This is a robot failing to grasp a ball. Almost every robot lab produces clips like this daily… and almost all of them get thrown away. This is the most abundant but underused resource in robot learning. We’re collecting all of it now as “OopsieData”, please join us at oopsie-data.com! (1/13)

I come from a MechE background and work in robotics, so my perspective is biased toward software that interacts with the physical world. But there’s a lot of software that does, either directly or indirectly. 1/

Brittany Ellich@brittanyellich.com · 2w ago

Testing a potentially unpopular opinion that I'm not sure the dev industry is ready for: Unless you're shipping something like nuclear safety code, you probably don't need a human reviewer for your PRs.

Why didn't the eagles just fly Odysseus straight to Ithaca

My book, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback is done! This is the book I wish I had when learning to fine-tune, align, & now post-train models since ChatGPT. The resource has been built by me finding time to study and document the fundamentals on nights and weekends since 2024.

100% agree. if i see “chore” in commit log, im judging you

Stop Using Conventional Commits

You’ve almost certainly encountered Conventional Commits before. It may have reared its ugly head in the changelog of an open source project you’ve used. It may have been the enforced commit format fo...

sumnerevans.com

Excellent post on Waymo's handling of safety incidents. open.substack.com/pub/philkoop...

Robotaxi Safety Problems Are The New Normal

Standing down to manage risk is smart. But what needs to happen next?

open.substack.com

I'm not gonna touch most of this but two things: 1. The apprenticeship model of science was never supposed to be about the PI's workflow. The point isn't to have research assistants to help to publish stuff faster. Training the next generation researcher *is* the point. Because we care. Allegedly.

Academics Need to Wake Up on AI

Ten theses for folks who haven't noticed the ground shifting under their feet

alexanderkustov.substack.com

A new mesh recovery method and model by our lab. My team is currently putting this on our robots, it works really well.

NAVER LABS Europe@naverlabseurope.bsky.social · 6mo ago

The 🔥🔥Anny roll continues this week with the release of Multi-HMR trained with the Anny body model. Multi-person, single shot Human Mesh Recovery predictions are now made in the open, interpretable parameter space of Anny! 🧑‍🤝‍🧑Multi-HMR code: github.com/naver/multi-... 👉Anny: tinyurl.com/5fsekm9z

Want to learn about the latest in robotics research? Like, the real cutting edge, right from researchers? In addition to our youtube channel, I post notes and information about new RoboPapers episodes on Substack here: robopapers.substack.com

RoboPapers | Substack

Chris Paxton & Michael Cho geek out over robotic papers with paper authors. Click to read RoboPapers, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

robopapers.substack.com

if i had more tokens i could have written a shorter reply

this is exactly right and explains why most handwringing about building systems we don’t understand is misplaced. pre-LLM software engineering already consisted almost entirely of building systems we did not understand

Nobody knows how the whole system works

One of the surprising (at least to me) consequences of the fall of Twitter is the rise of LinkedIn as a social media site. I saw some interesting posts I wanted to call attention to: First, Simon W…

surfingcomplexity.blog

I have updated my tutorial on making Vision Language Action models. This tutorial starts with a basic Transformer and walks people through the steps to transform it into a full VLA that uses PaliGemma as the pretrained VLM. Links below.

Loki robotics is cleaning like a person. Doing the work we really want to see automated

An attempt to express how I principally use LLMs. Rotating the Space: On LLMs as a Medium for Thought sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

Sam Barrett, PhD@ai4geo.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Curious if anyone else uses or has examples of using fiction as a thinking tool with llms as I do here. This is not an isolated example for me.

LLMs automate typing, not thinking. Mikayla Maki shares her mental model for working with agents, and how she puts it into practice: zed.dev/blog/on-prog...

On Programming with Agents - Zed Blog

From the Zed Blog: Agents handle typing so we can focus on thinking.

zed.dev

Pantograph is building a "daycare for robots" where they can learn unsupervised. These low cost robot crabs are part of the solution. pantograph.com/blog/buildin...

a lotta yall still don’t get it you can use multiple polecats on a single refinery

Bryan Cantrill@bcantrill.bsky.social · 7mo ago

WTAF steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-eme...

since LLMs save us time coding we have a lot more time to think since we're thinking about things longer we realize most of our ideas are bad and since most of our ideas are bad we don't ship as much code

Just published my annual predictions update, tracking from Jan 1st 2018, with new commentary and new ten year predictions. It is long. rodneybrooks.com/predictions-...