Echo Dot

I think we can do even better so it’s interesting that we decided our bodies were the pinnacle of biology and technology.

It’s not that we think the human form is the optimum, it is simply that we don’t want to have to modify human accessible areas for robots, partially because this increases the cost of automation and also partly because we need the environments to still be human accessible. In environments where you will only have robots, then the robots have freedom to be whatever design we want, but a general purpose robot needs to exist in a human-built environment, an environment with things like stairs, lips on curbsides, and boxes with handles designed for human hands. There are videos out there with the spot robot trying to do something simple like open a door with its weird giraffe neck arm thing, it’s not graceful and it’s not quick, because it is interacting with an object that was not designed with it’s body shape. It is much easier to build a human-shaped robot than it is to redesign all doors to have an interface to allow a robot of any arbitrary shape to operate it.

Also aesthetics do matter, if humans are going to be interacting with these robots they need to look like something that’s at least sort of friendly, if it looks like a multi limbed weird techno spider no one’s going to want to interact with them.

That is a weird take.

The robots are human shaped because the human shape is a good shape to be to interact with our environment. And environment that by definition has been designed to interact with human shapes.

They are implementing AI at work next week. I’m super excited to see how wrong it goes.

Yeah but when the AI overlords are writing up their kill list I’m not going to be at the top of it am I. Because I’m polite.

The drones used in Ukraine are basically just commercial drones with grenades strapped to them. And a 1 km distance they’re unlikely to be able to damage a target even if they detonated.

Warzone’s always the best environment to test new battlefield systems.

Look at the difference in technology between the beginning of the first world war and the end. We started off with essentially standing in fields shooting each other over distances you could spit, and ended up with tanks. The second world war gave us nukes.

Will probably have AGI battle droids by the end of this war.

Exactly, blockchain technology doesn’t do anything to prevent people from just straight up lying. I’ve heard people suggest that blockchain could be used to create a distributed Wikipedia, and somehow it would be immune to trolls because “blockchain”.

Also blockchain is susceptible to something called a 51% attack, where if you can compromise more than half of all of the nodes then the illegitimate version becomes the trusted version over the legitimate version, without ever having to compromise the original version, (because 51% of the vote is 100% of the control). The only reason that doesn’t really happen with cryptocurrencies is that there are so many people who use cryptocurrencies that the numbers required to pull off at 51% attack would be unachievable even for a nation state.

However I can’t believe that this database would be anywhere near that distributed so a committed actor could very well achieve a 51% attack.

It’s not as if other nation states don’t maintain their own versions of this anyway (it would be stupid to trust the United States exclusively even if it weren’t for Trump), as do a lot of the cyber security companies. So it’s not really a problem anyway.

It’s not even just about shoving AI into everything. That would be bad enough but this feature is literally useless, and it isn’t as if Microsoft doesn’t have a plethora of other features people want them to work on.

How about inventing Windows airdrop? Or spend some time unifying the UI so it doesn’t all look like it was developed by two separate teams working independently. Nah, let’s just build some spy software.

Hell I’d even accept them spending some time making a non-shit version of Teams

I don’t really understand who this is even aimed at. Anyone who needs to keep records of their work to refer back to already uses some kind of record keeping system such as version control or ticket creation. When I’m doing that I don’t need to keep a record of all of the ancillary actions I’m doing.

Web browsers have history, files can be reverted to previous versions in Windows already, as I said version control software exists (Github is even owned by Microsoft) and there is already software such as Shadow play.

Who exactly is going to be using Recall that doesn’t already have a perfectly good, and actually dedicated, solution in place?

That’s an easy problem to solve you just hash the database. Blockchain is good at solving the problem when you don’t have a reliable central authority but if you do have a reliable central authority there’s no point adding blockchain to it.

And we already have the reliable central authority, we have the original database.

Right but the planets being in particular locations in the sky doesn’t really result in astrologists saying a particular thing is going to happen. They basically just make something up and then decide that’s what the planet says. They could basically just ignore the positions of the planet and it wouldn’t really make any difference.

Otherwise history would repeat every couple of decades.

Yeah and the director of the FBI sells guy healing crystals.

Oh yes blockchain the solution to the world’s problem. Provided the world’s problem is that the current solution works too well and we don’t like that.

We need to back this data up but that doesn’t require anything anywhere near as complicated and over-engineered as blockchain, we can just have something as simple as multiple servers.

I’ve seen code where all the comments were simply URL references to tickets on a now deleted Trello board. Great, real helpful thanks.

Right but my point is they would just submit the request to the host server. If the original is taken down then all the federated service will lose the comments as well.

If the host server just straight up ignores turkey then they’ll block all servers that host Mastodon and say mastered on is a rogue element. Better you just remove the offending comment

Blue Sky isn’t in a country that is closely allied with turkey. They could have totally ignored these requests but then Blue Sky would have just been banned in Turkey

I sort of feel like that’s not really relevant. How would being decentralised make any difference, the government would just go after the server owners regardless of who they are. If the server owners didn’t honour the takedown requests turkey would just ban the server IP and no one would be able to access.

Federation isn’t a solution to every problem

In fairness they probably don’t actually know that. They’re obsessed with AKs for example but most Americans probably don’t know where they’re from.

If anything the US is now second world given the tenancy to bend the knee to Putin.

It is however extremely expensive.