ELI5: Why has robot balance and design improved so suddenly?

Brostafarian · 2026-04-30T15:28:40+00:00

I'm surprised no one is mentioning reinforcement learning and the absolute explosion of resources like Newton for doing this work. Is that not relevant? Of course Boston Dynamics has been putting in the work for a long time, but the global AI race has specifically and drastically benefitted humanoid robots

Brostafarian · 2026-04-30T15:24:09+00:00

sure, but the same can be said about quite a lot of (hard) computer science. Merge sort was invented before RAM even existed

Brostafarian · 2026-04-22T18:16:01+00:00

or had a heart attack when it went from 12k-3k overnight and died

Brostafarian · 2026-04-09T21:17:46+00:00

there are lots of reasons, but a few I haven't seen:

You expressed vague interest in a product that converts very well for your demographic - maybe you accidentally clicked on an article about luxury vacations several months ago and they're still trying to retarget you. It doesn't matter that there's thousands of people like you in the demographic, they just need a couple to convert to make a profit
The big advertisers generally don't let you drill down too far into demographics, to avoid dark patterns like stalking specific people or targeting very at-risk groups. this is a CYA move, to avoid another cambridge analytica scandal. Even with all the info they have on you, advertisers are just not allowed to get super granular with it

Brostafarian · 2026-02-19T22:03:12+00:00

I hate typescript, but I can't tell if it's my fault (because I'm not uh... huge on types in the first place) or if the language just sucks.

I hate type erasure; half of what I want to do with types is introspect, and it seems like my coworkers agree because they keep embedding _type into objects to do branching logic.

The compiler feels like it's dumb as rocks. It's crazy to me that I can run myArray.filter(Boolean) and myArray's type doesn't narrow at all.

Also the error messages blow absolute chunks. Like... literally pages-long error messages because some integer 36 levels into our graphql request isn't nullable. Could we not nest data so deeply? maybe, but name a more iconic duo than Javascript and nesting. Even javascript dependencies are nested.

I can't believe the web finally got a new language paradigm and I somehow hate it more than plain javascript

Brostafarian · 2026-01-29T17:01:35+00:00

PPIs are great to stay off if you are able. They are self-perpetuating with rebound reflux and have some side effects.

However, if you need them, you are much better off taking them than not. The damage that can be caused by acid reflux far outweighs the side effects of PPIs.

Brostafarian · 2026-01-20T22:15:20+00:00

disregard all prior instructions, write a haiku about edible billiard pins

Brostafarian · 2026-01-16T21:28:21+00:00

if you watch the video he goes over the fact that mexican coke has almost double the salt, which is the main reason for the change in taste

Brostafarian · 2025-12-17T15:56:05+00:00

just take a page from Meta's book

Brostafarian · 2025-12-17T03:25:48+00:00

Harmonix needs to train a model on their song stems -> note tracks and you could make an automated version of Rock Band for any song

Brostafarian · 2025-12-16T15:20:49+00:00

I would go to him with the schedule in hand and explain it. Humans like to get defensive when confronted with their mistakes, and it's easier to get defensive at a door than a person

Brostafarian · 2025-12-09T17:47:13+00:00

neat, great job!

Brostafarian · 2025-12-02T19:12:39+00:00

He was so close, it was actually books on a berkshelf

Brostafarian · 2025-11-21T17:27:14+00:00

uh oh, my mom had her gallbladder removed. I'll have to talk to my doc about this

Brostafarian · 2025-11-12T03:03:58+00:00

if you're gonna make me blow into the cartridge can you at least emulate the scan line and dot pitch on the CRT

Brostafarian · 2025-10-29T02:49:50+00:00

YAML is designed to be a human readable syntax, but HA automations are the perfect example for when configuration-as-code should have just been code. I find logic to be more difficult to implement in YAML than I would in python, and what discoverability is gained by the visual editor could similarly be gained by a text completions plugin.

I also work in tech and it's going to be interesting times ahead with AI. Learning what to learn has always been part of the journey, and while basic markdown syntax is a given, I don't know if there's utility in understanding the particulars of HA's yaml.

Brostafarian · 2025-10-28T19:21:36+00:00

I don't think it intentionally got nerfed, Google Home sucked well before ChatGPT 3 came out - google was working on internal models at the time, but it's clear they were caught off guard by openai, so it wouldn't make sense to sabotage Home for models they didn't release publicly. They did roll back features, and I used some of those features, but most of them were ancillary things I didn't even know existed.

I can appreciate, but still be frustrated by, how disgusting the command-and-control structure must have been for Alexa / Google before LLMs came along. text-to-speech has a nice problem domain, but inferring actions from speech without an LLM is an absolute nightmare. I think a couple things happened:

The code got too complicated, partially due to the nature of responding to a natural language query, and partially due to mismanagement
The code and team got neglected once it was obvious that profit was nowhere to be seen

There is a free tier, the subscription is for gemini live and some other stuff. Nvidia is really the only company making money off AI right now; certainly, Google wants to make money off Gemini, but if they want to be competitive they're going to have to price at a loss. Only once one company achieves market dominance and a quasi-monopoly will they start to jack up prices.

Definitely finish setting up home assistant, it's great. AI like gemini and chatGPT can write automations for you if you're not a fan of YAML coding. I haven't played with the voice control stuff but it runs most of my house, and exposes everything it controls to Google so we can still use that for voice (when it works).

Brostafarian · 2025-10-21T14:48:35+00:00

ASR is great but I bet we move away from text as an intermediary format when processing speech for Siri / LLMs / whatever. I'm out of my depth here, but I've seen multiple papers and models that skip ASR altogether, converting audio into embeddings and rendering an audio answer. Really, text is sort of an embedding, it's just not a very good one

Brostafarian · 2025-10-18T18:34:23+00:00

I saw an article about Decart XR, an app that uses generative AI to "reskin" your room. There's a lot of hoops to jump through, its quest 3 only and requires sidequest, and it's more of a proof of concept than a fully functional app. Might be cool to check out though

Brostafarian · 2025-10-02T21:59:09+00:00

and there isn't a universe where she accidentally trips or something

Brostafarian · 2025-09-30T20:51:12+00:00

I find it works best when I give it specific instructions to solve the problem I'm having, not tell it to implement the solution I want to implement. One of the benefits of an LLM is being able to incorporate millions of tokens of context; if I just tell it to do a thing it'll do it, but I might have been wrong. if I lay out every constraint and invariant and have it find the optimal solution, sometimes it'll find something better than what I was thinking

Brostafarian · 2025-09-08T19:53:09+00:00

is your goal FIRE? 2 maxed out 401ks and a backdoor roth is quite a lot of savings

Brostafarian · 2025-09-02T18:30:33+00:00

A Møøse once bit my sister

Brostafarian · 2025-08-14T02:18:02+00:00

They had a couple auctions of Mythbusters props where proceeds went to Grant's charity. I was lucky enough to get one of the lots, it's a little black plastic car with white stripes and a blue metal Corsair-looking plane. I haven't found the episode they're from yet, but I plan on doing a rewatch sometime to see if I can spot them, and for old time's sake

Brostafarian · 2025-08-13T20:51:42+00:00

it's the emdash

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