cs2818

As a longtime Dynamixel user I agree the U2D2 adapter is pricey in comparison to other options, but I would like some quantification of the “latency is very high” claim. I have always found it to be a sure bet for low latency (~1ms) across a wide variety of platforms.

Probably less common, but I write a lot of JS code interfacing with devices over serial connections. This makes Buffer's convenience methods for encoding and decoding data types in both big and little endian ordering really useful to me.

It looks like I could accomplish the same thing using a DataView of an ArrayBuffer, but I don't see enough of a benefit to justify converting everything to this approach.

Anecdotal, but the generic (Alvogen) I've received the past few times for the IR version has felt much stronger and has ultimately led to me adjusting to about half my prescribed dose.

I've taken the same dose produced by many different manufacturers for ~10 years and this is the first time I have noticed such a big difference. So far I haven't been able to find any other confounding factor that would account for the change in effect.

This really resonates with me. I recently traveled to an international conference and I am almost certain I spent more time jumping through the hoops of Concur and our university’s bizarre policies than I did presenting and attending the conference.

The worst part is the trip was significantly more expensive than it needed to be because of the constraints imposed by the system.

I’ve found just asking for a hypothetical response seems to work: https://ibb.co/CsTyrNY

Several years ago I advocated transitioning our academic robotics research lab to using Fusion 360 as our default for design. I regret that choice more and more with every decision like this. We are rarely affected by these changes on our academic license, but I hate to see students invest in a tool that may suddenly become unreasonable to continue using later.

Would really like to know more about the implementation here.

While I personally am not a user or fan of Google location history, I know people who have jobs that involve a lot of travel between medical facilities that find Google location history to be a good mechanism to verify their activities for billing appropriate accounts. Will there be a way to opt out?

My printing journey started with a FlashForge Creator Pro that has dual extruders and an enclosed build area. It was easy to use and worked well for ABS, but has essentially been idle since getting an MK3 a couple of years ago. I’ve had really good results printing ABS and ASA using the MK3 in a simple enclosure tent (Creality branded and like $80 on Amazon). We print a lot of ASA so I do want to move the MK3’s power supply out of the enclosure, but it’s such a great machine I’ve struggled to find something new that seems worth the purchase.

Fellow Aggie here! I graduated with a CS degree nearly 10 years ago, but I feel like earIy on I had similar experiences to what you’ve described.

For me the landscape and huge size of different orgs at TAMU was also somewhat intimidating. I did push myself to join a couple of service oriented groups and had a great time but didn’t make close friends (which is fine). I ended up getting involved in research and became close friends with many of my lab mates. There are many great CS research labs that are welcoming to undergrads just starting if you have interests in that.

For me I also found (perhaps too late in my studies) that taking classes in other areas that interested me (social sciences, psych for me) was a great way to meet entirely different groups of people without a lot of the effort of joining an org.

I hope something in here is helpful! Although I was definitely a 2%er with respect to school spirit, I greatly enjoyed my time at A&M and hope you will too.

What are the chances this is the same person that allegedly secretly recorded a customer showering when acting as a Geek Squad technician in 2007? [1]

It appears they have the same name and the age reported is consistent with 14 year gap. Not sure what the probability of that happening coincidentally is.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-apr-12-me-geeks...

I couldn’t agree more. To share a little bit of my experience in this area:

I’m a social robotics researcher and our group has spent several years working in this area, looking at the effectiveness, ethics, and protections (or harms) involved in using different emerging technologies for conducting forensic interviews with children. As a result I’ve become very familiar with the different forensic interviewing techniques used with kids.

One thing I can say is historically some horrible approaches have been common, but there’s tremendous effort today to reform this. However, even with these well designed techniques the research shows forensic interviewers fall back to using problematic methods if they aren’t regularly refreshed on proper techniques. Our research is focused on eliminating the biases and leading interviewers are vulnerable to by using software and even using tightly controlled social robotic interviewers to totally control expressions, body language, etc. during these interviews.

The general progression is ask an open ended question, then if that’s unsuccessful offer multiple choice, then yes-no. Our protocols strictly forbid adding information apart from repeating what a child says in open ended responses for clarification. But even that can be tricky, even through a robot. In summary it’s not an easy thing and it seems most police/social services in the US have relatively few resources dedicated to improving it. Here’s hoping we can improve this soon!

Thank you for sharing a treasure I somehow missed until today. Would enjoy this style applied to other safety videos!

Not an example from the wild, but our parrot (a caique) likes to laugh when he accomplishes a goal or encounters an unexpected challenge. I’m sure a lot of his use of laughter stems from living with humans though.

Just a note that they recently moved to patriots.win, as the owner of their original domain split with them. I haven’t had much time to study their moderation/censoring practices yet, but have been visiting occasionally out of curiosity.

I was curious about the board and spent an hour or so viewing the Twitter pages of each (most had one). Many had expressed sentiments critical of Trump in the past week or so. Some in a way that reflects directly on the issue at hand. Not a clear indicator of how they will judge this case, but interesting nonetheless.

From what I’ve read of their procedures they will publish some reasoning for their ruling as well as dissents, but unlike the US Supreme Court these will not be publicly attributed to the member writing them. Understandable for their own safety I suppose.

Facebook is a private company and free to do this however they want, so I’m not trying to be overly critical here— just found it interesting to learn a little about this private version of a court.

Wow, why can’t they give it until summer before demanding in person?

I was scheduled to teach in-person last semester (without my input) and despite my objections and a running 20% positivity rate in our area, was told it was required. I talked my department head into okaying the first week as virtual only and then just kept it that way. Had a pretty great semester too. The rate never went down much lower than 8% on our campus. They did very little random testing.

I’m just a grad student without any kids yet, so I could afford to worst case lose my position— but I worry about those who are pressured into in the classroom for no real reason apart from some admin feeling students want that experience.

There are dozens of us! I took Cal 2 and 3 from him.

Yep, received 5 of a product instead of one.

It wasn't anything expensive, but it looked like it didn't get split out of the bulk packaging it was likely received in (barcode for single item was applied to bundle of 5).

I haven't had a chance to look at it yet but here are the links to the paper and associated Open Science Framework data if anyone is interested:

Paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.181...

OSF Page: https://osf.io/ga9th/

Any good solutions for getting GPIO, I2C, SPI on a phone?

I have always thought an augmented reality headset would be the best interface for something like this. It would help eliminate the need to switch focus and be less disruptive to others. I guess it’s just not affordable enough yet.

> Half the OS services break or emit warnings, because the date component considers December 2017 as an illegal month.

This has been frustrating me as well. The console has become a constant stream of these errors, the out of bounds month one is particularly annoying.

It would be nice if Ars Technica would provide a link to their source material (unless I'm just missing it).

I don't understand why so many news sources skip out on providing references.

Definitely so. Even though it's rarely an issue today, I cannot escape thinking of title-safe and action-safe [0] while editing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_area_(television)

Yep, these studies have been appearing at human-robot interaction conferences for a couple of years now.

I've noticed it has entered the vocabulary of students at the university I'm at in Mississippi (where new trends seem to arrive later), so I assumed it was fairly popular across the country at this point.

Really glad to hear this perspective.

Over the past seven years most of my time has been spent in robotics research labs, and I really struggle to reconcile the state of research with the concerns of those like Elon Musk. I think a series of discussions between the major figures on each side of this would be really valuable.

I always encrypt because I worry an automated copyright scan will be the end of my account. If there was a policy that assured my non-shared files wouldn't be subject to these scans I would happily store content unencrypted.

For reference, I don't store pirated content, rather content that I have a license for, but cloud providers have no way of knowing that. Unfortunately the dispute processes are unreliable, so when it's time to backup a media project, I play it safe and encrypt.

This approach has been really helpful to me, as I often work on networks without Internet access (also for a long time setting up your own local signaling server was somewhat of a pain).