CARA – High precision robot dog using rope

If I'm reading your comment accurately, you're mentioning the discovery algorithm, which is neither of these. I also got the video, but I was already subscribed (it was suggested to me when it was released). Yes, the discovery algorithm has some of these issues but I'm more understanding of that because it's a much harder problem.

Both have self inflicted problems and I think they can be more easily addressed:

Discovery over optimizes to recent views and can get stuck in certain genres[1]. There is also a strong preference to things average user enjoys which doesn't work well for those of us who are only slightly less schizophrenic than the algorithm itself. Too much exploitation, not enough exploration (I wish this was a setting I could adjust. My mood changes, how can I let the algorithm know?)

Search has two critical self inflicted problems.

1) after about 5 results it will suggest completely unrelated videos (looks like it hands off to the discovery feed). Sometimes I need page two... just fucking show me more...

2) the problem I mentioned previously, where it distrusts you prioritizing popular videos over a trivial spelling or grammatical error. Google search has this exact same problem.

[0] my dumbass didn't check which video was linked. It's this one where he discusses it. At 12:30 in the video

[1] this leads me to having tons of YouTube tabs open as I'm unsure if a video I'm interested in but don't have the current bandwidth for is never going to be shown to me again

I'm quite fond of bowstring as a material for this sort of thing. It usually has other fibres mixed in with it so it's a little more bouncy than raw dyneema but that's minimised if you get thread that's intended for crossbows. It's usually waxed so there's some friction to it when you're manipulating it, and it's also easy to source.

The former has a rather large non-pecuniary component of total compensation.

I think the X-Carve 3-axis wood carver uses stepper motors with belts of all things. The Shapeoko Pro is leadscrews and stepper motors. Wazers, I believe, are belt-and-servo driven. And a lot of 'CNC conversion kits' you can order online use stepper motors. Plus of course laser cutters have really low torque requirements, so they've got a lot of design freedom.

Arguably those are "cheap" rather than "mid price" it just felt weird to declare a $4000 machine to be "cheap"

Back-drivability is the enemy of precision, so many robotic applications can do without it.

Burnia sends their million autonomous weapons to kill the million people they judge are most crucial to Hevonia's war effort, prioritizing Hevonia's political leadership and military officers.

Hevonia, meanwhile, sends their million autonomous weapons to destroy Burnia's autonomous weapons, when they can find them, but not to attack any humans.

Who wins the war?

I think Burnia does, because even if Hevonia's weapons are 99% effective, Hevonia's government has still lost its top ten thousand people, including all of their military officers, while Burnia has only lost half a billion dollars. That's going to make it impossible for Hevonia to keep fighting. And I think 50% effective is more likely.

I'm saying that the events we're seeing in the Ukrainian war are convincing evidence that the nature of war has changed, and the implications of that change for human society are disquieting.

For two million years, people have often resolved conflicts by warfare. But that warfare, though it has never ended completely, has always been localized, which meant that most places most of the time were peaceful.

This is the foundation of the system of international relations in which different states exercised monopolies of legitimate violence over geographical territories: by so doing, they could prevent warfare and provide security. This system has existed to one extent or another for thousands of years.

Warfare is no longer localized, so now the only place for anywhere to be peaceful will be for everywhere to be peaceful. It is no longer possible for states to provide security to the people within their borders. Consequently statehood itself has lost its meaning. The last time we saw such a change in the nature of warfare was twelve thousand years ago when the first states arose.

I have some corrections for you about other things that you did not understand either about my comment or about the wars we are commenting on.

It bears repeating that the planes blown up in Operation Spiderweb were not in a literal warzone, nor anywhere close to a literal warzone. Some of them were thousands of kilometers from the literal warzone, in a part of Russia that has China and Mongolia between it and Ukraine.

The Ukrainians reportedly did have humans in the loop for that attack in particular, and both the Ukrainians and the Russians are mostly using FPV drones rather than autonomous drones of any sort at this point, unless we count landmines as "autonomous drones". In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmfNUM2CbbM Russian drone developer Sergey Tovkach specifically says that Starlink is the reason Ukrainian sea drones have established control of the Black Sea — Russia could build sea drones but does not have an equivalent to Starlink, so evidently both Ukraine and Russia are dependent on remote piloting for their sea drones. He also says Starlink's latency is too high for piloting quadcopters. (Evidently Operation Spiderweb used the Russian cellphone network.)

The Israeli attacks are also using precision-guided weaponry and (in some sense) AI, not conventional bombs, and they're killing lots of innocent people, but you're right that it's less worrisome to me, for three reasons:

- The total number of people they're killing is about an order of magnitude smaller, about 80,000 so far (out of a total of 2.1 million Gazans), versus roughly a million in the invasion of Ukraine. Many more civilians have been killed in Gaza, but both Russia and Ukraine practice conscription, so it's not as if the soldiers being killed are only or even mostly volunteers; they were civilians until being, in many cases, conscripted.

- The weapons Israel are using are mostly very expensive, which limits the number of people they can afford to kill with them. By contrast, the drones being mass-produced in both Ukraine and Russia cost only a few hundred dollars each, and each country is expected to produce about 3 million of them this year.

- The people Israel are killing are almost entirely in close geographical proximity to Israel. Gaza City is 80 km from Jerusalem. Beirut, the residence of many of the Hizbullah personnel that Israel killed with explosive charges in pagers (along with, in several cases, their children), is 230 km from Jerusalem.

Therefore, while Israel's war is clearly causing terrible suffering to millions of innocent people, and it could easily spiral into a Third World War, it does not represent the advent of a new, borderless mode of warfare in which the cost of untraceably killing a precision-targeted human anywhere in the world is similar to the cost of a small air conditioner or 20 kg of beef.

The developments we are seeing of the mode of war in the Ukrainian invasion do represent such a transition, and that is true regardless of how the conflict goes. But mostly it is not the Ukrainians and Russians who are responsible for the transition; it was an inevitable result of developments in batteries, motors, power electronics, and 3-D printing and (more broadly) digital fabrication.

What will the new equilibrium look like, now that statehood is effectively meaningless? Well, it might be better or it might be worse, but not many people currently alive will live long enough to find out.