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?
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.
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.
What task do you think that humanoid robots can't do? Also, we don't need fully equivalent touch to get useful performance.
If you look you will see a really broad range of tasks accomplished already, including thing like manipulating screws, picking up pills, inserting wire harnesses, folding clothes, putting away dishes. And there are several companies with built in or component advanced touch sensors like Figure or leading edge touch sensor companies like SynTouch and GelSight.
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.
peeling an orange and cracking an egg already demonstrated. Figure 02 worked on BMW's actual Spartanburg production line for about 1,250 hours running 10-hour shifts.
keep paying attention, you will see how wrong you are about it being physical limitations as the physical AI continues to rapidly improve.
> 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?
They're poking at SOX and Dodd-Frank I think, but it's a bit of a specious argument, in my opinion the rise of massive private equity (plus the absurd market orientation around short term results) is more of the story, as you say.
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.
Sure. SOX reg sec 302 and 404. Section 302 is a 100% dealbreaker for most companies, so I stand by my 'impossible' threshold. My comment was simply shorthand for all the upfront and downstream costs of going public, combined with fewer exit alternatives. Auditor/directors increased/personal liability, litigious shareholders, time and attention of management, etc. And, to your point, the lower cost of capital from growth investors. But that wasn't always the case. Certainly not true during the dot-com bubble (pre-SOX). I'll leave it to the academics to try to and isolate causality.
Sarbanes-Oxley passed in 2002 and the number if IPOs climbed between then, in the wake of the dot-com crash, and the GFC six year later, while the median age didn't change much:
If your claim was true you'd either expect a decline in IPOs or the age of those companies going up and neither is true during that period.
Now to be clear I'm not saying changes in regulation had no impact. Rather my claim is that regulations plus monetary policy and other macro effects fundamentally changed the structure of the market itself, thereby deincentivizing going public, rather than somehow acting as a break or barrier to IPOs.
Seriously? The "you can't knowingly lie in your financial statements, and you have to make an actual effort when compiling them" section?
If that's a "100% dealbreaker" to you, nobody should ever invest in your company, because you are literally complaining about not being able to defraud them!
There's no strong consensus, but there's weak consensus that post-GFC regulation is a factor behind but is not causal in any way, for the decrease in IPOs. Here's a paper [1] (well it's the paper author discussing his paywalled paper lol) exploring SOX regulations and their effects on IPOs. There's other papers and I think a good survey will help you on this topic. I don't think there's consensus on regulations being the causal factor, but it is one of many.
I thought GP was modest in calling it out as simply a contributing factor. Regulation is complicated and reaching for it should be something done with care.
(Also FWIW, I think you're being a bit cheap by appealing to culture war talking points.)
It's hard for me to read '"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.' as anything more than that.
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 this forum has a lot of values and don't think it's been libertarian in outlook in a long time based on what gets upvoted here so appealing to that is a bit silly but anyway I don't think this is a fruitful conversation so have a good day.
I think we're running into (or at least pretty close to) a Two Guys Fallacy here:
There's still a strong libertarian streak in HN posters, in a variety of ways.
However, there are also (mostly) different posters who have more vocally shifted the site's Overton window to the left.
These days, I find it fairly common to, for instance, make a comment that points out the very obvious problems the Republican Party has created in recent years, get downvoted to -3, and then upvoted to +5 (or vice versa), all within a few hours. This would suggest that there are contingents of posters (or at least voters!) in both camps.
I generally operate with the understanding that HN today has lots of groups, with an overall "left" lean (as much as anyone can flatten politics into a single axis.) Libertarians, leftists, liberals, nationalists, everyone is here. Appealing to one "enemy" group strikes me as a cheap blow; it's sure to increase engagement for your post with little added discourse value. IMHO at least.
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...
Making things previously impossible possible? That's the business I joined.
Destroying people's livelihoods without care for the consequences while pursuing monopolies, capturing the value as rent seekers, and ultimately enshittifying entire industries?
Yeah, no, I know I didn't sign up for that, thanks.
And if you're thinking "wait that's not AI". Yes. That's precisely what these companies are trying to do.
That's honorable, but software has been used in no small way to disrupt traditional business. Uber. Doordash. Netflix. Tesla. Airbnb. Zillow. And yes, AI is coming for another round.
It's a part of the culture. You can say that isn't what you signed up for, but I find it hard to believe that you don't know it's part of the culture you're participating in, which is the "we" here.
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.
Survivorship bias. My own experience is that the jerks self-select out because no one wants to work for them.
That said, in the entrepreneurial space it's less clear to me this is true. In a team setting? Sure. But the C-suite of a business isn't necessarily a team sport and a lot of wildly successful CEOs are notoriously pieces of shit including Gates, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, and many others.
It's downvoted because it reads as though IBM made a mistake the commenter thinks they should've never made, as opposed to a mistake from IBMs perspective given their business strategy at the time.
That is, it appears to tacitly agree with, and chide IBM for failing to defended, closed, walled-garden ecosystems.
That's certainly not what it seems they meant. It's just how one might initially read it and downvote.
It was certainly a mistake to base the original IBM PC hardware design in easily obtained electronics, and hope the BIOS copyright would be enough to hold out clones, unlike previous IBM hardware.
But it's not their mistake at all there is nothing they could do, companies went out there and reversed engineered BIOS. They couldn't possibly stop them.
I wouldn't characterize that as sloppy or buggy in any way (though certainly that is also true for some games). Exploiting hardware in new and novel ways was an essential part of developing for older consoles.
This is something someone only familiar with writing code for general purpose devices or higher level languages can't imagine. But when you're building for one very specific hardware platform you can tailor your code to that platform in ways that simply aren't possible when building for portability.
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?
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