Just to emphasize this as someone that's worked in Elixir professionally for a decade now.
It really is that easy. The interoperability between Erlang and Elixir is fantastic and the communities get along well. There has been a long time push from many of the thought leaders that BEAM (the VM that Erlang and Elixir run on) should be a community regardless of language. That way we can share resources.
When I first learned Elixir I spent all my time in Elixir. Erlang has a lot of nice libraries though, so it wasn't uncommon back when I started to reach for one.
It was a pretty gentle learning curve, you can write Elixir with no knowledge of Erlang at all. You can consume Erlang libraries from Elixir with no knowledge of Erlang at all. Then if you are like me, you are curious about how something works and you go read some library code and it's a bit odd but you can mostly get the gist of it. Then over time reading Erlang is easy enough, the prolog inspired syntax is the hardest hurdle to get over, but then you realize how much Erlang and Elixir have in common.
Waiting for your child to come home from a particularly difficult day of kindergarten
"He tasks me. He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him 'round the moons of Nibia and 'round the Antares Maelstrom and 'round perdition's flames before I give him up!"
It's the same thing they tried to sell with low/no-code.
The problem is that the engineer turning what you want into code isn't normally the bottleneck. I would say about 50% of my job is helping people specify what they want sufficiently for someone to implement.
Non-technical people are used to a world of squishy definition where you can tell someone to do something and they will fill in the blanks and it all works out fine.
The problem with successful software is that the users are going to do all the weird things. All the things the manager didn't think about when they were dreaming up their happy path. They are going to try to update the startTime to the past, or to next year and then back to next week. They are going to get their account into some weird state and click the button you didn't think they could. And this is just the users that are trying to use the site without trying to intentionally break it.
I think if managers try to LLM up their dreams it'll go about as well as low/no-code. They will probably be able to get a bit further because the LLM will be willing to bolt on feature after feature and bug fix after bug fix until they realize they've just been piling up bandaids.
I am cautiously optimistic that there will be a thriving market for skilled engineers to come in and fix these things.
I'm holding out hope for https://www.slate.auto/en I know it's somehow associated with Amazon, is it going to be a cloud-connected privacy nightmare. I haven't heard anything about it, but I also wouldn't be surprised.
Until you have a cheap and effective robot butler. I also used to hate folding clothes, and then I got one of those folding boards that you see sometimes at clothing stores. (One of these things https://www.walmart.com/ip/BoxLegend-T-shirt-Folding-Board-T...)
Honestly a game changer. Sounds stupid, but there's just something very satisfying about being able to quickly fold a bunch of clothes and get very nice results.
And if we get humanoid robots at some point, they can use them too.
They've shown the "putting dishes in the dishwasher" bit before, it seems to be getting better, but I imagine it still has a high failure rate.
I wonder if this company started off or has some founder that's really interested in the "handling deformable stuff" space. They really seem keen to promote that it can do tasks like folding a shirt or working with soft packages.
Definitely seems like a carefully curated video, but the longer videos make me think that either they are running a scam or they have some of this stuff working well enough.
Here you can see another much simpler robot folding clothes for far longer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdeBIR0jVvU (there are more videos from other companies as well)
To answer your question -- folding clothes is easy, because clothes easily deform, do not break, fall smoothly when you drop them and most importantly are easily resettable task. Just through the well folded cloth up and voila start again.
Actually, folding clothes is a challenging dexterity task. However, it's a trivial mechanical engineering task, which is why it is so popular with underpowered robot arms.
How are you defining dextrous? I think it can be somewhat challenging but not dextrous -- the robot doesn't need to be very precise (few cms here and there do not matter), there are no forces involved, motions are all pick-place. Dextrous tasks would be things like shoe-lace tying, origami folding etc.
There used to be some automated systems that would detect curse words and escalate you.
It seems to work less these days, but in the past I would get a robot voice on the other end and just calmly start going “piss shit fuck damn ass” and it would connect me to a human operator.
I used to build systems that did that and other things. When Nuance came out I was like a kid in a candy store just deploying ridiculous features to clients’ IVR systems.
A lot of what Marx writes is pretty straightforward observations about how capitalism functions.
If profit isn’t the excess value of labor then where does it come from. You’ve got some inputs, you transform them into some outputs, you sell the outputs for more than the inputs. Something happened to make the output more valuable than the input.
And it seems hard to argue against that idea. Capitalism as a system describes who should get to allocate that value and as the name would suggest, it’s the people with the capital. If you own the factory you get to pay people to do work, they convert low value inputs into higher value outputs, and as the person with the capital you get to capture the difference as profit.
Marx simply looks at this system and says, why should they get to decide what happens with the value that got created by labor.
That tends to be where it goes from an objective “this is how this system operates” to “here’s an alternative system”
I think people would serve themselves well to read what he had to write. Even if you come away thinking the alternative doesn’t work, the analysis of capitalisms strengths and weaknesses is interesting.
As life becomes more unaffordable for many under a capitalist system, as rent seeking and exploitation become more rampant, people are going to want to critically analyze whether this system is really all it’s cracked up to be. Why do some go hungry while Jeff Bezos has more than he can ever use? Why do the wealthy get to have an outsized say in our society and our governments? Can the set of incentives that capitalism erects survive a condition like climate change?
When we decide that people are no longer allowed to ask those questions, we need not worry about the a theoretical dictatorship of the proletariat. Ask only who you are not allowed to question to see who is in charge.
No system should be above examination and reformation for the good of humanity.
A lot of people also has the misconception that Marx "hated" capitalism. But half the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is Marx being a total capitalism fanboy, arguing that capitalism has brought about advances never previously seen, and championing capitalism as eroding xenophobia because it interferes with the need for trade.
He first then goes on, as you say, from a "this is how this system operates" to "here's an alternative system".
To Marx, capitalism was both a necessary stage and a positive step, just in his view not some final utopia.
Arguably, one of Marx' biggest failing was that he severely over-estimated how quickly capitalism would saturate the world markets and get to a stage where growth is only possible through the reduction of labour costs, as his prediction of capitalism failing was predicated on that.
It really is that easy. The interoperability between Erlang and Elixir is fantastic and the communities get along well. There has been a long time push from many of the thought leaders that BEAM (the VM that Erlang and Elixir run on) should be a community regardless of language. That way we can share resources.
When I first learned Elixir I spent all my time in Elixir. Erlang has a lot of nice libraries though, so it wasn't uncommon back when I started to reach for one.
It was a pretty gentle learning curve, you can write Elixir with no knowledge of Erlang at all. You can consume Erlang libraries from Elixir with no knowledge of Erlang at all. Then if you are like me, you are curious about how something works and you go read some library code and it's a bit odd but you can mostly get the gist of it. Then over time reading Erlang is easy enough, the prolog inspired syntax is the hardest hurdle to get over, but then you realize how much Erlang and Elixir have in common.
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