Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level.

The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

I'm not surprised surprised or anything; but it seems like a serious problem that it's the 'maker of high-end sex toys' part; rather than the 'attempting to replace education and human interaction with chatbots' part that has the company embroiled in controversy. Real Dolls are certainly pretty niche; a lot of additional inconvenience and cost for modest gains vs. vastly cheaper and more accessible local stimulation tools; but using tools as stimulation tools seems considerably less weird than using them as friends or fobbing children off on them.

I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's much protective effect.

It's possible that having to go through the setup process yourself is a little too much seeing how the sausage is made vs. interacting with a pleasant frontend cynically put together by someone who knows how 'engagement' works; but it's not like the nerd reputation for skewing socially awkward or the AI bro reputation for reaching a bit too quickly for slightly mystical anthropomorphisms are entirely unearned(the 'soul.md' is a frankly somewhat depressing genre).

At least for now; there might be some confounding demographic effects if you are talking one of the chunkier local models; in a country with a per-capita GDP of ~$14k being able to comfortably afford, or willing to uncomfortably afford, the necessary hardware would make you either at least modestly wealthier than average or significantly more interested than average; but as you slouch toward stuff that runs on more typical hardware the demographic differences presumably decrease.

I don't want to diminish the accomplishment; that seems like a very cool dataset and probably one that was really fiddly to pull together; but, if you are talking single-neuron resolution; I am curious about whether you can still call an individual sample "the human brainstem" rather than "a human brainstem" and what comparative purposes you can use it for without running into trouble with cases where there are multiple ways for a brainstem to be adequately healthy, so long as certain requirements are met, so you'll need considerably more samples to draw useful inferences about exactly what the problem abnormality is.

Same sort of thing as when "sequencing the human genome" was a big project. Obviously a major exercise in gene sequencing and a basis for situating subsequent sequencing operations; but once you start talking detail there isn't 'the human genome'; literally everyone has one; and it turns out that different differences matter or don't at radically different levels.

Presumably the methods used to do it once will be helpful in doing it more often in the future; but I'll be curious what we discover about the balance of 'normalcy' vs. some relatively subtle and confusing combination of surprisingly variable ways to have a brainstem that seems to work just fine along with surprisingly subtle, no ghastly big lesions, ways to have one that ends up being totally dodgy.

I find "NOTE: Experiences vary by region." to be a bad sign for something that would be so trivial for MS to alter the behavior of; and where they are obviously not earnestly making improvements that were previously impossible but grudgingly rolling back bullshit they thought they could get away with.

Probably means good news for users in the EU; same way they get left out of some of the most egregiously bullshit 'AI' stuff; may help EDU and enterprise; but I'm guessing that it's no promises for less favored users.

I'm not expecting that from domestic opponents; both because the penalties are high and because people are, historically, shockingly bad at shooting for targets that actually matter. I'm thinking more internationally.

If 'AI' is half so interesting as its proponents claim one would expect being a machine learning researcher worth offering a fat signing bonus to be about as dangerous as being an Iranian nuclear physicist or a Russian oligarch who has fallen off Putin's friends list. If Zuck thinks that you are worth $100 million it seems like someone who takes the idea that 'AI' is the next frontier in state power would consider it worth the trouble to hire some local criminal to kill you in a botched robbery or have their clandestine services attempt to throw you a little tea party. So far no reports of even foiled attempts.

Anyone who thinks that the bots are going to wipe us out is overestimating the bots; but it seems like there is a disconcertingly large supply of people who are just chomping at the bit to replace people regardless of whether the bots are up to the job or not.

Honestly, the weirdest thing about the 'hard line activists' and the 'war with AI' is how much there isn't to it.

This is an industry that puts out a 'tehehe, we're an existential threat!' press release every time they need another VC round; and whose c-levels openly discuss how they will annihilate all human jobs and maybe someone should think about what we should do about that; and who routinely trample local interests to get their infrastructure builds rammed through; and what's the 'war with AI'? One idiot who tossed a molotov and a disgruntled constituent? That's it?

The same oddity is true for 'AI' companies and nation states, also very puzzlingly. To go by the rhetoric of 'AI' being an existential struggle for the future of industry and whether the AGI omnimind will speak english or mandarin you'd think that we'd see at least a bit of skullduggery. Prominent 'AI' hires occasionally dying under mysterious circumstances; sabotage of expensive GPU farms, maybe a Rosenberg-style show trial or two. But no. There's some lightweight hacking and ToS-violating 'distillation'; and a few export shenanigans; but aside from that it's basically the same as any other SaaS nonsense but with bigger numbers. Weirdly unserious.

There's also the issue of cost/scope. I'm not sure that Id is atypical for a studio of its age and size in terms of how its games have gotten more costly over time; but it's still very much the case that Quake was about a dozen guys crunching and Trent Reznor making creepy industrial noises; while Doom: The Dark Ages was closer to feature film level budget.

More potential players now than there were in 1996; but the production cost increase has still, on the balance, likely done bad things to your ability to turn a profit on the basis of a relatively small slice of the market thinking that your game fucking rules; rather than making a major seller more or less mandatory.

In Id's case specifically I'd also be curious if they are somewhat victims of their own legend. Basically every "boomer shooter" going is absolutely mainlining some combination of doom and quake nostalgia(often doom aesthetics but with quake's actually-3d to better render how you remember them rather than how the weird 2.5d stuff actually behaved); and a lot of those actually have dev teams closer in size to Quake; presumably with the expected effect on how many units they have to sell to remain viable.

Are we really just going to sit and take the fact that Cuba has already achieved the sort of electrical grid reliability that demented AI bros are setting billions of dollars on fire to try to bring to the US? This is an outrage!

"No, you don’t get to simply dismiss the oppression of Communism with a “I understand”. As if the death toll demanded by that ideology is dismissible with some shitty retort given on the ass-end of a customer support line."

Empirically, we do. You can feel however you want about it; but it's a trivial matter of historical record that, say, Vietnam, had trade relations pick up from the 1990s on; and full PNTR status in late 2006 leading in to WTO membership in 2007(both under noted woke liberal commie George W. Bush); and that's a nominally communist state directly continuous with the one we lost an unpleasant war to whose human rights record continues to be pretty tepid at best.

We do enjoy decrying the horrors of communism; but we'll 100% pick up an abjectly shit foreign policy pal if we think that they will be useful. During the cold war that normally meant any right wing dictatorship that liked us more than Moscow; now that Soviets aren't a huge deal you can still have "socialist republic" in your nation's full name so long as your resources are cool or your labor force is cheap and docile.

Cuba is really something of a weird outlier. Militarily unthreatening, not huge on strategic resources but some agricultural products we enjoy and by all accounts a pleasant vacation spot that (like a lot of pleasant vacation spots with dubious local governments) generally keeps things civil with tourists, even from unfriendly nations, so long as the tourists keep things apolitical and do tourist stuff. Normally that's the sort of place we'd absolutely do some business with.

A lot of it comes down to Cuban immigrants to the US skewing pretty sharply anti-present-government and being a voting bloc very much worth picking up. Basically mandatory in Florida; and helpful if less vital in a fair number of other states. They aren't necessarily rabidly single issue and trivial to pick up (especially for the purposes of primaries where there's generally more than one candidate promising disproportionate hostility to Cuba); but they do make being weirdly hostile to Cuba specifically more electorally rewarding than it would otherwise be.

This is not to imply any particular support for their administration on my part; but it's patently obvious that we are far chummier with rather worse people all the time without much caring about it; and we have no general policy against dealing with states that style themselves communist but make themselves useful market participants(even ones like Vietnam, where the history is rather less pleasant than with Cuba, we treat as totally normal manufacturing locations). It's hard to see much incentive beyond internal voter signaling for our rigid adherence to cold war freakout rather than just trying to shuffle Cuba into the same box as other Caribbean tourism-and-a-bit-of-agriculture-and-fisheries locations that we view as more or less powerless playground locations but don't put lots of time into actively fucking with.

It's not really a catch-22, since there's no need for it to be the same people regulating how much lying you can do about prices and producing goods and services.

It's also not really a catch-22 since, if it weren't for the tolerance of grotesque levels of regulatory capture, any 'capitalist' regulator would take ensuring high quality price signals really seriously.

The part that should upset people is that the 'capitalists' are so far into bed with actively anti-market rent seekers that you can't rely on them to stand up for honest price signals, contract law that isn't so lopsided as to be basically a joke, and so on.

It is definitely a good sign that you need to go with professed 'socialists' just to get some honest price signals in your market economy. Failure to enforce those is among the most fundamental failings one could imagine; yet here we are.

If you are going to anthropomorphize a tool enough to call it "AI" I suppose that it isn't entirely unreasonable to suspect that it might "reflect CCP ideology and values"; but fretting along that line seems to either be ignoring or deliberately obfuscating the difference between running a model and suckling on someone's black-box API.

A local bot can hurt you to the degree that you trust it to actually work; but a remote vendor can(and, given the competitive scramble for training data, almost certainly wants to and will try to to the degree they can get away with it) hurt you both to the degree that you trust it to actually work and to the degree that it can exploit the data and process information you are exfiltrating to them. This aspect is outright advertised as a virtue to some extent(when facebook is going on about how the 'AI' that 'knows you better' will be more useful; or one of the 'foundation model' vendors is promising your boss that, for real this time, improvements will allow next year's digital transformation to still work after it gets rid of you); but there's no reason to believe that it stops there: if the potential of 'AI' is half as interesting as they claim it is why would you expect that your vendor will just sit there obligingly renting you synthetic programmers or virtual back-office functions forever when they could just eat you whole?

For about 2 American money pits racing toward IPOs the chinese models are the scary pirate version that makes their value proposition look even worse than it does by itself; but for literally everyone else it's using the fancy, respectable, foundation model guys that is the glorious future of short-sighted outsourcing; and there's not much reason to expect any of them to like it for reasons beyond stupidity or desperation.

I realize that it's all about keeping the corporate sponsors happy; but I'm perpetually a bit puzzled by how the 'culture war' stuff never seems to result in any related action on things like food contamination (outside of a few 'crunchy'/'natural' influencers who make some social media noise but are essentially irrelevant from a regulatory perspective).

If one were looking for something remotely resembling intellectual coherence wouldn't the legality of persistent compounds that sure do seem to make endocrinologists nervous in food really get the people who are loudly concerned about biological gender or white birth rates motivated? However much you overestimate the ability of liberal propagandists surely you would take good, old-fashioned, chemical effects on the endocrine system even more seriously?