Comment by fjni
2 days ago
> Founded by alums of Tesla and the autonomous vehicle company Cruise, the San Francisco startup has received hundreds of millions in venture capital funding and is valued at $2 billion
Stop outsourcing the cost of your vision to the rest of society. Especially when it’s peanuts to you and meaningful to, in this case, the host of what they call an apartment and you seem to think is a test course.
Nobody in this startup landscape gives a shit about anybody or anything that isn’t, at that very moment, contributing to their product development, market share, or raising capital. Even then, they only give a shit if they can’t avoid it and still get what they want. The second they are no longer useful, they’re thrown out like a bag of moldy tangerines. Morally bankrupt “leaders” employing people too inexperienced to know better or too disempowered to change anything.
To be frank, nowadays nobody even cares about product fit, if it really works. What matters is creating a narrative compelling enough first to raise capital, then use this capital to create a narrative for a profitable exit. The product itself is secondary.
This is the product of "rugged individualism" so prized of Reagan/Thatcher politics. Thatcher meant exactly this when she said "there's no such thing as society".
I've got mine, you can all go f*ck yourselves.
We need to get back to a place where other people matter, where the implicit social contract is honoured by everyone, and there are consequences for breaking it.
No, that wasn't the meaning. In context, the lead-up to the quote was:
> people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing!
In subsequent years she often invoked society in phrases like "civil society", "free society", and "responsible society". The quote means that government won't help you very much, and indeed that you should be self-reliant. But it would be a distortion to extrapolate that into "be bad and inconsiderate and uncooperative". Individualism doesn't require the individuals to be unpleasant to one another. It just means they aren't an organized collective or hive.
which itself seems to have been just a ruse:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QTcL6Xc_eMM
I was watching some midcentury American Prelinger (sp?) archive video where some dapper and devastatingly square professor extolled the virtues of capitalism. Nearly point-for-point, his rationale for capitalism being fair and egalitarian was dismantled starting in the 80s.
> Stop outsourcing the cost of your vision to the rest of society.
They won't because that's a fundamental principle of the model they believe in.
tbqh the airbnb owners are also outsourcing the externalities of short term rentals to make a quick buck. It's outsourcing all the way down
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Indeed, but they do make a pretty compelling schadenfreude.
Well said. Unfortunate anyone would necessitate the Airbnbanhammer, and the lawsuits, but could be important tools here.
Scamming homeowners out of relative peanuts is super cringe. Everyone looks bad:
- Employees - Management - Investors - Previous companies listed
& “move fast & be antisocial” Bot Co. too. Photograph/video walkthrough the rental beforehand, safeguard antiques/uniques, professionally restore to 100%, nobody ever has to know. Or call host, drop cash.
Make people whole - this is so much easier than your robots, guys.
I mean, it's good that they're testing things in different places. Environments vary.
But hundreds of millions sounds like enough money to get some industrial or dead commercial space (even in/around SF) and outfit it to be like an apartment. Or six different ones, and six others two weeks from now, and two weeks after that. The cost of the space and the carpenters/painters/drywallers/handymen/managers/whatevers would seem to be something of such relative insignificance that it doesn't even show up on the budgetary radar.
They want realistic randomness in the apartment layouts. This is a quick, effective way to get that. If they were honest with the hosts, it wouldn’t even be a bad idea.
You don't need that until the very end. They should be modeling many houses first, and they can get that by having employees measure their own house. They should also know something about the edge cases and have a lot of very unrealistic houses modeled.
Then they should have a lab with real furniture and movable walls so they can do controlled real world tests. Once the above tests are done you add confidence with random real world tests.
The types of problems seen here are things that your lab tests should fail and keep you out of real world tests. Particularly when the test subjects don't have some sort of test agreement
I assure you that if randomness is the order of the day, then involving handymen to arrange things is a sure-fire method of getting there.
The cheaper the handymen come, the better the randomness is.
One doesn't even have to tell them to be random; that part happens all on its own in the ways that real apartments ebb and flow.
And the handymen themselves can be rotated out every couple of weeks, as well. The cost of rotation is low. The handymen are plentiful, and they are happy to get hired for a day here or there for literal odd jobs.
(If anyone wants even more practical solutions for robot testing facilities that don't make headlines by pissing people off, please put your contact information in the space provided by pushing the "Reply" button. Thanks!)
Lack of honesty is only one issue. Destroying things, leaving mess and forcing someone else to fix it iw the big one.
And that is very much on brand for these groups.
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Or, just throwing this out there, secretly list their own places and have robots clean up after the guests to evaluate -real places- that have -actually been used-. The key here though is that the places need to be theirs (or at least be a clear contract with the actual owner with full consent and understanding).
A robotics startup at this phase is unlikely to successfully clean an apartment. Usually it’s a lot more about data collection and training. Cleaning an apartment is very hard. The humanoid startup Figure showed their robot moving a few dishes from a nearly empty dishwasher to empty cabinets, and they’re an established company. Actually cleaning is very very hard and the systems are just not very capable yet.
There'd be loads of people with rough houses they're about to renovate who'd take payment to allow you to test a robot.
> Founded by alums of Tesla
That tracks.
> Founded by alums of Tesla
Learned from the best of them, I see.
Modern tech culture is a blight on society.