“If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you.”
— James N. Mattis
Joseph McGrail-Bateup, an honorary town crier in Australia's Canberra, has been recognized as the world’s loudest person. Guinness World Records acknowledged the 58-year-old recorded the loudest ever shout by an individual. He yelled ‘now’ at 122.4 decibels.
Printers never work because they are an affront to God. Man was not meant to pull objects from the digital realm into the real world. Icarus is flying too close to the sun.
Here's something I don't understand.
The writing is on the wall, right? To me it's so clear where all of this is going.
Why isn't Pep Boys offering bonuses to all of their employees willing to wear a camera like this and narrate what they're doing as they repair a vehicle.
Midas or another auto repair shop could even make a special glove or something like the MoCap companies do to capture really fine articulation.
Shouldn't every automotive service center be doing this?
Don't they know that with enough data they can completely automate maintenance in perpetuity? They have to know this, right?
Why doesn't McDonald's or In N Out offer cash bonuses to exemplary employees to generate this kind of episodic training data?
You could say that it's dystopian, that no one wants to automate their job away, but you can't convince me that these companies care about that. If McDonald's could build a completely automated franchise they would--they've already been doing the automated kiosk ordering for a long time, directly automating the most customer-facing "human touch" surface before they touched the back.
Do they not know they can do this?
Companies like Garmin and Jeppesen are sitting on years, maybe decades, of meticulously annotated data. Every month the FAA publishes charts that they have painstakingly merged into GPS maps for their flying apps. I mean they *already* have the data!
And if they don't all they need to do is start saving it after each chart update. Have they not heard?
Google/Alphabet has invested, what? Hundreds of millions? Maybe billions? Into Waymo. It's working, *amazingly*. Anyone looking at this can say "wow, these cars can drive themselves."
Are caterpillar, case, and John Deere looking into this? I haven't seen any announcements, any demos, any invitations to participate in early access programs. I know a lot of people in construction and real estate, and I haven't heard anything about this.
Developers like KB homes literally build the same set of floorplans all over the country, again and again and again. Have they invested even a dollar into motion tracking gloves and cameras for their carpenters and tradespeople to gather training data to automate home building?
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
I know the robots aren't there yet. I know that. Everyone knows that. But it's *so* clear they will be. It's crystal clear that the only bottleneck will be training data.
Why is all of the investment so limited? Where is the vision?
Do they not know? Can someone talk to them and tell them what's coming? It seems to me if you're a big company NOT in tech and NOT in AI this is your big chance.
In the time after the dot com bubble giants like sears roebuck were undone by their arrogance. Or maybe their ignorance? They were unable, or unwilling, to offer online services to compliment their retail offerings. Sears got eaten alive by Amazon. Blockbuster by Netflix. Everyone knows these stories!
Companies like FedEx and Charles Schwab that started offering internet services early survived, and thrived even. Do they even teach this stuff in business school?? Idk but it feels like they should.
I should think if I'm in the C-Suite of some massive national company that changes tires or refurbishes HVAC units or some such "real world" task I would be intensely interested in making sure I don't get displaced in 10 years by some punk who figured out how to get a robot to do it.
I should think if I run a surveying company or a digital chart app for pilots that I would want to automate as much of the data processing pipeline as I can with existing computer vision technology and be as prepared as possible to take advantage of the leaps still to come.
I might, if I was forward looking, I might even try to be at the forefront of those leaps, recognizing that my business is in a particularly advantaged position to collect the required training data.
I might even try to work out a deal with the frontier labs to get *them* to pay for outfitting my workforce with the gear required to create training data from our day-to-day operations and get them to license us free access to the resulting models in perpetuity.
Are they trying to do this? I hear of people selling datasets for millions of dollars, but the last time I want to Midas, I didn't see anyone wearing a headset in the garage.
This is to say NOTHING about organizations being so slow to adopt technology that already works today!! If you look up "Data Entry" jobs you see thousands of results. Now, some of them are actually, in truth, data annotation jobs. These companies know what's up.
BUT. Thousands of these are spreadsheet monkey jobs. HELLOOOO! THAT is a job for Chat GPT. Right here, right now, no advances necessary.
Do they not know?? Have they not heard???!>!
I don't understand how millions, billions, I'm told even trillions of dollars are being poured into this area of AI, automation, and robotics, and NO ONE seems to be working on a "General vehicle diagnostics and repair" data set.
What is going on??
In the old USSR, people could be arrested for photographing bridges, tunnels, etc. A repressive and paranoid regime assumed the photographers must be spies and saboteurs. Americans laughed at such petty tyranny. Nothing like that could happen in their free country! Until now.
Man you look at the shit the USSR was doing out of sheer will in the 1980s despite slowly falling apart and being largely isolated by the West. It really feels like a lost civilization.
A single gram of antimatter costs about $62.5 trillion to make. That is roughly half of everything the world economy makes in a year, for one gram. Reaching the nearest star would take hundreds of thousands of tons of it.
Antimatter packs more energy per ounce than anything else. A normal rocket barely turns any of its fuel's weight into energy, less than a billionth of it. Nuclear fission, the reaction inside a power plant, releases about 0.1 percent of its fuel as energy. Fusion, the reaction in the sun, reaches 0.7 percent. Matter meeting antimatter converts almost all of it. Per pound, that is about ten billion times the energy in rocket fuel. Nothing else we know of could push a ship to a fraction of the speed of light.
Speed is the whole point. The nearest star sits 4.2 light years away. Voyager 1, the fastest object we have ever launched, would need about 70,000 years to get there. An antimatter ship could make the trip in a few decades. Closer to home, it could reach Pluto in weeks instead of the 9.5 years the New Horizons probe actually took.
The price comes from how antimatter gets made. You cannot mine it. It is built one particle at a time in machines like the collider at CERN in Geneva. Every scrap humanity has ever made adds up to under 20 nanograms, enough to light a 100 watt bulb for a few seconds. At the current rate, a single gram would take about 100 billion years. The universe is 13.8 billion years old.
So the dollar figure is just multiplication. A 2003 NASA design figured that a crewed ship fast enough to reach the nearest star in 40 years would need roughly 815,000 tons of antimatter. At today's price, that bill lands past 50 trillion-times-a-trillion dollars. The number in the tweet is, if anything, on the low side.
The price tag is really a yardstick. It measures the distance between making antimatter one particle at a time, the way we do now, and making it by the ton. The obstacle is closing that distance. The dollar figure is just what that gap costs.
In 2023, researchers in a deep-sea submersible west of Australia came across several whale skeletons 2400 meters deeper than had ever been described.
As the expedition continued, the scientists found an unprecedented abundance of skeletons—the biggest, deepest, and oldest collection ever seen on the sea floor.
Learn more: https://t.co/erashDTYrQ @NewsfromScience
Its tragic that Germans, of all peoples, got to live, however briefly, in such a society. Nobody on earth deserved it less, and yet its still devestating that they had it torn from their grasp.