> “the expert evidence we have heard strongly suggests that the use of autonomous robots alone will very significantly limit what can be learned about our nearest potentially habitable planet” (Close et al. (2005; paragraph 70).
>
> Putting it more bluntly, Steve Squyres, the Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, has written:
>
> “[t]he unfortunate truth is that most things our rovers can do in a perfect sol [i.e. a martian day] a human explorer could do in less than a minute” (Squyres, 2005, pp. 234-5).
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ – and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity – for exploration is much harder. Healthy, smart humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
They are not going to land on the Moon! They are just going to sit in a can for two weeks and take photos. (OK. Tthe can is on top of a lot of burning explosive material and if they don't aim correctly they will get in a weird trajectory that will kill them. Not for the faint of heart.)
I'm not sure if they can override the commands send from Earth, but turning on and off the engines like in the Apollo XIII movie is like 100 times less accurate than the automatic orders. It's not 1969, now computer can play chess and aim to go around the Moon better than us.
Also, there is still Artemis III to test the live support equipment with humans inside, before Artemis IV that is spouse to attempt landing on the Moon.
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
Because many small steps are required before every giant leap.
I would like to point out that the current misadventure in the ME has cost at least $38,035,856,006 in 32 days. And that won't receive half of the "this is a waste of money" critiques this mission will. And there are a ton of people who are against that excursion.
Most people who will come across this will react with either extreme negativity or indifference. Very few people will react positively. This thread itself is evidence of that. This is a nerdy community filled with people who are deeply positive about space exploration and excluding my comments, the straw poll was,
When I see numbers like that ($38 billion) thrown around I always wonder: Where did that money go? In the best case, it stayed in the economy in the form of salaries and such. In the worst case, it goes directly into an offshore pile of mega-wealth where it won't benefit the economy and likely won't even be taxed. Is there any way to determine where on this continuum this program stands? I'm guessing the 1960s space program, while incredibly expensive, was firmly on the "money stays in the economy" side.
That kind of money, even if it goes to a single person, doesn't get taken out of the economy. No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.
It might not be the allocation of capital we like, but it doesn't disappear.
Well, there is a financial 'sink' - stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'. Their political value is almost non-existent actual money. If any, at all.
> stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'
Goods like longer-lasting food, medical supplies or a strategic oil reserve are not wasted. The money that went into supplying them has gone back into the economy, and they serve a more strategic purpose than the market participants could have borne (i.e. societal insurance policies). The same could also be said of military stockpiles, and continuing to buy them sustains a capability that is hard to get back once lost.
Those stockpiles weren’t created by putting money into a shredder and getting ammunition out. They were created by paying for the materials and labor. At that point the government’s money is frozen and stockpiled, but the economy still has the money that was spent.
> No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.
You make wealth concentration sound like a good thing somehow. This was publicly collected tax money, that will go on to enrich some already rich douchebag.
Only in the last few minutes, the livestream actually covered various goals this mission - explicitly a test mission - is meant to achieve. For example, one they just mentioned is they're going to be doing some docking maneuvers practice.
This is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.
Not just yet. Give it a few more years for AI (haha, another thing yielding stupid amount of value to everyone, that people are totally oblivious of - your antibiotics comparison in another subthread kinda applies too) - but for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors. We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions.
> for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors
Is this really helpful for a tech validation flight? We can put those sensors onboard.
> We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions
To a degree. We’ve validated vehicles remotely for LEO enough times that I’m sceptical we need humans for that. (Again, we do for ground-crew interaction training.)
> Apollo was over three orders of magnitude more efficient in producing scientific papers per day of fieldwork than are the MERs. This is essentially the same as Squyres’ (2005) intuitive estimate given above, and is consistent with the more quantitative analogue fieldwork tests reported by Snook et al. (2007).
Scientific papers are a pretty poor measure of productivity so here's another one. We know about the existence of He-3 thanks to samples brought back from astronauts on the moon. Astronauts setup fiddly UV telescope experiments on the moon, trying to set up a gravimeter to measure gravitational waves, digging into the soil to put explosive charges at different ranges for seismic measurement of the moon's subsurface... They were extremely productive. Most of what we know about the moon happened thanks to the 12 days spent on the lunar surface.
If your goal is to save money, just ignore the moon. This is not the west indies to be exploited, at least not yet. These are scientific missions, not economic missions.
The philosopher Randall Munroe once wrote:
> The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
I see Munroe's work as filling the same role in society as did Socrates in his time. Not only in commentary about current events, government, society, etc but also in expressing his viewpoints in a fashion accessible to society. Socrates paved the way to bring philosophy to the masses. Munroe uses a popular medium and comedy to the same effect.
But essentially, gunpowder made castles obsolete. In 1450, when the English were driven out of France, the walls fell in hours. What was an essential cornerstone of military strategy and supply chains became obsolete overnight.†
Star Forts were the answer. It's a simple bit of physics, as long as the force isn't head on i.e. along the normal and can be deflected (ideally at angles shallower than 45˚) then it is more likely the fortifications will survive.
But this ends up leading to exponential cost escalation (I have the numbers converted via chickens and eggs to modern currency! Again, sorry in process >.< ) that has a significant long-term impact on the techno-sociopolitical trajectory of the world.
The fun counterfactual that no one brings up is that this didn't happen in China where the technology of castling evolved side-by-side with gunpowder over a thousand years. I think it's because of dirt. They were deliberately filling castle walls with dirt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortifications_of_Xi%27an / https://greatmingmilitary.blogspot.com/2019/06/chinese-forti... they were able to deform and better withstand the impact of cannon balls. But further research is needed. I'm not completely certain about this.
It's not an accident that this appeared within a month or two of the California one. I would bet good money that there's someone shopping this bill around.
If you do a frequency analysis of when these bills are being introduced, you'll notice an odd cluster internationally. Less charitably, they're coordinating / talking / being pushed by someone. More charitably, the "idea" is spreading.
It's a very odd idea to spread though. Age "verification" isn't something people are truly passionate about.
I suspect that, long-term, this is about surveillance. The powers that be would rather kill the golden genie that's general purpose compute than have teens and radical youth with compute.
What you have overlooked is that this type of bill is being introduced in states that have the strongest data protection and privacy laws, such as California and Colorado, and now Illinois.
This is happening after several other states have introduced age verification laws that actually require age verification which typically involves uploading your identity documents to each website that is required to verify your age.
Apply Occam's razor. Which do you think is more likely?
1. These states that have a record of concern for privacy are now introducing an age verification law that relies entirely on the age that the administrator enters when configuring a user account in order to give a push down a slippery slope toward their nefarious secret goal...even though it would be a complete waste of time since as the examples from numerous other states shows it is not hard to pass a law that starts with making people upload their ID documents to any social media they want to use.
2. These states that have a record of concern for privacy are doing age verification in the way that many privacy advocates said it should be done when they were objecting to those bills in those other states that required uploading ID documents, because those states do not want to go down the slippery slop that those other state approaches risk going down. Namely, through parental controls on the devices that children use that put the parents in control and leave the government out of it (other than requiring that such controls be included with the OS).
Real conspiracies exist. Openly. They're open secrets for those in the know.
You'd be surprised by how banal so much of this is. So many parties trying to get what they want. Doing a cost v benefit analysis and looking the other way.
Did you know that the way people like you respond in posts like this pushes everyone else away with a strength that is unmatched by anything known anything man.
Black holes have less strength to destroy goodwill than posts like yours.
The tone of your post makes people dislike you intensely, makes them ignore you, and go about their business. But they’ll remember you and the repulsion they feel to posts like yours (which all of you saying this message seem to use) whenever they even think someone is saying something like you’re saying here.
You guys are your own worst enemies because you can’t see how fucking abrasive your posts are
OK. I was just trying to be cheeky to lighten the mood.
I just want my peers and future generations to live in a society without perpetual, personalized surveillance and gated generalized compute. I think everyone deserves freedom. I appreciate your input!
One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he came back to Apple in 1996/97 is that he took a shredder and a flamethrower to Apple's product lines. He'd ask managers, "which one should I tell my friends to buy?" And if they couldn't give an answer, he'd kill the line. Or so the story goes, https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/how-steve-jo...
Big companies drift away from the ground truth of their employees and customers over time. Without someone highly focused coordinating things, it's easier to create a "new" product and call it a day than it is to innovate.
And when you're big it takes years, decades even, for the cracks to eventually show, but show they will.
Because ask yourself, if you were telling your friend to buy a Macbook, which one would you tell them to buy?
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edit: just to clarify, currently Apple's lineup includes the "What's a computer?" iPad – $349+, iPad Mini - $500+, iPad Pro – $999+ and iPad Air – $599+.
These come with a pencil and a magic keyboard. Also some of them are more powerful than the A18 Macbook Neo.
Then there's the Macbook Neo - $600+, 13" Macbook Air - $1,099+, 15" Macbook Air – $1,299+, 14" Macbook Pro – $1,699+, 16" Macbook Pro - $2,699+.
Who are all of these things for? Why does the iPad Air exist with the magic keyboard alongside the Macbook Neo? That's the same keyboard attached to a less powerful processor and a touchless display for a spitting-distance price.
Until today if they had less than around $800 to spend my answer would be "Don't buy a new MacBook from Apple" because there isn't one that cheap. Maybe look for a used or refurbished M1-M2 model.
Today it's the MacBook Neo unless you have a higher budget and want a nicer screen and more power. Then it's the MacBook Air, unless you do serious photography, video, audio, or development work then it's a MacBook Pro.
It's still a pretty simple, linear progression up the line.
Steve Jobs presided over an era where they were selling:
- A white plastic 13" MacBook
- An aluminum 13" MacBook
- 13", 15", and 17" Macbook Pro
- A high end 13" MacBook Air that thermally throttled and was more expensive than most of their other laptops
I'm now a 15'' Air user after always being pro. I notice no difference in performance but enjoy the lighter form factor and damn does it run cool compared to the pro.
Replacing my iPhone was a nothing burger of choice, on paper the iPhone 15 pro was the best feature set for value vs buying a new iPhone 17, but Apple know that so don't sell the older models directly when the new models come out.
There's really limited impactful innovation when you get into the details.
When Steve came back Apple was months from bankruptcy; their product lineup was full of duds.
Today Apple is the most profitable company in the world, and every product line is ruthlessly optimized/scrutinized to maximize their revenue/supply chain use/suss out consumer needs for the next cycle.
There isn’t a world where Apple has a $4T market cap and where their product offering fits in a neat 2x2.
Easy: MacBook Air. The friend is asking this question, so that’s what they need. If they needed a MacBook Pro, they wouldn’t be asking this question. If they wanted to spend as little as possible, they would have already bought something cheap, like a PC or Chromebook or now this Neo, so they wouldn’t be asking this question.
However, with the recent Macbook Neo. I actually went ahead and recommended Neo. Especially to a friend of mine whose going into college soon and has asked me what they should buy.
Now the 8gb can be concern to some but not to many IMO. And I am also feeling just a bit optimistic that Apple will realize that the largest criticism of this product can be that it doesn't have 16GB otherwise even more people can buy so in the future, I expect 16 GB to be possible too (When Ram bubble finally bursts)
People habitually misunderstand this moment in Apple’s history. Jobs took a shredder to a complex product line of poorly selling products, produced by a company that was nearly bankrupt. That was the right thing to do at that time.
Later when Apple was on sound financial footing, Jobs expanded the product line. That was the right thing to do at that time.
With the Neo, Apple now offers 3 lines of laptops: Pro, Air, Neo. This is not substantially different from 2010 when Apple under Jobs offered 3 lines of laptops: MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air.
MacBook Air - mid range mid price, good quality, basically as functional as the Pro now.
The price of the Neo is very compelling if they want it for light duty work though.
And obviously high end is high end but those people know who they are
I think this is now the one you should be telling your friend to get (unless they are a developer or professional in which case they probably aren’t asking your opinion)
I think Steve would have approved of the Neo. The 96/97 lineup was a mess so if a customer asked what to buy you wouldn't know. Now it's fairly simple - Nano for budget users and school, Air for general public, Pro for pros.
Generally the MacBook Air is incredible and what I generally recommend. If somebody is doing 'more' then it's the MBP. Now with the Neo I even have a recommendation for price sensitive people who may have otherwise gotten a cheap Windows device filled with crapware.
I think these are all different markets - $1k seems like a small amount for the MBA but it's too much for quite a few people.
MBP has some other advantages too- better display, better speakers/mic, more ports, driving more external displays. But yeah the MBA with an M1 chip is incredibly powerful and an awesome computer.
Do you truly believe that ID "verification" will do anything in a world where IDs are leaked by the tens of thousands to the millions?
You are shifting the onus on to the platforms, when the problem is pretty simple; with a few exceptions, we've failed as a species to learn how to think.
Also do you think that the TLAs don't know who the bots most likely are with all the surveillance data they're gathering? That the NSA doesn't have detailed telemetry of the surveillance ops??
Let me ask you the question, what have they done about it? And why not?
I know a lot of people that don't get through their email every week, for example. Even saying no takes too much time, with the volume of communication required by daily work.
Very few people email me except for endless newsletters that I accidentally signed up for. I try to un sub to a few every day but it seems never ending.
In the event that you actually do end up emailing me, it's contingent on me actually checking my personal email, which I never do when I'm not working, and only sometimes do during work hours.
If it's you asking me a favor that I'm not in the mental space for, I'll mark the message unread as a reminder to get to it later.
Maybe I just have weird email habits, but I can get away with this because email is not a heavy part of my job.
That being said, one guy was pitching me on something several times a month for several months. I just recently responded to him and apologized because of x y z. He said don't worry and we had a fruitful conversation later.
Passing on some life advice to anyone who’d benefit, people are busy. Maybe they didn’t respond because you’re annoying?… no no, feel it out and text again a while later. Give them another shot, get to the top of their inbox or messages again.
I think analyses like these are motivated reasoning. In 2000, I'm sure you could have said that after infrastructure costs the internet, and the web, added "basically zero" to US economic growth. And there were people saying that!
Someone I deeply respect, Clifford Stollm wrote a book called “Silicon Snake Oil — Second thoughts on the information highway" in 1995. And while he was and is a brilliant person, Stoll was wrong.
Don't make his mistake. Don't look away from the change being wrought. The world has changed and our history now has a new, sharp dividing chapter "Before ChatGPT | After ChatGPT"
and that chapter will go down right next to "Before Trinity | After Trinity"; "Before PC | After PC"; "Before 'Internet' | After 'Internet'"†
† Yes, I know I'm referring to the Web. But we're still using the dark fiber from the .com boom.
> documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted
If you genuinely believe that this is about those moustache twirling executives, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Have you ever wondered why and how these systems are being implemented? Have you ever gone why Discord / Twitch / what have you and why now? Have you ever thought that this might be happening because of Nepal and the fears of another Arab spring?
I think too many people on this platform don't understand what this is about. This is about power. It's not about what's good for you or the children. Or for the constituents. It's about power. Real power. Karp-ian "scare enemies and on occasion kill them" power.
There are many ways in which such a system could be implemented. They could have asked people to use a credit card. Adult entertainment services have been using this as a way to do tacit age verification for a very long time now. Or, they could have made a new zero-knowledge proof system. Or, ideally, they could have told the authorities to get bent. †
Tech is hardly the first industry to face significant (justifiable or unjustifiable) government backlash. I am hesitant to use them as examples as they're a net harm, whereas this is about preventing a societal net harm, but the fossil fuel and tobacco industries fought their governments for decades and straight up changed the political system to suit them. ††
FAANG are richer than they ever were. Even Discord can raise more and deploy more capital than most of the tobacco industry at the time. It's also a righteous cause. A cause most people can get behind (see: privacy as a selling point for Apple and the backlash to Ring). But they're not fighting this. They're leaning into it.
Let's take a look at what Discord asked people for a second, the face scan,
If you choose Facial Age Estimation, you’ll be prompted to record a short video selfie of your face. The Facial Age Estimation technology runs entirely on your device in real time when you are performing the verification. That means that facial scans never leave your device, and Discord and vendors never receive it. We only get your age group.
Their specific ask is to try and get depth data by moving the phone back and forth. This is not just "take a selfie" – they're getting the user to move the device laterally to extract facial structure. The "face scan" (how is that defined??) never leaves the device, but that doesn't mean the biometric data isn't extracted and sent to their third-party supplier, k-Id.
k-id, the age verification provider discord uses doesn't store or send your face to the server. instead, it sends a bunch of metadata about your face and general process details.
The author assumes that "this [approach] is good for your privacy." It's not. If you give me the depth data for a face, you've given me the fingerprint for that face.
We're anthropomorphising machines. A machine doesn't need pictures; "a bunch of metadata" will do just fine.
We are assuming that the surveillance state will require humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. It won't. You can just use a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model instead. Servers are cheap and never need to eat or sleep.
We can assume de facto that Discord is also doing profiling along vectors (presumably behavioral and demographic features) which that author described as,
after some trial and error, we narrowed the checked part to the prediction arrays, which are outputs, primaryOutputs and raws.
turns out, both outputs and primaryOutputs are generated from raws. basically, the raw numbers are mapped to age outputs, and then the outliers get removed with z-score (once for primaryOutputs and twice for outputs).
Discord plugs into games and allows people to share what they're doing with their friends. For example, Discord can automatically share which song a user is listening on Spotify with their friends (who can join in), the game they're playing, whether they're streaming on Twitch etc.
In general, Discord seems to have fairly reliable data about the other applications the user is running. Discord also has data about your voice and now your face.
Is some or all of this data being turned into features that are being fed to this third-party k-ID? https://www.k-id.com/
k-ID is (at first glance) extracting fairly similar data from Snapchat, Twitch etc. With ID documents added into the mix, this certainly seems like a very interesting global profiling dataset backstopped with government documentation as ground truth.
Somehow there's tens to hundreds of millions available for crypto causes and algorithmic social media crusades, but there's none for the "existential threat" of age verification.
yep, the ol four horseman of internet censorship lol
if folks actually wanted to protect minors they would age restrict internet ACCESS instead of letting adults personal details get spewed all over the world for bad actors to take advantage of.
The best of humanity is remarkably capable as compared to the best physical machines / robots. There's a great paper called the "dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency." https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article-abstract/53/2/2.22... // https://lasp.colorado.edu/mop/files/2019/08/RobotMyth.pdf
Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ – and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity – for exploration is much harder. Healthy, smart humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
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