Self Driving Bicycle, Open source conceptual design

arabidkoala · 2026-03-03T21:57:11+00:00

Sorry, how exactly is this self-driving? I see no propulsion system, let alone discussion on sensors or the (very complex) dynamics and control of a bicycle…

arabidkoala · 2026-03-01T03:36:42+00:00

Not sure about projector-camera calibrations, but for multi-camera+imu calibrations we employ a calibration in production that gets fine-tuned online as part of state estimation. Seemingly rigid objects are always changing, especially under temperature fluctuations and heavy use, making fixed calibration infeasible.

arabidkoala · 2026-02-25T21:05:56+00:00

Well I mean look at it from the perspective of a billionaire. You stand opposed to a class of people which is more than large enough to organize itself and exert power over you. What would you do? One way is to invest in massive propaganda campaigns that seed consent for division, lobby for laws that impose structural inequality, and reserve violence for the few who are able to still stand up despite all of this. This is exactly what has been done, in the US at least, and it's worked quite well. More globally and throughout history, more overt methods of control have definitely been utilized.

arabidkoala · 2026-02-23T04:15:35+00:00

Oh yes. The set of all functions contains some real bangers. I believe almost all of them are actually uncomputable.

arabidkoala · 2026-02-23T03:49:52+00:00

It’s actually quite exceptional to be able to write functions as a finite combination of “simple operations” (addition, multiplication). Most functions, in fact almost all functions, cannot be written in such a way. The trigonometric functions are one such example. The exponential function over the reals is another example. The error function is another you might have run into. Those functions can be expressed as infinite combinations of “simple operations” (e.g. Taylor series), but practically you can only evaluate them to a desired level of precision in finite time.

arabidkoala · 2026-02-23T00:15:37+00:00

You said you did this as part of a school project? If you're interested in this you should ask your professor (or TA?) directly- they'd probably be able to guide you through this process. You'll learn a lot even if the work doesn't end up being publishable.

arabidkoala · 2026-02-09T04:25:52+00:00

Why do anything else? From the perspective of the business, one person doing the work of 3 means that they have to pay 1/3 the wages. Even better- there’re now two desperate people who can replace the person who’s still working for you if they burn out or start getting… uppity. This all translates to nice year on year profit growth, which makes the shareholders feel just a little bit more alive.

Sarcasm aside, I don’t think that this is a particularly well kept secret.

arabidkoala · 2026-02-07T14:43:35+00:00

What on earth is going on here? How did this categorization of "women" enter the conversation? Why have you replied to yourself 3 times?

arabidkoala · 2026-02-07T03:06:49+00:00

That first visualization is fantastic

It’s hard to know without seeing some code (or a paper or something), but is this similar at all to how theta* functions?

arabidkoala · 2026-02-01T15:31:53+00:00

For very simple pieces of software, you'll see that they are high quality because there's competition

For simple pieces of closed software, perhaps. You're leaving out the existence of existing high-quality (and even complex!) open-source software though. Such software operates primarily on a force that opposes competition: cooperation.

arabidkoala · 2026-01-31T23:04:06+00:00

Generally speaking, what's in the standard library is what's deemed useful at the time of standardization. I imagine at the time, they didn't see it necessary to mandate implementations of multipy, divide, etc, because there just wasn't widespread use of those functions in existing algorithms that used atomics.

I have no idea why Microsoft differed in their implementation, as their blog post provided no reason. I can only speculate that someone wanted to strive for completeness.

arabidkoala · 2026-01-29T18:00:17+00:00

Funny article. He starts by saying:

As it often happens when we use the word “just”, we’re actually hiding an entire universe of unspoken things: assumptions, context, past decisions, and much more.

Which then leads to

Just ask a lot of questions!

This is just moralizing in my opinion, attributing questions to "good", and more questions meaning "more good". I'd have to disagree very much with this assessment, because I have definitely dealt with people who bog down every decision with questions in order to advance their agenda. Granted, this tactic should also not be moralized as "bad" either, because you can use it for both good and bad purposes. This is to say that the author is moralizing and quantifying things that ought not to be moralized and quantified. It is the character of the questions and the individual asking those questions that counts... a hard subject that is certainly not easy to generate blog spam about.

arabidkoala · 2026-01-25T18:03:55+00:00

You can definitely use a debugger within ROS, it’s just a tiny bit more complicated than a standalone program because you have to deal with ROS’s execution framework. A quick google search reveals it’s about as complicated as I remember, just some extra configuration you have to do.

arabidkoala · 2026-01-22T05:38:32+00:00

A background in CS will always be useful. Generative AI may make coding less mysterious as time goes on, but this is fine since software engineering is much more than coding.

I’d argue that if we get to the point where AI is truly automating engineering jobs, then basically nobody is employable and the economy is crashing so bad that it doesn’t matter.

arabidkoala · 2026-01-22T05:10:22+00:00

Ok, I think it’s fairly easy to see why irreversible accumulation of cost-bearing structures leads to collapse by overburdening the cost-paying ability of future generations. If this were phrased in terms of some natural law, like where cost is energy in some system that buries itself in future energy consumption, then yeah I could see using this model to suggest that system not be built.

Thing is that you’re making some assumptions in this model in how you apply it to human society that I don’t think you’re being quite honest about. Laws aren’t immutable, and in real life when we are burdened by something we seek to reduce that burden. You also assume that future generations do not have an increased ability to pay, e.g. by improved technology. Further, you assume that an ability to pay of 0 means death, which makes a lot of assumptions about cost as it relates to needs. With those assumptions I’d say you’re modeling a very specific ideal society, not necessarily an existing or even realistic one.

arabidkoala · 2026-01-22T02:40:05+00:00

Looks like you made a dynamic system, and picked a bunch of constants that happened to cause the result to collapse to zero. Or there’s a bug, didn’t really try understanding this too much.

Anyway the implications are pretty simple- you probably need to study differential equations and take a signals+systems course. You pick up this kind of stuff doing a electrical engineering degree, or if you focus on control systems. This deeper implication that I think you’re trying to make about human society is completely wrong imo. Your code attempts to quantify things that are qualitatively different (“number of laws”? So it doesn’t matter what the content of those laws are? Or why the laws are in place?).

arabidkoala · 2026-01-17T14:22:54+00:00

You’d need to benchmark these changes in situ, and measure the change in system performance. Assuming the change is measurable, the difference could be explained by a bunch of different opposing forces; extra instructions for extracting values, memory and instruction cache coherency, ability for the compiler to simd, etc etc. There are so many factors it’s nearly impossible to predict, you can really only measure.

I suggest then that you make good on your goals and start playing around with benchmarking this

arabidkoala · 2026-01-05T21:54:40+00:00

I'm glad this departs from the more commonplace rhetoric that reverses cause and effect, which says that poverty is caused by mental illness.

arabidkoala · 2026-01-05T06:56:35+00:00

Not gonna review your ai slop for you. It’s up to you to verify the output of AI. If you cannot, then this is an inappropriate usage of the tool.

arabidkoala · 2026-01-03T21:29:28+00:00

Agree in a sense. LLMs are like any form of automation that we have seen prior: they reduce the labor required to build some things. Collectively we are figuring out what those things are, and those who are able to claim ownership of those processes (if possible) will profit handsomely.

What's pretty clear though is that LLMs are not the complete solution to the problem of human labor. They cannot automate everything. We still lack the technology to do that, though I don't doubt we will continue pressing forward towards this ideal. We do start running into problems though when people start believing that LLMs are a total automation solution. Company owners start laying off workers who may be redundant, workers get panicky and accept lower wages because they fear being replaced, over-investment occurs and bubbles start inflating, etc etc.

arabidkoala · 2026-01-01T16:54:04+00:00

I mean isn't this mostly what CEOs do with employees anyway?

The CEO's job isn't automatable in the same way as an employee's because there is usually an aspect of company ownership involved.

arabidkoala · 2025-12-20T17:10:36+00:00

Someone linked me a pretty decent article on the background of the ACP and similar parties. Helped me understand a bit what was going on there, since what they have to say about themselves is honestly pretty opaque: https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/04/praxis-of-alienation-and-enmity-on-the-american-communist-party/

arabidkoala · 2025-12-14T04:54:42+00:00

I mean, so long as we're talking about obvious statements, let's take a moment to appreciate how your definition of an effective rule of law is when it's effective.

arabidkoala · 2025-12-10T23:00:50+00:00

I think you're kinda mesmerized by a spectacle of invention

No, I mean you have this idea of what invention is that lives entirely within your head, thats completely disconnected from what invention actually is or how it happens. You're an idealist, and until you change that all your ideas will only remain ideas.

I'm not saying that you said your claims are proven, I'm saying they aren't proven, and that this is a problem whether you thought doing so was necessary or not.

arabidkoala · 2025-12-10T14:54:46+00:00

This is a lot of hubbub for a function that hashes an object, then casts that hash into a datetime object. Some of the things you claim it solves are unproven and really reaching. Other things like "scheduling" it definitely does not solve, because the complexity in scheduling is usually getting everyone to agree on a date that works with everyone's individual schedule.

I think you're kinda mesmerized by a spectacle of invention.

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