Humanoid robots make sense in only one context I can think of, and I definitely wouldn't put it past Musk to enter that market. It will be a big one. He may just be waiting for material science to catch up with his product vision. Much like Steve Jobs waited by the river until capacitive multitouch came floating by, and then pounced on it.
Meantime, as others have pointed out, the Model S and X are not selling enough to justify keeping the factory running. I don't see them going into Optimus production immediately, since as you suggest it's a solution looking for a problem.
If you’re beating around the same bush, I think the material science is already there. It’s more the power draw and the societal blowback that are issues. It is an underrated market, but not a >1T$ market (I hope).
What you (and the authors) call "hallucination," other people call "imagination."
Also, you don't know very many people, including yourself, if you think that confabulation and self-deception aren't integral parts of our core psychological makeup. LLMs work so well because they inherit not just our logical thinking patterns, but our faults and fallacies.
I don't know. It's one thing to tell Joe or Jane User to "Get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." But if Joe or Jane can just cut-and-paste that advice into a prompt and get their own personal Dropbox...
Except when that new Dropbox fails Joe or Jane on that Saturday evening, their only recourse is to ask the AI for help, and the AI starts spinning “oh yeah, mmm, I think I found where the problem is. Cut and paste these debugging lines in that function and let me know what the output is…”
Meanwhile, this year, that happens less often than it did last year... and it actually isn't how AI-assisted development works at all. Agentic models do the cutting-and-pasting by themselves, evaluate the results by themselves, and almost always succeed at fixing the problem by themselves.
It works if there is no scheduler, or you tell the scheduler what you're doing.
Turns out the first scenario is rare outside of embedded or OS development. The second scenario defeats the purpose because you're doing the same thing a mutex would be doing. It's not like mutexes were made slow on purpose to bully people. They're actually pretty fast.
You can limit yourself to the performance of a 1mhz 6502 with no OS if you don't like it. Even MSDos on a 8086 with 640K ram allows for things that require complexity of this type (not spin locks, but the tricks needed to make "terminate stay resident" work are evil in a similar way)
Modern CPUs (since around 2000) go faster in large part because they have multiple cores that can do more than one thing in a time. If your program needs to go faster using more cores is often your best answer and then you will need these tricks. (SIMD or the GPU are also common answers that might or might not be better for your problem)
Modern CPUs can do 4-5 GHz singled threaded. (Sometimes you can even get a higher clock speed by disabling other cores.) This somewhat outpaces "a 1mhz 6502" even without parallelization.
They can, but nobody runs a single process on such CPUs. They run some form of OS which implements spinlock, mutexes, and all these other complex things.
I suppose someplace someone is running an embedded system without an OS on such a processor - but I'd expect they are still using extra cores and so have all of the above tricks someplace.
I never get the single threaded assertions regarding CPU performance, it is mostly useless in the day of premptive scheduling in modern OSes.
Yes it matters on MS-DOS like OS design, like some embedded deployments and that is about it.
It is even impossible to guarantee a process doesn't get rescheduled into another CPU with the performance impact it entails, unless the process explicitly sets its CPU affinity.
OS kernel runqueue is using a spinlock to schedule everything. So it works. Should you ever use a spinlock in application code? No. Let the OS via the synchronization primitives in whatever language your app is in.
Not really. A different place to look for this is in chemical reactions and things biological life does.
You may have some simple chemical life needs, and life may have some other simple chemical it can use to get the needed simple chemical, but the processing steps are complex and limited by physics themselves. Evolution almost always finds a path of using the minimum activation energy to let these reactions occur. Trying to make the process simpler just doesn't get you what you need.
Not really. If the solution has less complexity than is inherent in the problem, it can't possibly work. If the solution has complexity equal to or greater than the complexity inherent in the problem, it may work. So if you see complex code handling many different edge cases, you can take that as an indicator the author understood the problem. That doesn't mean they do understand or that the solution does work; only that you have more confidence than you did initially.
Probably not, not without formal verification which is usually lacking.
Everyone's computers hang or get slow some of the time. Probably all of our locks have bugs in them, but good luck getting to the bottom of that, right now the industry is barely capable of picking a sorting algorithm that actually works.
Neither is murder. Just file it under "Something you'd be screaming to the moon about if Biden or Obama were doing it."
Of course, you've forgotten that it was a Republican who once told you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. These days, the Republicans recruit street gangs and order them to see how many rights they can violate at once. A whole different breed.
You don’t need to learn performance, you can always scale later.
My (half-joking) attitude was always, "Performance? That sounds like Intel's job, not mine. My code magically gets faster if I do nothing at all, so I'll focus on new stuff instead."
That didn't scale very well at all, as it turned out.
In my country they have 16 year old kids working in the supermarket. They are pretty cheap to employ and these jobs train the boys and girls into becoming adults.
It would be a shame if this shared experience was taken over by third worlders.
Meanwhile the distinction between the US and the so-called "third world" seems to become less apparent and less relevant every day. Indian teenagers need jobs too, don't they? More power to them.
Meantime, as others have pointed out, the Model S and X are not selling enough to justify keeping the factory running. I don't see them going into Optimus production immediately, since as you suggest it's a solution looking for a problem.
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