beau_g

Interesting, I came to the same conclusion, making my dangerous robot look dangerous on purpose to keep people away from it. Are there actually written rules on this policy somewhere?

Tamagotchi but you feed it tokens

The images are not AI generated, they are just renders from CAD composited into photos or pure renders. I have received a lot of reach out from all sorts of backgrounds which is cool, though I am a very long ways from being able to sell anything, has definitely lit even more of a fire for me though to keep making progress.

Working on the chainsaw for my centaur form factor robot. Have one part to machine then just need to weld everything up and will be ready to try it out. It uses a motor and controller sourced from an E foil, and has 2DOF position control. https://www.satyress.com/buildprogress

I've also been slowly chipping away at a Jagged Alliance 2-like game in Godot. Nothing to share yet but if anyone else is also frustrated that there hasn't been a good video game since Jagged Alliance 2 and you want to work on it reach out to me through the contact in my profile.

Bean bag chair seats solve every problem.

How about a centaur? - https://www.satyress.com/

You saw someone try to drink a soda upside down and spill it? We are going to need more than a Flock cam to stop that heinous act, perhaps a Flock robot arm that could grab the criminals arm and turn it right side up, or just restrain them while the authorities are on the way.

If you're talking human size bipeds, if they have the required peak torques and speeds on the leg actuators to work at all, they will have the physical ability to sprint. You can think of a Segway to visualize this more easily - the motor on it needs quite a bit of power and speed to overcome a human leaning forward drastically without just falling over, a biped is the same thing with more steps. You need quite a lot of power to even idle stand a biped and a lot of speed to even do tiny corrections. If you want to rely on an ifElse statement or a model policy to not sprint, then you just introduce more likelihood of falling over, which also isn't great around humans. If you truly want to know a robot will not (meaning cannot) sprint, you would need form factors like a worm or centipede.

I read the beginning of the post and immediately tabbed back to start writing a rant about standing up a website being fine, but the real loss of web functionality was Flash, glad I kept reading. I'm quite good with CSS and doing tricks with SVGs, but constantly run into things I want to do in 2D web I find to be complex enough and time consuming enough I don't even bother, while I would have been able to do it in Flash as a 13 year old in a few minutes. The modern web is a prison built out of <div>s, the tricks you see for "amazing" websites with obnoxious scrolljacking/parallax don't hide it.

Though we are not yet competitive in the Argentinian Polo clone wars, we are making significant progress - https://www.satyress.com/

A comment on HN a few years ago in a thread about car washes brought this to light a little bit for me, the proliferation of subscription car washes everywhere in the US (self storage too) seems like it can't possibly make sense financially, but when you think about developers that also want to speculate on the land, car washes and self storage are about as easy as it gets to develop and maintain some cashflow, then you can sell or redevelop later. Now I am expecting a spinoff to Mister Inference and Quick Flops as these sprawling networks of carwashes turn into data centers in 2030

We have something close, but unfortunately not at the halloween decoration price point - https://www.satyress.com/

I disagree and think the software model described works better when done well. I have seen this within a company, where both the hardware side and software side used the same titles (senior, staff, senior staff, principal). The hardware side used largely a combination of industry tenure and especially whether they had PHDs/patents/inventions or not to determine these titles, while the software org was very gung ho on using responsibility and influence to determine promotions. The other thing this led to is in the hardware org, often people would get hired on as senior staff or principal, while this almost never happened on the software side (nobody could get hired on as these roles as they couldn't possibly meet the rubric, as it required some outsized impact in the company with thousands of people using software you near singlehandedly developed and maintained).

As other people pointed out in this post in a roundabout way, titles only matter at all internally to a given company. And considering that, compare these two systems; yes the software org in this system does end up in a position where a 25 year old that's been at the company for 3 years could be senior staff, but that's very telling, to do that, they absolutely had to ship something novel, useful to many, and keep it running and good. Knowing that someone is a very well educated graybeard that invented something at Sun in 1989 is also some good information, but from the context of communicating with people in other orgs within a company I don't know so well, it's more valuable to me personally to understand whether they are responsible for a large running process and to what degree, moreso than how long they have been around and what they did elsewhere.

For a while I was missing the ability one uses all the time in stable diffusion prompts of using parentheses and floats to emphasize weight to different parts of the prompt. The more I thought about how it would work in an LLM though, the more I realized it's just reinventing code syntax and you could just give a code snippet to the LLM prompt.

It would be interesting to first create a taxonomy of juggalo face paint patterns a la aruco markers/April tags, then see if a sufficiently large crowd of juggalos could be used to calibrate cameras

Consider 2 welding systems, a hungover human on a 3 legged ladder with a scratched up welding helmet doing an overhead TIG weld holding the filler rod a foot away from the weld pool, and a 6 DOF Kuka bot doing a weld in the same position on a completely rigid work piece clamped down to a precision machined fixture table which is clamped down to a precision machined floor that the robot is also mounted to.

The human system weighs 250lbs and can be placed anywhere. Let's ask what it takes to walk the factory robot in that direction. First let's have the work piece be moving, let's say on a conveyor belt. The old robotics way of thinking would be to introduce this variable into the programming of the bot/station, create simple sensors for either the work piece or conveyor itself to indicate to the programming loop where the part is with as little error as possible, and continue to keep accuracy while maintaining as much precision as possible using rigidity (which equals mass and space). Now the whole system is functionally 7 DOF, and you add in the error and failure modes of the 7th DOF (the conveyor system) and accumulate some error. Now just imagine instead of a conveyor the part is on a rolling table with random Z height, and so it the robot arm, and you can see this will fall apart, you can't fight this battle with deterministic programming, machining precision, and rigidity. Obviously if you extended this system to be a humanoid robot on a 3 legged ladder which would be 30+ DOF between the weld and the ground, it couldn't possibly work.

But back to the hungover human, why does this system work so well? The human has very good eyes and a very good internal IMU. They are looking at the end of the filler rod and the weld pool, and even though the information isn't that good coming through the scratched welding helmet, they can compensate for all that error and run an internal function that holds the torch and filler rod in the optimum position to do a good TIG weld while ignoring or automatically adjusting for tons of other variables. Now to address your original question, in our system 1. Are current cameras good enough to get an equivalent amount of information about the weld that the hungover welder has? Yes, in fact can get more information than a human can 2. Are IMUs as good as a hungover human has? Hard to really know, but seems like it, though if you need many IMUs attached to different limbs on a robot its probably not as good as humans yet 3. Is the power density of actuators and power storage good enough to approximate this 250lb system of a human on a ladder with some combination of DOF that reaches a sufficient range of motion to emulate the humans hands (whether the robot looks like a human or not?) - yeah, plus in this case the welder is plugged into the ground for the human anyway so that system is already attached to mains power

So given all this, seems like the limiter is just software, which is the bull case for this prospected robotics revolution

Many overactuated, purpose built robots (like surgical robots and pianos) exist, and have existed since the Unimate, and work great in certain situations. The problem with all of them is they are very expensive, often extremely large, and single purpose or very narrow purpose (and even if they are narrowly multipurpose, require tons of setup to get to work for each job they are intended to do).

I personally am not bullish on 1:1 human hands either, but IMO the question shouldn't be $100k 2 ton Kuka arm vs biped with hands, it's overactuated robotics (build it from the floor with hard coded operations) vs underactuated (build it from the contact point of the work backwards with ML and sensors). We shall see which form factors prevail, but the type of robotics development posted here seems like the way forwards regardless, an ecosystem of small, power dense, reliable, accurate QDD actuators will lead to many general purpose robot applications. I recognize I am not using underactuated vs overactuated in their strict definition here but if you are familiar with robots I think you'll understand where I am coming from as far as a robot design ethos.

I will say though in designing robots of this type without necessarily being bound by trying to make a robot look like a human, I have often found myself accidentally recreating human arm DOF in a round trip way, it does just end up being well packaged beyond the "world designed for humans" talking point. Maybe hands will end up being a similar situation.

There was a sharp rise in demand/value since 2020 on cars like the 355 and 550, and some bit rarer but still significant in number cars like the 360 Challenge Stradale and 430 Scuderia. Especially for the 355 and 550, which exist in significant numbers, before 2020 these cars were $70-100k, but now with nice examples going from $150k-225k, it can make a lot more sense to import one from a softer market like Europe or Japan (especially since Japanese market examples are often extremely well kept and LHD), even if the cost of importing is $10-20k.

Check the results here - https://bringatrailer.com/ferrari/550-maranello/ Example EU market car, imported 2023 - https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1999-ferrari-550-maranello... JP market car, imported to Canada 2018 then US in 2024 - https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1999-ferrari-550-maranello...

The ship example maybe wasn't the greatest, in the cases of the Ever Given and MV Aman, the crews were required to stay on the boats as custodians while dealing with these issues, in the latter case a single sailor was on the ship for 4 years, the last 2 alone and without power.

Another interesting case with ships is the Trieste and several other Russian oligarch mega yachts being held in Italy. Italian law requires them to maintain the value of frozen assets, so they are spending millions per month to keep these yachts maintained.

I was in the same boat as you and sounds like others in this thread, >1000 hours in Blender over the past few years, but learned Fusion360 to be able to get parts lasercut and machined so had to go to proper parametric CAD format. The simple answer is use both - some things like making a simple bracket or fixture are just much easier in CAD. For organic shapes with lots of complexity, sub D modeling is far faster and easier IMO in Blender than the ways to achieve that in CAD (like T splines in Fusion).

The space between those 2 things is where you have to decide what you are really trying to accomplish. The program you use will have an impact on what your result looks like, you see this in the evolution of product design alongside the evolution of design software (boxy cars in the 80s, soap bars in the 90s, and the last few decades of cars with flowing designs with body line defining creases which modern A surface modelers seem to draw you towards). I find parts made in Blender with my workflow often look a lot more interesting and visually pleasing, using edge crease/bevel modifiers and sliding loops around vs. using fillets in CAD for instance, they both aim to soften an edge, but look far different in the end. If you are only ever going to 3D print parts and never CNC, you are already fast in Blender, and part strength vs mass doesn't matter much (especially to a degree where you don't care about FEA), Blender is plenty viable to make printed parts with.

You can footgun yourself easily with both programs, but I find Fusion to be worse for this, half because of the UI, but using tools like sketch projection for me has caused really diabolical issues in the timeline. The whole trick to CAD is being very careful with the design intention as you progress forwards, which is hard to learn coming from 3D modelers where that doesn't matter much and you can just shuffle around non destructive modifiers. This might just be due to my own experience difference in the programs though, I definitely remember going down some roads in Blender I never returned from on meshes when I was learning, normally by either applying subdivision modifiers, doing too many loop cuts, or using a tri/n-gon somewhere thinking it wouldn't be an issue or I would fix it later.

AI = Again It's-saturday-time-for-another-12-hours-of-in-office-work

These $100mm+ hires are centering divs in flex boxes on the first try. They are simply not like you and me.

Making a high performance, expensive, rare car is a small part of the recipe. Most Ferrari owners own more than one Ferrari (65% according to Ferrari of North America study from a decade ago or so, not sure if there's an updated number). A significant number of owners own more than 2. Ferrari famously has dealer prioritization and waitlists that reward you for buying more cars, just like Rolex which another poster mentioned below. When I was servicing these cars around 2015, many customers would buy FFs and Californias that they didn't necessarily want just to have the option to buy something like a first year 458 Spider, not even one of the particularly rare offerings. If someone got something truly low production like a LaFerrari or F12 TDF, chances are that customer had already bought 10+ cars from the dealer and immediately trades in many of their cars at a multi hundred thousand dollar loss to them as soon as they are able to get out of a "regular" model into a special edition. Ferrari drives/meets also serve as social clubs/networking which certainly does provide some positive value for many owners of these vehicles. Very few customers I ever met really cared about outright performance/$ and would have been cross shopping a Ford GT with a 430.

I've seen an interesting A-B test with this seeing the difference in clutch wear between the Ferrari F1 transmission in the 599 and 612 and the DuoSelect transmission which is essentially the same box in the Quattroporte. The shifting strategy and technique is more of a controlled variable here because the shifting is automatic though it's a somewhat traditional manual gearbox with hydraulic actuation. The QP is a bit heavier but the Ferraris make a lot more power. From what I saw the cars that fared far worse were the Quattroportes, and those that ate the most clutches by far were the ones putting around the city, especially in San Francisco, Marin, Los Altos Hills, etc. where people are slowly creeping into parking spots on hills. On the Ferraris that are weekend warriors that get driven hard the clutches could go 30k+ miles no problem, Quattroportes would come in with smoked clutches in a few thousand miles sometimes.

To the parent posters point though, those manufacturers are holding outsized control over what can be retrofit to their machines, so to disrupt them, you have to make your own machines. Working on and owning heavy equipment myself, I of course have looked at it and thought there's a lot to improve, but at the the same time, I don't really see where the big brain Silicon Valley + venture bucks ethos can be applied to the space, it would be a long and slow grind of doing mostly straightforward mechanical engineering and supply chain/vendor agreements to build something like a bulldozer, just to enter a near impenetrable market due to many existing sunk costs and long relationships between buyers and the existing manufacturers.

I was thinking the same thing but the cost of an equipment operator isn't that significant compared to the expense of running and especially maintaining these machines, and if teleop incurs more maintenance cost or efficiency loss due to clumsier operation, it's definitely a step in the wrong direction financially.

Every technological leap has it's Chuck Yeagers and Yuri Gagarins that will put it all on the line with early tech for humanity to take that next step - we have to accept the inevitable and hope that luck is on these brave soul's side

The article opens with a statement saying the author isn't going to reword what others are writing, but the article reads as that and only that.

That said, I do think it would be nice for people to note in pull requests which files have AI gen code in the diff. It's still a good idea to look at LLM gen code vs human code with a bit different lens, the mistakes each make are often a bit different in flavor, and it would save time for me in a review to know which is which. Has anyone seen this at a larger org and is it of value to you as a reviewer? Maybe some tool sets can already do this automatically (I suppose all these companies report the % of code that is LLM generated must have one if they actually have these granular metrics?)

There's a lot of logistics cost for replacement parts, shipping, storage, a system to track them, etc. in distribution warehouses all over the world in small numbers. It's all work done manually by humans at every level. Studies to project failure rates, failure modes, demand planning, etc. may be baked into this cost as well depending on how the company accounts for it.

Many years ago I was servicing Maserati GranTurismos and Quattroportes of which some use a ZF 6 speed auto transmission. Since the same transmission is used in Land Rovers, I would buy parts from the Land Rover dealer which was nearby. One time I went there and they didn't have any fluid for the transmission for Land Rovers, but they did for Jaguar. The fluid was identical, but on a different shelf, and cost a lot more. The parts department said that Jaguar uses a 3rd party parts distribution contract in North America, but Land Rover does it in house, so every Jaguar part, of which many are identical to Land Rovers, costs more. They could not just bill out a Land Rover part internally to their own dealer to service a Jaguar either (they were a franchise that repaired both).

Hopefully people are responsible/safety conscious when shooting down drones and use birdshot