The most common form of male birth control also happens to be the primary recommended means to avoid HIV and other STI's: the condom. Sorry if I was unclear and made it seem like it was improperly related.
The only 100% effective form of birth control, which is also the most effective at avoiding HIV and other STIs, is the one that the Catholic Church recommends. Why do you want them to promote less effective alternatives instead?
It's not 100% effective, in the real world you don't start with a hypothetical value and then insist it's real despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary: You Modify Your Hypothesis.
There are many practices that have been widespread for thousands of years, which we would nevertheless all consider wrong. Why is this issue different?
I'd argue that it isn't something to promote harmful policies over, recognizing reality as it exists is essential. You can want to change the world, but until you have you need to work with what you have and not doom so many people to horrible lives and deaths as a result of your ultimate goal.
Edit: You ultimately can't claim a fictional effectiveness rate for something that's never demonstrated that level of success. Theory and Practice DIFFER.
I had it read all of the emails find which accounts were associated with the old email and then go switch them to the new email. I only had to manually intervene for 2 accounts out of 36ish.
Humanoid robots are obviously more than marketing. The entirety of human civilization is human shaped. Making robots that are human shaped is easier and more efficient than redesigning and rebuilding everything that exists.
> The entirety of human civilization is human shaped.
That's the marketing pitch.
A plumbing robot doesn't need to be humanoid, an octopus shape may well be better for all the awkward corners. A robot police officer could be the municipality itself for sensory nodes (essentially the sales pitch of Flock etc.), plus some drones or robot dogs to perform arrests*.
The robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers we already have are nothing like a human. A robot taxi driver can be just the car. Robot dogs are already used for maintenance and security sweeps.
If you've got wheelchair access, you've got wheeled robot access. If you've got guide dog access, you've got access for Boston Dynamics' Spot.
* this may be a bad idea with current robotics, but I aver it's not improved by making those robotics humanoid.
You are not understanding what humanoid robots are about. Those are specialist robots you are describing. The promise is of course one robot that can do the plumbing, clean your house, do the dishes, build a house, and basically every physical job a human can do. It's extreme lly likely that at least a somewhat humanoid shape is required for that.
Humans are really bad at everything we do compared to the specialized creatures in nature, it’s just that we can do many things that sets us apart.
A humanoid robot is incredibly dumb for that reason. At least add a set of arms and legs and 360 vision. And obviously dislocated joints than can move freely and hands should have two thumbs and more fingers.
It’s not hard to come up with a bunch of improvements for humans, it’s just that making robots in our image is a lot more trivial because you only have to solve for those same averages attributes that we have.
Adding arms and 360 vision is not free. Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle. The one who wins is not the one that makes the best robot ever. The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.
Vision is hard regardless of the angle, but scaling it from a normal camera to 360° doesn't add much cost or difficulty once you've done the hard part of turning pixels into a suitable latent space.
> Look at octopi with their insane nervous system required to support their tentacle.
500 million neurons across the whole animal, brain included. We'll only know the synapse count when someone does a full connectome scan of one, but based on the vague estimates I see with a quick search, their whole mind is less complex than a SotA LLM today.
> The one who wins is the one who builds a robot that can do the most, while being the cheapest.
This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.
The best container ship is a terrible pleasure yacht, and vice versa. You use container ships pretty much constantly, even though you (almost certainly) don't own one, by the power of indirection. You can rent a pleasure yacht as desired without owning own.
I will ignore the insane comparison between neurons and LLMs. But
> This is a reason for specialists, not generalists.
Precisely not. The amount of work a human can do is basically unenumerable. Requiring a specialist for each task will quickly run up costs to be completely unreasonable.
> I will ignore the insane comparison between neurons and LLMs. But
Please don't.
I mean, you yourself specifically said to "Look at octopi with their insane nervous system", and that's exactly what I'm doing and my conclusion is "doesn't look that bad compared to what else we do now".
Also note that I expressly noted that synapses, not neurons, are the important factor in parameter count.
> The amount of work a human can do is basically unenumerable.
> Requiring a specialist for each task will quickly run up costs to be completely unreasonable.
The existence of specialists in professional settings proves this claim false.
As does the existence of special-purpose robots, all the way down to injection moulds designed for one specific part, which overall make the end product cheaper, a process which probably started with whoever invented whichever came first of the wind or water powered grain mill.
Much of the economic gain of the industrial revolution was replacing the very expensive salaries of general-purpose humans with machines that, despite being extremely single-purpose and having high purchase and maintenance costs, were still cheaper than the wages of the huge number of humans needed for equal output.
Since the industrial revolution we have been the species that makes tools even though it sometimes also uses slavery, not the species that relies on slaves and has tools for decorative reasons.
Yeah. Can't wait to see three or four armed robots. Or five or six!
How do you train a robot to use three hands effectively when we only have two? Then again, why is the robot limited to being one robot? If two humanoid robots are in the same area, they don't have to be distinctly controlled. If they're both controlled by the same AI, a third arm on one body is the same as that arm being attached to another body.
Things you need to take into account that you've almost certainly glossed over:
Safety. Human-robot interactions are generally dangerous and avoided, unless the robot is specifically designed to interact with people. In those cases you often sacrifice speed, strength, and flexibility for safety and softness. Having someone come in with a specialized plumbing robot makes sense, you owning one probably doesn't, and you owning a generalize android capable of plumbing makes less sense still.
Cost. The more compact, complex, and interactive your robot is the more it costs. Make a strong, compact, complex robot safe for interactions with people in the wild is non-trivial and adds costs. The software required to do all of this is hypothetical, but obviously also costly.
Need. I understand the dream of a robot to do whatever you want is very much part of our culture, but when you consider the downsides do you really need it? I don't need a plumber living in my house any more than I need a carpenter or a landscaper to live on premises. At most these are services I would need occasionally or on a schedule. I also doubt my need for them will overlap much, unless we're talking about building a new dwelling.
So why do I need a generalist in my life that's going to cost more than you can imagine, when the means to hire existing human generalists is cheap, quick, and frankly less likely to accidentally punch a hole in you.
Generalist humanoid robots that are able to operate in unstructured environments weren't an option (they still aren't an option for the majority of operations). The humanity had no ways of building them.
Anyway, it's true that replacing an automated production line with a crowd of generalist robots doesn't make sense. Generalist humanoid robots are intended to replace the remaining human workers.
They weren't an option because they are much harder to build, that's my point. Fat from being the easy option, they are still the unlikely option, compared to purpose designed machines.
Historically this has never been correct. Turns out you get more efficient systems when designing them without how a human would accomplish a task in mind.
Outside of sci-fi, marketing proposals, and niches like "Elder care in Japan" there are very few humanoid robots. By contrast non-humanoid robots have been mass produced and used in industry for decades. Arms. Carts. Trollies.
No people. If you want something with fine motor control and dexterity, it's easier to make that the robot and then have another robot bring the workpiece to the arm than it is to build a single robot that can walk around and do it. There are compromises in human features because we're generalists.
It's also complying with tax and employment laws in the country the hacker is in, to the satisfaction of your legal and finance teams.
Sure, in western-style legal systems you can call them a contractor and they can pay their own tax. Just don't employ them full time for long enough to trigger 'sham contract' rules that would make them employees.
But your corporate legal team doesn't have anyone trained and licensed to give advice on Tajikistan tax and employment law, so they can't approve this proposed contract without hiring an outside legal expert. And of course all suppliers, regardless of country, must agree to our anti-slave-labour policy which permits audits of...
One might say "skip that nonsense, just send the money" - but the larger the company, the more their in-house infosec becomes a load of uptight squares who love compliance and audit. And the kind of companies that can pay out five-figure bounties tend to be pretty large.
Less about that. More about “not accidentally funding terrorism” (or, more realistically, not giving money to sanctioned countries which can have significant consequences).
CISO: "We're going to invite random strangers from all around the globe to hack us, and pay them for their findings"
CEO: "I'm not sure I like the idea of us inviting people to hack us - or paying a 'bounty' to hackers holding a knife to our throat. Will they at least agree to a binding NDA and terms of engagement, in advance?"
CISO: "No, they won't."
CEO: "Well, at least if the hackers are in poor countries, a $500 payout for a critical bug will be plenty, right?"
CISO: "No, critical issues will be 10-100x that"
CEO: "Well will the average quality of these reports better than those we get from our hired pentesters?"
CISO: "On average these will be the lowest quality reports you've ever seen. But 0.1% might be gold. Oh, and I need to hire 3 more guys to sift through these terrible reports. Also our sifters might miss the gold."
CEO: "Oh. Well at least we won't be breaking the law though, right?"
IIRC all cryptocurrency that's money is money (so bitcoin, ethereum, etc but not necessarily project-specific tokens) and if you happen to make or lose money on a currency conversion it doesn't have tax implications.
Italy has progressive taxes on salary, with marginal rates from 23% to 43%. The latter on income above €50k
And if you've got taxes like that on earned income - shouldn't people with unearned income pay just as much? If your tax on investment gains is too small, you end up with an economy where the salaried worker renting a house pays more tax than their landlord, who owns ten houses.
I think America’s tax policy and redistribution scheme have made it the country where private individuals have the most money in the world - and that saying the landlord should pay just as much tax disincentivizes wealth concentration!
I don't know. It used to be 26%, like capital gains from shares, securities, etc. but since 1st January 2026 crypto is taxed at 33% unless it's euro stablecoins (still 26%).
At this point, I think most crypto investors in Italy will just evade taxes altogether.
Buying stable coins is a mild pain because so many banks think crypto is radioactive. Then you have to wait for your deposited funds to completely settle before you can withdraw the crypto from your account and send it elsewhere. Doable, sure. Easy & convenient, not so much. I wouldn't call it a solved problem in the same way you can hand someone cash, tap to pay with your phone, or pay by scanning a QR Code.
Revolut does not have a banking license in the US. At the moment they are a front for another bank. Don't be gullible and believe blindly what the marketing departments tell you.
> You can gamble with it, but it doesn't let you own or send it.
You can deposit (receive) and withdraw (send) cryptocurrencies there.
"Owning" is a matter at the private key level which of course you use a self-hosted wallet for "true" ownership. But no argument was made on ownership.
My point still stands that Revolut is a bank that allows cryptocurrencies.
You got downvoted, but sadly we have 2026 and it's still not easy to send money to any bank in the world. You can say a lot of bad things about the crypto world, but thats a problem Bitcoin solved two decades ago.
That was not my point. Money with bancs also not, if it would be so easy, there would be no problems with nigerian oncles and so on. Good look get your grandmas scammed money back.
In Canada, every bank has Interac e-Transfer, essentially we can easily email or text either other money. It's really wicked, and I'm always amazed other places like America don't have it built into their bank accounts and have to use 3rd-party apps to handle sending money to each other.
But anyway, the point is that it tells you every single time you send a transfer that way to be careful, because you can't undo a transfer after it's been sent. I'm assuming it's the same for most methods of bank transfer? I mean, debit transactions are surely a different beast.
Banks can always try to undo a transaction - it's just not guaranteed to work. AFAIK, credit/debit card reversals are always reversible because if the merchant doesn't have the money, it becomes their bank's problem to get the money or eat the loss. This works because the merchant is easily identifiable, well known, and has a reputation to uphold (at least to their bank). Other methods of transfer don't come with such contractual protection, but can still have best-effort.
They can. Maybe in some jurisdictions they don't have to so they try to avoid it. But if there is crime involved for example, they can be required to do what's inconvenient
The method of “reversal” was sending the money back, because it was a transfer between banks. The actual method of transfer or underlying currency is of no import in such circumstance.
The entire point is that the bank can send the money back and transaction is always between banks. Whereas in cryptocurrency world transaction is direct. Like with cash, except you can accidentally a million dollars
They always all gather around the same spot then that spot moves every 6-9 months. I think the clustering is more likely evidence of distillation. I don't personally think distillation is a bad thing. If the LLM providers can distill all of human output into their models for 'free'. I don't think distilling a model from the output of those models is morally wrong.
I think it's more likely to be the effect of synchronization of launches, and the fact that models that do not challenge SOTA in some way do not get launched (think Gemini Pro delays), launched quietly or do not get any attention.
I gathered that the most recent advances haven’t been in capabilities of the model but more the way that it’s able to be employed (most recently agents).
If you talk to the Chinese models, even super smart Qwen 3.8, you can tell they are distilled just from the verbal ticks they have. Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude do not sound alike. The Chinese models 100% sound like one of the 3, usually Claude. American models are load bearing for this LLM generation seam.
Why isn’t it more like building a hardware store using lumber you purchased from a competing hardware store? Or founding a school using an education you obtained at a different school?
Because that doesn't satisfy the narrative of American exceptionalism. It's easier to point at something and say it was stolen or copied than it is to compete, especially with the political climate in the US.
This isn't an anti-American sentiment. It is an anti-corporate/regulatory capture/embrace and extinguish sentiment (which probably reads the same to many people these days).
Because the companies did it underhandedly without prior consent? Imagine you walked into a hardware store to grab some lumber, didn't pay for it, and the store had to call the cops to swing around your house? That's hardly the typical shopping experience, now is it?
I think that’s my point: none of those things happened, so on what basis can we claim that it’s like they did. Who has to agree with what you’re doing in order for it not to be considered underhanded?
As i understand it, they accepted guilt for downloading stuff illegally. They didn’t accept guilt for incorporating all of human output into their model without consent.
So basically because they just browsed and used the information that was mostly public on the internet and they didnt copy it, they just learned from it and thats fine. Which makes sense. None of the llms let u copy someones work exactly anyways... makes total sense honestly. So in this case what happens to distilling? Is that also learning or ur trying to get to their actual weights by kind of reverse engineering it? Where would the argument fall there?
I seriously wasnt judging i maybe shouldve asked llm to frame it better cause i knew it might sound that way, thats why i added: im not judging, merely asking...
There's always a way to make your substantive points thoughtfully, though of course this takes more time and energy - sometimes a lot more - but if you'd please invest the effort to do that when commenting here, we'd appreciate it. Or, of course, it's always an option not to post.
Sorry, I can see how what I wrote wasn't clear. Let me put it this way: you can criticize EA without attacking a specific person. What you did in the GP comment was to make a statement attacking the person and then mention EA as an afterbit. That made your comment a personal attack, which is not ok on HN.
It's good he is getting it out in the public, on record. He'll lie, conveniently ignore techno fascist astroturfing, selectively moderate on hot topic issues and then point to some wabisabi philosophy on both sideism.
The majority of top threads on hn on any given days are legit flame wars and llm accusation mud slinging.
But you cant say Dario Amodei is an effective altruist. Incredible.
How are abortion and birth control at all related to HIV? I don't understand the connection.
reply