Viewing profile — rck

Yeah, for professional robotics you just accept that this is the world we live in. But for learning and hobbyist stuff, it's better to play with simple hardware and build the thing…

The thing that most people don't appreciate is that ROS was co-designed with the PR2, which had a very idiosyncratic architecture: two separate computers in the base, ethercat for …

Get an arduino kit and learn a little electronics. The kit likely comes with a brushed motor and a servo. Learn how motors works and how to write code to make motors spin. Then get…

The Stoics are explicitly mentioned in Acts of the Apostles, but I think a better way to think about it is that the framework of "Virtue" as "Conforming to your Nature" is a very u…

It's interesting that the main thinkers listed are all Roman. They're definitely the best known, but Stoicism was a Greek philosophy first and foremost, and Cleanthes, Chrysippus, …

Yeah it looks like about 1500 grants: https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-... But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that…

I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared ab…

Not a lawyer, but the NSF clause covering clawbacks is pretty specific: > NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, durin…

I'm not sure what motivated Parmenides because he was more of a poet than anything - it just happened that his poetry was what we would now recognize as incredibly philosophical. H…

This is fun. But the bit at the beginning about philosophy is not correct. Parmenides did not believe in what we would call essences, but really did believe that nothing ever chang…

The Nevada Museum of Art had an exhibit last year about Picasso's ceramics, and I was amazed at how ... meh it all was. Apparently the market agrees with me, because you (yes you!)…

Pope Pius XI wrote about _subsidiarity_ as a guiding social principle: "Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and in…

This feels like the kind of popsci that's written for people who already agree with the author - there's nothing resembling an argument, or even a definition of "computation." Ther…

In 2023, shrinkage at Costco was less than 0.2%, vs a US national average of 1.44%. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/costco-winning-war-against-re...

This is the Lean blueprint for the project, which is a human-readable "plan" more or less. The actual Lean proof is ongoing, and will probably take a few more years. Still cool tho…

For the sake of comparison, you can train a 124M model on a 3090 (see nanoGPT). In that case, each batch ends up having about 500,000 tokens and takes maybe around 10ish seconds to…

You are underestimating the hype around self-driving. A quick search gives this from 2018: https://stanfordmag.org/contents/in-two-years-there-could-be... The open (about the bet) …

Do you know of any short examples of this? Yesterday I was trying to prove some "easy" theorems that involved machine number representations, and I couldn't find anything in Lean.

Just about everything that a non-specialist in combinatorics needs to know about counting can be found in Rota's twelvefold way, which lists the 12 counting problems that you can d…

They're claiming some revolutionary "synthetic muscle," but is there video of one of these things walking? If it's just pneumatics then this is a repeat of the early androids out o…

Yup! Lean is based on a variant of the Calculus of Constructions, which is in turn based on strong connections between (intuitionistic) natural deduction and type theory. The conne…

It's interesting that, at least through ollama, it appears impossible to get DeepSeek-R1 to give concise answers to questions that don't require any reasoning.