Great! Reminds me of Pikchr a bit https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/homepage.md
675 karma · joined September 16, 2022
Maybe another quote to add to the list is about Bob Widlar (from https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/bob-widlar-silicon-val...):
> In 1965, Widlar left Fairchild to work at National Semiconductor. While there, he released his design for the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator, the LM109. This finding came at a time when engineers hotly debated whether it was possible to develop a high-power regulator on a single chip.
> Widlar, established as an engineering genius in 1969, wrote a paper settling the debate, claiming temperature swings and packaging limitations made the device impossible. The industry took his word for it and stopped all efforts to build such a device. However, in 1970, Widlar shocked his contemporaries with the 20-W LM109, the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator. The device included all of the features Widlar had claimed were impossible just one year prior.
> has a countdown timer above warning visitors that the door will auto-open in x amount of time.
A toilet that has a door with a countdown seems like the most stress-inducing thing ever.
foreach (i, int, 10, vector(10, int, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5))
println(*i);Legged robots overall have more implementation complexity, spend energy just to idle standing up, but can go over much more varied terrain provided the controller is good enough. There are ways to adapt wheeled bases to different terrains (eg. larger wheels, whegs, RHex, rocker-bogies) but we know how to use legs to locomote over many terrains from personal experience, while the perfect wheeled/non-legged locomotion system perhaps remains to be designed.
There's also the way robotics is going toward data-driven methods, which in some forms (ie. imitation learning) require human teleoperation data. Here having the robot mimic the human form makes the mapping from human joints to robot joints easier (compared to other morphologies where you'd need to figure out how to best approximate a human motion with the joints/joint limits your robot has, though this is not impossible).