Microduck

She's still bitter we didn't get the Sony dog a decade ago.

(it does look like subsequent models were launched about a decade ago)

Many people with a dog don't get that as a pack animal it's cruel to leave it alone indoors all day, they overfeed them and keep them alive well beyond the stage where some hip/back/joint pain issues would keep it in constant pain. Cats are the opposite, people get them "a companion" so it doesn't feel "alone", yet in reality, in addition to also being way overfed, there is now constant warfare in the house cause cats (that are not directly blood related) actually hate each other, another word for being territorial. "Oh look how cute they are playing with each other, chasing through the house!" Yeah no, it's Hunger Games day in day out. Other species don't fare better, from turtles living in their own s*it to birds who never can fly. We are very cruel to our pets, often too ignorant to notice, with exceptions being much too rare.

I welcome those pets being replaced by robots.

Also the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all and which is what will happen if you replace it with AI. You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.

Undoubtedly true.

> They are evolving via natural selection to be suited for living in houses, they already pretty much can’t live in the wild.

Ok? What you say can be true, and at the same time many pets can suffer too. Unsuitable housing, neglectfull or worse owners, bad circumstances. Evolution doesn’t guarantee happiness of individuals.

> the dog would rather be alive than not alive at all

That is a deep philosophical question. I have my doubts. But if it is true, why are you not breeding dogs at an industrial scale? After all every dog who could have been born but wasnt would be rather alive, if i hear you correctly. That is millions of potential dogs not born who you could have bread during your lifetime if you were more efficient about it.

> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.

That is a great reason for not putting down old Fido and replacing him with a robot dog. I wouldn’t recommend that.

On the other hand if we just breed less dogs, and get robot pets to the people who are circumstantially, habitually, or emotionally less suited to have a living one. That way they can fulfill their emotional need without torturing a living animal.

Natural selection has little to do with how pets are bred. The criteria their genes are being selected for by breeders have nothing to do with optimizing their happiness and more with what maximizes profit (which only losely relates to owner happiness).

Incidentally, lots of domesticated cats could survive in the wild just fine, just like lots of somewhat functional dog breeds. But that has nothing to do with whether the conditions keep them in are still painful to them.

Most humans can't survive in the wild. Put any of them in solitary confinement and you will see how much natural selection has done for them. We are social animals, just like dogs.

> You don’t shoot an old person just because he has hip pain.

No, because it is a human that has human rights. Which include the right to live. (Arguably they should have the right to decide the end of their life too, but religios groups are still having a strong grip on laws about that.) Animals don't. A friend of mine is a vet for farm animals and she always gets angry about how people treat their suffering pets. Cow has a painful broken leg? Bolt through brain, suffering ends immediately. Same with similarly injured sheep, goats, etc. No point in letting them suffer unnecessarily. Already horses are special because people get attached and sometimes they are worth tons of money so people rather pump them full with antibiotics. But dogs and cats? Man, people attach wheels to the lower end of dogs so they can keep their beloved buddy for another 2 years, even though that poor thing can't even go for a pee anymore. You can see owners drag their terminally ill dog through the streets which has clearly lost all will to live. We let pets suffer much more than cows or goats and it's cuel.

I welcome a humane substitute for those without the time or understanding to properly care for another living creature. Mostly people should not be allowed to have a living pet.

> Emotional AI Support, Powered by Intelligence

Targeting emotionally vulnerable people with AI promises is pretty disgusting

> Through communication, Moflin’s emotional state changes. Your robot companion can show joy, sadness, and happiness, reacting just like a living creature would. Moflin does not possess actual emotions like humans do. Their emotional expressions are simulated by AI. And lots of bits of the advert seems to be explain how it's not real in the QA and that everything is a simulation.

I have not used the product, but nothing strikes me as dishonest about the advertising.

Seems like a lie to me. Compare:

> Our synthetic foodstuffs can taste sweet, salty, tart or tangy, delicious flavors just like natural ingredients.

(But then it's all aspartame, etc.)

Your second one point also does not seem like a lie to me since it's claiming to emulate natural ingredient (although here I guess to be just like means to emulate perfectly).

I don't really see why any one would look at the product and it's marketing as evil. It seems to me aimed at people who can not have pets and are want to create a simulation of a soothing positive interaction with a pet. I don't see this as exploitative (apart from it's exploiting a desire that people have in the same way that virtually all products do), I can not see someone forming a relationship with this to the detriment of human interaction or exacerbate some kind of mental illness or cause addiction. It does seem a little expensive and that would be my only criticism of the product so far as I can see.

The sentence is not saying “it is a living creature”. It says it behaves as one. How much of that sentence is a lie obviously depends on how well the robot works.

> If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written...And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

Basically, reading writing (without instruction) will only make people seem like they know stuff, by parroting others, when in fact, they know not much of anything.

Which is an intriguing argument considering he .. wrote it down and not just once. He was a prolific author. He also speaks _through_ other people, mostly Socrates, which complicates matters quite a bit. You're getting a narrative as told by someone inside the narrative about the nature of narration itself.

I'd be hesitant to linearize Plato. There's quite a bit of subtlety to his arguments.

That said, I understand the sentiment. Just want to introduce some nuance into the statement. I'd hate it if people thought Plato could just be pinned down like that.

In Western cultures, "mouth" is how one perceives emotions, while in the Eastern cultures, it's the eyes.

e.g.

You see Disney characters got all big mouths, while say, Japanese ones like in anime or Hello Kitty has small or no mouth but BIG eyes.

Same for Microduck. It's got gigantic mouth, while Moflin has none.

---

As a personal preference, I like anime/manga characters but not fond of disney characters nor other Pixar characters. they look terrible to me.

I suppose Moflin is preemptive revenge against that scenario. “How do you like them apples, future torturing AI?”

I can see some parallel between how arduino gave hobbyist a mini computer they can use in any way imaginable, I can see this kind of thing being used to solve unimaginable problems by hobbyist or RL computer scientist or heck any UG student with claude subscription

JSONRPC over Unix sockets is a better interface for language agnostic IPC.

You have to engage in a significant amount of motivated reasoning to believe that.

JSONRPC can be trivially implemented in any language which can read/write a Unix socket. Which is any language worth using.

It's the trade off for performance and accessibility.

Like another poster already commented, while iceoryx2 is implemented in Rust, it already support other languages, like C, C++, C# and Python. We'd love to add even more languages to the list, with Go being on top of our wishlist, but like always with OSS, someone needs to do the work or needs to step up and fund the work.

At the end of the day, it's an open source robot so someone can implement these protocols if they see the reason to.

(Except iDevices of course)

[0] - https://youtu.be/mfmdXPT7nAM

The Microduck is meant to be a hacker toy. Train it yourself, write software, hack it, etc.

It depends what you're trying to get for your daughter. Is it something to get her into robotics? Then probably the Microduck is the way. If it's literally just a toy, then the Beni robot is better because that's literally all it is.

I have ordered Beni for my family. It's sturdy and more practical for careless fun.

With Unitree bots all but banned in the US I've been looking to pivot away from that platform anyway. Took a couple months to jailbreak the Go2 platform initially, but I'm betting this will go even faster with modern agents

it seems like the only useful capability this thing has is picking up very small items of clothing with I imagine a very low success rate.

I've only contributed to three kickstarters, and they all worked out well. But I think I'm more selective than most people, and generally don't jump on something until it's already been fully funded by other people.

Many, many startups and several megacorps have burned their money. Robots are so fun to make, if you have that spirit in you! But alas they are very, very hard to make valuable outside of manufacturing /warehousing/weapons.

Bonus points for laser tag capability like those tabletop tanks.

Well they have had a lot of time to get their shit together, and its not even happened a little tiny bit.

But maybe one day they will die? And when the Mormon church inherits the IP they might use it a bit better.

Yeah, they struggle...

Though... the Unity-engine based Shadowrun(s)/Battletech were decent. Mechwarrior 5:Mercs (not Clans) with it's doing-the-heavy-lifting mods is fun.

But that seems more like them half listening to others-with-a-clue than themselves getting their act together. It is frustrating knowing the wealth of stories they have, and yet they offer precious little.