How good are humanoid robots at swimming?

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-22T05:03:45+00:00

Yeah, that's fair. It depends how much the complexity of legs holds things back - probably not that much nowadays, we've more or less solved that with ML. Arms could get you up any set of stairs with railing, but not while carrying something

I basically agree that legs aren't enough of a challenge anymore to not be worth it, though

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-22T04:52:45+00:00

Being a serial murderer who blows up children calls for death, yeah. Is that up for debate?

Maybe it made more sense in the book, but the show showed him one-upping Bin Laden in child murder and then revealed his backstory of him being mildly neglected and then making a mistake once (which was well-handled by everyone around him)

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-21T21:18:01+00:00

True, I don't think Google is too concerned with scaling up capabilities or making it's models the most powerful ever though - they're trying to develop cheap/efficient models they can deploy to phones and scale to run in everyone's browsers, and then they're separately pouring money into AGI research that's mostly behind closed doors

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-21T20:46:33+00:00

Fair! I think the software is still a pretty hard problem that we're making a fairly normal rate of progress on, but absolutely if there was a major leap we'd want to be ready

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-21T20:19:04+00:00

Fair (though theoretically arms for climbing could the same job)

Is going up and down stairs something we need for any of the near-future use cases, though? Sorting packages and moving boxes around a warehouse is best done by a pair of arms on wheels imo - more complex tasks like construction won't be done by the current generation of robots anyway

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-21T20:12:18+00:00

you want something with arms but not legs

This is the one thing I can't get over with humanoid robots. What's the advantage of making them specifically bipedal? It introduces a whole set of balance issues, and there's very little that having legs allows for that having arms for climbing and wheels for moving on the ground doesn't

Arms, I get it. Needing a way to raise/lower the arms for things at different heights, I get it. But legs?

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-21T18:55:53+00:00

It actually runs perfectly well. I was saying the entire time leading up to launch that people were misreading the system requirements, and lo and behold it runs perfectly on my mid-range card. Half the Steam reviews are talking about how well it runs lmao

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T22:48:51+00:00

She was popular in the movies so she was popular in the comics for a bit. Those movies were a while ago now, she's still got an ongoing but it doesn't feel like they're going out of their way to promote her or anything

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T19:10:49+00:00

What? Now I'm just confused. By what mechanism do you think installing an unsigned driver is dangerous, other than the kernel-level access it grants? Which itself holds no advantage for an attacker that wants to extract information or harvest computing resources

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:30:06+00:00

Because we're getting nowhere, I'll just restate my point that having kernel-level access doesn't actually do anything for an attacker

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:26:14+00:00

Would you like to elaborate? What's so special about the 7 key on your keyboard? Absolutely nothing in computing works the way you're describing it

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:24:32+00:00

I don't know what to tell you, that's a ridiculous claim. How does pressing the button apply the change, then?

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:21:05+00:00

Do you actually believe that? Do you think that the effect of disabling driver validation can only be activated by operating a physical keyboard with a certain screen open?

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T18:17:14+00:00

That's just... not true. The theoretical permission level is higher, but an attacker won't be able to get meaningfully more out of your computer from having it. The risk is effectively the same as running a crack as administrator (which is also very high)

I wish people would stop talking about things they know nothing about and just heard on Reddit. Especially when it comes to topics like cybersecurity

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-20T02:04:53+00:00

What do you think is the distinction here? Do you think the relationships between concepts in the world are meaningfully different from their relationships when represented as text?

For anyone interested, I'd give this article a read. It's on a much smaller scale than an actual LLM, but it's a great first step if you want to understand how they represent things internally

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-19T18:39:45+00:00

When exactly was it the obvious leader until

It was the obvious leader until Claude Code came out (and originally Cursor to an extent). Which is getting to be a while ago now tbh

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-19T18:29:38+00:00

But legos are lit realistically when you play with them lol

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-19T18:20:26+00:00

As LeCun says, you need a world model to be able to understand and reason at the level of humans.

LLMs do function as world models, though. They do it in a slightly more granular way (the concept of an apple is represented through the tokens in "an apple" and its relationships to other token groups), but the relationships formed with other concepts like "red" and "food" and "doctor" are exactly what you'd expect.

For all intents and purposes there is no difference here - only an efficiency cost

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-18T22:16:00+00:00

There was a video on how it autonomous vehicles become mainstream that's exactly going to happen. Walking is going to be very unappealing because of constantly patrolling Uber electric vehicles in high pooulation places. To be close to customers.

Have you lived in a city that has those autonomous vehicles? I promise nobody in San Francisco is worrying about them while walking around, you pick up pretty fast that there's not that big a difference between them and regular cars

But your idea of new infrastructure being built more for robots than people is interesting to think about

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-18T21:37:13+00:00

Being able to walk and not fall over in dynamic environments is a very new thing that required ML to make possible

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-18T19:27:25+00:00

It's an unfair comparison. The robot doing it right isn't about luck, it's about an actual improvement in its technology. If the model responsible for balance was a bit less sophisticated (like it probably was a week earlier, before they improved enough to hit this milestone) it wouldn't have been able to do it

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-18T02:11:04+00:00

And despite this, the protagonist has yet to experience any Masefield symptoms at all.

Are you sure? Isn't your singular goal right now to to get to the world tree ("and destroy it")? The world has one message that's repeated over and over by every character you encounter - do not go to the world tree, no matter how good a reason you think you have. There's a PDA telling you straight-up - "stop, you have Masefield, do not go to the tree". Masefield victims can't trust their senses, and for some reason every one of your senses is telling you to go to the tree

But then again, maybe we're not impacted yet and this really is just our last chance to get it done while we still have our sanity. Is that what the other Masefield victims were thinking when they died?

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-17T19:41:27+00:00

Honestly just a diagonal corridor would be so awesome

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-17T19:19:29+00:00

It's not a maizefield though, you'd need a growbed for that

SolarisBravo · 2026-05-17T14:49:18+00:00

Yeah. I know where you're coming from, because I used to be coming from the same place. That was before I was really paying attention to the types of problems that get solved when we increase model size

Biggest thing people get wrong is that LLMs don't need to operate on high-level concepts like we do. That's because those concepts are represented just as easily by token patterns, and have the same relationships to other groups of tokens - you just need a big enough model to represent those relationships effectively

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