"How will an LLM change the bedpans in the nursing home?""Oh.
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@dingodog19 @futurebird @mxchara or looked at the cost of even a single stepper motor
I'm mostly a school teacher and hobbyist. I was very excited about home automation and one of my more naive early projects was to make it so I could open and close the windows of my apartment via the internet. Then I could make algorithms and save on AC by switching dynamically to open windows based on the wind outside, time of day, humidity and temperature.
If you know about windows or motors you are seeing the big flaw and the real problem already.
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I'm mostly a school teacher and hobbyist. I was very excited about home automation and one of my more naive early projects was to make it so I could open and close the windows of my apartment via the internet. Then I could make algorithms and save on AC by switching dynamically to open windows based on the wind outside, time of day, humidity and temperature.
If you know about windows or motors you are seeing the big flaw and the real problem already.
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But knowing nothing (this was 15 years ago) I thought "I just need to find a motor that can open and close each window and set it up with wifi and hook it into my self-built home automation system.
Do you know how HARD it is to open an window? If you want to open it the way that people do, you need a motor that does not exist. There are systems that can replace the pulleys, but they aren't cheap and installing them is no joke.
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But knowing nothing (this was 15 years ago) I thought "I just need to find a motor that can open and close each window and set it up with wifi and hook it into my self-built home automation system.
Do you know how HARD it is to open an window? If you want to open it the way that people do, you need a motor that does not exist. There are systems that can replace the pulleys, but they aren't cheap and installing them is no joke.
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I thought "get a motor to open the window" was a simple matter. It was not. The best solution seemed to involve changing the whole way windows were designed, so that less expensive motors could reliably open and close the system.
A good home aid will notice that a room is stuffy and open the window. Close it when it rains. This isn't their main job function. It's just an extra thing that most "robots" can't do.
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I thought "get a motor to open the window" was a simple matter. It was not. The best solution seemed to involve changing the whole way windows were designed, so that less expensive motors could reliably open and close the system.
A good home aid will notice that a room is stuffy and open the window. Close it when it rains. This isn't their main job function. It's just an extra thing that most "robots" can't do.
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When it came to home automation I had much more luck with automatic watering systems for plants. Turning water on and off is something you can do, and it can be very powerful.
Since I'm rebooting my roof garden I'm making a new watering system now.
Automation can be very hit or miss. Some "easy" tasks are hard.
Opening a window? It's a big deal.
4/4
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@Taco_lad @cinebox @dingodog19 @mxchara
It turns out many windows are designed to be hard to open so that ... people don't rob you. And our windows are old.
It might have been easier with newer windows, but I would need to replace all of the windows. OR make ugly 3D printed inserts that I could control. (I considered this, but it was too ... solarpunk in a bad way)
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When it came to home automation I had much more luck with automatic watering systems for plants. Turning water on and off is something you can do, and it can be very powerful.
Since I'm rebooting my roof garden I'm making a new watering system now.
Automation can be very hit or miss. Some "easy" tasks are hard.
Opening a window? It's a big deal.
4/4
@futurebird creating a remote watering system is on the todo list for my "new" house, but a bit below, getting a new roof and fix the cimney
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@lienrag @futurebird
Mind you, some of the demos are quite impressive, even as we know that they're probably rigged and certainly carefully choreographed to stay within the envelope of current capabilities@sabik @lienrag @futurebird Let me know when they can tell whether a container full of piss is at risk of sloshing over?
(the wu shu's all very nice but having done a little myself it's not telling me the right things about a robot to know whether it can do all the other things I learned from chinese martial arts generally)
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@futurebird I like robots too (well the idea of them, with genuinely independent intelligence and personality) but it's very difficult to imagine the current crowd of tech boys to come up with anything better than dubious toys for military and police use (and they'll spend public money on anything)
@mxchara @futurebird
You want R. Daneel, C3P0, or Robbie; they'll give you Terminator -
@sabik @lienrag @futurebird Let me know when they can tell whether a container full of piss is at risk of sloshing over?
(the wu shu's all very nice but having done a little myself it's not telling me the right things about a robot to know whether it can do all the other things I learned from chinese martial arts generally)
@flippac @lienrag @futurebird
I mean, you can see that the ones with the nunchucks just wave them about and never catch themAll it really shows is bipedal balance
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When it came to home automation I had much more luck with automatic watering systems for plants. Turning water on and off is something you can do, and it can be very powerful.
Since I'm rebooting my roof garden I'm making a new watering system now.
Automation can be very hit or miss. Some "easy" tasks are hard.
Opening a window? It's a big deal.
4/4
@futurebird Yeah I watched a video involving an automatic ventilation system recently and they used louver units designed to be remotely open and closed. Typical windows are impossible for inexpensive motors, and you'd have to put some ugly mods on the window to make it doable for expensive ones.
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@flippac @lienrag @futurebird
I mean, you can see that the ones with the nunchucks just wave them about and never catch themAll it really shows is bipedal balance
@sabik @lienrag @futurebird There's subtly more in the the sequence that appears to involve an actual contract drill towards the end, but only in the sense that the human performers get the job of making it look good (and we wouldn't see if any of them got a bruised arm doing it!)
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@flippac @lienrag @futurebird
I mean, you can see that the ones with the nunchucks just wave them about and never catch themAll it really shows is bipedal balance
Bipedal balence is impressive. I'm impressed with the ankle joins. ankle and wrist like joints are hard.
Though the feet do not flex which means these robots cannot really walk the way that humans do. Foot flex is so powerful and subtile.
Most animals have that joint much higher up, what do we get by making it so short? (it's not nothing. )
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"We have a design for a robot, but the parts needed to build it do not exist. We need to use the LLM to design those too now."
Real things people have said.
@futurebird @mxchara At least the space elevator wasn't in the context of a space bubble!
(it's genuine hypothetical engineering, but also the context "unobtanium" was coined in...)
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@sabik @lienrag @futurebird There's subtly more in the the sequence that appears to involve an actual contract drill towards the end, but only in the sense that the human performers get the job of making it look good (and we wouldn't see if any of them got a bruised arm doing it!)
Yeah, remembering how a top Chinese gymnast broke her neck¹ while preparing for an impressive show like that (and was basically left to fend by herself by the government), I wonder how many children were wounded during training...
¹IIRC ? at least her spine, as she ended completely and irremediably paralyzed
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Yeah, remembering how a top Chinese gymnast broke her neck¹ while preparing for an impressive show like that (and was basically left to fend by herself by the government), I wonder how many children were wounded during training...
¹IIRC ? at least her spine, as she ended completely and irremediably paralyzed
@lienrag @sabik @futurebird There's a reason the last time I was asked to demonstrate something I'd done a handful of times in my 20s, I said no!
(butterfly kicks are, at the very least, for people who are still actively training)
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@sabik @lienrag @futurebird There's subtly more in the the sequence that appears to involve an actual contract drill towards the end, but only in the sense that the human performers get the job of making it look good (and we wouldn't see if any of them got a bruised arm doing it!)
@flippac @lienrag @futurebird
The human performers are doing a lot -
@flippac @lienrag @futurebird
The human performers are doing a lot@sabik @lienrag @futurebird yep, the other sort-of-interactive sequence with the poles I legit couldn't tell how good the bots really were
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When it came to home automation I had much more luck with automatic watering systems for plants. Turning water on and off is something you can do, and it can be very powerful.
Since I'm rebooting my roof garden I'm making a new watering system now.
Automation can be very hit or miss. Some "easy" tasks are hard.
Opening a window? It's a big deal.
4/4
@futurebird @cinebox @dingodog19 @mxchara
We experimented with a window "robot". No messing with cords, just 3d prints to mount a long threaded rod driven by a motor that lifted/pulled down the shade.
When we finally got it all rigged up the kid and I got to learn about thread pitch and how glacially slow it moved the shade. The setup was fine for a 3d printer's Z axis, not so much for a 3' tall shade. -
@futurebird It's so great that we've got all these helpful robots taking places in care homes now!
@darkling I was creeped out by our news showing a robot powered by an genAI chatbot "working" in a nursing home in Germany. My only big thought was: please let me get dementia *before* I have to talk with such an idiotic stochastic parrot to think I had a "friend".
Since then my idea is that my generation needs hacker communities in nursing homes. -
@futurebird tangentially, i bet that any person who believes in developing fully robotized bedpan changers with the current technology never had to care for the bedridden people.
As someone who visits care homes regularly I really don’t see robots having much impact.
I also wonder how often they need repairing/charging/replacing over, say, a 40 year lifespan?
Let alone dealing with the emotional side of working in care homes, especially for those with the varying forms of dementia.
These jobs are the ones we should value way higher in society.
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