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A grand vision in robot learning, going back to the SHRDLU experiments in the late 1960s, is that of helpful robots that inhabit human spaces and follow a wide variety of natural language commands. Over the last few years, there have been significant advances in the application of machine learning (ML) for instruction following, both in simulation and in real world systems. Recent Palm-SayCan work has produced robots that leverage language models to plan long-horizon behaviors and reason about abstract goals. Code as Policies has shown that code-generating language models combined with pre-trained perception systems can produce language conditioned policies for zero shot robot manipulation. Despite this progress, an important missing property of current “language in, actions out” robot learning systems is real time interaction with humans.

Ideally, robots of the future would react in real time to any relevant task a user could describe in natural language. Particularly in open human environments, it may be important for end users to customize robot behavior as it is happening, offering quick corrections (“stop, move your arm up a bit”) or specifying constraints (“nudge that slowly to the right”). Furthermore, real-time language could make it easier for people and robots to collaborate on complex, long-horizon tasks, with people iteratively and interactively guiding robot manipulation with occasional language feedback.

Many philosophers endorse physicalism, the view that everything is physical. But what is a physical property?

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0:00 — Physicalism.

He broke the world record for GPS art.

Back in 2008, Yasushi ‘Yassan’ Takahashi wanted to find an original way to propose to his girlfriend. So he went on a journey that took him 4,000 miles (7,163 kilometers) over a period of six months, according to a video posted on Google in 2019.

The art was the words MARRY ME with a heart with an arrow in it at the very end.

In order to write this message in GPS, Takahashi traveled from the island of Hokkaido in the northern part of Japan to the shores of Kagoshima in the southern tip of the country.


GPS drawing.

Thanks for this awesome review. I’ve been trying to follow the recent papers about the unfolding stuff, and Hoel’s paper, but having read this post I feel much better about my shorthand summary: 1. Any theory that is testable will necessarily rely on measuring behavior of some system 2. Any given behavior is independent of Phi 3. Phi is not a testable value for a given theory.

Adopting and maintaining a healthy lifestyle might prevent up to 60% of inflammatory bowel disease cases—Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis—finds a large international study, published online in the journal Gut.

The findings prompt the study authors to suggest that subject to further research, particularly in those at high risk of developing these conditions, may be a feasible option for future preventive strategies.

Inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD for short, affects an estimated 3 million adults in the U.S. and another 1.3 million in Europe, and diagnoses have been increasing, particularly in newly industrialized countries.