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@futurebird

It's time for nanobots! Have any attempts been made with robotics?

@illumniscate

If we could make a tiny robot with 1/100th the dexterity and elegance of motion of an ant it would change the world.

They are remarkable and nothing we've made comes close at all. I can't stress this enough... all those little flying robots and tiny motors are clunky and clumsy when compared to any random ant.

Robotics is hard and we have not made as much progress as some would pretend.

@illumniscate

I urge you, and everyone, especially the students I coach in robotics to watch, really watch, how ants move and manipulate their environment. Watch them and consider how many servos and stepper motors you'd need to do anything close.

Watch how the mandibles carry a larvae without harming its soft skin. Watch how she tears a cricket limb for limb with the same jaws.

Watch the way the two tarsal claws adjust allowing her to walk on glass upside down.

@illumniscate

This is why when Elon claimed he'd have a robot walking like a person bringing you drinks I was disgusted.

I was disgusted anyone took it seriously at all. Why do people think robots are easy and solving such mechanical problems is something we already know how to do?

There is some kind of vast mental category error occurring in the minds of many people that they'd even consider such a thing possible.

@futurebird @illumniscate There was a burst of this kind of hype back in the late 1970s, probably because Star Wars had made people interested in robots. Lots of people hawking commercial robots, which tended to be simple toys, though some had interesting hobbyist features... but also conmen saying we'd have really capable home servant robots soon, and doing extravagant faked demos of products they claimed would soon hit the market.

@futurebird @illumniscate i remember this outfit called Quasar Industries (no relation to the home electronics brand, though I'm sure they intended the confusion) that kept demonstrating this hulking conical "robot" with a spherical head, sometimes called Klatu. It was going to be able to cook and clean and hold conversations. Of course the demos were fake, they had a remote controlled chassis with people running the motions and the voice. But this thing kept getting hype sporadically into the 80s.

@futurebird @illumniscate of course I was a kid at the time and mostly heard about this through uncritical secondhand reports in kids' media, so it was one of those things where the stories disappear after a while and you idly wonder what was up with that decades later.

@mattmcirvin @futurebird @illumniscate

in retrospect, the science-for-kids stuff of the 1970s-1980s was highly credulous. Well, even before then, and presumably after then as well.

I do recall a few exceptions; that episode of _The Bloodhound Gang_ where the young black woman was sure the "superheavy white dwarf" meteorite being auctioned really, actually, couldn't be any such thing ... : )

@llewelly @futurebird @illumniscate People wondering what happened to the old shiny future we were promised almost always underestimate the extent to which the promises were bullshit. Elon Musk is about my age and every single thing he talks up is some element of that genre of "World of Tomorrow" hype from the years around 1980. You could go through an Omni magazine and just tick them off.

@llewelly @futurebird @illumniscate and now he's in with goons who are scrubbing government science databases for wrongthink, which just shows you how much he cares about the process that makes any technical progress worth talking about.

@mattmcirvin @llewelly @illumniscate

About 10 years ago we took the train out to CA to visit a close childhood friend of my husband. He was the kind of guy really into tech and was so excited to show off his new Tesla to us. This was right about the time when people on the left were growing sour on Elon. I remember him asking me, as he considered me to be "the left" what I thought of all the mean things people were saying about Mr. Musk.

I remember not wanting to hurt his feelings.

@mattmcirvin @llewelly @illumniscate

But, I'm bad at white lies. So, I told him that I thought the many critics had some points. But, also that electric cars seemed very "neato" which was also the truth.

"I just think people are blowing things out of proportion, could he really be that bad of a guy? Some people are saying he's racist!"

You know? I wish I'd been wrong. It's not a argument its served anyone well for me to have won.

But, I was right. For the little that is worth.

@mattmcirvin @llewelly @illumniscate

I remember looking at the big screen in that car as we rode around the city with the guy gushing about all of the many features of the Tesla. It seemed dangerous to me, to have a big screen in a car you had to look away from the road to see. I held on to the seat and hoped I survive.

@futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate Tesla's touchscreen-only dashboard design was always terrible and I think it was just a way of reducing manufacturing cost at the expense of design and safety.

@mattmcirvin @llewelly @illumniscate

It looked like a cheap gaming PC monitor turned on its side. Very janky vibes.

@asakiyume

@futurebird @mattmcirvin @llewelly @illumniscate

Before that cave rescue episode in 2018 I admired him for SpaceX stuff, and that's really all I knew about him.That comment was the first clue I had about who he really was.

I thought perhaps he knew something I didn't or had a bad day - still made excuses. I forget what followed, but in '22 I left Twitter, so...

I think no other public figure has gone from high to so low in my estimation.

@faassen@fosstodon.org @asakiyume@wandering.shop @futurebird@sauropods.win @mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz @llewelly@sauropods.win @illumniscate@mastodon.education
I remember watching a vid of one of the SpaceX launches made by one of the people "chosen" to go to Mars, cheering as the engines began to malfunction and then caused the rocket to explode.

Critical thinking is important.

@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate This distinction between science-as-Promethean-wizardry, and *actual* science, which is usually boring and stodgy and about rigorously questioning your own ideas and not fooling yourself... not too long ago I read Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and was shocked to discover that it had a bit that was all about that, written by a practical kid in 1818. She had these people's number.

@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate You can read "Frankenstein" as, basically, what would happen if one of these cranks who find scientific method too boring somehow actually hit on a world-shaking accomplishment, and managed it in the way they do things? Oh, God, it wouldn't be good.

@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate People usually assume the story is just a "science goes too far and plays God" narrative but it's a lot more subtle and complex than that. Victor Frankenstein is this pampered heir who has been raised in the most sheltered environment imaginable, has never experienced anyone telling him no, and is really pissed off when he goes to university and learns that science tells you no a lot. Who is this gross ugly troll of a professor telling me no? I want beauty and ultimate forbidden knowledge and a world that tells me yes!

So he goes off on his own and in a more realistic scenario, he'd just fail utterly, but what if, what if... (Mary Shelley had already internalized the "one free assumption" rule of science fiction.)

@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate And then, through some means the book carefully declines to tell us, he actually creates an honest-to-God sentient being, the marvel of the ages... but just because the *look* of the thing creeps him out, he casts out this functional newborn baby with the brain and body of a grown man and leaves it to die, instead of giving it the parental love and guidance it obviously needs. And everything follows.

@dalias @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate there are a lot of clever takes about how wisdom is realizing that Frankenstein *is* the monster, and he is, but really the Creature is a monster too, very like Frankenstein in some ways. It's just that the Creature got there by being rejected and feared by the whole world, whereas Frankenstein had the opposite.

@irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @dalias @mattmcirvin

trouble is, there's heavy overlap between these 3 types. More than half the linux nerds I knew personally went so far off the blockchain deep end that even the gentlest criticism of anything cryptocurrency-based results in instant hostility.

@llewelly @irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @mattmcirvin I think the classification was unclear, but group 3 should be the people who actually understand, architect & make stuff rather than make using it their personality.

@mattmcirvin @irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @dalias

that's a fair point. I should not have used "crypto" with their meaning. I will go back and edit my comment.

@mattmcirvin @irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @dalias

I don't think I ever had a coding job in where I wasn't made to feel alone in believing global warming was a serious problem. Not even in Silly Con Valley. And I have met plenty of seriously capable programmers who think evolution is a hoax.

@llewelly @irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @dalias The scene is a bit different in the Northeast--I think the people who buy the whole libertarian package are a minority, though they're definitely there.

@mattmcirvin @irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @dalias

I think I can safely say the only difference between working in Utah and working in silly con valley is that I never had a paycheck bounce while in Silly Con Valley. Oh, and I never had an employer suddenly stop providing health insurance.

@llewelly @irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @dalias though there were times when the job market was hotter in the West I have never regretted not going.

@mattmcirvin @irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @dalias

1/2
I had an interview in NYC in the early 2000s. At some point in the late afternoon, I explained to them was that my biggest worry was I had no idea how to find an apartment in NYC. They completely could not understand how I was having any difficulties. We went round and round in circles about it until after dark, and I never figured it out, and had to turn down their offer because I had no idea how to find housing in NYC.

@mattmcirvin @irelephant @futurebird @illumniscate @dalias

2/2
I also didn't have a car, and despite NYC being apparently designed for living without a car, it sure seemed awfully difficult to move there without a car. And I had two younger brothers who didn't have jobs, who were dependent on me paying the rent where we lived at the time, and I don't know what I would have done about that either.

@llewelly @mattmcirvin @illumniscate

Omni makes me think about how they managed to talk about sex bots an awful lot for a publication that tried to be so dour and serious. And how bashful and cheeky and thinly veiled all such speculations were.

I remember some really off-putting "sexy robot woman" illustrations making me think "this is very silly and a little pathetic and desperate" and still being a child.

@futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate It was Bob Guccione! A friend of mine pointed out a lot of it was the same content as Penthouse just without the explicit porn, just porn-adjacent stuff.

@futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate Yeah, they had a section called "Antimatter" that was ALL pseudoscience/paranormal crap, and feature articles on it. Lots of alt-medicine type hype, too. At one point they spun off a magazine called "Longevity" that was JUST stuff that was going to make you immortal. Which makes me think of Peter Thiel and his obsession with conquering death.

@futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate (let me register offense at calling the paranormal section "Antimatter" on behalf of antimatter, a thoroughly legit and stodgy physical phenomenon, albeit one that seems to attract this kind of attention. One my late uncle asked me if I "believed in antimatter". I told him I'd worked with the stuff, if only in lab courses, and he said he'd gotten that response from someone else too. I mean, they use it in medical imaging. But it still seems to be the kind of thing that people wonder about belief in.)

@mattmcirvin @futurebird @illumniscate
in retrospect, it's surprising that section wasn't called "Quantums". : ) A stroke of luck, maybe.

@mattmcirvin @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate

To some extent, OMNI spawned Mondo2000 (coparented with bOING bOING), which spawned Wired. It went from their first issue manifesto about it being about art and people that/who used emerging technologies, and then became about IPOs once it became Condé Nast.

This descent from creativity and hope into frangible money purchasing is how we got Stupid Future.

@JoshuaACNewman @futurebird @llewelly @illumniscate Everything countercultural can be productized and sold back to us for profit; the entertainment industry figured that out long ago. You can ride it productively for a while but eventually the life gets sucked out of the trend.

@mattmcirvin @futurebird @illumniscate
there were some of those segments I really liked, and some I really didn't. But I lived in a house with no tv, and it seemed like anything educational was exactly the kind of thing that people who had tvs never wanted to watch. TV owners would watch all manner of terribly boring garbage, and then respond with hatred when I wanted to watch something like 3-2-1 Contact. If I had been able to watch it regularly, I'd have felt differently.

@llewelly @futurebird @illumniscate I was the kid who watched them. I loved the whole PBS afternoon block of kids' shows, watched them from toddler age: Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, The Electric Company (which I am convinced taught me to read), and some fourth show aimed at slightly older kids whose identity varied--it was the crowdsourced WGBH variety show ZOOM for a while, based on viewer-submitted content. 3-2-1 Contact was a bit later. Square One Television, the math show, was after my time.

I watched a lot of Saturday morning garbage on the commercial networks too, but I could tell that PBS stuff was gold. Of course conservatives always wanted to kill it.

@mattmcirvin @llewelly @futurebird @illumniscate : I loved Square One; even though I was a bit old for it, I watched it with my younger sister. Contrary to your opinion of the Bloodhound Gang, we liked the Mathnet segments best. (Lots of running gags that I got and my sister didn't, but she liked it them anyway.)

@JorgeStolfi @futurebird @illumniscate When I was going down a rabbit hole reminiscing about old calculators and "pocket computers", I learned that Casio sold a dedicated pocket Lisp machine in Japan in 1989-- surely the only moment in history that such a thing could have been a thing:

https://youtu.be/H-yuZ2pejGU?si=BiYFPPspdfS90kBa