alsodumb (u/alsodumb)

alsodumb commented on Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans spectrum.ieee.org/amazon-... · Posted by u/Luc

philipwhiuk · 7 months ago

It's interesting how Amazon is embedding robots in human-designed warehouses whereas Ocado has humans overseeing a robotic warehouse.

The later is a much easier problem.

alsodumb · 7 months ago

It takes hundreds of millions to build a warehouse. Amazon has tons of them. Retrofitting things is capital intensive.

alsodumb commented on Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth? cleantechnica.com/2025/03... · Posted by u/guerby

sholladay · 9 months ago

They keep falling for it because fixed route busses are the one use case where hydrogen could theoretically make sense. The bus can fill up far faster than it could recharge an equivalent battery. The bus gets lighter and more efficient as it uses fuel. And crucially, it can always fill up at the same place, which really ought to be the central depot where all the buses in that network return to.

But inevitably with these projects, the fueling station is instead where some random gas station used to be or in an industrial park or near a harbor, purely because that’s what made sense to the hydrogen supplier, who is probably hoping other customers will come along, even though they won’t.

And that’s before the high risk of the hydrogen supplier throwing in the towel, at which point the next nearest fueling station might be ridiculously far away.

If hydrogen buses are to have any future, it will have to be more centrally managed from end to end and it would probably still need some public funding to get off the ground. In the end, a lot places won’t bother with all of that when electric buses are “plug and play”.

alsodumb · 9 months ago

I blame the transit agency for those missteps though - it doesn't have to be like that.

Take for example CUMTD (mtd.org), the transit agency serving Champaign-Urbana, a college town in Illinois with about 200k people. It's an excellent bus system, everyone in the city loves it, the people running the place always embrace new technology, and they actually have a hydrogen plant setup in their depot and the plant is powered 100% by solar energy: https://mtd.org/inside/projects/zero-emission-technology/

alsodumb commented on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/bakugo

alsodumb · 10 months ago

Honestly I don't think Anthropic cares about you moving over to them - it's pretty evident that they already have more demand than they can handle.

I've always had better experience with Claude in day-to-day coding and text writing, and looking at public forums that largely seems to be the case.

alsodumb commented on Neo Gamma (Home Humanoid) 1x.tech/neo... · Posted by u/onnnon

xnx · 10 months ago

The hardware is maybe 4% of robotics. 96% is the AI behind it.

alsodumb · 10 months ago

1X is different. This is purely a hardware demo, they are doing pure teleop on the software side, no AI in the demo (except maybe RL for walking). 1X's bit thing was always their mechanically compliant safe hardware.

alsodumb commented on Neo Gamma (Home Humanoid) 1x.tech/neo... · Posted by u/onnnon

Tiktaalik · 10 months ago

Do we have any sense that this is actually real and not a carefully crafted made up demo?

alsodumb · 10 months ago

It's teleop, they are pretty open about it. It's not autonomous.

They do have an RL controller running for the legs, but it's just an intermediate controller and it probably get high level commands from a teleoperator. The upper body is purely teleop.

alsodumb commented on Meta Project Aria - Smart Glasses Research Kit projectaria.com/research-... · Posted by u/walterbell

jimiasty · 10 months ago

Founder of Estimote, Inc. (YC S13) here — we do beacons.

In Project Aria video, they claim to have installed beacons at an airport to enable indoor location, only to dismiss it as something that "doesn't scale."

Instead, they say they "trained" an AI model using vision from glasses, allowing for vision-based localization.

So, here’s an honest question: which approach is actually easier, more cost-effective, and energy-efficient?

1) Deploying 100 or even 1,000 wireless, battery-operated beacons that last 5–7 years—something a non-tech person can set up in a day or two.

2) Training an AI model for each airport, then constantly burning compute power from camera-equipped glasses or phones that barely last a few hours.

Thoughts?

alsodumb · 10 months ago

When Valve came out with their VR headset that had base stations, everybody thought that’d be the holy grail, that you can never achieve better localization and tracking without base stations, and a base station free method can never be better than that.

Well, Meta poured a shit ton of money into making Quest base station free and they got there. We use to use valve setup for our robotics applications but we swapped it out with Quest cause honestly Quest was as good but much more easy to setup and operate.

The bitter lesson is that don’t bet against data or compute. Also, I don’t think you’d have to train a AI model for each location at every time in the future. Things get more efficient, etc.

alsodumb commented on Show HN: Scripton – Python IDE with built-in realtime visualizations scripton.dev... · Posted by u/nightcraft

levocardia · 10 months ago

But does it have a variable explorer? Somehow this simple feature, available in MATLAB and RStudio, is sorely lacking in many Python IDEs. I put up with an unbelievable amount of crap in Spyder because I can actually inspect dataframes, matrices, etc.

alsodumb · 10 months ago

Vanilla vscode has some version of this in the debugging mode, you'd perhaps need to install their Python extensions but that's about it.

alsodumb commented on Show HN: Scripton – Python IDE with built-in realtime visualizations scripton.dev... · Posted by u/nightcraft

rcpt · 10 months ago

For magnet levitation project I am dumping data to a csv on a rpi and then reading it over ssh onto matplotlib on my desktop. It works but it choppy. Probably because of the ssh.

Could I drop rerun into this to improve my monitoring?

https://youtube.com/shorts/Y1LGSMFisDc

alsodumb · 10 months ago

Yes! Rerun can definitely make your life a lot easier!

Rerun natively supports the server and the viewer being on different devices (https://rerun.io/docs/reference/sdk/operating-modes). In your case, in the script you are dumping data into csv, I'd add the relevant lines to log data to rerun.

On the desktop side, you can spawn a viewer that can listen to the stream and visualize it.

alsodumb commented on Show HN: Scripton – Python IDE with built-in realtime visualizations scripton.dev... · Posted by u/nightcraft

bsder · 10 months ago

> So I just scrape their docs into a markdown file and ask my interns to paste the docs in their prompt before they query LLMs and it works like a charm now.

Huh. Nice hack. I may have to give that a try for some of the more obscure stuff I deal with.

> Recently, it kind of made my life hell as all of my interns refuse to use docs and try using LLMs for rerun code generation and come to me with a messy code spaghetti. It's both sad and hilarious.

I'm really agog at this. Do your interns understand that if they're just an LLM prompt injector, their job can be done by anybody? I haven't bumped into this yet, but I think your reaction was a lot more positive than mine would have been.

I know that I certainly wouldn't be rehiring any interns that gave me that kind of grief.

alsodumb · 10 months ago

I am not the hiring manager, and unfortunately a lot of interviews and hiring decisions happen at org level or at my manager level. These are mostly sophomores/juniors - folks who went through school in post-COVID, post-LLM era with a lot of virtual classes.

I tried my best to explain it to them, and nudge them to using docs. I did live debugging sessions with them to try and 'teach' them how to use docs. Ultimately, it was taking away too much of my time for little to no return. I only started working in the industry like a month ago and it's my first time having interns that I didn't pick (back in school, I had undergad research assistants that I interviewed/selected, and they were all excellent) - still learning the ropes.

alsodumb commented on Show HN: Scripton – Python IDE with built-in realtime visualizations scripton.dev... · Posted by u/nightcraft

alsodumb · 10 months ago

I am a robotics engineer/scientist and I do shit ton of visualization of all kind of high-fidelity/high-rate data, often in a streaming setting - time series at a few thousand Hz, RGB/depth images from multiple cameras, debugging my models by visualizing many layer outputs, every augmentation, etc.

For a long time, I had my own observability suite - a messy library of python scripts that I use for visualizing data. I replaced all of them with rerun (https://rerun.io/) and if you are someone who think Scipton is exciting, you should def try rerun too!

I use cursor/vscode for my development and add a line or two to my usual workflows in python, and rerun pops up in it's own window. It's a simple pip installable library, and just works. It's open source, and the founders run a very active forum too.

Edit: One slightly related tid-bit that might be interesting to HN folks. rerun isn't that old, and is in active development, with some breaking changes and new features that come up every month. And it means that LLM are pretty bad at rerun code gen, beyond the simple boilerplate. Recently, it kind of made my life hell as all of my interns refuse to use docs and try using LLMs for rerun code generation and come to me with a messy code spaghetti. It's both sad and hilarious. To make my life easier, I asked rerun folks to create and host machine readable docs somewhere and they never got to it. So I just scrape their docs into a markdown file and ask my interns to paste the docs in their prompt before they query LLMs and it works like a charm now.