The history of media have always had an disruption and people taking advantage of it: printing machine was a disruption that caused people like Martin Luther to be able to reach to prominence (printing press was initially printing more short news/tabloid letter, wayy more than books or proper news. And it was majority fake news). Another disruption was the radio. Made people with good, passionate voice being able to take advantage of it (Hitler, that US crazy pastor I can't remember the name of). It's up to your own moral compass if those disruption was good or bad, but they all followed by regulators realizing the potential danger of it, and putting guardrails.

But that's not the point. The point is scale. You have finite bandwidth to process information and unlike some queue system on a computer that will just lag or overflow, as a human you'll start to behave differently and it affects your information processing capacity. Doubly so if that queue is artificially filled (biased) with certain information (attention grabbing, outrage seeking algorithms)

People saying "fake news always existed" is saying "quantity doesn't matter". They're essentially saying: "school math test have always had 10+ multiplication table memorization questions. Why are people whining that they have to do 1e6 questions on one sitting??" which is ironic because techies are the first to say SCALE SCALE SCALE SCALE as an crucial strength and differentiator of software.

Appeal to history is the favorite Fallacy of techies (at least on HN) fueled by some American libertarian delusion of thinking social dynamics can be ignored.

It's pretty clear to me that those kind of techies clearly can't even conceive the problem, so don't be surprised that people are shifting to regulators to tackle this

Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.

SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %

Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.

To me it seems like this is really the only point OP have, which seems to have more to do with how modern clothes are produced? (factory, based on some averaged out categories of body type)

Other than that it seems like all the things he say are "better", you can find modern variants that do as well.

And the women's cloth rant is weird. Isn't that... Same for (most common) women's suite too? Pockets being too small is enough of an issue that I know some women just buy men's jeans (smallest size) instead, if their proportions are not too different (hip) from average for men.

Also, I didn't see any defense for neckties. What's good about that?

Most of the issue they have would be reduced if the yen got stronger or they introduced some expensive tourist fee, but that's very unlikely

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832958

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One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff (such as grill brush [1])

I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.

"I'm coding 10x faster" "look at the output velocity per employee"

"we are producing much more (in China)" "look at profit / number of (manufacturing) employers"

Seems ok if you're American / Chinese but I'm struggling to understand how the rest can be OK with allowing institutional knowledge to deteriorate while having an active dependency to the former two. We already see this with the tech dependency towards USA and manufacturing competition from China.

[1] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_progr...

This is fact known for a very long time....

The reason Japan won't have nuke is more so it's politically impossible. Even if USA and LDP wanted to, more than 80%+ of Japan (last survey I read) is strongly against it, and there's no way a reimpretation of the peace constitution can in anyway justify nuke, so a referendum is required

Japan also have advanced space programs so the method of delivery, is also not something that is something they can develop quickly. (and more recently, also chips etc required)

There's indeed a neighbor (albeit with a large ocean in between) that have imperialist streak of abducting a head of state with its military and starting a war that is actively causing global economic damage. You never know what this one is planning to drag you in to, maybe provoke another big neighbor and get yourself dragged in to the lose-lose quagmire

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=68142

Accounting for the asset holding, Japan's net debt is even lower than UK/US.

>The key lies in the Japanese public sector’s operation of a de facto sovereign wealth fund. Unlike countries such as Norway and Saudi Arabia, which fund such vehicles with national savings from natural resources, Japan finances its investments largely through domestic borrowing at very low floating interest rates

.... >In the case of Japan, evaluating fiscal positions solely through the lens of gross government debt can present a highly distorted picture of the overall fiscal health of the country.

Usually these roads are so small, you can barely fit a car and maybe one pedestrian on one / each side. And these streets are quite common in residential area. As in the picture, usually there are light poles along the pedestrian street. the pictures pole is pretty small but normally they're big enough you can only circumvent it by going in the path of the car, and that's a Hotspot when people get hit.

I didn't even know you were allowed to drive 60km/h on those streets. Most people slowed down because the chance of damaging your car is quite high

Edit: also why big American car are not that popular in Japan. You can't even reach your house for many, if you get an American car

(Chinese but since it's esp32 and raspberry pi it is possible to tinker with it)

I wonder what's the catch? Cheap IMU/motors?

Some people have friends, and some people also have friends that are very distant (geographically, life style, stage of life, etc).

Social media can allow you to keep in touch with these people in a very convenient way. For me, being able to see life updates of friends with 8h+ timezone differences is very nice perk, because planning a call or having energy to chat with someone that far away is tricky and many people understandably then drop it if that's the only way. (same applies if I want to talk to my digital nomad friend or, new-dad-overwhelmed friend). It's much easier to facilitate meeting up when I'm traveling too.

But even for people that want to use it for that purpose only, FB/Instagram will shove down infinite scroll and stories/reels/updates of people/entities you can care less about.

And yes for some it is hard to have "the willpower" as you want to frame it. (although we know it's not so much willpower, from addiction studies around nicotine and how loss of socialization around smoking usually is a detriment to quitting smoking for example)

And yes just removing / blocking those features help. There are also unofficial side-loadable app out there. So for me it works.

And for your life maybe there's no loss in socializing by just walking away. Good for you. But maybe the examples can shed some light in how social NETWORK (social media before algorithm and attention economy) is useful for many in different predicament than you, while the social media aspects, many would rather opt out.

And unfortunately only a select few of my friends (nerds/techies) are outside it (signal, discord, good old email) but almost everyone at least have an account. Many of the people I know move often enough that phone numbers aren't even a reliable way to keep in touch

So meta won.

The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media. Let me remove infinite scroll on Instagram and don't show me things I have explicitly followed on Facebook. And do this setting by default and a cigarette like warning pop-up when you try to enable the algorithms.

(I know you can do this with custom apps and I'm doing that but you have no clue how many non tech people beg me to share how and then cop out when they learn you have to download custom apk. Just add these functionalities as an default )

They just showed their delinquency very differently. Some weird form of "honor among thieves/不良/yakuza" deal, which mostly meant they were aggressive, hanged out late (loitering around convenience store asian squatting with a cigarette in their hand) and driving around in loud bikes and fight each other. Breaking public things was a rare overstep.

So I still don't get it no. There are many ways to have "delinquent fun" so to say, so why at one place the same need is put out on public things vs the other place it is taken out on... Each other(?) is a mystery to me.

>Tell me, how does the whole 'kids take care of their own bathrooms' thing work out for bullies?

This is the most predictable counter argument I get when the public responsibility in school in Asia is brought up, and it sounds fair on the surface on it but it is a red herring; bullying exist independent of collectivism or individualism nor collective responsibility or not, and neither address it, and neither is anyone claiming it addresses bullying.

And no bully don't usually love it. Because there's something called a teacher that checks in if everyone is doing their part and if a malicious actor is not, they get reprimanded. This is ofc not perfect and doesn't solve "teachers pet/favoritism" issue, but it does its job of teaching the students that "if everyone collaborate, one can circumvent race to the bottom Nash equilibrium when no one cleans the room." which I would say is a much better systemic approach than "idk individualism, things are shit because we are too lazy to think about responsibilities nor systemic way to uphold some trust in social settings"

"If your system is built on the assumption of every actor acting ideally, that's a broken system."

One thing that perplexed me endlessly during my youth living in Sweden was seeing drunk teenagers go around vandalize things for... Fun. Breaking the glass at the buss station (designed to shatter in to million pieces so you don't hurt yourself), friends enjoying graffiti, littering, throwing beer bottles on the street for fun....

During public school lunch (I only heard my friends doing it) they had "meatball war" throwing meatball at each other for fun. Justification was that school lunch taste shit so it's ok to throw food. Mind you all this was in the district with highest median earning in the entire country, not a ghetto.

Same for toilet. Just why did you need to rip off that toilet lid?

Collective ownership and responsibility is taught. In most Asian countries kids are often tasked to clean their own classroom. If someone then just destroys things for fun everyone suffers. EU/US just think that's dumb thing to teach because "eww collectivism" and even the weird conservative people going on about rules usually don't even want that.

So you have a society where race to the bottom is inevitable when it comes to caring for public utilities. "privatized profit(fun) , socialized loss" teaching starts even before economics class

Maybe I work in a different field but last year when I was still looking for jobs, only one company asked for coding assignment and every other company did coding interview which is always browser based editor.

I feel like the industry is mature enough that you can tell a company that sends you a zip file of code to f-off.

If there's a text to speech for rapping I'd really love to insert your sentence.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49207856

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https://youtu.be/Pz35sXPjo2c?si=tEP5TlI8rDqWccb9