[JumpCrisscross]

> Super slow and bad at it

Eh, this still has value for me if it can do it reliably. Leaving a robot to badly fold my t-shirts overnight and then badly put them in my closet the next day is fine. I don't need my casual wear beautifully folded. But I do need it organised, and that's apparently a chore I'll just never learn to like doing.

[iot_devs]

Absolutely!

Also if this scale anywhere close to LLMs in 2 years they will fold at super human speed and much better than me.

[XorNot]

The real question is whether a hardware platform today would be good enough.

The model is software on a server or in the cloud, so the real question is are there any show stoppers from the hardware for going faster?

[fragmede]

Physics. Right now the clothes folding is computationally limited, but assuming we get faster computers to get them folding faster, gravity and air resistance are still going to take their time.

[wojciii]

Exactly. I will pay money for a robot to take laundry out of the washing machine and hang it to dry and then fold it and put it away or just sort it by size. This is a chore that my wife and I have to do several times every week.

[bonoboTP]

My solution: stuff the clothes from the washer into the dryer, then stuff them into my wardrobe. I buy clothes that don't get wrinkled much even if simply shoved in the wardrobe and if they do, I tolerate it and wear them anyway.

[phs318u]

Ha! You remind me of something I used to tell my colleagues back when I held a regular job. They would compliment me on my highly patterned shirts (eg. A very small floral pattern repeated). I would explain that a shirt like that just requires low spin in the washer, and then drying on a hanger. Whatever wrinkles are left are almost invisible due to the pattern. With collars and cuffs I’d just literally manually stretch/tension them while they were still wet. Bada bing bada boom.

[dnemmers]

Sorry, but if you're buying clothes that have manual drying steps, it's gonna be a hard sale to the general public.

[static_motion]

This is a mostly American perspective that I find endlessly amusing. I only have a handful of clothing items that say that tumble drying is fine on the tag, and most of my clothing is very casual wear (t-shirts, jeans, sports clothing). Dryers eat up clothing like it's nobody's business. Plus, electricity costs money while the sun is free. And while yes, the time to hang laundry has value, it takes 10 minutes to hang a load. If it rains, I hang the clothes indoors with a dehumidifier which is cheaper to run than a dryer and dries clothes in a matter of a couple of hours.

[jldugger]

> Plus, electricity costs money while the sun is free.

Paradoxically, wholesale electric costs are negative during the day here in California[1], especially in the Salinas region. In theory you could get paid to tumble dry clothes.

[1]: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/prices

[phs318u]

I was referring to shirts specifically. If you put any kind of cotton shirt in a dryer it’s almost certainly going to need ironing. Waiting for a shirt to dry naturally shouldn’t be a big deal.

[JumpCrisscross]

To be fair, I have quite a few of these, and they inevitable just get shuffled over to the dry cleaners.