larwick @larwick

At a 500 drone show in Orlando in December 2024, drones collided during takeoff and fell into the crowd, and a 7 year old boy needed open heart surgery. Investigators found the operator had entered the wrong center point into the show software. Show drones follow paths planned in advance. Avoiding collisions live works differently. A velocity obstacle is the set of relative velocities that lead to contact. If both drones dodge the full amount, they can oscillate. ORCA has each drone take exactly half of the required change, which keeps every pair separated without a central planner. 10-minute visual breakdown. bookmark & watch

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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Hyundai paid about $880M for 80% of Boston Dynamics, whose Atlas humanoid became known for backflips. In the air, angular momentum is fixed: L = I × ω. A 5% weak push off leaves a flip about 18 degrees short, and nothing in the air can add momentum back. A robot can still change orientation with zero angular momentum, the way a falling cat does. Cycle the arms through a loop of shapes and the body turns by an amount set by the area of that loop in shape space, not by speed. In the video's model, each arm loop turns the robot 11.6 degrees. 10-minute visual breakdown. bookmark & watch

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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Nothing explains SpaceX's reusable rockets better than this. One Falcon 9 booster has flown 37 times, falling out of the sky and landing upright on a ship in the Atlantic. That single booster stood in for 36 new ones SpaceX never had to build. Every landing is limited by an equation a Russian schoolteacher published in 1903. Fuel saved for the trip home is payload you can't sell, and the rocket equation shows exactly how much fuel the booster needs and why landing on a ship saves so much of it. 11 minutes. bookmark & watch today. plus how the landing software is related to the math that trains AI

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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the most complete explanation of why balancing machines fail that you'll find anywhere. About 300,000 self balancing Onewheel boards were recalled after regulators cited 4 deaths. The maker's fix wasn't a smarter controller. It was a warning buzz. a theorem from Bell Labs in the 1940s says no controller makes balance free. Push the error down at one frequency and it pops up at another, like a waterbed. For anything that wants to fall, the theorem puts an exact price on staying upright, and no tuning beats it. 10 minutes. bookmark & watch today. the one bill every robot controller has to pay

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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The best explanation of how a robot boat sailed straight into a Category 4 hurricane. 120 mph winds, 50-foot waves, and a 7-meter drone called Saildrone filmed it from the inside. Its sail is a rigid wing, and the push it gets from the wind grows with speed squared: lift = ½ρv²·A·C_L. Nine times the wind speed means 81 times the force, so the same wing that drifts along in a breeze has to survive a hurricane. 5 minutes. bookmark & watch today. one formula decides whether the wing flies or snaps

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

5 0 24 12K 11

Finally, someone explained why Amazon's drones were set to lose $63 on every package. That number came from Amazon's own internal projections for 2025, reported by Business Insider. A hovering drone holds its whole weight up on nothing but air, and helicopter physics says the power that takes grows with weight to the 3/2 power and shrinks with bigger rotors. That's why doubling the battery doesn't double the flight time: the extra battery is extra weight you also have to hold up. 11 minutes. bookmark & watch today. a $63 loss to fly a toothbrush to your yard

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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This is the simplest explanation of how a Roomba cleaned your room for years without knowing where it was. More than 50 million were sold, and the famous ones had no map at all It hit a wall, turned at a random angle and drove on, and random lines still cover a floor if you draw enough of them. Drive about 4.5 times the floor's area and 99% of it is clean, whether it's a closet or a ballroom 5 minutes. bookmark & watch today. a robot doesn't need to be smart to finish the job, just patient

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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The most satisfying explanation of robot running I've ever seen. A pair of robot legs with no head and no arms ran 100 meters in 24.73 seconds, set a Guinness World Record, and the company behind them agreed to go public at about $2.5 billion Running is just bouncing: your leg works like a pogo stick spring, catching your weight and throwing it back up, and a stiffer spring means shorter steps and a faster stride. Motors make bad springs, so the robot used real springs in its legs and learned its rhythm in a computer simulation first 10 minutes. bookmark & watch today. one pogo stick formula decides how fast any legs can run

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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This is how robots find a plane on the ocean floor, explained better than anywhere else. Governments spent up to $200 million searching for MH370 and found nothing. Now a robot company gets $70 million only if its machines find it. Every empty search isn’t a waste - it makes the places you haven’t checked yet more likely, so the map of where to look keeps shifting. Trust your sonar too much and you walk right past the answer, which is exactly how one lost jet stayed hidden for two years, until robots went back to the middle and found it in one week. 11 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The one rule every search robot uses to decide where to look next.

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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Every drone, every helicopter and every flying car pays the same tax just to stay in the air: hover power grows with thrust to the power three halves. Double the weight and you don’t need twice the power. You need 2.8 times. Momentum theory, worked out in the 1800s for ship propellers, says a rotor holds itself up by throwing air down. Bigger propellers move more air more slowly and save power. Thin air at altitude costs more. A 249-gram camera drone needs only about 9 watts in theory, really draws closer to 38, and that’s why its 19 watt-hour battery buys about 30 minutes. Double its weight with the same propellers and the hover time drops to about 15. Neural network pilots now outfly human champions, but no algorithm escapes this exponent. 11 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The exponent behind every drone’s flight time.

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

5 0 24 12K 11

A bike with nobody on it falls over the moment you let go. A robot motorcycle stays up with one line: the tangent of the lean angle equals speed squared over gravity times the turn radius. There’s no mass in it and no height. A dirt bike and a heavy touring bike lean exactly the same through the same curve at the same speed. The mechanism is steering into the fall. A tilt with no turn means nothing pushes back, so gravity wins. Steer toward the lean and the path bends into a curve, the road pushes sideways, and that push lifts the bike back up. At 10 meters per second, a tiny nudge of the bars catches a two-degree tilt. At walking pace you’d need a curve tighter than the bike can steer, and standing still nothing helps. Every self-driving planner splits the work the same way: a learned model picks the path, and this formula decides whether the curve is physically possible. 10 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The one formula that explains why a robot bike fell over at the start line.

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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A car taught itself to stay in its lane in about 15 minutes. Nobody told it where the lane was, and it had no map, just one camera, a safety driver and a score. The car was a tiny Renault Twizy. The company behind it, Wayve, was started in 2017 by two Cambridge PhD students and has since raised a $1.05 billion round from SoftBank, Nvidia and Microsoft. The car earned points for every meter it drove, and each try ended the moment the safety driver grabbed the wheel. Steering at random, it managed about 7 meters between takeovers. After 11 tries, it drove the whole 250-meter road without a single one. The trick is one line of reinforcement learning: the value of a move is the reward now plus a slightly shrunk value of whatever comes next. A takeover at the end of a run lowers the value of the moment before it, then the moment before that, until the blame reaches the turn that caused it. In September 2026, Uber and Wayve launched robotaxis in London. 10 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. We run the formula by hand, and the 7 meters vs 250 meters gap makes complete sense.

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

5 0 24 12K 11

Dean Kamen predicted his scooter would be the fastest company ever to reach a billion dollars in sales. Twenty years later the Segway was discontinued after selling about 140,000 units. The physics inside it never failed. A rider on a Segway is an inverted pendulum, and the tilt grows on its own. It doubles roughly every two tenths of a second, and in about two thirds of a second you’re on the ground. The machine survives by measuring the tilt and driving its wheels under the fall, again and again, faster than the fall can grow. Walking humanoid robots balance on the same math today. 5 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. Try balancing a broom, then a pencil, and you’ll feel the formula

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

5 0 24 12K 11

In 1979, a robot needed five hours to cross one room full of chairs. Computers could already play checkers. Seeing a chair was the hard part. The robot was the Stanford Cart. It rolled one meter, then sat still for ten to fifteen minutes while a mainframe linked by radio, at about a million calculations per second, worked out where everything was. Its builder Hans Moravec later wrote that making computers play checkers at an adult level is comparatively easy, and giving them the seeing and moving skills of a one-year-old is hard or even impossible. That idea now carries his name: Moravec’s paradox. The cart judged depth with one line of math, Z = f·B/d, using a single camera that slid along a rail and took nine pictures before every move. The same line has a catch. Error grows with the square of the distance, so five times farther means 25 times more error, and at 40 meters a one-pixel slip costs more than 4 meters. Tesla pulled radar from its cars in 2021, then the parking sensors in 2022, and bet everything on cameras. Its cars face the same physics. 10 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. Try the thumb test in the first few minutes and you’ll feel the formula with your own eyes

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

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@0xEvrenn ibm left the general purpose facial recognition business in 2020, two years after this audit

In 2011, a Stanford robotics PhD student and a precision-farming veteran met in a startup class and set out to build a machine that looks at every plant and decides which ones to kill. Six years later, John Deere paid $305 million for it. Every decision that machine makes is graded by two numbers: precision, how many sprayed plants were really weeds, and recall, how many weeds it actually caught. Turn one knob and you trade one for the other. Today the cameras ride on 120-foot booms, and Deere says farmers used it on more than 5 million acres in a single season. 11 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The same two numbers grade every AI that has to say yes or no

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

5 0 24 12K 11

@0xorenx the rods had graphite tips, so pressing az-5 first added reactivity at the bottom of the core before any absorber got there

@0xzivo every point on the rate moves that 20 year deal about 6%, roughly $7M

@0xBenjamine skilling reportedly brought champagne to the office the day the sec signed off on mark to market

in 2015 Oregon State professor Jonathan Hurst founded Agility Robotics to build robots that walk like animals its humanoid Digit lives by one school formula, runtime = battery energy ÷ average power the newest Digit works for only about 90 minutes before it walks off to charge Amazon tested it in warehouses and its maker is going public at a $2.5 billion valuation a working robot draws about 460 watts, nearly 5 times what your whole body burns and the twist is a shorter battery can mean more work per day if it charges fast Agility says it already has more than $300 million in orders riding on that math 11 minutes on the formula plus how to read any robot spec sheet yourself ↓

larwick @larwick

2 weeks ago

wall street is throwing $5 trillion at robots that still can't fold a basket of laundry investors price in a sci fi future for machines that struggle with your fucking chores read this before you become exit liquidity for the biggest robot hype trade ↓ x.com/i/article/2107…

5 0 24 12K 11