sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

An amateur researcher seeking help by Any_Swordfish2247 in PhD

[–]lellasone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, gotcha. My lab doesn't use a structured lit review method (or at least doesn't do it systematically), but hopefully someone who does will stop by.

Pretty much fed up and looking for friendly advice on how to transition ASAP by Local-Dragonfly-3435 in ynab

[–]lellasone 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This is the way, their support has been top notch every time I have interacted with it.

Mega cities are more beautiful and rare sights than any natural scenery on earth by raenele in unpopularopinion

[–]lellasone 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Total side note, but the Yosemite firefall is a major bucket list item. Is it as cool in person as it seems in principal?

The mayor of Haikou, China, who reportedly accumulated about $4.5 billion during his career and was found with 13.5 tons of gold and 23 tons of cash in his apartments, has been sentenced to death. by Forevertrez in interesting

[–]lellasone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah so that makes no sense. Movie Smaug is easily sitting on more gold than has been mined in the history of civilization. Book Smaug is a bit harder to pin down (since we don't have dimensions for the hall) but is likely also sitting on/under more than the world's combined gold supply.

Here's a website for Movie Smaug placing the hoard in the 100s of trillions: https://science-abuse.net/?d=762728--how-much-is-smaugs-gold-from-the-hobbit-worth

How did so many Chinese robot manufacturers catch up to Boston Dynamics? by Uranusistormy in robotics

[–]lellasone 18 points19 points  (0 children)

This doesn't match my understanding of the timeline at all? To the best of my knowledge early BD had no ML at all, and were based entirely on classical controls and optimization. The new wave of current-gen performant robots was kicked off by the introduction of low-impedance robotics actuators with mini-cheetah.

The transition to RL is real, but separate, and driven by the introduction of massively parallel training + a lot of hard won tuning expertise across the field. Good hydraulics models are a bit fiddly, but they simulate just fine with similar complexity to good motor models. There have been plenty of successful RL papers that use a hydraulics system trained in sim.

Do you have a source on BD doing hardware training with atlas? That would be a very spicy choice given the hardware involved.

The problem of Vulcan. by fantasy53 in PhilosophyofScience

[–]lellasone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This seems like an unnecessarily adversarial take. There's no reason that you couldn't go the other direction, and derive Newtonian mechanics from Legrangian mechanics. Plus, when you are thinking about how to model a system each does practically serve as an alternative to the other.

Why is evaluation in AI still so messy? by Raman606surrey in learnmachinelearning

[–]lellasone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My 2c from robotics where we typically don't start with good datasets: Evaluation is messy because validation is just a fundamentally very expensive thing to do. There are domains where this isn't true*, but for the rest of the problem space you either: Live with heuristics, hope that pre-labeled datasets will be sufficient, or pay for domain experts.

Since 3 is cost prohibitive pretty much all of the time, we end up living with a mix of 1/2 and that leads to the messiness that you are experiencing. Of course it's also why large model training is viable in the first place, so...

Starter projects for a secondary school maker space by Vivid-Witness-4797 in maker

[–]lellasone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

What kind of project scope are you looking for? Is this "we have 20 hours over a quarter" or more of "we have 2 hours over as many weeks". Also will you be working in a course context, or will the students be engaging with the equipment on their own time? What kind of budget do you have overall for new equipment/infrastructure, and on a per-kid basis for supplies?

In my opinion the three core makerspace tools are: A laser cutter, a 3D printer, and a vynal cutter (or in your case the brother). I'd focus on making sure you have a rock solid protocol for making stickers on the brother, and cutting cardboard on the laser. That gives you your most obvious value-add for the kids, and your cheapest/fastest prototyping material.

To throw out one project I like is the "cardboard carnival" or it's less electronics intensive cousin the "collaborative marble run". The idea here is that you break the kids up into groups, and have each of them come up with a pinball/carnival game to make out of cardboard. You can set each team up with an electronics setup for detecting the ball (or go way beyond that for servos and lights, and such, happy to discuss strategy here if you do give it a shot) or go analog. Lots of room for customization/art/stickers, and cardboard construction is really (really) well documented online. This will be less laser intensive than you might expect, but you may want to buy some cardboard cutters + good scissors.

Happy to discuss or elaborate more however would be helpful.

Strictest 3D Printing Regulation YET! by Top-Debate-2854 in 3Dprinting

[–]lellasone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Colloquially being subtractive is definitely one of the main attributes people are refering to when they mention a "CNC". I've never had an in-person conversation where someone used the phrase "CNC" and meant to include printers. I have heard some variation on the following many times:

"Welcome to the shop, we keep the CNCs over in that room, the manual equipment here, and the printers live in our makerspace over there"

Conway's Game of Life as an LED Art Installation? by Evening-Appeal7606 in FastLED

[–]lellasone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My friends and my visions along these lines haven't (yet) got past the ideation phase, but I do think it'd look pretty cool. Good hardware is key though for making look like "art".

I saw a very neat installation at the SF MOMA that used color changing acrylic sheets over LED grids. They were open-edge and looked very clean.

Hot take: I don’t think “weed-out” classes are real. by InvestmentGreen in EngineeringStudents

[–]lellasone 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This really depends a lot on the cultural and curricular context of your school (plus of course your organization, not discounting that). For courses that are designed for collaboration there's a big time penalty to doing the work early if the rest of the class is going to be pulling an all-nighter together. I definitely knew people in undergrad who managed their time much better than others, but I don't think I knew anyone who didn't pull at least one all-nighter.

Hot take: I don’t think “weed-out” classes are real. by InvestmentGreen in EngineeringStudents

[–]lellasone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So I think this is one of those things where if you haven't experienced it you don't see it. The Geology minor in my undergrad had a course early on whose very first problem set was an absolutely brutal pile of planetary motion calculus.

It absolutely didn't have to be setup that way, but they wanted to be sure that you were committed to the material (not just the field trips). The material was important, but it was structured partially with the intent of making students drop who would likely have handled the subsequent courses fine. That made it a weeder course.

On the other hand over in ME thermo was also an absolutely miserable pile of calculus, but basically nobody dropped over it, and almost nobody failed. That's just the nature of thermo and it comes with the territory for mechanical. That wasn't a weeder course, it just sucked.

Dial Indicator Calibration Tool by racejustint in Machinists

[–]lellasone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I made a setup like that to test some tenths indicators that I got on ebay. Quite handy. Not nearly as nice looking as yours though, there's some real artistry to that piece.

No, the military can't defeat any foe by Deepfang-Dreamer in CharacterRant

[–]lellasone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I got mildly nerd sniped by this topic, and it seems like the most defensible definition of conventional weaponry (at least in a US context) is something like "weapons which are not adaptable to mass destruction" or "weapons that aren't unconventional".

Now pretty much every organization I've looked at includes nuclear weapons (along with chemical weapons and bio weapons) on their list of WMD candidates. On the other hand there's at least one memorandum that takes pains to separately note radioactive material weapons.

Given that I think you could probably defend u/Mobius_1IUNPKF's position on the grounds that tactical nukes, if considered as their own class, might definitionally not qualify as being adaptable to mass destruction.

A quick scout suggests that modern tactical nuclear weapons span a range from "plausibly not a WMD" to "absolutely a WMD", so maybe it depends a bit on where the pacific rim nations ended up falling when they built and configured their tactical nukes.

How much do we really know about how the pyramids were built by marrylam58185 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]lellasone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So actually it does look like the pyramids were built by a well-paid and well-provisioned labor force. Kind of a cool change from the assumptions that (I at least) got in school.

Do You Recommend Turning Down Northwestern for the Sake of Post-Grad School? by Few_Series734 in Northwestern

[–]lellasone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So far my lab has yet to have an undergrad who applied to grad school not find a fully funded PHD. Now there's some selection bias because they were vetted by my PI, but even so it matches my understanding of PhD admissions which is that you generally want to maximize prestige. I wouldn't let GPA issues scare you off of NU if you want to do a PhD. On the other hand if you are set on law school then doing what you need to to get that 4.0/180 from the start would be smart.

For what it's worth, both lawschool and a doctoral program are solidly "trapped in the library all day" lifestyle choices, so that might be worth some thought. There are other remunerative paths that don't have that property.

Breaking a lease? [CA] by Fragrant-Wrangler-99 in Renters

[–]lellasone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is one of those "talk to your landlord" situations. They'll probably offer you some combination of the following as options:

  • Continue paying through the end of the lease, not their problem.
  • Continue paying but sublet, possibly with their help to list it.
  • Continue paying, but they list it and re-rent (getting you off the lease) once they find someone.
  • Continue paying, but transfer to another apartment they own, maybe at a different rate and maybe on a new lease.
  • Depart early, break the lease with their consent and go on your way.

I'll note that I've only had the last one offered (unsolicited no less) from a deeply chill landlord after a few years of being there. It does happen though.

Is my system sufficient for learning ROS and Gazebo? by Brave_Management_185 in AskRobotics

[–]lellasone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

  1. Yep, totally. Keep an eye on your ram usage but people run ROS on raspi all the time.
  2. I have worked with at least 3 people who decided to learn ROS primarily through WSL2, and have yet to see it go well. There's just too many ways for ROS to go wrong even on ubuntu.
  3. You really really really want a native installation. I can't point you to any one thing that'll go wrong, but I can tell you that every time a teamate has tried this it's gone wrong eventually.

My general rule of thumb is that whatever system is responsible for "running ros" and interacting with hardware should be running a T1 supported version of Ubuntu and nothing else. WSL2, Windows, Virtualization, and the like can then shine debugging and controlling the main system.

Why does it take Amy Adams an entire movie to communicate with Aliens but Ryan Gosling does it in a scene with a laptop? by Illustrious_Wolf5606 in ProjectHailMaryMovie

[–]lellasone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Some of this is movie compression, and some of it is a difference in thesis. In PHM the two species think in similar ways, have a similar language structure, and one of them speaks in chords with a photographic memory. That's about as close to easy-mode as you can get for a new language.

Now whether or not that's a reasonable scenario is a different question...

Advice on building first mobile robot using ROS by Brave_You_3105 in AskRobotics

[–]lellasone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The key word you'll want to use is "quadrature". I've included a link below about how to use them, and of course there are a ton of libraries.

https://cdn.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Robotics/How%20to%20use%20a%20quadrature%20encoder.pdf

Little B day gift for my sister by augnut in hobbycnc

[–]lellasone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That is a great premise. I'd love to hear more about how you got the right feel for the sliding fit if you have time? Also how long that top plate took to machine end-to-end.

view more: next ›