It's incredibly ironic that the left, originally the party of labor, is so strongly protecting illegal immigration. When you let in 20 million low skilled workers from different cultures into your country, who do you think suffers: capital or labor? Who feels the pressure in rising housing prices, job prospects, rising crime in cities, etc?

The other ironic part to this whole situation is that the current administration goes so hard on their rhetoric and marketing but ultimately are deporting less people than ever before. Everyone is losing here, and the American Empire is fading away, eroding from the inside out.

1. App creators will pass the extra cost over to the iPhone users.

2. Android (and other platforms that can host smartphone apps) will be more competitive and start to look better for both app creators and consumers.

Sure, there's a bit of a context switching cost. Not everyone will just be able to automatically change over to an Android phone tomorrow. But it doesn't need to happen all at once. These phones get updated and replaced every 1-2 years. If iOS users see their app store prices rising too high, and they aren't OK with this, then they will switch to Android eventually, once it's worth it.

Otherwise, I don't see any problem with Apple reaping the benefit of their powerful and well-built walled garden ecosystem.

- This admin is deporting less than Obama was during his first year in office despite promises to the contrary,

- There is now organized harassment and resistance stopping federal agents from removing illegals that are also criminals from our country.

Ironically, you need to take your own advice.

One side is crazier, and it's not mine.

I had a condescending response from a HN mod the other day telling me that HN isn't all that left wing, just a 'slight skew'. Well OK buddy, exhibit A, read through the diversity of opinions that aren't flagged in this thread. I'd go as far to say that HN is basically like Reddit, except more of you happen to have computer science degrees.

And that's fine, it is what it is, but let's not pretend this website doesn't have a heavy bias in a particular direction.

"Slight skew" is just your claim and opinion. We're both equally entitled to them. I'd be happy to look at actual data: try an anonymous poll on HN for political affiliation sometime. We both know that skew wouldn't be "slight".

Please don't make unfounded counter claims without evidence.

They also have proven themselves in other white collar knowledge endeavors as well, as valuable tools that augment human economic output. Marketers can make more copy material, any office worker can improve the quality of their email communications, etc. Easy.

What are humanoids doing exactly? What can they do, that actually makes sense and provides positive economic impact over existing alternatives? Not clear to me.

Because every time I think of something, either an existing industrial setup can or will do it better, or a special-purpose device will beat it.

So general intelligence + general form factor (humanoid) sounds great, if feasible. But what will it do exactly? And then let's do a reality check on said application.

But I really struggle to come up with any other economically viable short-term use cases, even with great hardware...

I'm completely open to the possibility of having good telepresence in reliable hardware be a valuable addition to our economies. The hardware really is getting good these days, at useful payloads.

But what I'm particularly pessimistic about is seeing academic-type research try to fold clothes and put screws into holes with humanoid-like systems, raise 10s of $Mils, and form a company out of it. Ditto for existing humanoids.

One of the major humanoid companies (you can google/guess who) recently claimed that their humanoids will be doing surgeries in hospitals within 5 years? This is egregious, there is zero chance that becomes the platform of choice for doing surgery, over a special purpose-built bed + multi-arm platform specialized for said tasks. This is perhaps even worse that Rosie from the Jetsons vacuuming our homes before the Roomba is invented.

Showing another example, I have to get into specifics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlUFoZstcWg But I want to know, how could this possibly be better than setting up arms for this task, assuming it is to be done thousands of times? Is the change to the factory layout the main issue that makes this worth it? Even if it is... a single arm on a mobile platform certainly does this more economically.

Anyways, I see all this stuff, there's tons of money and hype and optimism, and I feel crazy being pessimistic, as I'm usually the techno optimist. So, do others feel similarly? Are there things I'm missing that could fuel some optimism perhaps?

Looking forward to the discussion.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46607364

Points: 5

# Comments: 9

I don't know much about the biochemistry here, I assume this is not something like GABA that can be directly supplemented. But maybe there are precursor nutritional and supplemental substances that can help these people upregulate how much of the glutamate molecule in question the body can produce.

You wouldn't charge your CNC Machine taxes for the productive labor it produces that could have otherwise been done by a dozen blacksmiths.

By all means have corporate and sales taxes pertaining to the owner of said tools though. Even as a right-leaning individual, it's become pretty clear to me that corporations pay too low in taxes compared to the broad 'middle class'. Corporate tax cuts don't help the common man. An extra few hundred in their pockets each month certainly would though.

That's the common pattern I see, at least.

So I'm curious about the opposite - are there any businesses that are relative monopolies in their industries that you're happy to use / do business with?

I'm struggling to come up with an example myself. Are monopolies doomed to become awful to consumers?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110560

Points: 2

# Comments: 10

I do wonder how a modern revival of Pebble will compete from a product perspective within the current landscape. Obviously there's the high-end Apple Watches, but there's also incredibly cheap and long battery life products from China that you can see on Aliexpress and similar. Fitness tracking is another related niche that seems oversaturated, unless you do something really unique in biometrics sensing.

So it seems like a hard market to get back into, curious where they take things.

We understand that China's (and other countries) low wages and high population lead to the US losing large portions of its manufacturing base, starting in the early 2000s.

But with robotics and engineering expertise, which the US definitely has, or can afford to have, why isn't more 'reshoring' happening via industrial robotics? Shouldn't this be our way "back into the game" vis-a-vis manufacturing? How is China outpacing us so much? Do we not care, are there technical barriers, lack of skilled workers in automation, too much of a head start with our competitors?

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661478

Points: 3

# Comments: 3

To train GPT, all of the training data (the internet of text, scanned books, etc) had already existed, even before the GPT project began. Arguably, the compute required (for GPT-3) also already existed, even before GPT-2.

The GPT project really just came down to investing in all of the pieces to take the ideas from a 2017 research paper to the next level. Nobody knew if X thousand GPUs, plus all of the internet's text, plus neural network transformers, would work out. But somebody took a risk in putting together the existing pieces, and proved that it can.

There's no analogy here to humanoid robotics. Not only is the data required for neural network operated humanoids close to non-existent (at the scale needed), but the nature of the data itself is enormously more complicated that taking a list of tokens in a vocabulary, and outputting 1 more token from the same vocabulary.

That being said, I still applaud the ambition of the Figure team. While I think it's clear they are presenting incredibly cherry-picked examples, they aren't trying to mislead consumers with a product for sale (because... they can't). Instead, they are productizing important research to investors, who would otherwise waste money on less important and less ambitious projects. So overall I find projects of this nature to be a net positive for technical innovation.