aerophilic

There is a neat solve for the thermal problem that York Space systems has been advocating (based on Russian tech)… put everything in an enclosure.

https://www.yorkspacesystems.com/

Short version: make a giant pressure vessel and keep things at 1 atm. Circulate air like you would do on earth. Yes, there is still plenty of excess heat you need to radiate, but dramatically simplifies things.

This seems to be a way to identify and create a 'periodic table' of different machine learning approaches... importantly identifying 'gaps' between approaches which may yield new ways of doing various learning techniques.

Honestly, and I feel like a promoter… but get either a hackpack from Mark Rober or as otherwise mentioned, mindstorms from LEGO.

Crunch labs: https://www.crunchlabs.com/

As someone in the industry (I literally can call myself a Robot Master having a Masters Degree in Robotics), these simple “kid kits” are phenomenal. When you first start out, the hardest part is knowing the hardware is actually going to do what you tell it to do. Simplifying the mechanical engineering/electrical engineering so you can immediately create real world actions makes a huge difference in giving you motivation to keep going.

Once you have the basics in place and you understand mechanisms, sensors, and some algorithms, you can move on to other parts of robotics.

However, keep in mind robotics is really about system thinking… you have to understand trades between sensing, thinking, and acting. But most importantly you have to remember you are dealing with the real world… you can’t as easily write a unit test and know that a particular actuator will behave exactly the same way every time.

They don’t… just do whichever one you are most interested in doing. Each box more or less stands alone (at least that is what I am observing from my kids assembly of them)

My kids have loved watching Mark Robers videos, have the subscriptions (one of both the backpack and crunchpack), and we uploaded our video for SatGus.

If you have young kids (6-15) these are perfect educational tools. Highly recommend. Only downside is some of them are a bit “mischievous”. For example a “Bobbie trap” that launches balls at whomever tripped the wire. Good times…

This has been a pain point for us and our development process… not all versions of Nvidia drivers are the same… even released ones. You have to find a “good” version and keep to it, and then selectively upgrade… at least this has been the case the last 5 years, folks shout out if they have had different experiences.

Side note: our main use case is using cuda for image processing.

Just to plug a friend… Velo.ai does similar things… but has other stuff going on: https://www.velo.ai/

Interesting to see how these two would compare, but my first (light) glance points to velo.ai being further along…

It seems to me that if SLS goes… so does Gateway. That said, one thing to note: There are not that many stable lunar orbits. Unlike the earth, the moon is very lumpy. It is the reason why most lunar orbiters end up doing a planned crash as their end of (relatively) short life. From that standpoint, orbits that are a bit further out are much more appealing to have relatively low delta v requirements.

All that said, once Starship is regularly in use for lunar delivery… I suspect we will have a fundamental new paradigm for space.

Reading this, this line deeply resonated: “People that out of necessity grow a thick skin with not fitting in and being OK standing out.”

I think this is a pre req to trying to do what a founder is working to do: Change fundamental belief states of the vast majority of people. It is extremely uncomfortable to stake out a position no one else believes in… yet. It requires courage (and thick skin) to get people through the disbelief curve.

They insist likely due to the “Kleenex” effect. Couldn’t find a good reference, but once an item becomes generic, it can loose copyright.

Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/smarter-living/how-a-bran...

Question: If this change goes into effect, will it effectively open up banking for all the cannabis related/cannabis adjacent companies? Seems like a really smart move to bring them into the financial system.

The best resource I have found for “news” has been Andra Keay’s newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/comm/newsletters/710308591124398489...

In it she covers the latest and greatest robot news, with occasional commentary/perspectives.

However to more directly answer your question, you need to know/talk to someone in the industry at the moment. I am not aware of a single “spot” that gives an honest in depth appraisal of where we are.

From my experience there is a ton of new “hardware” coming out, not just in the humanoid space (Agility Robotics being imho the most “real”), but also in lower cost robot arms, end effectors, sensors, and compute.

Where things are harder to track is where we really are in the software realm. If you look at software driving this hardware, most of it is early stages. Perhaps TRL level 3 to 5 at best. The higher TRL is non-intelligent control software (that is based on decades of work). The newer, AI/Machine Learning/“Smart” software tends to only have limited roll out. At best it will be a startup at the relatively early stages, but more often then not it is still a researcher sitting at a University or a large corporations research lab. In either of those cases, you will see single to at most double digit examples of those systems actually doing work.

However, to your point, it is super easy to create a single (or even a series) of cool videos… it just takes one success in 100s of takes. It is harder to make something that will perform day in and day out and really change the industry/world.

This is something I think about quite a bit: There are about 8 billion people on this earth. Of the 8 billion, I would argue only 1 in 10 (800 million) have their basic needs met and a decent education. This is the pool of people most of our innovations, business and scientific come from.

Imagine what would happen if we doubled or tripled that number.

How many more companies founded, inventions created, or if you care about art, new creations never imagined.

We really MUST do better, it is in all our best interests.

lol, yes… it is indeed fun to share these stories.

Two alternate stories I didn’t tell:

First is about my two friends (both ridiculously smart) who in undergrad became the TAs for the Operating System class at Carnegie Mellon as undergrads (normally taught by grad students)… this is the hardest CS course taught there. As part of their summer prep, they wrote a new file system example… I believe based on a b-tree.

The next was my AI professor, Andrew Moore [0], he was legendary at the school… eventually becoming dean after doing a stint at Google (he has since stepped down). By far, he is the smartest person I have ever personally known. To give you context (and we did this regularly in his class), you could ask him a question on anything and he would pause, think about it, and come up with a well reasoned answer that would be both insightful and illuminating… from first principles. On any subject. You could not throw him (we tried). I am still in awe of him.

While I agree that legendary tales grow… they are almost always based on a kernel of truth. The reality is most people don’t often interact with folks at these levels. I was very lucky, and I have only interacted with a handful.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2017/10/30/carnegie-m...

This was 30+ years ago… I don’t know the details, but trust the source. The source used to teach at Carnegie Mellon. The point my friend made to me was that this guy was so good he never had to debug a program after he was done.

FWIW, apparently back before Intel released a particular 4 bit processor, this guy made an emulator and compiler for the chip so they could start writing code in anticipation of its release.

Once again, not direct experience… but trusted source.

Story from a friend who once was offered the first PhD in Computer Science.

He once mentored a guy who was so ridiculously good at writing programs, that he wrote out (once) a 5 foot stack of punch cards (back when that was how you would code), to create a program that was needed by the company for some purpose.

It worked, flawlessly, the FIRST time.

This was his MO.

Once, he wrote a program for an internal client, and it got shipped. They ran the program and ran into a problem. My friend told him to debug it for them… he replied “I don’t know how”. Up to that point in his life, He had never had to debug a single piece of software…

My friend helped him debug the program: Turns out, the problem was not an issue with his code, the customer had given him the wrong spec for a critical interface… and that was the only reason it had not worked the first time.

There are truly people that qualify. The only note I will make is that generally if you are a super genius in one dimension, you likely have something you are absolutely terrible at in another. Hopefully it is in a dimension that either doesn’t matter, or you have enough complementary people around you to mitigate it.

This is overall a good, and needed thing. While the BE-4 engines from Blue Origin are fantastic, they need the level of system maturity that is represented by ULA. Together, I see a real chance to be competitive with SpaceX long term. Yes, they have work to go before they could do reusable launch, but the combined company probably has the best chance to do so.

The more reusable launch providers the better for the industry and for human kind.

Surprised they didn’t include the blue cube… Defense and Defense applications (including NASA) were some of the key funders for much of the “silicon” in Silicon Valley…

In Graduate school I fasted for a week. It was deliberate as a cleansing activity for myself. Before this I had never really did any extensive fasting.

To directly answer your question, I didn’t talk to a doctor ahead of time, but I did make sure to drink lots of water during that period.

I remember the hardest day was day 2. For the first day, you “feel” hungry as your body is accustomed to eating, but it is day 2 you are genuinely hungry. However, per the article, after about the third day you simply don’t notice yourself being as hungry anymore.

I noticed then (and notice now when I fast) positive effects on mood, and ironically energy.

The only drawback I have noticed is that the first meal after a fast, especially if a large carbohydrate based one, seems to have outsized effects on drowsiness.