Somewhat relevant: when I first searched for those videos I searched for “robot that tests Ikea chairs by sitting on them” or something. I got lots of results, but every one of them was about robots that were building furniture, not testing it. To actually get the results I wanted I needed to say “furniture testing machine”.

So, I guess the Internet doesn’t think those are actually robots, so they don’t worry about their purpose.

Here’s a video from 2012:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s_gyzshNPQ

And another one from 2012 testing cupboards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW6RsT4w2hY

Ooh, here’s ine from 2018 where a machine hit 9,999,999 tests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbMB-qG_x8o

On the subject of devices lasting a long time, does anybody remember when Ikea used to have displays in their stores where you could see a machine testing a piece of furniture over and over? Like, they had one that simulated someone sitting down in a chair over and over again, or one that simulated a drawer being opened over and over again.

Those machines were great. They should bring them back.

Start a tech company. They spawn garages as part of their “backstory” stage.

Nice.

Ok, now tell us what your magic 8 ball said.

Once again proving that while AI can’t do a programmer’s job, a tech writer’s job, an artist’s job, a composer’s job, a doctor’s job, or any other job involving thinking and understanding – it can easily do a CEO’s job and probably better than the CEO.

Yes, any journalist who uses that term should be relentlessly mocked. Along with terms like “Grok admitted” or “ChatGPT confessed” or especially any case where they’re “interviewing” the LLM.

These journalists are basically “interviewing” a magic 8-ball and pretending that it has thoughts.

No, they haven’t. They’re effectively prop masters. Someone wants a prop that looks a lot like a legal document, the LLM can generate something that is so convincing as a prop that it might even fool a real judge. Someone else wants a prop that looks like a computer program, it can generate something that might actually run, and one that will certainly look good on screen.

If the prop master requests a chat where it looks like the chatbot is gaining agency, it can fake that too. It has been trained on fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Wargames. It can also generate a chat where it looks like a chatbot feels sorry for what it did. But, no matter what it’s doing, it’s basically saying “what would an answer to this look like in a way that might fool a human being”.

we should teach them these things directly, instead of relying on science classes

Ok, so by “these things” you mean logic, argument analysis, media literacy, critical thinking, etc.

Yes, I had classes like that, and I think they’re much more important than science and math classes. You can learn science and math on your own from YouTube videos, but you need the media literacy to know which YouTube videos you can trust.

It sounds like they lost you in 3 months, not immediately.

They work, but there are no humans inside them.

It’s amazing how complicated just the O2 cycle is. Basically, we don’t yet how to do it without a whole planet being involved.

Like, plants do release O2 sometimes, but they also use O2 as fuel when they grow. Growing a plant requires light. On the earth that’s easy, just put it in the sun. On Mars there’s no atmosphere and no magnetic field, so if you just put a plant on the surface they’ll die. So, you need to grow them underground in a mostly earth-like atmosphere at mostly earth-like pressure lit by artificial lights.

So, you plant a lot of plants deep underground lit by bright artificial lights. Then you need to supply the plants with a lot of water. Some of that water will be released into the air, but some of it will be incorporated into the plant’s body. There’s a whole water cycle that isn’t yet fully understood.

What about the soil? On earth worms and other bugs break down leaf litter and other things into usable soil and bees pollinate many of the plants. So, do you ship up a bunch of bugs? You’d have to supply a whole ecosystem of them so they live in balance. You could go with hydroponics instead, but then you’d need a constant supply of nutrients for the plants, and given the amount of plant matter needed for just one human, that would be a huge supply of nutrients.

I’d love to see another honest, scientifically rigorous attempt at a biosphere project. Building a closed ecosystem on Earth is easy-mode compared to doing it anywhere else, but so far all the Biospheres have been failures. IMO until we can easily do it on Earth, we’re nowhere near ready to do it in space, on the moon, or on another planet.

“… and now that I realize how easily conned I am, I promise not to vote in any future elections because I’d just make the wrong choice.”

(One can dream)

Don’t misspell things in your quotes.

Don’t misspell things in your quotes.

whose

Obviously, the end goal is to ensure that nobody has any rights, just temporary privileges which can easily be stripped at the dictator’s whim. That way everyone is always afraid to stand up to them or they’ll get locked up, have their citizenship stripped, etc.

illegal immigrants being turned away

This sentence makes no sense. “Turned away” implies that they are rejected at the border. If they’re rejected at the border, at no point are they illegal immigrants, they’re just people who want to pass the border for whatever reason. The only way they can become illegal immigrants is if they pass the border and are not turned away at the border.

we have no idea about their criminal history and ignoring them allows drug dealers and gangs to sneak through

This is Fox News propaganda. Drug dealers and gang members aren’t taking their passports to a checkpoint and asking to please be admitted. If they’re “sneaking through”, it’s because the US has one of the largest borders in the world, and it’s effectively impossible to police all 9000 km of border, and it’s obviously also unrealistic to build a secure wall covering all 9000 km.

It’s been around since the 1980s. If you didn’t know it it’s not because you’re a millennial, it’s because you weren’t part of the right subcultures when you were young / teen / 20s.