erwincoumans

I remember playing Stratego as a kid at a friends house, and eventually found out some of his pieces were subtly marked (chip in the pieces). Unhiding information was very unfair :)

"making a new theory that is really useful is out of reach for the moment in my opinion."

Curious how this ages.

Recursive self improvement, self-play and multi-agent RL could make useful new theories, eventually.

Bits of information depend on the readers prior knowledge, those bits are not absolute numbers. That makes communication not just information exchange but also syncing of priors. So some amount of redundant information maybe needed/wanted.

Lossy expansion or bloat?

Very cool projects, and amazing a 14 byte nn can do it. Would be fun to analyze its approach, converting it to a Code-as-Policy.

Very cool. Are you familiar with the game Voxile? Its author also created custome languages, and the game uses Lobster.

Thanks for the really nice in-depth post! Hoping for a future one about:

"Much recent work on auto-research, self-improving agents, and evolutionary program search can be organized around this question. Other work on model self-play, synthetic data, test-time training and a broader theme of continual learning also matches the RSI vision (e.g. Yuan et al. 2024, Chen et al. 2024), Zhao et al. 2025, Choi et al. 2026)) but they will not be the focus of this post."

Brings back memories of Soundmonitor (Commodore 64, 1986) with vertical scrolling, hex note tracking, and 3-channel column layouts.

Another happy customer, bought two Jamcorder units. Not just the hardware is simple, the software as well: it just works, quietly in the background. I just had to enable daily auto-reset otherwise it eventually had issues. Whenever someone starts playing piano, it records. The iOS app is so nice, playing back on the phone or on the piano, and keeping track of total hours played and organizing favorites. Congrats, if only more projects kept things simple and useable!

Makes me feel old, as original Bullet creator.

Great to finally see Box3D released! Glad to see some healthy physics simulation options, next to Jolt, PhysX and https://github.com/newton-physics/newton (using MuJoCo Warp, which I've been pushing at NVIDIA).

Bullet Physics author.

I got bifocal monthly contact lenses (-7, +2 and correction for astigmatism). It has been such a relief to read screen/phone without needing to wear reading glasses while still seeing far away). The daily soft lenses didn't correct as well as the firmer monthly ones.

Agreed Gemini maybe not the best, but it is still pretty good. And their research was the foundation of others (Attention is all you need paper).

Gemini is pretty good.

and active suspension, now attach wheels.

Just a matter of time until they add wheels to its feet, and the legs will act as active suspension. See also https://youtube.com/watch?v=srPz8TRpZ_8 and https://youtube.com/watch?v=iI8UUu9g8iI (at around 1:36 a human rides that Unitree quadruped)

>> I am curious what you mean by rework tweezers. Link please!

Hakko FM2023-05 Mini Hot Tweezers Kit or Hakko FX8804-02 Hot Tweezer for Hakko FX-888 for example.

>> I wish there was some way to switch tips that didn't involve letting it cool down

I replace tips while hot: the sleeve is not hot.

Agreed on stereo microscope, also suggest flux and a good iron with exchangeable tips and hot tweezers (I enjoy the Hakko).

Very nice project. If you like this, the Pupper quadruped robot project by Stanford University is also interesting, with RL training pipeline as well and well-documented open source instructions for 3d printing etc. https://pupper-v3-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gui...

Green Beret and Rambo: First Blood Part 2 tunes are still amazing, Martin is a wizard.

There is a 122TB nvme PCIe SSD: https://www.solidigm.com/products/data-center/d5/p5336.html

CentralComputers is worth visiting, if you were into Frys.

It is common for header-only libraries: you need to include this header in one c++ using the macro for linking (don't use that macro in other c++ files to avoid duplicate symbols). In C++, you can declare a function as many times as you want, but you can only define it (write the actual body) once in the entire project.

I highly recommend starting with the very affordable and well documented Lerobot SO101 arms. You can 3d print or buy parts and actuators, camera. Lots of tutorials and training policies, data collection and simulations. https://huggingface.co/docs/lerobot/en/so101

Indeed, magic. How about the Commodore 64, there was a game (Eindeloos, Radarsoft, 1985) within 64kb that has a huge map. Someone recently (after 40 years!) extracted the map (500 screens) and the png alone is 800kb. See the story an zoom in and try finding the little heart in the map! https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2025/03/07/endless.html

If only exfat had symbolic links.

Nice shots, would fit well in the Baraka (or Samara) movie.

Yes, an amazing and detailed post, enjoyed all of it. In AI, it is common to use jit compilers (pytorch, jax, warp, triton, taichi, ...) that compile to cuda (or rocm, cpu, tpu, ...). You could write renderers like that, rasterizers or raytracers.

For example: https://github.com/StafaH/mujoco_warp/blob/render_context/mu...

(A new simple raytracer that compiles to cuda, used for robotics reinforcement learning, renders at up to 1 million fps at low resolution, 64x64, with textures, shadows)

Pretty complex project, brings up C64 assembly programming memories (with some freeze cartridge with monitor to enter asm OP codes). It would be interesting to see all the actual LLM queries to get those results.

I wonder if they used silent computer fans? I love the quiet Noctua fans, and replace all noisy fans with them: fans in pc, wifi router, playstation 5, mister fpga, robots, jetson orin etc.