it really feels like we are in the middle of a big shift) but I didn't really want to venture into my own predictions. One of my early readers had the suggestion of using prominent AI CEO/VC's predictions about the near future and treating them seriously as if they were inevitable fact, which I found very funny. And really this is all about amusing myself.

aww thanks David.

My Favorite Le Guin quote on science fiction is very appropriate"

SCIENCE FICTION IS OFTEN DESCRIBED, AND EVEN DEFINED, as extrapolative. The science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. “If this goes on, this is what will happen.” A prediction is made. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.

This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.

Congrats David! I love your approach and your problem space. I'm rooting for you.

This is a little tool I made to try and figure out how to make humanoid startups profitable. It goes with this blog post: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/humanoid-robots-dollars....

I thought folks here might like to play with it.

Hey HackerNews. Using AIs for coding it has become obvious that software development will use AI assistance from now on. I wrote this post talking about what it was like for me to teach an LLM a new technology.

I'm super curious about other folks' experience, as I'm sure lots of people are doing similar things.

I'm on an EC2 instance. Most of the effort was on cuda/pytorch/pip nonsense. Once stable diffusion webui was working, diffusers worked basically out of the box, which was really nice. (Trickiest bit was figuring out that I needed to use their tool to convert my safetensor file and that the version of python I was using wasn't working with it for some reason). Stack is flask + gunicorn which was what chatgpt recommended (lol). I had a websockets version of the progress bar working on flask-socketio on my local machine but could never get the server version through nginx to work correctly. So eventually I just gave up and switched it to polling so I could launch.

While I have folks attention, I want to try training a model to generate monster/creature walk animations. Anyone know of a dataset of walk cycle sprite sheets that I could massage and label to see if I can make that work?

Several of the themes (including "alien jungle", which is my favorite) we're created by chatGpt. I totally want to try evolving the game in that direction.

I'm also curious if anyone has made a level that worked particularly well/poorly or has a great custom theme (that maybe I should add to the dropdown) :)

Thanks! It has been a ton of fun too.

Great feedback. I added it to the start of the article. Thanks!

Sure, but I'm more interested in things that were just impossible before. You can hire a artist to illustrate a level, or have AI do it cheaper, but you can't have an artist illustrate a level the player made while they wait. I think there are whole play patterns that are possible because the cost and especially speed of creating the art are many orders of magnitude different.

The main one is that making the control-net depth input look like something helps a ton. You can creating levels that have more 'structure' (large flat platforms, platforms that line up with others) and levels that are more random and see that the structure works way better. I played around a lot with turning the control-net on and off at the beginning and end of generation, which seemed to help when I was playing in the webui but then I didn't immediately find the API in diffusers and the results I was getting were great so I didn't keep looking.

Yeah, in the map editor there is, in fact a random button that generates. I havn't gotten around to making sure that the random level is playable (and about 1 in 4 have unreachable areas) but that wouldn't be that hard to add. (I've been focused on the creative aspect of creating your own levels because right now that part is more fun).

The comment is referencing this story where hasbro did indeed hire pinkerton to show up at someone's house and intimidate them which has been shaking the mtg world recently. https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/trading-card-game/new...

OP here. I'd love feedback on this and what folks want to read about robotics in the future.

I mean only 93% of humans have died so who knows for certain....

https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived...

Facebook Blog post with more information and longer chat session example:

https://ai.facebook.com/blog/state-of-the-art-open-source-ch...

A FB engineer's response at the time: https://www.facebook.com/notes/mike-develin/debunking-prince...