If a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
I don't think it actually is worth a lot to people. I know dual-professional households who don't even use their dishwasher consistently, and multiple companies have gone bankrupt trying to bring automated laundry folding (which does exist in industry) to the consumer market.
Maid services are generally expected to handle "everything" for a pretty expansive definition of everything. They pick up scattered stuff and put in a sensible location, they arrange everything visible in an aesthetically pleasing way, they take out the trash, if there's some weird dirt that's hard to clean they creatively problem solve to find a way to get it off. I don't think there's a market for a service that can only handle basic cleaning.
(Will someone eventually invent a machine that can do all of that and more? Yes, probably, and they'll make billions when they do. But Tesla has offered no reason to believe this is on their horizon, and the focus on a humanoid form factor strongly suggests that they're optimizing for media appeal over practical capabilities.)
Maids are paid a VERY low wage in exchange for being able to take on an almost unlimited list of general tasks, from folding laundry to managing kids to mopping stairs. We are decades away from robots with that capability, and they are intended to replace people who are often not making even minimum wage? Please. Get real.
Robot vacuum with a mop, washing machine, tumble dryer and dishwasher reduce housework to like an hour per week, ie 30 min/person/week. This can be higher if you live in a big house, but if your marriage can’t tolerate 30 mins of house work a robot will not solve it.
> Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
Dual-professional households could hire a maid and pay for marriage counseling and still save money compared to a $20k robot plus whatever a subscription would run.
I can google "maid service seattle" and see dozens of entries. The first one in the yelp list is available to book and will clean a 1000 - 1500 sq ft, 2 bed, 2 bath house for well under $200. There's even a decent discount if you book is as a weekly or biweekly service.
That feels pretty affordable? I know it's a scale, but minimum wage here is $21/hr now.
I have enough time to take care of my own space, but for comparison Comcast internet is well over $120/month for crappy speeds. I think in comparison a little more than that for 1 deep cleaning a month is reasonable.
Doesn't matter if it was or wasn't, it was a failure that GM never followed up with. Why it was a failure is also irrelevant, because whether you feel it was a technical failure or killed by GM, GM never did anything with the project or knowledge. Effectively it was a curiosity.
If GM killed it to keep it from succeeding, then there is massive precedent to never reuse the tech. In fact, their NiMH battery patents were sold to Texaco/Chevron who held them close and never let anyone use them. From that point, they couldn't follow-up without dumping even more cash into it, effectively burying it. Until new lithium battery tech matured, there was no way to do it again.
Not only were electric cars available since the very beginning of cars, but they've always been available as niche options. There are tens of electric cars that postdate the EV1 and predate the Tesla. Do you even know their names?
We have stupidly cheap gas. An electric car has only ever been a curiosity for America. Even now, the primary driver of people buying electric cars is ideological, and a mild convenience of never having to go to a gas station.
Pre-lithium battery electric cars are a huge hassle, for very little gain, even outside the US. The history of cars is a global one, and no amount of conspiracy theory about GM can counter the fact that nobody else made electric cars either, even in places with drastically more expensive and unreliable gasoline.
They have always been a novelty, like hydrogen and LPG and compressed gas engines.
Hybrids were the closest anyone got to making older battery chemistries meaningful for car-style transportation, and even that was extremely limited.
Cheap gas, car culture and the incredibly long distances makes America a very different place from the urban centres of the Netherlands, China and Korea.
GM didn't sell EVs for years after releasing the EV1. They didn't get any market advantage from the EV1 because they left the market after, for a long time.
It is very widely known that GM held a 7 year head start on every other automaker on manufacturing the modern EV. Several other EVs were sold during it's time in low volume.
I was a kid without any PC anywhere in 40miles around me, had no idea that SCSI had to be terminated or anything. I don't remember any jumpers on the drive, though.
My first guess was debouncing. They assume that the switches are worn out, deeply weathered, and cheaply made. Each press will cause the signal to oscillate and they're taking their sweet time to register it.
When the device is new this is an absurd amount of time to wait. As the device degrades over 10, 20 years, that programming will keep it working the same. Awful the entire time, yes, but the same as the day it was new.
I was late for a train at my local station and the parking machine was taking ages to respond to keypresses. I could see the training pulling up to the platform and I was still stuck entering the second digit of seven. In my shameful frustration I hit the machine fairly hard. While the button presses might take a while to register, the anti-tamper alarm has really low latency and is also quite loud.
You need to find the right person to complain to. Here we are sympathetic, but can't do anything.
The right person is the other riders on the train - but the hard part is to frame this such that they join you on a march to the the agency that owns that machines to complain. I wish you the best of luck figuring out how to do that (I don't know how to do it - and if I did there are might higher priority things that need to be fixed).
Well it was six years ago, I work from home now and take the train once a quarter, and they've augmented the machines with app parking now so I have nothing to complain about anymore :)
Debouncing would be smart, sure. But sometimes, these sorts of embedded machines are weirder than that.
At Kroger-brand gas stations near me, I get to interact with the buttons on gas pumps to select options and enter a loyalty ID.
Those buttons have visible feedback on a screen, and also audible feedback consisting of a loud beep. And there's always delays between button press and feedback.
Some combination of debounce and wear might explain that easily enough.
Except... the delay between pushing a button and getting feedback is variable by seemingly-random amounts. The delay also consistently increases if a person on the other side of the pump island is also pushing buttons to do their own thing.
It's maddening. Push button, wait indeterminate time for beep, and repeat for something like 12 or 13 button presses -- and wait longer if someone else is also using the machine.
I can't rationally explain any of that variability with debounce.
Or perhaps the original programmers skipped the class on concurrency 25 years ago, and nobody has subsequently bothered to pay anyone to update that part of the software.
One time I decided to test whether these grocery story loyalty card XX cents off per gallon transactions were properly isolated, when my wife and I were both filling up vehicles at the same gas station at the same time. We both got the $0.50 discount per gallon with no problem. I'm sure there are lots of creative ways you can exploit the poor design of these things.
Yeah. Just like another engineer. When you tell another engineer to build you a feature, it's improbable they'll do it they way that you consider "right."
This sounds a lot like the old arguments around using compilers vs hand-writing asm. But now you can tell the LLM how you want to implement the changes you want. This will become more and more relevant as we try to maintain the code it generates.
But, for right now, another thing Claude's great at is answering questions about the codebase. It'll do the analysis and bring up reports for you. You can use that information to guide the instructions for changes, or just to help you be more productive.
I don't understand this comparison. An EV's battery cooling system is a cooling system. Regen braking isn't more complicated than an alternator.
The rest, yeah. The chemical stacks in the batteries are expensive, and dealer markup was a problem (now they're 47-56k new). But the energy costs! $7-12 for a fill-up on home power overnight instead of $75-85 at the gas station.
And maintenance. So little maintenance. For local non-towing fleets these would save a lot.
Only if you have a home or some other super convenient always available spot. I don't and EVs are non-existing to me for another decade at least, simply too much hassle even if ignoring all other downsides (I don't buy new but mildly used for 25-30% of price of new which for ICE means 95% of the car, I do sometimes family 1500km drives like another one in 2 days - PITA with overcrowded electric cars, in cold which is normal here they become fraction of their capacity and drain battery continuously when parked and so on).
Its future but its coming/will come at very different time for various folks
> Regen braking isn't more complicated than an alternator.
Either disingenuous or ill-informed. one is ~1KW for a few seconds a day, the other is > 100KW of power for dozens of seconds, multiple dozens of times a day. completely engineering
No they won't. DoD is small compared to the rest of the software market. You get better quality and lower cost with COTS than with custom solutions, unless you spend a crapton. The labor market for software's no different.
Everyone likes to crap on C++ because it's (a) popular and (b) tries to make everyone happy with a ton of different paradigms built-in. But you can program nearly any system with it more scalably than anything else.
In my experience people criticize C++ for its safety problems. Safety is more important in certain areas than in others. I’m not convinced that you get better quality with C++ than with Ada
Go was built because C++ does not scale. Anybody that's ever used a source based distro knows that if you're installing/building a large C++ codebase, better forget your PC for the day because you will not be using it. Rust also applies here, but at least multiplatform support is easier, so I don't fault it for slow build times
Go was created because Rob Pike hates C++, notice Plan 9 and Inferno don't have C++ compilers, even though C++ was born on UNIX at Bell Labs.
As for compilation times, yes that is an issue, they could have switched to Java as other Google departments were doing, with some JNI if needed.
As sidenote, Kubernetes was started in Java and only switching to Go after some Go folks joined the team and advocated for the rewrite, see related FOSDEM talk.
A lot of people hate C++, that doesn't grant you the ability to make a language, however very few have the opportunity to create a new language out of free time provided by said language taking too long to compile.
I do not know why they did not go with java, I imagine building a java competitor (limbo) and then being forced to use it is kind of demeaning. but again, this would all be conjecture.
C/C++ basically demand that codebases be large. And we hear all the time about software troubles written in these languages. Finding reports of this are almost endless.
I think people who write complex applications in more sane languages end up not having to write millions of lines of code that no one actually understands. The sane languages are more concise and don't require massive hurdles to try and bake in saftey into the codebase. Safety is baked into the language itself.
Very few people have a problem with just paying for cosmetics in a game. The main issue here is that it's gambling for cosmetics, rather than straightforwardly purchasing specific items.
Most people do have an issue with it, because every game that's replaced loot boxes with discrete cosmetics purchases has to then massively increase the price of them. For 20 bucks in Overwatch 1, you got (afaik) 10 loot boxes which all had 4 random items. In Overwatch 2 20 bucks barely gets you single good skin.
It's very much a grass is greener type of situation in my experience, having been part of communities of both types of games.
Slowly getting their stuff independent of wintel gives a lot of flexibility. And the big gaming market's on phones / tablets. A steam controller could find itself paired to an iPad running steam in a year or two.
The only play I see here is a legitimate Valve console to take on XBOX and Sony. Plus Arm on a Steam Deck would improve the battery life considerably (assuming they are able to integrate with some powerful GPU solution).
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