Full of childlike wonder. Teaching robots manners. RL Lead @ Apptronik. UT Austin PhD candidate. Past: Boston Dynamics AI Institute, NASA JPL, MIT ‘20.
he/him
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when you argue with me about control theory this is who you’re arguing with
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this is just a taxi. what you’re describing is a taxi. what are we doing here man.
First day, I got out of the Airport and I saw the ‘Uber Zone’.
Instead of booking an Uber and finding it, you simply book an Uber and go to the first car in the queue of cars, tell your PIN to the driver and off you go to your destination. No waiting time.
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big miscalculation on the admin’s part, “the floor is lava and the consequence is jail” is the kind of loony tunes engineering challenge MIT students salivate for
VP of MIT grad union explaining that they are standing on a ladder because they have been banned from setting foot on campus
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Overheard in lab meeting: “we can’t build that, I don’t wanna end up on black mirror”
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The south isn’t republican, their voters are just suppressed, oftentimes explicitly. If you see this map and use it to justify feelings of moral superiority, while doing nothing to help dismantle it, you’re allowing yourself to be made complicit in the subjugation of black voters
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I had a physics elective in college where the professor basically went century by century and made us derive astronomical quantities using only information and techniques available to people of the day. size of the earth, distance to the sun, etc. one of the best classes ever.
quick question
without modern technology, how would you prove that the sun and moon have different sizes?
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Today during lab meeting one of the grad students (male) was talking about research that he’s working on with an undergrad (female). Whenever the guy made a point, my advisor would stop and ask the undergrad what her opinion was
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the drivers get paid worse tho. the whole point was that rideshare apps skirt regulations and protections that drivers otherwise have. it’s cheaper primarily because it siphoned VC money for years without returning any real profit. I’m not sure I would call it a better system.
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that’s crazy. for almost a decade MIT’s course picker was run off a server in a closet in my frat that we built for fun. then a guy in my freshman class made something 10x better and so everyone switched to that. he graduated in 2.5 years and has been at Jane Street ever since.
NYC's public college system paid Oracle ~$600M to build our course management portal. It's built on top of Oracle's PeopleSoft suite, which they refused to customize without an extra $400M (to hit $1B).
New Yorkers got the image below and pay $5M+ / year for *hosting*.
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(whispers) hey kids... wanna see a murder?
What do you think is the best way to get around town and still do our part to protect our environments? #WorldEnvironmentDay
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I went to a talk during MIT’s career fair week circa 2017 where the speaker strongly made the case that over the next decade we would see an extreme oversupply of people with CS backgrounds but an extreme undersupply in domain experts with CS skills.
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my advisor just started lab meeting by going around the (virtual) table and telling each student what he was proud of them for. damn.
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Secondary note, literally every suggestion from the undergrad was absolutely fire, and we’re lucky to have her in lab
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He made it clear that despite being an undergrad, her opinion was trusted and valued and he actively wanted her input. Additionally, being one of the only women on the call, the advisor made a point of not letting anyone talk over her or drown her out. He does this regularly.
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He doesn’t necessarily vocalize what he’s doing, but the effect is unmistakable: everyone in lab deserves to be there and should be part of the decision making process. Male dominated spaces often talk over their female colleagues, but I’m really glad to see push back
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fucking hate grad students. the professor mentioned this random paper in class and one of the students pasted in chat the url to the paper in 2.3 seconds FLAT
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this is 100% false.
I got Bs in math in middle school. And high school. And college. And grad school. By every metric of success I’ve “made it”- I use advanced math in my PhD research every day. But that doesn’t mean it was always easy or that it’s something you’re born with.
I hate to say it, but as a former physics major, if you actually want to go into physics you should be the kind of person who finds this level of material completely obvious at 9 years old.
It's absolutely worth studying -- but physics only needs people who are math freaks.
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how can we expect machine learning to produce ethical outcomes when purported leaders of the field peddle this sort of sexist bullshit
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the fact that I get ~5 more years of student Spotify+Hulu pricing is worth doing the PhD for alone
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do you have a deep psychological need to balance the center of mass of your egg carton or are you normal?
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I realized when my advisor said I should spend 15 hours a week on a project he meant 3 hours a day and not 15 hours the day before we meet to talk about it each week... much to think about
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Every time I get an email from someone with an “@ nasa.” email address my heart skips a beat. I know I work there now, but it’ll never stop being surreal. I’ve been dreaming about this since I was 6
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moral of the story: never pay a company $1B to do what a cracked freshman could do for fun.
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found the hospital where I was born, if I died right now my average velocity would be zero
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you don’t get a PhD so people call you Dr. as a term of respect, you get a PhD so your coworkers (who also have PhDs) call you Dr. as a term of affectionate mockery
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plus there’s a big problem with safety, cab drivers are required to be registered vs there’s a huge market for renting other people’s Uber accounts so they can drive even if they wouldn’t pass the background/safety check, which puts customers in danger and harms trust.
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as it gets hotter, remember: she’s not dressed like a slut, you just think like a harasser
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hey thanks again for letting me borrow your lambo @frogs4girls it smelled like a field of wildflowers
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the key wasn’t “learn to code”, it was “learn to use code to solve hard problems in your chosen field”. you’d be shocked what passes for “can code” in engineering industry outside of CS fields.
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Yeah I peaked in high school. I also peaked in college. Peaked again yesterday. It’s called a concave function luv
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Research is just reading papers, having a breakthrough idea, and then your advisor telling you it was already done 10 years ago.
You invent the future? Not me, I invent the past. I’m not like other girls
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I’ve been told to lick a rock in at least five different languages and I think that’s really beautiful
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POV: one of your company’s most public personalities just came out as a raging racist
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six of the largest robotics companies in the world just pledged to never build weaponized robots. this is huge!!!
link to the letter: bit.ly/3SKKVSi
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Imagine being my exes, unfollowing me on everything, only to see memes of me licking a rock all over the internet. Damn.
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all my college friends who are aero/mech/bio engineers who ALSO have strong CS backgrounds get snapped up in a heartbeat. they’re not going to google, but they’re making huge differences in their respective fields.
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no you’re absolutely right, even as a roboticist the thought of being able to throw bad robots into the sea is immensely soothing
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for the umpteenth time, can all the “move fast and break things” people shut up already? we don’t have to blow up rockets and implode submarines to learn things. unchecked innovation for its own sake is a literal death wish.
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when I see this kind of thing I have two conflicting gut instincts:
1) this is going to be used to steal a LOT of money, especially from the elderly/people not involved with tech. this has already been happening but this tech will absolutely make it much much worse. BUT
2)🧵
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this is part of why I so utterly despise interacting with people that just go into CS for the clout/prestige/etc and not love of the game. take your skills to an industry you’re actually passionate about and you’ll have a wildly more stable + fulfilling career. and no leetcode.
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“sorry, the road in front of your house didn’t meet profit targets this quarter so we’re closing it. also, if you try to walk on it we’ll consider it trespassing and sue for damages (gotta recoup costs somehow…)”
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10:00 am - I have the whole day! anything is possible
1:00 pm - ...
4:00 pm - ...
7:00 pm - ...
10:00 pm - ...
1:00 am - but not today.
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the lack of big-red-button hardware e-stops as an expected norm (or better: a requirement) is an abject failure of the robotics industry. even Spot from BD doesn’t ship with one, and it’s the most mature legged robot platform on the planet. we need to do better.
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if you’re wondering what it’s like being a robotics PhD student, I just unironically told someone “I have a robot due Monday” and zero part of that is an exaggeration
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I’ve seen physicists struggling with this one so I’ll take a crack at it:
to understand electron spin, imagine a ball that is rotating, except it isn’t a ball and it isn’t rotating.
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if you start with GRPO you’re cooked
if you want to understand RL*, start with the policy gradient theorem. then natural policy gradient, generalized advantage estimation, trust region policy optimization, proximal policy optimization, and then group relative policy optimization
If I were you I'd be studying either RL (starting with GRPO) or PTX (starting with cuda). If I were much younger me I'd be studying my ass off in both subjects plus MuZero and training 0.5B models every day on my 4090
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emailing your advisor at 6am so it looks like you’re an early riser getting to work and not that you stayed awake until 6am like the degenerate you are >>>
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ah yes time for my yearly PSA: do not drink the milliQ water. I know what you’re thinking! “it’s just water!” I also thought this, and paid for my ignorance dearly.
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I hate when companies bastardize math to sell their product. the thread is based on the assertion that GRPO could solve robotic tasks if only we could better simulate tasks in parallel. except:
1) we can already do this
2) that’s not why GRPO works
The future of robotics is RL with synthetic data.
GRPO could teach robots to learn like humans do.
But implementing it for robotics is non-trivial.
Here's where this breakthrough technology remains trapped:
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one of my close friends is senior level at a mid size aerospace firm in <5 years in large part because she’s also a great programmer (besides being a great engineer more generally) and her combination of skills + leadership is rare.
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i just got a letter from my undergrad institution asking for donations, as if i don’t still owe them one hundred thousand dollars.
one.
hundred.
THOUSAND.
I have $7.
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people seem to be misunderstanding. I don’t mean a button ON the robot, I mean one of these:
the lack of big-red-button hardware e-stops as an expected norm (or better: a requirement) is an abject failure of the robotics industry. even Spot from BD doesn’t ship with one, and it’s the most mature legged robot platform on the planet. we need to do better.
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Ladies, if he:
- only responds to you every few months
- is stuck looking into the past
- is a staunch relativist
- only gets turned on for BIG curves (in spacetime)
- is 4000 +/- 1m in diameter
That’s not your man. He’s the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
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the fact that my account is big enough to get shit on by twitter randos is so fucking funny to me
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Me talking about doing research: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Me actually doing research: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
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