How has this gotten so little activity on this forum? Has LLM stolen the oxygen from really cool stuff? This is the kind of hacker stuff that makes me smile. Seems like a really clever idea that can actually be useful.
My impression (backed up with data from my RSS reader) is that articles about robots don't usually get a lot of votes on HN, and I do think that's sad because there is rapid progress in that area. If you are worried about LLMs taking white collar jobs you could also be worrying about robots taking blue collar and service jobs.
I've posted a lot of articles about vine robots and this is the first one that got any traction but this one has the advantage of making them look really simple although these ones are a little too simple in that they don't have the mechanisms that make it possible for them to turn.
I've seen papers in arXiv for vine robots that look really phallic, I mean they don't just look like a penis but they work like a penis. There is a lot of work on these at national labs and I've wondered what would happen if one of these papers were submitted to The Journal of Irreproducible Results (whose title isn't such a joke anymore since that's Science and Nature) or to one of those conservative commissions that wants to stamp out "government waste".
