[hprotagonist]

This is your monthly reminder that Boston Dynamics is exceptionally good at product demos.

It remains much less clear that they’re any good at anything else.

Also, Spot looks like a Houndeye to me, so i keep waiting for it to make “wheeeennnnnnn BAM” noises.

[me_me_me]

> It remains much less clear that they’re any good at anything else.

They are also exceptionally good at building impressive robots.

[hprotagonist]

Not to be too blunt here, but: besides very impressive numbers of youtube views, what have those robots accomplished, in a “we have deployed X thousand of these in the following Y situations” sense, since 2006?

I’m (way more than) fine with blue sky work, and BD deserves credit for not building weapons, but at the same time there’s an impedance mismatch here.

[JackFaker]

If you're interested Adam Savage was allowed to use a 'Spot' robot for several months and shares some observations and information on actual usage on his youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-PdPtqw78k

[hprotagonist]

https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/24/boston-dynamics-puts-its-r...

reading between the lines, as of Q4 last year they're still in _extremely_ early in any meaningful deployment. Lease-based alpha access to select customers, "hey we don't have to send a 12-man team out every month anymore", and carefully PRd information is certainly some kind of progress, but it's not anything like normal use.

[JackFaker]

Definitely not normal use, probably something akin to controlled alpha or beta testing. The only recent article a saw about the fall 2019 trials/leases was this article that didn't provide any meaningful details on usage.

https://www.officer.com/command-hq/technology/article/211286...