hard agree! I've read so many insightful comments over the years. Didn't expect for it to be me one day! The project here is really cool and competes with the robots we built fair and square; and we had several engineers building and designing these.
That's actually exactly what J.P Merlet was researching about! But to be honest I am not sure if it ever got out of the university prototype phase. I know of systems in care-homes which are like movable cranes but they require big doors and even flooring like you would find in a hospital. Because handling cables is actually tricky and you have longer setup times than you would expect the only commercially successful cable robot that I am aware so far is the skycam other comments have mentioned.
Awesome project! What you've built is a Cable-Driven Parallel Robot, and since you are using gravity to keep the cables in tension it is a suspended cable-driven parallel robot. Using the four cables you are able to move a point in 3D space. I happen to know this because I wrote my phd on the accuracy of these types of robots and their kinematics. At that time Jean-Pierre Merlet was probably the most famous/prolific researcher on this topic (https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Jean-Pierre.Merlet/merlet_e...). You may also have heard of a company in Germany trying to commercialize this technology on a slightly bigger scale: https://redcablerobots.com/en/. There is also a conference on these types of machines in Europe: https://cablecon2027.sciencesconf.org/ the original being organized by Andreas Pott (another high impact sholar on this).
I have not worked in this field for many years but had a fun time learning about a very wide array of topics.
yea, if thats the case then I feel that AAA studios release creative things all the time. GTA for example, Alyx to name two. I guess it is always easier to buy creativity when you are a giant studio.
I think Innovation in big companies does happen, but often it get's stiffled by the bean counters before something comes by it, but that is also a good thing. Small businesses should always have the potential to bring the goliath to its knees if the big business has outlived is usefulness to society as a whole.
I guess the question is what is "truly creative" for you? Does Half-Life Alyx count? How about the original Half-Life? Pong? Outer Wilds?
To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?
radioactive molecules were probably born in a star... a big hunk of dirt hurling through space hardly creates any energy when compared to a star. We CONSUME...
What do you mean it doesnt scale as well?? It scales much better! It's super complex to extract mechanical work out of exploding pistons, if i need more energy with solar I just make bigger panels (or wait for some more efficiency gains).
For some reason I doubt Max Planck wrote or said this after his death (1947). The person i meant (maybe it was Kuhn). Either way I think it is too harsh, and many of the scientists I know strive to minimize bias as much as possible.... but I admit it being very hard to break out of conventional thinking and even more so as I age.
I am not a computer scientist so my understanding is "incomplete". I thought it stood for polynomial and non-polynomial time. But i do mix them up here and there. What i have read time and time again is that: If P≠NP would mean some problems really are harder to solve than to check (which feels intuitive given working encryption exists and all the mathematical functions that I know and understand). For example checking the roots of polynomials is easier than finding them in the first place.
thanks for the quote. Reading through it is clear that my understanding of P=NP is not complete enough. I would have thought n*M is precisely not polynomial but exponential time.
From my experience in research this was already the case 15 years ago (and from older peers, way before). Science has always has "in-groups". I forget the name of some philosopher in the 50's who was the opinion science is just a bunch of fads and it takes the old generation to die before a new idea can really be accepted.
I believe this stems from an incomplete understanding of the problem space on my part (excuse the multiple puns); but, I am skeptical Knuth really said P=NP. There are so many mathemtical examples of equations that clearly show P≠NP. Computing in itself was originally formed from using iterative methods to solve hard problems. Least-squares methods, sin() cos(), traveling salesman, so many to list? To say P=NP for all problems seems like a fools errand to me.
How is that an example of burying the lead? (I presume lede is the correct spelling, but burying lead for others to find in their drinking water amuses me.)
EDIT: saw the picture and yes. That certainly was catchy, but I the hn title is missing the subtitle: "until the black death made them commonplace".
Or the productivity gains, albeit substantial, are not as earth shattering as the llm providers would have you believe. As with any new technology adoption is a laggard. The internet "existed" in the late 80's, early 90's. Many companies are still reaping productivity gains from plugging into this first.
Very interesting. LLMs at the state today certainly do feel like a Cambrian explosion on software with more code is being written/generated than ever. Throughout my career it felt like solving one problem opened the door for many more. To infinity and beyond! With all the trepidation coming from the maths community (Terrence Tao in particular), I am optimistic that many previously overlooked opportunities in software will now be filled.
Being interested is also a lot more easy than to be interesting. The latter really depends on the eye of the beholder. Whereas I make it a game to find out what is interesting about the person across from me. Sometimes I strike gold, sometimes it's a dumpsterfire and we implicitly agree never to talk again. But once you strike gold and meet people you genuinely are really interested in, you get addicted.
I like your list of "challenges" but have a personal issue with two of them:
1. "improve uniteds' plane shedule" -> the word "improve" does a lot of heavy lifting there..
2. Turing test for me is solved: "AI expert" is just moving the goal posts imho. The original turing test to my knowledge is about passing notes under a door. Obviously, llms can't communicate via hand-written notes and if that is the bar it will take a long time (or a specifically designed hand-writting machine) to really do this. As far as how much writing back and forth you can do it is clear that turing test is beat: I am wondering often enough on text sent to me from colleagues if it is generated, the same goes for comments here or any ol' website. In a standard llm session I don't really communicate differently than with a human and would not be able to tell the difference in an hour texting session or so. Of course if I ask it to count words or do something ridiculous I can find sus it out; but for all intents and purposes the chat-bot exists.
I completely agree with everything you say here. I felt the critique in the article was way more strawman falacy than everything else. I use(d) git much more locally, and would never run into this problem because I would only use sha-256 on new repos. Rewriting the entire history is also not so much of a pain depending on organisation size and how it is done (if an org decided to do it). It may be a pain for git-hosts, but even there i think reasonable solutions can be found. Still not sure if I care about the switch though sha-1 worked and the security implications seem minor to my use-cases. I am much more concerned with code leaking online...
sidenote: i hate the term "forge", is it too late to settle for something less... cringe??
lul what? As a linux fanboy who "speaks unix" (presumably, do I? not sure...). I find it humorous that we have gone full circle. The newest tech shit is recommending I learn almost 50 year old technology? Time for me to log off.