Windows API and ABI has always been more portable than anything else. This is why Microsoft is a tech giant. You can take a windows binary from 1995 (actually even older) and run it reliably today.
If it doesn't run and you are a commercial client, Microsoft will implement a compatibility hack for you in the latest windows code so your thing from 1995 will work.
There is no parallel to this in the tech world so far. Linux gets around this by requiring you to recompile things, but recompiling old code along with old compilers and old libraries and all their dependencies is a nightmare.
Sure, I know all that, but it’s ironic to me that Unix, which was boasted as the epitome of portability once with C, POSIX, X11, X/Open and whatnot, actually struggles with backwards compatibility while Microsoft, the notorious developer of a closed-source, locked-in platform, has managed to become the key to portability :)
That's source-level portability, while this is binary portability. Even early on, MS put in lots of effort to ensure that old applications kept working.
Maybe people don't realize that this is very much within the capabilities of modern AI nowadays?
At $dayjob we have encountered people reverse engineering our driver with Claude and creating GitHub repos with pretty useful vibecoded tools and documentation.
Yes, the raw binaries of the driver. Not leaked source code or anything like that.
Humanoid (or dogoid) robot hardware on its own offers no benefits over non-humanoid factory machines. It just has fancy firmware controlling its motions.
Humanoid robots loaded with an AI agent, on the other hand, could actually make you a sudo sandwich, do your laundry, or help you with that weekend project in the backyard. They're finally about to get useful.
I'm not a fan of humanoid robots personally (they creep me out), but I'd love to have a functional R2-D2 with me.
This is over the last decade at one of the largest automakers in the world. Naturally there is significant variation between individual lines and plants; some are newer and more automated, some are older and much less automated. Are some cars being built on more automated lines? Yes. But a great many, probably the vast majority, are being built with fairly low assembly* automation.
* There is a significant split in automation between "body weld" stages and "assembly" stages. Body weld is very heavily automated basically everywhere (although there are some surprising exceptions in places), while assembly is much less automated.
Agreed, and hence I suggested an amazon warehouse tour (they offer one for their flagship robotics 'research' warehouse) to anyone, or a Tesla factory tour (might need to talk to someone, fairly manageable).
This reminds me of the quote, "the future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed."
“One of the largest automakers in the world” makes me think of very low-tech companies like Ford or whatever. I can’t imagine this would bring much actual experience with this new generation of robotics.
Ford doesn't even make the top 5 - and however "low-tech" you think these companies are is the point, the overwhelming majority of new cars are being built by those "low-tech" automakers. The problem is not the limits of current technology (or even of the state of the art 10 years ago), it is the lack of vision and will within these companies to invest in using it.
> I can’t imagine this would bring much actual experience with this new generation of robotics.
Luckily for you, my job has always been within the robotics research side of the company, so I am very much aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the current technology.
This gives me vibes of "... but they're dinosaurs" that pervades Tesla-type discussions. I've watched several extensive discussions here with some Tesla fans breathlessly announce "really cool", "futuristic" "new thinking" functionality or features for their cars that "the dinosaurs just aren't even considering"... except to their initial skepticism, disbelief, actually, the dinosaurs often do have those things (examples including "adaptive blind spot", where triggering of those alerts is highly dependent on speed differentials, so if the vehicle is more rapidly approaching you, the alert fires earlier, dynamic traffic sign recognition - my car doesn't just recognize school zones, but can see when they are active if they have flashing lights, and, based on equipment installation, will actually count down to when my intersection light will turn green, or road mapping radar, where it actually scans the road surface ahead, avoiding potholes when safe, and adjusting ride height dynamically, not just 'press a button or choose a mode to raise or lower').
Indeed, Ford. Leaving aside the "old school" six axis robots that have been around for decades, Ford absolutely uses UR10s collaborating with humans to sand the entire car body in about 30 seconds, and to fit shock absorbers. They're also used at the engine plants. They also use the Symbio platform for transmission assembly, and fully autonomous forklift robots throughout their Tennessee plant.
My point isn't that they're dinosaurs, it's that they don't really develop robots. Some automakers do, rarely, but they mostly buy them from specialized robotics companies. It's not knowledge-gathering to buy a sander, nor even really to use one. Not on the same way it is to develop that sander. If they were all making their own robots and competing in that way, maybe my response would be different.
I don't need robotics experience, I need automaker experience. Their software is universally terrible.
Ford isn't a tech company, they don't even make their own robots. They buy them from someone else. What... positive experience do you have to assume that one of the lowest-tech industries in existence is somehow giving experience with some of the most advanced tech in the world?
> I don't need robotics experience, I need automaker experience. Their software is universally terrible.
If you had any auto industry experience, you would know that the people responsible for the design and build of the physical car and the people responsible for the user-facing software are very separate (in fact, the user-facing software might be entirely contracted out).
> What... positive experience do you have to assume that one of the lowest-tech industries in existence is somehow giving experience with some of the most advanced tech in the world?
You do realize how laughable this position is, commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying out the remaining stake in the robotics development company that they already effectively owned. Do you really think that somewhow between owning BD and their partnership with GDM that no-one in the entire corporate structure of Hyundai is aware of the state of the art in robotics?
>commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying out the remaining stake in the robotics development company
enhance:
>commenting on an article about one of the largest automakers in the world buying
ENHANCE:
>buying
It does not support your point to show that Hyundai is purchasing the company that actually built the robots.
If you want to make your point about how laughable it is that companies don't tend to be in the business of making highly advanced robots, you should probably not prove it with a company that essentially achieved world-largest-status before even finishing their straight-up purchase of this knowledge and tech.
> companies don't tend to be in the business of making highly advanced robots
I think you've gotten hung up on the idea that making robots is the essential part of the problem. I'm not going to go as far as much of the ML community and say that making hardware is secondary, but the software side is where most of the latest and greatest work is happening. Better hardware is not going to magically solve all the outstanding problems of manipulation. Better software might solve them entirely independent of hardware so long as the hardware is "good enough". I think there is a general sense that the field that robotics is approaching the equivalent on the mid 2000's with respect to computing architectures - there are still first-party RISC UNIX workstations on the market (e.g. Apple, IBM, Sun) but the incoming tide of commodity x86 platforms is clear for all to see. There are still some gains to be had by designing everything in-house, but the marginal gains versus off-the-shelf components or even full systems are steadily narrowing. There is every reason to believe that COTS hardware capabilities will continue to mature and become more commoditized.
Of course, the purchase here that actually mattered happened several years ago; this headline is just the final piece. BD and Hyundai have been working fairly closely on Altas applications to auto manufacturing for some time, never mind the additional research being done at BDAII/RAII.
You have to have the will to be a vertical company how many companies want too in the west? Not many do.. BYD, DJI, Huawei, maybe Apple a little there are few others but most are partial but the Chinese are the leaders in a willingness to do it all, note Ford Motor at one time did it all for a short time at their beginning.
I have visited factories for work and my experience is the same. There is so much stuff that could easily be automated but is not because it is too expansive for too little value to make a custom one off machine. The big high volume things will be automated but these machines will have 90% success rate and lot's of stuff that needs to be done by hand. You can search for factory tours on youtube to get an idea. Here are two videos, an Amazon warehouse and a Tesla factory. the big heavy stuff is automated but lot's of work is still done by hand.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-R6cBkza17khttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45slYC99uUg
Do you think humanoids would be a fit on assemblying the assembly line itself? To my limited knowledge a lot of setting up the factory is making sure your line works as expected with X 9s reliability. Here dexterous humanoids are this _universal_ virtual-to-physical interface and, akin to Auto Research, could run assembly line experiments autonomosuly?
automotive workers unions started around 1918 and became major political players in the 30s -- a fact that i'm sure is wholly unrelated to why there are so many un-automated tasks in that industry.
It’s not really a secret that most new auto factories serving the US tend to open in places where those unions are not active, like the South or Mexico
Pretty different tasks, environments, outcomes, metrics, goals, and other things in a warehouse vs. a factory… really have no clue how this is supposed to be relevant. Why not mention farms or libraries?
Libraries are typically either governed by a municipality's rules around employment and treatment of employees, or part of a school/etc where there are again additional guidelines about these things to be sensible and not leading people into unsafe behavior.
The problem is not capital here. Universities and governments have quite a bit of capital. They could do this in a larger scale.
It's more about risk management. Do you want your university to be disbanded or your local government bankrupt if there is a war or natural disaster, or even a standard city block fire.
I assure you wars and natural disasters are not that uncommon in the grand scheme of things. That's why we have people or corporations with a higher appetite for risk assume the risk. These entities, unfortunately, don't always have your best interests in mind.
What cities in the US have the capital to do this at a large scale? Risk management is certainly a part of it but every discussion here in SF and broadly in the CLT movement is about how to get capital access.
A university endowment or a city's tax revenue is legally and structurally earmarked. They can't just liquidate those assets to buy for local real estate. For the non-profits and community land trusts actually doing this work, securing patient, low-cost capital is absolutely the primary bottleneck.
The high leverage of private landlords actually makes them more vulnerable to systemic shocks. Meanwhile, non-market housing models (like land trusts) don't over-leverage their properties, which is exactly why they historically have much lower default rates during crises.
Given the option of landlords making bank for their risk and then getting a government bailout when there's an economic shock or having more housing decommoddified I'd take the latter. There's very little housing in the US that is under these alternative structures so at the very least I'd encourage more experimentation with them.
I'm going to assume ignorance and try to explain why landlords exist. Of course you could already understand this and have this as an ideological stance, in which case my effort is likely wasted.
Landlords assume a similar role in economy that banks do, they assume risk on your belalf. We have quantified this to an extent that you can reliably put a dollar amount on how much risk there is.
When you are renting and there is a job change or war or natural disaster or really, anything inconvenient at all, you can more or less walk away without losing much.
Landlords do not assume risk in their role as landlords.
The land is there regardless of whether anyone "takes on the risk."
Landlords often take on risk in their role as property managers or developers. They should be rewarded more for that, and not at all for their simple ownership of land, which again: would be there regardless of whether someone else or no one at all owned it.
We need to draw a box around the property owner, the previous owner, the owner before that, etc, because the current property owner does take price risk, but only by virtue of the payment they made to the previous property owner and so on. The intra-chain P&L distribution is not a legitimizing factor if you believe the entire ownership structure is an exercise in rent seeking (in the economic sense -- as you point out, development and management are not economic rent and I'd add abatement to that list).
Equivalently, we can just pretend that there has only ever been one owner.
The risk inherent in the ownership of land is having too much of your wealth concentrated in it, and having used leverage to purchase the land. Both are true for a large fraction of landlords in the world.
A real estate bubble bursting or anything that makes your area unappealing to live in would suddenly be really problematic and in the case of leverage get you negative equity.
Banks hold money for you, the cash would still be under your mattress if the bank did not hold it.
I'm sure you have a philosophical point here, but this is exactly how the modern economy prices risk. Your understanding of the semantics of risk is not being questioned here.
Uhhh... banks do not "hold money for you." You think banks pay you interest to have the privilege to... hold your money?
No.
They pool deposits and they lend it out, taking on the risk of doing so with the guarantee they will make their depositors whole. This is called "taking on risk," and they are paid for this service (among the other instrumental services they provide in order to make this happen). Without banks providing this set of services, these deployable pools of capital would not exist.
This is absolutely not the same as the price risk that any asset holder has, and it is not what landowners are paid for.
It's not a philosophical point. It is literally a question of who is getting paid what, and why?
Any high risk high reward strategy gets you in charge of creating the risk to chase a higher reward.
The math is fairly similar between spending 10$ to buy a call option and a 1 million down payment to buy a 10 million property with 15 apartments to rent out.
When ownership shows up at zoning meetings, the main risk they seem to be concerned about is accidentally letting someone build enough housing. Heaven forbid!
Anecdata here but I'm a landlord in an area with low 10s of thousands of residents and low 100s of rental units. I absolutely do not care about new housing being built, other than encouraging it because economic development of the town is good for everyone.
My neighbors, the homeowners who don't rent, are typically on the other side. And it's not unreasonable to want to keep SFH neighborhoods predominantly SFH.
My main risks have have absolutely nothing to do with more housing. It's more physical risk to the property and depreciation.
Are you perhaps too privileged to have seen situations where owning land is a liability?
As we speak, close to a billion people are in the middle of ongoing wars. There are entire countries where land is worthless. Ukraine has several hundred square kilometers of land with a thick covering of fiber optic cables from drones.
A better first world example is laws change and now this site where you were gonna build self storage for 20yr before selling out to an apartment/office developer is now worthless
We have seen forest fires burning city blocks in west coast cities in the recent past, can't get more first world than that.
If you think insurance will save you, it might not if no one is willing to insure your property (large true in California nowadays) or the insurance company goes bankrupt in a crisis (happens pretty much all the time).
Why on Earth should I feel the slightest obligation to make whole some jerk who bought the right to kick me off a piece of land and lost money when that right became less valuable?
I have a much better idea: point, laugh, and say "sucks to suck!"
If you didn't mean to imply that I should feel an obligation to compensate the risk of a capital loss, what was your argument?
No, the system works the way it does because it was built by the rich, for the rich, to ensure they had a way to get paid for being rich. You can, of course, choose to deliberately not understand that.
That means the opposite of what you're telling everyone it means. When someone assumes risk it means the risk is theirs. You're debating the meaning of English words right now.
I take your overall point about rich people making laws. But on this specific point you're wrong. Take the L.
They return instructions for you to do something, and you or a script you permit chooses to execute what the model tells you and return the result to the model.
If it doesn't run and you are a commercial client, Microsoft will implement a compatibility hack for you in the latest windows code so your thing from 1995 will work.
There is no parallel to this in the tech world so far. Linux gets around this by requiring you to recompile things, but recompiling old code along with old compilers and old libraries and all their dependencies is a nightmare.
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