ask me about technology

One of your posts on energy suggests that technology like https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-terraformer-mark-one/ should not be possible at its price point (you wrote that even with free energy the equipment should be too expensive). Do you think the made a genuine advance to make it work?

If so would that basically mean we can plan for using a lot of methane in the future?

What's your overall view of how the energy transition will go (assuming the AI transition doesn't overtake event)? What do you think about claims like this one that we don't have enough mining or mineral reserves to support the transition plans that people are depending on?

When I posted this, I actually thought I'd get stuff like

• "Do you think [startup]'s technology is practical?"
• "What do you think the best approach to [problem] is?"
• "Do you know of any notable promising inventions regarding [subfield]?"

because that's what I've gotten by DM elsewhere, but apparently a public post on LessWrong is different.

What do you think about synthetic biology as a manufacturing technology?

You have a post about small nanobots being unlikely, but do you have similar opinions about macroscopic nanoassemblers? Non-microscopic ones could have a vacuum and lower temperatures inside, etc.

Why did Microsoft have so much success with MS-DOS back in the 80s? I feel like they didn't actually have that much leverage over IBM. Wouldn't it have been cheaper for IBM to pay some software developers to build their own OS instead of paying all of the royalties to Microsoft for MS-DOS? Enough to eventually make Bill Gates the richest person on earth.

Thoughts on this paper about an improved electrochemical process to fix nitrogen? (Originally came across this in a youtube video.)

Do you have any views on the most promising avenues for human intelligence [LW · GW] enhancement [LW(p) · GW(p)] through biology? I'd be most interested in approaches that would give us (humanity) better odds in worlds where AI takes off in the next 1–15 years.

What's your opinion on load shifting as an alternative to electrical energy storage. (EG:phase change heating/cooling storage for HVAC). I am currently confused why this hasn't taken off given time of use pricing for electricity (and peak demand charges) offer big incentives. My current best guess is added complexity is a big problem leading to use only in large building HVAC(eg:this sort of thing)

Both in building integrated PCMs(phase change materials) (EG:PCM bags above/integrated in building drop ceilings) and PCMs integrated in the HVAC system (EG:ice storage air conditioning) seem like very good options. Heck, refrigeration unit capacity is still measured in tons (IE:tons ice/day) in some parts of the world which is very suggestive.

Another potential complication for HVAC integrated PCMs is needing a large thermal gradient to use the stored cooling/heating (EG:ice at 0°C to cool buildings to 20°C).

With respect to articulated robot progress

Strain wave gearing scales to small dog robot size reasonably(EG:boston dynamics spot) thanks to square cube law but can't manage human sized robots without pretty horrible tradeoffs(IE:ASIMO and the new Tesla robots walk slowly and have very much sub-human agility).

You might want to update that post to mention improvements in ... "digital hydraulics" is one search term I think but essentially hydraulic actuators fed from a single high pressure fluid rail using throttling valves.

Modeling, Identification and Joint Impedance Control of the Atlas Arms US10808736B2:Rotary hydraulic valve My guess is current state of the art (ATLAS) Boston dynamics actuators are rotary vane type actuators with individual pressurization of fluid compartments. Control would use a rotary valve actuated by a small small electric motor. Multiple fluid compartments allow for multiple levels of static force depending on which are pressurized so efficiency is less abysmal. Very similar to hydraulic power steering but with multiple force "steps".

Rotary actuators are preferred over linear hydraulic cylinders because there's no fluid volume change during movement so no need for a large low pressure reservoir sized to handle worst case joint extension/retraction volume changes.

Roller screws have high friction?

This seems incorrect to me. The rolling of the individual planet screws means the contact between the planet and (ring/sun) screws is rolling contact. Not perfect rolling but slip depends on the contact patch size and average slip should be zero across a given contact patch. A four point contact ball bearing would be analogous. if the contact patches were infinitesimally small there would be no friction since surface velocities at the contact points would match exactly. Increasing the contact patch size means there's a linear slip gradient across the contact patch with zero slip somewhere in the middle. Not perfect but much much better than a plain bearing.

For roller screws the ring/planet contact patch operates this way with zero friction for a zero sized contact patch. The sun/planet contact patch will have some slip due to axial velocity mismatch at the contact patch since the sun screw does move axially relative to the planets. Still the most of the friction in a simple leadscrew is eliminated since the circumferential velocitiy at the sun/planet contact point is matched. What's left is more analogous to the friction in strain wave gearing.

What is your opinion on general robotics (driven by an early form of AGI) and then robotics self manufacturing?

I have personally thought that using a technique that is a straightforward expansion of LLM training, but you train on human manipulation from all available video, would give you a foundation model. Then you would add rl fine tuning and millions of simulated years of RL training to the foundation model to develop excellent and general robot performance.

Do you think this isn't that straightforward or near term?

I ask because if robots can go from their narrow and limited roles now to performing most tasks if given information like (an example or a prompt or a goal schematic) it would change everything.

It would trivialize energy transitions for one. And deep mining and ocean mining and so on. (Because you task some robots with building and assembling others, some with building and deploying energy collection, some with mining, and are now rate limited not really by money directly but by materials, regulations, energy, or mining rights)

Your opinions must rest on an assumption that this problem cannot be solved anytime soon. How confident are you in this belief? What are the obstacles you believe are limiting in developing such a robotics technique?

Past efforts failed but didn't have sufficient compute, and a multimodal technique as described would need all the compute for gpt-4 plus all the compute for image processing, as well as much more training and quality checks during inference. So essentially the technique has never once been attempted at scale.