yardie

I've been playing around with Hugging Face's Lerobot[0] projects and it has been a lot of fun. To me, it has really democratized the field and has made it much easier to get into the subject without having a mechatronics degree and research lab budget. I've built 2 AI controlled robot arms: SO-ARM101 and Koch. I'm in the process of building a dual armed mobile bot[1] that looks very similar to this one. It will be interesting to see what Xiaomi's engineers push to Github.

[0] https://huggingface.co/docs/lerobot/index [1] https://xlerobot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

They get you hooked on a teaser tariff. Like $100k worth of AWS, Azure, GCP credits. Like a good drug dealer, the first hit is free. Once you've convinced yourself that moving to AWS is the right move, based on the teaser rate, they've got you in their jaws. Most of your IT team is gone, most of your on-prem/colo hardware is outdated, and for tax reasons it's better to lease than to purchase capital intensive equipment. But now the low AWS rate is gone, you can't go back, and you'd look like a fool for calling your decision a mistake.

I really like AWS. But I feel like there is a lot of money to be made in consultants overselling services built on it. And a lot of traditionally expensive IT teams are being replaced with even more expensive cloud "architects".

Does the model account for the blatant favouritism in the refs? We used to laugh about it before but as the cameras have gotten better it has become a lot more visible. And in this case, is turning the tournament into a bit of a joke.

-- Egypt was robbed.

It's still a thing and I was gearing up to do it in the 00s. But I accepted a job offer and my freewheeling days were over.

We already have that in the GAO. We also have personnel who's job is to root out fraud: inspector generals. The budget is constantly audited scrutinized for excess and waste, except 2 departments: defense and Medicare. The former is pork for the politicians' home states. The later is so complex it relies on the healthcare industry to help write the rules. And they can't help making sure they get paid the most.

One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it.

Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.

So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?

Well the alternative is people do rational things like self emolate, self defenestrate, suicide, and familicide. During the ‘08 financial crisis I was reading horror stories of Spanish debtors topping themselves because financial fuckups in NYC, London, and Madrid caused a problem other people had to pay for.

The NASA Langley stability wind tunnel [0] is now part of Randolph Hall at Virginia Tech. You can visit it in Blacksburg, VA. Beautiful campus, btw. The stability tunnel is the biggest, they also have smaller hypersonic tunnels and

I worked there as a work-study student. Part of the job was wiping down the tunnel chamber after their test runs. The smoke you see used in wind tunnel videos is not actually smoke, but a white oil. And for a FWS job the pay wasn't bad, had to put on a bunny suit and crawl around tight spaces, LOL.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_Stability_Wind_T...

It won't work because it's unnecessary. If these boneheads are right AI will drive the price of goods down. Price of labor goes down. It's deflationary. UBI is a backstop against inflation. And really just there so that rich people's money is worth something.

Dumbasses the lot of them.

Took that nonsense to Capitol Hill, trying to tell a bunch of politicians who knew damn well they are only there as long as they can keep their voters employed. They could have asked their own AI what happens when employment reaches 40-50%. Hint: it's never good. They were going to become another problem the government had to solve.

Also, UBI is non-starter no matter what Sam Altman believes.

the ADL would report on any celebration by antisemites and other extremists, asserting that this would deter tourism and harm Iceland's economy

If everything is antisemitism then nothing is antisemitism.

I don't consider anything digital as being bought unless I own it free and clear, unencumbered of any encryption. Not interested in anyone's "digital locker" or storage scheme. I have 20 years of music bought digitally through iTunes and Amazon. I can still play them to this day without needing to check-in with a licensing server. That is ownership. That is why I don't buy encrypted movies.

A few months ago the founders of the top AI companies walked into Capitol Hill. Tried to explain to a room full of elected representatives exactly how their technology was going to put almost half the working population into under/unemployment and they should consider UBI [0]. Then they went back to the airport, got on their corporate jets, and went home secure in the knowledge that they really showed them. That they were the smartest people in the room.

BTW, no one I know gives a shit about the energy consumption or water usage. They absolutely want to know if these datacenters will bring jobs to their area. So far Altman, Ellison, O'Leary, Amodei, Pichai, and Zuckerberg have refused to answer that question.

[0] All except Jensen who has been really trying to explain the benefits of AI and has said these massive layoffs are a huge mistake.

The base model 13" MBA was $799. I remember because I needed a laptop for our son to continue attending school during COVID shutdown.

Roaches in a clean, maintained apartment means there is a problem elsewhere in the building. We had a small infestation. And no matter how many times we called the exterminator they kept coming back. Found out one of our neighbors was a hoarder. He passed away, they deep cleaned the apartment, and the roach problem stopped right away. Roaches still need to feed and breed. Once you take that away no more roaches.

It drives me crazy that after every update the menu icons, like the browser, is in a completely different arbitrary place. And since Tesla doesn't want to allow Carplay I'm forced to use the slightly less than useful mobile web version of my favourite apps.

How did you like 42? Would you recommend it? I worked some great devs who came out of 42. They all wanted to be game developers. The industry is notoriously unreliable. So they pivoted to writing business software where the client actually pays you for more features. LOL.

I grew up going to hackathons and they were fairly open ended and collaborative. The recent hackathons I've attended are just a vehicle to get you to use cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Vercel, etc).

More recently, teams have been attending hackathons with an already completed product, using the event to attend VC meetings instead of doing any hacking. And when they invariably win with a well done, complete product they use the media announcements to generate leads. My duct-tape and cardboard hack doesn't look very good but we designed and built it within the team we assembled 48hours ago.

The framers separated the branches so the legislative, executive, and judicial balance one another. What they didn't account for was all 3 being corrupted at the same time. I've been telling friends we really don't have a defense from this. Even if we held another election the powers that be can run the same playbook again. I'm convinced the US will cease to exist as a democracy in the next 10-15 years.

Their competitors did exactly that!

Moved right in with the same old price so I didn't even have to expand the budget and they threw in training for free!

One of the tools we use was bought by PE last summer. When it was time to renew our support contract had tripled in price. I use it across 10 projects so our costs went from $200k to $500k. I let our account manager know this was unacceptable but even his hands were tied. Cancelled those contracts and let them know we were retooling with a competing tool and opensource to fill those gaps. The impression I got was we weren't the only ones. Sales were getting squeezed between customers bailing and PE management wanting to stay the course.

I've seen PE make businesses more efficient by reviewing all contracts and dropping or renegotiating ones that no longer align. Closing product lines that aren't profitable. But that is year 1-2. By year 3 they start the squeeze, layoffs, asset selloffs (stripping), and lowering quality, raising prices. That is where the real teeth of wolf are shown.

A HOA on a house never made sense to me. There are no amenities they provide worth what you pay. Condos in are different story. You're using shared resources in a limited space. Condos in a bustling urban core are great. A condo in the middle of the suburbs makes no sense.

Now I have another project for this weekend! I also have tons of video and not a lot of time to index them.

Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then. They just had very bad supply chain management. A bunch of old Macs sitting in warehouses not selling and too many people on payroll without any clear objectives. As Steve put it, "the ship was sinking and Gil (D'Amelio) was worried about which direction we were pointing."

The Apple board had hired a series of presidents who, in the short term, were good for the stock, but bad for the company strategically. The one good thing they did was hire a guy who didn't give a shit about any of that, tore up the old products and wanted a clean start. Thus, the iMac and iBook was born.

While I was in uni, one of my friends was a young woman from a conservative East African family. She was pursuing multiple degrees and multiple majors. She got accepted to our school and it was the first taste of independence and freedom for her. Once she graduated she was culturally expected to get married and have children right away. Careers for women were not common. So as long as she was in school her family paid for it. We lost touch but I like to assume she is a multi-hyphenate post doc by now.

I've been using Meshtastic for years. Still have a few Heltec v2 nodes running. It's been a lot of fun. It also encouraged me to get my HAM license since most of the local meshtastic/meshcore users are also in the radio clubs.

It reminds me of the early internet. In the early 90s the entire list of URLs could fill a notebook. And it was my first exposure to P2P nets. Meshtastic is a bit like that where it doesn't work well until you have a large enough community of nodes and gateways.

The Blockchain is back, baby!

/s

The reasoning gets worse the further you peel back that onion. Basically dumpsters are too large for sidewalks. Logically, it would make sense to put them on the curb. But no, drivers would complain because having to give up any curbside parking whatsoever.

Japan is well known in their acceptance of foreigners. Their economy is sputtering, the population is aging, and no matter how many economists tell the politicians they need to invigorate their economy they would rather build shitty robots.

$1200 for the kit https://www.seeedstudio.com/reBot-Arm-B601-DM-Bundle.html

$830 for just the motors