Oh, article title on the homepage of ABC is different to the one inside the article. Actual title "Out-of-control fire rages at one of Australia's two oil refineries in Geelong"
Why do these kept getting made? I feel like I see some new soft robot every few months or so. Are they used to infiltrate past grates in a sewer security system and slide under lasers or something what is up with these???
> With their ability to shapeshift and manipulate delicate objects, soft robots could work as medical implants, deliver drugs inside the body and help explore dangerous environments.
I'm not sure that's a big strike against it yet. Kinda the whole point of engineering in academia is to work on hard things that are far from commercialization.
The fact that a product has not yet been created from a given technology does not mean the technology or the research itself is useless, or will not turn out to be useful in the long term. You can also learn a lot from research or development that does not ultimately work out.
>>"never once seen a productionalized version of these"
YET
Just because we have not YET seen one does not mean it should not be pursued.
Examples are endless, start with: 30 years ago, no one had seen a solar panel with 25% efficiency produced for less than $1/watt. Now, it is the most economical and fastest-growing and most sustainable energy source on the planet.
That argument is simply an argument against all efforts at making progress. Perhaps rethink making it?
You can't mix really strong robots with humans without barriers separating them. That's one reason humanoid robots won't sell. They're dangerous. Real robots in real factories that make real stuff can juggle car engines. And they can tear you limb from limb. So they work behind barriers and intrusion detection systems.
This is the much more likely future of home robotics. Yes it will be a box, because it would be dangerous to let you stick your fingers inside that mechanism. It won't walk around.
Disaster response is a lie researchers tell themselves when building military hardware. The purpose of such robots would be to e.g. burrow into the collapsed tunnels at Fordow and confirm the uranium is there. (Or, alternatively, burrow into military tunnels to identify targets.)
Pretty interesting. In homeopathy mint is considered one of the most potent antidoting substances which is something that neutralises or cancels the action of another homeopathic remedy. Maybe a comment like this activates chimp brain downvote circuits in HNers but a lot of medicines start from these folk traditions and then make their way into regular medicine.
There's tons of folk remedies that do absolutely nothing useful at all, too. When you don't have any reliable medicine, you take whatever you have on hand and hope for a placebo effect. Eventually, you find something helpful because even a broken clock is right twice a day.
There are recorded beliefs in medieval Germany, for instance, that carrying or wearing an eye from a bat will make you invisible.
I think the closest one ("but no cigar") might be oscillococcinum, but its popularity isn't due to doctors recommending it (because they don't, by and large).
The premise is asymmetrical. One could just as easily ask "Which regular medicine has been adopted as a folk remedy?", to which the answer of course is largely no. There is also a (purely pedantic) argument to be made that folk remedies are more 'regular', though assuming the question here is "Are folk remedies widely prescribed in their original forms by typical modern-day MDs?", the answer, again, is largely no.
Now, to the question "Which folk medicines have a fairly robust (or at least promising) clinical basis?", there are certainly some: ginger[0], turmeric[1], honey[2], psilocybin[3], and of course capsaicin and peppermint. Not to mention sunshine, exercise, and meditation, all of which have traditional origins.
Taking a step back though, historically, pharmaceutical drugs have often been derived from natural remedies with bases in folk remedies. The pipeline from traditional medicine -> scientific study -> molecular isolation -> synthesis and mechanized production is pretty well-trodden. Aspirin comes from willow bark, morphine comes from opium, quinine (malaria treatment) comes from cinchona bark, paclitaxel (cancer treatment) comes from yew bark.
Homeopathy is BS though, no argument there. GP really shouldn't put it in the same bucket as folk medicine (it's not even particularly old).
Correlation != Causation. Sitting this close to a mint plant gives you a dose that is way to undiluted to have any effect. Now if you were to sit roughly two kilometres away with a gentle breeze going from the plant towards you... (but make sure that there is not anothe mint plant on the path of the wind.)
He used to make a lot of short illustrated stories too. My favourite is 'Imouto He' because I love the plane concept - there is really nothing like it and I wonder if an aerospace engineer could look at it and spot any reasons it couldn't exist.
Not an aerospace engineer, but I think it looks borderline plausible and simultaneously very unsafe.
Having the propeller so high up relative to the center of mass is going to produce a massive pitch down moment: because there's only a small horizontal stabilizer, it would require very aggressive thrust vectoring or elevon usage. A fly-by-wire control system would be essential, I think.
The anhedral wing angle would make it even more unstable, and there is really no reason for it here except aesthetics. Seaplanes with wing-mounted propellers could benefit from the extra clearance, but the propeller is not even on the wing here.
These seems to be much more robotics / autonomous vehicle focused? I don't quite see the mass surveillance angle you get from this you don't already get from cheap ubiquitous cameras, basic computer vision and networking (aka flock) .
I think you've made the erroneous assumption that the researchers care. I work in 3D reconstruction and I've not really seen too many people care about the actual use case, and indeed have had some friends join defence.
I'm not sure what you mean. The input video feed already constitutes "surveillance". You'd need cameras everywhere and if you have a camera, you can also just use regular models like China already does.
I mean, i think if you want to perform mass surveilance, you can do it far cheaper and more efficiently via facial recognition, mobile phone surveillance and a variety of different other methods.
If you want reconstruction and training of robotic movement, this is far more appropriate. I believe we're going to see robots being able to "dream" in terms of analysing historical video information on spaces and improving movement and navigation.
So not mass surveilance, but probably there's a future of mass subjugation using robot enforcement.
>too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers.
yeah but if the OP doesn't do that and you confront their argument they can retreat into definitions and ambiguity without addressing your rebuttal. i think its good manners to be hyper-specific particularly on HN where there tend to be a lot of martian brained people who need it to engage with you. the fuzziness just won't do.
I feel like to notice something is botslop you have to look at every comment with suspicion first. I don't think I can notice if something was written by an LLM off the bat unless I'm actively looking very hard at it.
When you see multiple → or •, that is a good sign, especially because they appear with poor formatting on HN. Many more signs exist. They are either direct posts or copy-paste without thinking.
I've seen some where they have hallucinated the github account or project name, often matching the hn handle or project name which is slightly different.
In my opinion the real problem for Iran lies in the north, on the border with Azerbaijan.
The Israeli-supplied Azeri military has already demonstrated its effectiveness when it curb stomped the unprepared and internally betrayed Armenian military and militias. Baku will eventually decide to intervene in the northern territories. If I had to guess, a "special military operation" into northern Iran is the most likely follow-up scenario goaded into and supplied of course by Israel/US. The goal will be to foment a civil war and begin the dismemberment process of Iran.
A little personal conspiracy theory I have is that after the last Israel/US intervention (when they mysteriously liquidated the only high-ranking and influential internal opposition of the Khamenei clan left) is that some sort of deal was worked out behind the scenes with the clan to get rid of the wizard-in-chief kinda like how Maduro was sold out. It is much easier to go to war with a country when it responds with only symbolic attacks and secretly promises to fight with one hand behind its back - provided cash and security flows for those at the top of course.
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