Marty Cornish

Would be good to at least give us the option of selecting routing/navigation as the reason for disengaging, because I’d bet that 80-90% of the time, that is the reason for most people lol.

The Billionaire Tax is actually an Everyone Tax. The Billionaire Tax is a new tax proposal written by four professors who don't believe in the American dream. Some of them aren’t even American…go figure. Despite its name, it applies to every California resident who currently has assets or ever will. The creators named it the Billionaire Tax so you would get into a froth andwouldn't look closely at what it actually does to you. On page twenty-six, it explains how the government can convert to an Everyone Tax without voter approval. They can also adjust the tax to be a yearly tax, not just one time…again, without your approval. Here's how the tax would work: As a voter, you're being asked to approve a tax that would require you to: 1. list all your assets and the value of each, then submit them to the California Franchise Tax Board. 2. authorize the tax board to appraise your assets and confirm the value of each. 3. pay a penalty of up to forty percent of your tax bill if the board determines your reported value was too low in their opinion. 4. allow the tax board to subpoena your financial records from every one of your financial institutions for auditing. This Everyone Tax runs 34 pages of shifty language describing how the government plans to take your assets. Read the fine print and decide for yourself. If this were truly a billionaire tax, it would be 3 pages. It’s 34 pages so that it can create the mechanisms to steal from all of you.

The people who wrote the California Asset Seizure Tax say: “Don’t worry, if the state mis-prices your startup, you can bring in ‘independent appraisers’ to argue with them. And if you can’t pay 5% right now, they’ll put you on a five‑year payment plan. With interest.” That’s not a safeguard. That’s: we take the money, you fight the DMV on hard mode to get it back.

The entire robotics industry is about to compress a decade of progress into 18 months, and nobody’s pricing it in. The hardware has been ready for years. Boston Dynamics had Atlas doing backflips in 2018. The bottleneck was never motors or actuators. It was that every robot behavior had to be hand-coded. Pick up a box? That’s one program. Pick up a bottle? Different program. Move the box from shelf A to shelf B in a warehouse with slightly different lighting? Start over. Foundation models broke this completely. Before VLAs, teaching a robot one skill gave you exactly one skill. Zero compounding. Zero transfer. A robot trained to fold shirts couldn’t fold towels without starting from scratch. The labor intensity of data generation meant robotics datasets stayed narrow, robots overfit, and small variations like object weight or table height caused failures. Now a single Gemini Robotics model handles tasks it has never seen in training. Google’s On-Device model learns new behaviors with 50-100 demonstrations. Not 50,000. Fifty. That’s a 1000x reduction in the data requirement for new capabilities. The speed implications cascade through everything. First order: deployment timelines collapse. What took robotics teams 6-12 months of custom programming now takes days of fine-tuning. Second order: the addressable market explodes. Tasks that were never economical to automate suddenly are, because the integration cost dropped by orders of magnitude. Third order: the data flywheel accelerates. Every robot running Gemini Robotics feeds learning back into the foundation model. More deployments means faster improvement means more deployments. Physical Intelligence raised at $2.4B because investors finally understood this. Boston Dynamics partnered with Toyota Research Institute to bolt Large Behavior Models onto Atlas. Every humanoid company is scrambling to either build or license the intelligence layer they don’t have. The market is still valuing robotics companies on their hardware differentiation. But hardware is commoditizing. Boston Dynamics spent a decade perfecting locomotion, and now that’s table stakes. The value is migrating entirely to whoever owns the foundation model that generalizes across embodiments. Google trained Gemini on the largest multimodal corpus ever assembled. Then they added physical actions as an output modality. That’s not a robotics company bolting on AI. That’s an AI company whose models now output motor commands. The companies pricing this correctly are building around foundation model access, not around proprietary hardware. The companies pricing this wrong are still acting like the moat is in the mechanical engineering. AGI moving into the physical world isn’t a 10-year prediction. Gemini Robotics shipped in March. The 1.5 version with chain-of-thought reasoning shipped in September. They’re iterating on a 6-month release cycle while hardware companies iterate on 3-year cycles. The gap between software intelligence timelines and hardware development timelines is the entire trade.

The two biggest narratives about AI right now are that (1) it’s a massive bubble (i.e. totally fake) and (2) about to give rise to superintelligence (i.e. totally real). Both narratives can be fake (which is what I believe) but it’s very unlikely that both can be true.