unknownfuture

It is deeply funny to me that my asking a rhetorical question and using a little italics triggered you while "So, you can scream fake news all you want, but..." earned not a single complaint.

Perhaps I just struck a nerve.

Peel an orange? Crack an egg? Thread a needle? (Heh, drive a car...) There's a huge range of tasks that a non-specialized, general purpose robot simply cannot do yet. I'd be easier to enumerate the things they can do than the things they can't given the current state of the art.

Sure, build an orange peeling machine and it'll do great. But that's not what we're talking about here.

As for those demos videos we often see, those are very highly choreographed demonstrations. Show me a real life humanoid robot operating free form on a factor floor and doing those things and I'll be impressed.

And to be clear, this is not meant to understate what's been accomplished. I'm just saying the path for advancement is a lot harder and based in physical rather than computational limitations, which are much harder to overcome and go much slower. We simply cannot look at the growth curve of LLMs and expect robotics to advance at the same rate.

Sure. Those should be addressed, too.

The difference is they already exist while the datacenters don't. And its a lot easier, in a democracy, to stop a thing from being built in the first place than to tear it down after the fact, what with pesky laws about private property and so forth.

Or are you really saying that if we can't solve all water usage problems then we shouldn't solve or prevent any? Is that what you're suggesting?

Yeah but it's all Chinese propaganda so it doesn't count this time. /s

Hard disagree.

The problem is sensors.

There are simply no technologies today that can replicate the density, precision, and versatility of human touch sensors. Until then, there is simply no way to create generally capable robots that can operate at the level of a human.

And unlike LLMs, advancement is held back by physical limitations like materials science, so progress has been and will continue to be much slower.

It's an observation about prevailing libertarian values in the HN community that tend to attract upvotes while going unchallenged.

If you consider that part of a "culture war", then it seems that term has lost all meaning. Might as well just accuse me of being "woke" and get it over with.

I think you're being oversensitive or just looking for a fight if you detect even a hint of "culture war talking points" in my comment.

And further, if the goal is to eliminate regulatory frictions in public markets that keep companies staying private, then you're effectively advocating for eliminating public markets.

The entire damn deal we make when a company goes public is that the company can raise money from a much broader, potentially less sophisticated investor base that don't have to be accredited, etc, and in exchange there are more stringent requirements around reporting and so forth.

So sure, we could just throw away that regulatory and social contract, but at that point the public market serves no purpose.

> The increase in regulations, post GFC, made it impractical/impossible for small companies to go public.

Care to be more specific? "Regulations bad" is a pretty common platitude around here but you've stated your main thesis, here, without a hint of support to back it.

My observation is that the glut of available private credit has meant for at least 15 years you could just raise funds from those markets, and that's the ultimate reason IPOs have become less common.

This hasn't made it "impossible" for companies to go public. It just eliminated the need. If you can raise billions of dollars in a G round why go to the public markets at all?

Maybe first define "participating" and then perhaps I'll respond.

Because if this a case of "well you use a computer so you're part of the system, man" then I probably won't waste my time. Cynical fatalism usually involves moving goalposts IME.

Sure. Who doesn't love 10 episode seasons every three years that are regularly and unceremoniously cancelled whenever the algorithm says so. I know folks in the industry absolutely love the total lack of job security...