Hacker News: tootie

New comment by tootie in "Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6"

tootie — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:40:30 +0000

When we built self-driving cars, did we put a humanoid robot in the driver's seat? No. We put sensors on the car's perimeter and plugged in to the existing electronics. Forget "fits in human spaces" and think about an actual task you'd trust a robot to do for you before it's battery runs out. And who says you need one generalist? I have 5 different automated kitchen machines right now and they are all various types of rectangular prisms. I have a robot floor cleaner and it's a disc on wheels. I'd sooner have a kitchen robot that's on a rail bolted to the ceiling and connected to mains power.

This is a terribly contrived demo and not really realistic, but it illustrates my point. It's a bathroom-cleaning robot and it's kinda what I described. R2D2 with arms coming out of it's head. It's roughly human-scaled, but not at all humanoid.

https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/comments/1q9y5wh/toilet_cl...

New comment by tootie in "In the last 30 years, the number of public companies has been cut in half"

tootie — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:44:24 +0000

The tweet and article say exactly what the culprit it and it's lack of IPOs due to fear of shareholder litigation.

New comment by tootie in "Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6"

tootie — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:37:50 +0000

We build our living spaces against the constraints of the human form, but that still doesn't imply the human form is optimal for anything. There's no reason a robot traveling over smooth surface should have legs instead of wheels or treads. There's no reason to have a head. Some kind of arm is a common design feature, but certainly no reason to have two. No reason to be symmetrical. A domestic robot may be constrained in terms of scale (ie see things at counter height) but not shape.

New comment by tootie in "Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6"

tootie — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:13:07 +0000

Is emulating human behavior really a valuable end goal though? Humans exist as the evolutionary endpoint of exhaustion hunting large pray and organic tool-making. We've built loads of industrial and residential automation tools in the last 100 years and none of them are humanoid. I'd imagine a household robot butler would be more like R2D2 with lots and lots of arms.

New comment by tootie in "40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal"

tootie — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:06:49 +0000

I know you warned us, but this overly flippant.

There's plenty of obvious reasons we shouldn't be wasting land, energy, water and labor on producing things that don't get utilized. Even in the most selfish capitalist sensibility, we are wasting money. Yes the energy issue is much bigger than this but wasted energy utilization is part of that problem. I know this is politically fraught, but that should not have any bearing on scholarship. This is just data to add to our understanding.

And also that this study is global, not purely applicable to America. Republicans can exploit outrage with lies to their base, but that isn't such a slam dunk everywhere in the world

New comment by tootie in "The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)"

tootie — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:28:04 +0000

Gift link: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/04/13/t...

New comment by tootie in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

tootie — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:42:45 +0000

I think they missed Uruguay which is a similar case. They have also traditionally benefitted from a hydro able to cover 80-90% most of their needs but they made a concerted effort to fill the entire remaining gap with wind and solar.

New comment by tootie in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

tootie — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:42:50 +0000

Not a question but just wanted to make sure you saw this:

https://theonion.com/anyone-else-have-those-weird-dreams-whe...

New comment by tootie in "Congress Became the Weakest Branch"

tootie — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 03:29:44 +0000

"Eventually" is doing a lot of work. There's no indication we're anywhere near a threshold.

New comment by tootie in "Congress Became the Weakest Branch"

tootie — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:48:49 +0000

I think you're just wrong though. For one, the debt is not our top problem. It's a big one, but not the top. Climate is tops. Dems care about it somewhat and pushed a huge bill through during Biden's term. Republicans don't care at all. Healthcare is another big one. Dems do an ok job, Republicans are terrible. In terms of rule of law, again, Dems do ok and Republicans just wipe their ass with the Constitution. Dems are not strongly asserting their role because they are in the minority. There were many votes to curb tariffs and war powers and they were shot down on party lines. It's also very much the fault of the conservative supreme court who have been ridiculously deferential to Trump and are allowing him to seize unprecedented power. The same conservative justices who voted to allow unlimited corporate campaign spending, who declared the president immune to prosecution, who basically nullified the emoluments clause. And it's not just a question of failed institutions, it's voters who decided to just forgive Jan 6 and reelect a traitor. There's absolutely no "both sides" to this. The right are killing this country. The left are just not saving it fast enough.

New comment by tootie in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

tootie — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:10:14 +0000

Seems like a good time to dust off Trump's policy on POWs

“He’s not a war hero ... I like people who weren’t captured.”

New comment by tootie in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

tootie — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:05:08 +0000

He probably said "no quarter" because it sounds cool and doesn't really know what it means. The most ironic part is how he is an avowed Christian warrior and says "no mercy" when mercy figures pretty prominently in Christianity.

New comment by tootie in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

tootie — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:01:32 +0000

Herschel Walker got 48.6% of the Georgia vote against Warnock. Slightly different in that Walker was a popular football hero in Georgia but he was also clearly mentally incompetent.

New comment by tootie in "The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s"

tootie — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:08:59 +0000

Futurism is the same. It's an appealing concept but the actual Futurist movement was basically just fascist.

New comment by tootie in "OpenAI Acquires TBPN"

tootie — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:37:34 +0000

Conspiracy theory: they recorded a guest with egregious dirt on OpenAI and this money is to bury it. I have no proof and it's implausible but it makes more sense than the stated reasons.

New comment by tootie in "OpenAI Acquires TBPN"

tootie — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:35:50 +0000

Bezos said WaPo would retain independence and it did. For a while. Then he meddled to the point of ruin.

New comment by tootie in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

tootie — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:40:15 +0000

IEA had been predicting 2030 as peak fossil fuel usage up until recently. They revised it back upon Trump's election and shifting policy, but it's possible the Iran War has moved it forward again. Either way, it's within reach.

That being said, peak fossil fuels is the future date at which we are burning more than ever followed by the slow decrease. Meaning we are still accelerating CO2 emissions and even if we emit less, every emission is still cumulative so the march towards actually fixing the climate will only start at peak fossil fuels. We still need to remove all that GHG.

New comment by tootie in "EmDash – A spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security"

tootie — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:39:47 +0000

But "back to CMS roots" is absolutely not what the WordPress ecosystem is about. It's about the absolute galaxy of plugins that provide you with an entire digital experience "in a box". You can just install whatever plugins for ecommerce, CRM, forms management, payments, event calendars. They will all plugin to both the template system and the MySQL database. There are a lot of well-known and reputable plugins with huge installed bases (woocommerce, gravity forms, yoast seo) but there's a ton of shady ones that can infect your install. Cloudflare is directly addressing the shortcomings of the existing plugin architecture indicating they intend for EmDash to fill a similar niche as an All-in-One digital experience and not just a simple CMS.

New comment by tootie in "Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies"

tootie — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:59:50 +0000

3 years is already beating the odds with a stage 4 glioblastoma. It's one of the worst

New comment by tootie in "Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email"

tootie — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:30:34 +0000

We know for a fact that the current DoD are using private Signal messages for coordinating military action. We know they are constantly using private emails. We are sending the president's son-in-law to negotiate with foreign countries despite not being a government employee and also have massive conflicts of interest.