The rare earths situation is embarrassing. This has been a political football for years now, but the efforts to fix it aren't working very well.
First, you need a mine site and a mine. The US has a big one at Mountain Pass, California, and it's producing. But in the past twenty years, it's gone bankrupt twice and has been through three owners, because there were a few rare earth gluts and the price crashed. Also, they once had a big spill from a retention pond, and that was expensive.
Mountain Pass isn't the only ore deposit in the US. There's what's supposed to be a good one in
Montana. But the company developing it has been doing "studies" since at least 2023.[2]
There are a few other rare earth "mining" companies which don't produce anything yet.
There's one in Tennessee with a "definitive feasibility study" underway.
I'm tempted to say that the real product is the stock. Anyway, it's not like there's a need to go to Ukraine or Greenland for rare earths. It's all available in the US, with a decent climate, good road access, and no wars.
Second, you need a beneficiation plant at the mine. This takes in rock and dirt, pulls out ore with a reasonable fraction of rare earths, and outputs almost as much waste as it takes in ore. This is a somewhat messy process. In China, the settling ponds are visible from space. Mountain Pass has a better process (the Sierra Club approves) and doesn't make such a mess. The waste is dried, the fluids are reused, and the dry waste can be put back where it came from eventually.
This is now a known technology and is being replicated at some Australian mines.
Then you need a separating plant, where the actual rare earths are separated out. The US has very little capability in this area. Not for any good reason. There's a small startup.[1]
They're slowly scaling up. Production in 2027. There's another startup, Medallion (then Gabo, then Gamma) which has been fooling around since 2020 without building much. That's one of those companies where you read five years of press releases and they're all about financing, reorgs, and management changes, with no actual product. Here's another one, RER. They've been at this since 2021, and they have a little demo plant in Wyoming.[3]
Then you need a smelting and magnet making plant. This is a modest size operation, because it processes tons, not millions of tons, of material. One has been built in an industrial park in Texas.
That took funding from DoD and General Motors. Not big enough to replace all imported magnets.
This is US postmodern capitalism. The US financial system just doesn't seem to be able to bring a complicated heavy industrial project to completion in a reasonable period of time.
Rare earths are not actually all that rare, they're just present in very low concentrations and require tons of processing with nasty chemicals to extract. Those startups etc aren't sitting around twiddling their thumbs for kicks, they're mostly mired in bureaucratic approvals and/or lack of finances due to a very justified fear of those approvals. Throw in the wild price fluctuations and it's much easier to just buy everything from China, which already has everything in place.
What you're describing looks less like "we tried protectionism and it failed" and more like "we don't have institutions that can reliably carry long-cycle industrial projects from idea to operation."
Exactly. This supply chain requires four quite different plants, none of which make money until the other three are running. US capitalism isn't good at setting that up from a cold start. Market forces may get there incrementally, but it takes a decade or two. It's high risk for any part of the chain to get ahead of the others.
China's industrial central planning has no problem doing this. Where there's been progress in the US, it's been because big customers, DoD and General Motors, pushed.
This is a nice example to look at closely. People in US politics have been screaming about rare earth problems for a decade now. It's not a resource problem. It's a capitalism problem.
why go to the trouble of building and maintaining mines in your expensive western country if you can just take all the minerals from african mines, while also getting the profits of these mines. no worries about salaries, no one cares when workers die by the dozens, ...
Because Africa produces a very small percentage of rare earths in mines, and basically 0 in separation, refining, and production of rare-earth components.
i had diamond and cobalt in mind, i'm sure that this doesn't apply to every type of mine. but you can't deny that this isn't a current, imperialist strategy. soft colonialism.
I reckon hackers get a thrill out of doing the inputs themselves. They seem to be able to disregard the fact they've got an unfair advantage, pretending that they are still achieving something by their acts.
Where vision based AI will start running riot is in games like Runescape where macroing is a huge problem. I expect it will become undetectable and therefore unbannable.
That's still an improvement over the current state of games. Cheats being able to read hidden game state is a huge advantage vs. just what is visible on screen.
No, it just leads to subtler cheating. Closet cheaters are much worse than obvious ones, and they thrive in exactly these conditions: the game is not too broken by rage mode cheaters so there's a lot of fair players they're preying on, they have an inconspicuous advantage, and the advantage is gatekept with some entry barrier so there aren't too many of them.
You can have a fully encrypted and attested click-to-photon DRM chain, but it will just a) turn your computer into an appliance and b) cause even worse cheating.
People already closet cheat to avoid detection. It's nothing new.
You can closet cheat with ESP and that is very game breaking without obvious rage cheating. You can't do ESP if cheats are limited to what is visible on screen so I would say it's an improvement. Even something like autoaim is a bit less effective because it wouldn't be able to snap on players who are offscreen. The gap between cheating and legit players would be reduced which makes it less frustrating for the legit players and probably less tempting for cheaters.
You're right, but developers don't really care about cheaters cheating. They care about cheaters ruining the game to others, so closet cheaters are not such a big deal to them even when they're thriving as long as they remain closeted.
There's nothing good about this, and you'll be surprised how many people are willing to spend more than $1k/mo just to cheat in video games. Your game will still be ruined in a worse way, and every step towards the full lock-in just makes this closer. As I said, closet cheaters are MUCH worse than obvious ones, and much harder to catch (and for the context, I used to host very popular servers for several games, so I've seen player complaints and retention rates).
Here's my previous comment about what it takes to actually eliminate cheaters. Anticheats are only marginally helpful in this, it's all about observability, manual control, and community building. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139481
Intrusive DRM schemes will just take any semblance of computing freedom away from you, while actually making the problem worse in the end.
Which is a pretty naive view of the cheating landscape that ignores everything I posted above. Enforcing the rules by technical means is largely superficial everywhere except the actual esports, the culture around the multiplayer gaming (both esports and not) needs to change.
Those, who has better ping, bigger screen, better video card, better mouse, always have advantage over those who haven't. Adapt. There is no fair game in the real life.
At the level of League of Legends me and my friend group play, we never noticed cheaters. We play casual ARAM games. Never noticed any hackers or anything.
But we definitely notice when at the start of the game, one of our team didnt actually get past the loading screen because Vanguard decided instead they need to reboot their machine. And then good luck winning when you are down a player for several minutes.
It doesn’t happen often, but it happens way more often than cheaters did. And this bug happens to multiple people in my friend group. This anti cheat software is extremely buggy. And causes way more problems than it solves for us.
I wish i could say “but the software is improving” because the last few weeks it’s been fine, until literally yesterday. I got out of fountain and into combat and then got a “Vanguard must be running” popup. It kicked me out and I couldn’t get back in until I rebooted. And then if you open league too fast after the reboot, because you are hurrying to get back in, you can actually open League before Vanguard starts and then too bad you have to reboot again!
There's some ML image-based cheats out there but they're much worse (and have been for years). Some games have sidestepped this with tiny imperceptible color changes to nametags & outlines to throw off the cheats while not bothering a human player.
The Nordic Nano connection is strange. Here's their web site.[1]
They claim to make solar panel coatings, solid state batteries, and do something involving hydrogen. This is all done from a little metal building in a small town on the east coast of Finland near the Russian border. There's no detail on any of this technology.
One Youtuber thinks this is a capacitor, not a battery. But that would require a dielectric orders of magnitude better than anything known.
Donut won't talk about either the chemistry or the manufacturing.
The only thing they showed at CES was one pouch cell hooked up to a charger at 4.2V, drawing current. Everything else was a 3D printed mockup or an existing electric motorcycle.
For small screws, in the millimeter range, the jump between metric sizes is too big. So, in addition to M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, etc. standard metric screws include M1.4, M1.6. M1.8, M2.5, and M3.5 (rare) to fill in the gaps.
Screw sizes and drill sizes should have been sized by a ratio, like resistor values. But that would have been a pain for manual machining.
Domestic drill sets don't seem to be designed for tapping holes but if you stick to M3, M6 and M10 the tapping sizes do correspond with the 2.5, 5 and 8.5mm drills[1].
I guess if it was based on a ratio system you would need special tapping drills for all of them.
e.g. M4 needs a special 3.3mm tapping drill already.
I'm fine with social media, but not with the illusion of it from Facebook, Instagram, etc. Those are ad delivery systems. I'm on Discord, Github, Substack, and Reddit.
There are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have Youtube videos of them moving around. Some are far more agile than this one.
Needs more manipulation. Such elaborate fingers and all it does is mime carrying a box.
There are some brief material handling demos at the end, but nothing challenging.
There's been considerable progress in robot manipulation in the past year, after many decades of very slow progress. This year's new manipulation demos have been for fixed base robot hands. Robot manipulation still isn't good enough for Amazon's bin picking.
The best demo of 2025 is two robot hands opening a padlock with a key, with one hand holding the lock while the other uses the key.
We'll probably see this start to come together in 2026.
I think manipulation will come long before 2036, but the people doing high level planning on LLMs trained on forum discussions of Chucky movies and all kinds of worse stuff and planning for home robot deployment soon I think are off by a lot. Things like random stuff playing on TV rehydrating that memory that was mostly wiped out in RLHF; it will need many extra safety layers.
And even if it isn't just doing crazy intentional-seeming horror stuff, we're still a good ways off from passing the safely make a cup of coffee in a random house without burning it down or scalding the baby test.
That's what I was thinking, but could not find the link. Here is it working on some standard tasks.[1] Grasping the padlock and inserting the key is impressive.
I've seen key-in-lock before, done painfully slowly.
Finally, it's working.
That system, coupled to one of the humanoids for mobility, could be quite useful. A near term use case might be in CNC machining centers. CNC machine tools now work well enough on their own that some shops run them all night. They use replaceable cutting tools which are held in standard tool holders. Someone has to regularly replace the cutting tools with fresh ones, which limits how long you can run unattended. So a robot able to change tool holders during the night would be useful in production plants.
See [2], which is a US-based company that makes molds for injection molding, something the US supposedly doesn't do any more. They have people on day shift, but the machines run all night and on weekends. To do that, they have to have refrigerator-sized units with tools on turntables, and conveyors and stackers for workplace pallets.
A humanoid robot might be simpler than all the support machinery required to feed the CNC machines for unattended operation.
> A humanoid robot might be simpler than all the support machinery required to feed the CNC machines for unattended operation.
A humanoid robot is significantly more complicated than any CNC. Even with multi-axis, tool change, and pallet feeding these CNC robots are simpler in both control and environment.
These robots don't produce a piece by thinking about how their tools will affect the piece, they produce it by cycling though fixed commands with all of the intelligence of the design determined by the manufacturer before the operations.
These are also highly controlled environments. The kind of things they have to detect and respond to are tool breakage, over torque, etc. And they respond to those mainly by picking a new tool.
The gulf between humanoid robotics in uncontrolled environments is vast even compared to advanced CNC machines like these (which are awesome). Uncontrolled robotics is a completely different domain, akin to solving computation in P by a rote algorithm, vs excellent approximations in NP by trained ML/heuristic methods. Like saying any sorting algorithm may be more complex than a SOTA LLM.
Most flexible manufacturing systems come with a central tool storage (1000+ tools) that can load each individual machine's magazine (usually less than 64 tools per machine). The solution to the problem you mention is adding one more non-humanoid machine. The only difference is that this new machine won't consume the tools and instead just swaps the inserts.
There is literally no point in having a humanoid here. The primary reason you'd want a human here is that hiring a human to swap tools is extremely cost effective since they don't actually need to have any knowledge of operating the machines and just need to be trained on that one particular task.
I think the big differentiator for this one is the carrying capacity. They list 50kg instant/30kg sustained carrying capacity which is very impressive and I can't think of other humanoids with similar capability off the top of my head.
A service where your limo drives out to the aircraft, with all searches and paperwork pre-done, would have about the same time gain as going Mach 1.7 vs. Mach 0.85.
Underrated observation. The low-hanging fruit is all in the office/home-to-takeoff and touchdown-to-office/home blocks on each end, not the time in the air. The commute, checkin, security, airport transit, boarding, and taxiing are the time-sinks worth optimizing.
That's a real service.
Some airports, including LAX and London Heathrow, allow a "tarmac transfer", where the limo goes directly to the plane. [1][2] Cost is $200 to $1000. That could save an hour or more at each end.
VIP Terminal Access: Skip the standard queues and enter exclusive VIP terminals where you’ll receive expedited passport control, security checks, and personalized services, all while enjoying luxury amenities. Avoid long security lines with expedited security processing, ensuring you spend minimal time in the airport.
Which already is a bad signal for the article's argument. We already have a way to significantly reduce that travel time and it's a niche.
Could Boom Supersonic or whoever actually survive selling only to a hundred Taylor Swifts? How are they going to keep the lights on for the 30 years those jets fully saturate the market?
Yes.
The rare earths situation is embarrassing. This has been a political football for years now, but the efforts to fix it aren't working very well.
First, you need a mine site and a mine. The US has a big one at Mountain Pass, California, and it's producing. But in the past twenty years, it's gone bankrupt twice and has been through three owners, because there were a few rare earth gluts and the price crashed. Also, they once had a big spill from a retention pond, and that was expensive.
Mountain Pass isn't the only ore deposit in the US. There's what's supposed to be a good one in Montana. But the company developing it has been doing "studies" since at least 2023.[2] There are a few other rare earth "mining" companies which don't produce anything yet. There's one in Tennessee with a "definitive feasibility study" underway. I'm tempted to say that the real product is the stock. Anyway, it's not like there's a need to go to Ukraine or Greenland for rare earths. It's all available in the US, with a decent climate, good road access, and no wars.
Second, you need a beneficiation plant at the mine. This takes in rock and dirt, pulls out ore with a reasonable fraction of rare earths, and outputs almost as much waste as it takes in ore. This is a somewhat messy process. In China, the settling ponds are visible from space. Mountain Pass has a better process (the Sierra Club approves) and doesn't make such a mess. The waste is dried, the fluids are reused, and the dry waste can be put back where it came from eventually. This is now a known technology and is being replicated at some Australian mines.
Then you need a separating plant, where the actual rare earths are separated out. The US has very little capability in this area. Not for any good reason. There's a small startup.[1] They're slowly scaling up. Production in 2027. There's another startup, Medallion (then Gabo, then Gamma) which has been fooling around since 2020 without building much. That's one of those companies where you read five years of press releases and they're all about financing, reorgs, and management changes, with no actual product. Here's another one, RER. They've been at this since 2021, and they have a little demo plant in Wyoming.[3]
Then you need a smelting and magnet making plant. This is a modest size operation, because it processes tons, not millions of tons, of material. One has been built in an industrial park in Texas. That took funding from DoD and General Motors. Not big enough to replace all imported magnets.
This is US postmodern capitalism. The US financial system just doesn't seem to be able to bring a complicated heavy industrial project to completion in a reasonable period of time.
[1] https://rareearthexchanges.com/news/ucore-secures-18-4m-dod-...
[2] https://uscriticalmaterials.com
[3] https://www.rareelementresources.com/technology/
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