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Whoever approved making a robot look like it is about to dance before awkwardly panning to a "static" model should not be making those decisions. It literally killed the vibe in the room. People went from the verge of freaking out to the biggest let down ever that it ruined whatever they said afterwards.

No doubt the original intent was to have the blue robot start breakdancing, but the engineering team probably said it wasn't ready on time

Sometimes, demos are just not ready on time. It's a reality of life. Not every company throws baseballs at their Cybertruck windows onstage.


If that's the case, just scrap the demo. They literally kept the script "let us show you what it looks like".

Or at least have it serve bags of popcorn.

Well they did show us what it looked like. And a physical model is better than a CG render

and they did

Disagree, it was a good transition to a second example. It didn't kill it for me at all.

Disagree, it was a bad move in two different ways. It was anticlimactic emotionaly and it didn’t convey the right message rationaly either.

Anticlimax because the first robot hyped up the entrance of the second robot. It was emotionaly conveying that “hey you think these groovy movements are great? Check out this guy.” But once it become clear that the next guy is just a dumb statue it deflated. How lively the first one was made the second one that much worse in context. A step back.

That is the emotional fail. But perhaps you don’t care about that. Think about what additional message the stage presence of the second robot conveys. The first robot estabilished that they can make a smooth robot. They drove home that the robot is usually autonomous, but in any way it is not pupetted by a guy in a motion tracking suit. The presentation covered how the robots will be used, who will be the first pilot costumer, how will it be introduced and how will it be manufactured. These are all great answers to a concern someone from the audience might have.

But what is the concern to which the second robot is the answer for? Did you doubt even for a second their ability to make the same robot you can already see on the stage but in blue? Because i didn’t. Not before they shown the static demonstration. If they just said “we are working on a production optimised, and streamlined v2” i would have totaly accepted that they can do it.

The only message the second non-working robot communicates is that they are having trouble with their production model. They couldn’t even make it stand in one spot and wave politely! Something is cooked with it and badly. It adds nothing positive to the message of the presentation while introduces the very visible sign that something is wrong.

Now, do I think they won’t be able to solve the problems eventually? Of course not. Heck maybe it will be up and running within days. But why show something which is not working? It is such an unforced error. The first robot could have just done the dance then pointed at the screen and then walked out and nothing would have been less about the whole presentation.


I'm not trying to say you're wrong. I'm trying to say that it did not kill the "vibe" for me, so to say. For all I know they _wanted_ the second one to move, but it wasn't ready in time, and situations like that are completely legitimate. I still am very impressed by what they _did_ demonstrate. Can't win them all!

Im sorry, but this is just too much. This is an industrial product. Decisions will not be made based on emotions from a demo at CES.

> Decisions will not be made based on emotions from a demo at CES.

Sure. It is not a mistake with grave consequences. Something can be a mistake and not matter much in the long run. Like the CEO could have went on stage wearing mismatched shoes, or wearing a red clown nose. It wouldn't ruin everything. Wouldn't bankrupt them. If the robots are good they will be still sold. But it would just undermine the message a little bit. For no good reason whatsoever.

The fundamental questions will be: Do the robots work? Are they cheaper than the equivalent labour from humans? (including all costs on both sides of the comparison.) Nothing else matters in the long run. They could have just never went to CES and it would be all the same.

> Im sorry, but this is just too much.

ok :) if you say so. But then tell me. What did the stage presence of the second robot add to the show?


This may be a bit overwrought, I’m on my 3rd watch and can’t identify the moment where breakdancing could be expected, my best guess is when it does a tai chi position at 3m20s, which seems unlikely but perhaps on the nose if you’re western, young, not a dancer, and don’t know breakdancing well, i.e. as a series of static positions moved through slowly.

What they are stating is:

# Initial robot tai-chis towards the right of the video

# This is a stage act that "cues up" the second robot

# One can expect that this "ta-da" moment will have the presented robot do something

# Instead, the presented robot stands there doing nothing

# We have statues that are hundreds of years old easily accessible. Hence a new statue is not interesting


Maybe folks where still confused by memories of the Australian breakdancer from last summer olympics (?)

This was excellent comedy, and I never say that, kudos

Really .. it was a bit anticlimatic. "We've developed the new Atlas. It's so great bla bla. We wanted to show it but now we don't" -- /switches off TV

real kicker was

>"We just couldn't pry the actual production samples out of our engineers hands at the lab this week. "

sounds like "Our CEO ordered samples to be shipped but those pesky engineers just wouldnt do it guys!"

>"Um, so we're going to be showing you videos"

Except they didnt even show videos, just some bad CGI aka "We rented this huge ass auditorium to show you our pet. Golden elephant is currently in our basement, he is tired right now so instead look at all those cool drawings my nephew made"!


What the fuck are you people on about

The second robot is broken. It is not moving. Why show a broken robot? That is what we are on about.

I am just trying to help you write better. Your writing says "if I had to give up either AI or chocolate [...] I would probably choose AI". However, your language and intent seems to be that you would give up chocolate.


I know you are using the definition of tyrant here to be "unjust ruler" as opposed to "absolute ruler". You can certainly have benevolent tyrants but I would argue that, without a constitution, you are by definition ruled by a tyrant. The USA has the oldest ratified constitution so that is a prime candidate for being considered the oldest stable non-tyrannical government. Of course, we are using different definitions of tyrant so you will not agree with my conclusion.


While I agree to some extent with your point, I think your definition is far too strict. For example, by your definition, the UK is currently and has always been a tyranny, since they don't have a formal constitution in the sense of any US-style state.

However, I do think you're generally right - even under a more relaxed definition of what does or doesn't constitute a tyranny, the USA is clearly one of the first non-tyrannical states, at least among those that still exist today. The UK had a mostly-democratic ruling system for even longer than that.

On the other hand, if we define tyranny to refer to any state in which elections are restricted to a relatively small subset of the population, then the USA or UK are not that early. Voting in the USA was largely restricted to male property owners until 1840. Many other countries had adopted at least universal male voting by this time. The UK was even later to pass this standard.


While you are being downvoted, this is actually an astute observation. However, your point is working against you in this case. If the vaccine was actually deadly, the unvaccinated individuals who survived the pandemic would be having better health outcomes. This is not what they found. If they included the pandemic in this study, the deaths by COVID would be much worse in the unvaccinated group.


Looking at Table 2 and as the name suggests, COVID is included in "all-cause" mortality. Your statement does not follow because it could have made COVID outcomes better yet "all-other" causes worse for a neutral "no increase in all-cause". If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases. That being said, as much as I think this is over-stated, this is very much a correlation thing because we all know that unvaccinated individuals live their lives differently compared to vaccinated individuals. Even accounting for similar statistics, the one group is prone to higher death rates not because they are unvaccinated but because of the reason they are unvaccinated.


Read again.

> After standardizing the characteristics of vaccinated individuals to those of unvaccinated individuals, we observed a 25% lower standardized incidence of all-cause death in vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated ones…

> Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.

> All-cause mortality was lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination, regardless of the dose administered, compared with the control periods...


You should read my statement again.

If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%, you will still have a reduction in "all-cause" mortality yet your chances of dying by anything else has increased. I already said Table 2 does not show this is happening and in fact vaccinated individuals have better outcomes across the board. However, people are drawing this conclusion (even though they are correct) incorrectly without looking at the data.


> If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%…

But you already agreed this is not the case, in your comment:

> If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases.


GP is saying that indicates there is some other factor involved in reducing all-cause mortality, since it is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases, and that therefore the sampling of these populations is not random.

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46164643


> It is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases,

By now, this is not a reasonable belief. We know that COVID can cause cardiovascular damage, kidney injury, diabetes, neurological problems, and systemic inflammation, all of which increase mortality risk from other causes. It only makes sense that preventing or reducing the severity of COVID infection prevents those downstream complications and reduces all-cause mortality.


Not the OP. I think what they are driving at is that if knowledge is discovered during exploration in cohort A, cohort B can exploit it. Then, the whole A/B test breaks down to which cohort got to benefit more from the bandit learnings.


Yes, this is exactly the kind of scenario I was alluding to.

For example, cohorts with very light traffic are likely to get undue benefit as a lot of exploration might be done before the smaller cohort needs to select an arm, so things are closer to convergence.

Another example is if there are wildly different outcomes between cohorts. More of the exploration will be done in cohorts with more traffic, leading bandit optimizations to fit large cohorts better than lower traffic cohorts.

Even if you do manage to make things independent, you have to wait for bandit convergence before you know what converged results will look like. That requires being able to measure convergence, which isn't always easy, especially if you don't know to do that before designing the system.

With all of these problems, we kept bandits, and even expanded their application. At least for the 10 years I was still around. They are incredibly powerful. But there was a lot of "I wish those damned bandits didn't work so well!"

For anyone who is not aware, A/B tests assume cohorts behave independently of each other. The less true that is, the less reliable the results are. This was even worse for us in parts of our system where there were no bandits, but there was direct interactions between individuals.


Why does Liquid do the RWF in person then?


Mostly because it’s a lot of fun to get in one room and play together. They’ve pretty consistently said that they’re not even sure that it’s a net benefit for winning.


Because they all equally share in the struggle and accomplishment. It’s an actual team not an adult daycare like most jobs.


Every recent RWF, including the one a couple of weeks ago, they have at least a few people who are still remote.


At a very high level, revenues enter your bank account and expenses leave your bank account. In this case, you are getting confused about the taxes. There is employee compensation (which the business will withhold taxes on behalf of the individual) and then payroll taxes (which the employee is not responsible for). In essence, "their taxes" is not the correct classification. The business pays the employee (and facilitates the tax collection) and also pays the tax the business owes.


> I’m currently going through an identity crisis (as a gearhead) as a result of this.

I would challenge you that it is your proclivity for logic that is causing your identity crisis. If you enjoy a certain aesthetic, the pursuit of that aesthetic is reason enough. You are already putting constraints on the concept of a car because strapping a rocket on wheels with wings is going to have much more performance than an EV. Redefine your pursuit to be the most performant muscle car and everything is squared. No identity crisis needed.


You are perfectly correct.

I’m morphing love of modifying cars away from performance numbers but into a way to build mechanical art and enjoy emotional moments with other humans.

I’ve realized that was the whole point all along. EV or IC it doesn’t matter. Just the statements above


I think you mean webmain.


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