Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
mastodon
4.5.9
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com.
Disabled by #LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in #Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817.
Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
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Joined March 22, 2026
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
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16h ago
@secretsquirrel @cstross Thank you!
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
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20h ago
@secretsquirrel @cstross I am confused by the hour hand. It's difficult for me to figure out whether it's pointing at "five" or "four". I think I'd be able to read it more easily if it was either pointing at the word or if the words were under (or over) the hour markers so the hand is pointing straight at them. Or is that part of the intentional accursèdness?
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
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Apr 11, 2026
@audioflyer79 @alisynthesis @davidaugust @blterrible You might like Dreamships and Dreaming Metal by Melissa Scott, if you can find copies. They explore both sides of the "is it sentient" question.
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
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Apr 11, 2026
@audioflyer79 @alisynthesis @davidaugust More properties that I don't actually want a machine to have!
Humans do generalize very well. They also see non-existent patterns in noise and walk in circles when blindfolded (the Mythbusters episode on that is hilarious).
We can "believe six impossible things before breakfast".
But when I interact with a machine, I want it to be able to identify and tell me the context it is assuming, I want a rigorous back end that can identify potential areas for misunderstanding and let me know they exist, and if I can't have predictability and precision, I want at the very least awareness of the existence and degree of unpredictability and imprecision. I do not want the machine to lie to me, ever, and I want a system grounded in facts.
The point is that I, as a human, navigate conflicting statements by context within a shared reality. I do not expect a computer to understand that shared reality because its reality is grounded in what we write, not what we experience.
If I see a word problem that is about fruit color and mentions "unripe," that is a context cue for relevance because ripeness is correlated with color. The computer missing that correlation is exhibiting the same underlying flaw that produces "smaller means subtract" - inability to connect the tokens to the underlying concepts (why we have language in the first place).
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
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Apr 11, 2026
@davidaugust @audioflyer79 @alisynthesis @blterrible One of the things humans are really, really good at is adapting to tools. (I suspect tool use and invention are more fundamental to our intelligence than pattern matching.)
This is one reason research into human-robot interaction is so challenging - the human will adapt their actions and expectations to the tools after just a handful of uses and won't be able to give good feedback about how hard or difficult it is to use or what change in performance they would expect.
Which means that because we have been trained in this particular form of call and response, the mere fact of the system treating a question like an elementary school math test may predispose the user to assume that they *intended* the model to treat it that way and not realize that their original intention was to gather a different kind of information about the system.
That's one thing that makes the Apple paper particularly nice - they managed to intentionally avoid human built-in post hoc rationalizations and focus on the specific question they wanted answered.
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
·
Apr 11, 2026
@audioflyer79 @davidaugust @alisynthesis This is actually very important.
LLMs do not "forget" the way humans do. They don't have memory lapses.
Humans have memory lapses and difficulty recalling facts they know.
But the nature of computers is to remember perfectly. LLMs exist because they remember perfectly and look for patterns in that memory.
If it is to be useful at interpreting human commands and understanding human expectations (see "now anyone can code" PR), it needs to be encoding concepts, not characters.
People are making big claims that these machines are somehow conscious or intelligent and are able to understand abstract concepts.
If an inference machine with perfect memory states unequivocally at one point that unripe bananas are yellow, and then later states unequivocally that unripe bananas are green, then it is not storing and retrieving conceptual information.
Any claim of generalization cannot involve this kind of concept.
In the battle between Cog and Cyc, LLMs are Cyc writ large.
Cog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cog_(project)
Cyc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
·
Apr 11, 2026
@blterrible @audioflyer79 @alisynthesis @davidaugust True.
I apologize in advance for the personification, but it does seem to make some concepts easier for me. In robotics, the "user" is shorthand for any agent that initiates a task. (I'll spare you the technical discussion about whether users are the same as operators.)
"Users" as agents can be known knowns (represented), unknown knowns (the concept of a user agent is encoded without being linked to specific data or goals), known unknowns (there is an interaction with something during the task, but the robot doesn't associate it with the concept of "user"), and unknown unknowns (the robot has not been given the concept of a "user" and the concept is irrelevant to its operation).
In this case, there are at least two factors feeding into an LLMs response: the model is trained to provide the kind of answer it sees most often, but is also constrained to provide the kind of answer the designers have decided is what most people expect to see.
Depending on how the constraints and interface layers are designed, the system could be in any of these states.
So while the internal trained model generating the words may not be aware, I think it's hard to argue definitively that the system the user is interacting with is unaware of the concept of a user.
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
·
Apr 10, 2026
@audioflyer79 @alisynthesis @davidaugust
I don't want something that's sold as "useful because it is knowledgeable and capable enough to perform jobs for me" to operate at a grade school level of understanding. I want it to grasp nuance and call out uncertainty, so that it will do precisely what I need it to do.
The problem with this challenge, as posed to a computer, is that it is not fundamentally a math or language understanding problem.
It is an *inference* problem. It is assessing the model's ability to infer properties from insufficient information (what color are apples, ripe bananas, unripe bananas, and lemons?"). (Questions like these are one reason standardized tests produce biased data, because people exposed to different environments reach different answers.)
But the Apple paper is posing a *math* problem that enables them to probe the model's *language understanding*.
The success metric for the math problem is "did the model demonstrate understanding of the text when not specifically trained to do so?" (and therefore loses its utility once it is available publicly and can be included in their training data).
The success metric for the inference problem is "can the model correctly match fruit names to a color label?". This metric doesn't illustrate understanding, because it is testing precisely the kind of linguistic pattern-matching the models are designed to do.
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
·
Apr 10, 2026
@audioflyer79 @alisynthesis @davidaugust
The correct mathematical response to your question is either a statement of uncertainty (I can't answer that because I don't know what color the apples are or how ripe the lemons and non-unripe bananas are) or a request for clarification (what kind of apples? are the lemons ripe? how ripe are the ripe bananas?).
The fact that it provides a guess indicates that it has correctly understood what *you want it to say*.
It's not doing math. It's playing "what does the user expect?"
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
·
Apr 09, 2026
@dingemansemark @jonny Growing up, I always wanted to be the wizard or the magician, not the princess.
We finally have something that makes it feel like you're a wizard.
But instead of incantations that accurately describe precisely what I want and have a predictable mapping to outcomes ("This incantation reliably creates a bucket of water small enough to carry.") I feel like we're getting "Pretty please with a cherry on top could I maybe have a bucket of water?" and sometimes it's a KFC bucket filled with empty water bottles, and sometimes it's a hose next to a knick-knack shaped like a bucket, and sometimes it's actually a bucket that actually has water in it, but it's upside down or has a hole in the bottom or the water is carbonated and flavored with lemon.
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
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Apr 08, 2026
@MissConstrue @afewbugs Wait, capybaras? OMG! Capybaras!!!
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
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Apr 06, 2026
@grimalkina @fnohe I suspect those are people who attribute their own difficulty in learning *other* things to those things being just "really hard to learn" instead of to a lack of support and accommodation for their way of learning.
Learning programming and physics triggered similar struggles for me - there are some concepts and ways of thinking that my brain finds difficult to grasp and emulate. On the other hand, learning biologically-inspired and behavior-based robotics concepts and ways of thinking just slotted right in and made sense almost from the start, where other people found them completely alien.
I taught myself to read as a small child - I had been taught letters and sounds, but the association between letters and words happened by gestalt when I was alone. It would never occur to me to say that children who don't teach themselves to read are just not curious or intelligent, because that's obviously ridiculous.
That's some serious lack of empathy and comprehension going on.
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
·
Apr 04, 2026
@afewbugs Also cats, flowers, landscapes, moss, books.
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
·
Apr 03, 2026
@robotics Whyyyy!?
Robots for specific purposes? Sure. Humanoids? Has no-one learned the lessons of Star Wars?
Robots are most helpful when they are designed to meet specific needs.
Roombas are designed for stability and robustness and convenience and I *still* struggle to find a charge station placement that isn't either blocked by a curtain, blocking a vent, or dreadfully in the way. And no matter what I do, if I set it up so the Roomba doesn't get tangled, the cable always wants to push the charger away from the wall
Where are these humanoids going to hang out while charging?
What chores are they actually going to be *helpful* at?
How much will you have to modify your home or workplace so people can get past when one randomly shuts down?
How much back end teleoperation will they require and how deep are the security/privacy chasms they open up going to be?
What horrifying new crimes will they enable?
Most importantly, what are they FOR? Because I can tell you now, as someone with an exertion-limiting disorder, "folding laundry" is right down there near the very bottom of the "things I'd like help with" list. Most clothes are (shocker!) still wearable even when wrinkled! (The top of the list includes things like "carry heavy and awkward things, especially up and down stairs" and "pick up annoying things below waist level".)
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Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
Robotistry
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
Moved from mstdn.ca and sciencemastodon.com. Disabled by # LongCovid and semi-retired, currently active in # Robotics via Robotistry Consulting & Research Services and in long Covid via the Patient-Led Research Collaborative. Chair, IEEE standards development working group P2817. Located in the Canadian Maritimes.
fediscience.org
@Robotistry@fediscience.org
·
Apr 03, 2026
@AnarchoCatgirlism The thing that I continue to completely not get:
If the *computer* doesn't respond deterministically to "x = true" what makes anyone think it will respond deterministically to "x = TRUE No I REALLY MEAN IT this time"?
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