Computer vision, robotics, software, hardware and stuff. Advocate @OpenRoboticsOrg / @rosorg. Board @ohsummit. π kscottz@sfba.social & bsky
San Francisco Exclusion Zone
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Tech bros who've never been in a manufacturing facility:
HUMANOID ROBOTS ARE THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING!!!1
Actual manufacturing people:
Can you just make the robot arms, gantry robots, and CNC machines easier to program and more reliable please?
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Santa Monica is on fire and Richmond VA has lost running water due to a snow storm. All of Puerto Rico lost power last week.
Maybe we are the shit-hole country.
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I'm begging computer vision professionals to stop creating this kind of Orwellian garbage.
I don't care how desperate you are for work, you can't put a price on morality. Your job as an engineer is build things that benefit humanity.
Me: Just grabbing a latte
NeuroSpot: You sat 18 mins, moved 2.3 meters, glanced at the counter thrice, and drank 1.5 cups.
Also me: π
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I had to double check this using the Gimp. It is not a fake. Seeing is not believing.
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My partner: Why did you buy that stupid hard hat and high viz vest at the Silicon Valley electronics swap meet?
Me: It was $15 and it guarantees me entrance into any facility in the bay area. And you call yourself a hacker. Sheeesh.
I need a clipboard and some business cards.
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Let me get this straight, the planet is choking on carbon dioxide, we live in a country that lacks public transit infrastructure, and the median vehicle price is like $45k so we are going to tax cheap Chinese electric cars and solar panel imports at 100%?
What the hell?
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This one weird trick will make your SREs shit a brick: change your slack name and avatar to Jenkins and start posting random warnings and messages.
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The most successful robots ever created are dishwashers and washing machines. They have sensors, actuators, and control and thus are robots.
Fight me.
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Apex Electronics of Sun Valley is a hidden gem. If you need a knob, tube, transformer, or 50 year old oscilloscope they got you covered.
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Just so we're clear, Figure has done a couple of clumsy robot demo videos and a softball pilot and that means they are now worth more than one of the largest car companies in the world.
Nah, we're not in a humanoid bubble. π«§
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I love how sassy the FFMpeg Twitter account has gotten.
I am starting to wonder if this is the way. Open source projects have gotten smeared by FUD for way too long.
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Bay area robotics people, I'm going to need you to show up to city hall.
SFPD wants to authorize robots to shoot to kill. This is a very bad idea. If anyone would like to put together a letter to @sfbos please reach out to me.
missionlocal.org/2022/11/kilβ¦
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How programmers read a resume versus how HR reads a resume. I would say this is pretty spot on.
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Unpopular opinion: we pay cops too much. $800k a year for a single officer seems excessive.
sfchronicle.com/projects/202β¦
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VLA model developers like @LeRobotHF aren't concerned enough with robotic safety. They need some skin in the game.
I would like to propose a new robotic competition format for ICRA 2026:
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I have been writing software for damn near 20 years. I have degrees in computer engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. I am still god damn amazed that any software works, ever. All these years and it is still a trash fire.
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Interesting and cute gif. The rotating snakes illusion appears to work in cats. #caturday npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/0β¦
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One of the biggest failures I see in junior ML/CV engineers is a complete lack of interest in building data sets. While it is boring grunt work I think there is so much to be learned in putting together a dataset. It is like half the problem.
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If you want to know how unhinged the tech scene in SF has become, Musk and the head of YC are bullying the law firm that is fighting unconstitutional homeless sweeps in SF.
This is on top of tech billionaires spending $1B to set up their own libertarian free state near SF.
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Free twitter hack: put all the people you follow on a list. Your new list will be ad free and in chronological order. I only browse via my lists now. You are welcome. π
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Hi, we're here to fix your electrical problems.
Yes, it is best practice to use a trained rat to run cable.
Yes the rat makes the union rate. Her name isn't scabby.
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Wait, let me get this straight, because apparently I'm behind on the news cycle.
Amazon slipped a LoRa network into all their IoT devices that piggy backs off the owners internet and they're turning it on tomorrow?
And its opt out?
That's creepy as fuck.
Fuck. That. Shit.
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Imagine not paying your mortgage for a few months, defaulting on your loan, and then working with a friend to buy your home outright for pennies on the dollar.
That's what one of San Francisco's largest landlords is doing right now.
therealdeal.com/sanfranciscoβ¦
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San Francisco can cough up close to a billion dollars to pay for cops but they can't make up a million dollar shortfall for after school programs.
I just can't with this city anymore.
Eleven high schools in San Francisco are expected to lose 54 percent of their funding for after-school programs next year. ow.ly/sNXi50OWb9a
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Call me when the "foundation models" for humanoid robots have a 0.01% error rate in production.
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We're really to replace all of culture with AI slop.
Is life really worth living without culture?
We've long suspected that Spotify was recruiting fake artists and juicing them in its algorithm and placing them on the most popular playlists. Liz Pelly collected the internal docs + other evidence to finally prove it.
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The day I learned that AWS instance names can contain emoji.... πππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππππ
One weird trick to piss off your SREs....
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If you are down for real change, not just cringe optics, and support defunding and abolishing the police, check out @ShahidForChange.
He's got my vote and my money.
Us: We want concrete policies to force the police to stop killing us! #DefundThePolice
Dems: How about Nancy Pelosi in some kente cloth?
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Oh, and San Francisco is out of eggs.
Seriously. There are communist bread lines for eggs now.
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Start-ups need to fucking cool it with the bullshit NDAs you sign at the front door. I just saw a company shake down kids for NDAs on a field trip. For meetups I've taken to giving a fake name and drawing my favorite "signature" 8===D.
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Hey, remember when people said SF's drug deaths were caused by our progressive DA?
Yeah, it turns out that he actually lowered drug deaths (red highlights).
JUST IN: San Francisco surpassed its deadliest year last month, with fatalities counted in the first 11 months of 2023 eclipsing the previous peak of 726 deaths in all of 2020.Β Β trib.al/VSuzsSK
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"No, we don't need more rent control," says the son of billionaire parents who has never rented anything in his entire life.
I'm going to really enjoy watching this guy lose.
The mayoral candidate says he wants to keep rent caps exactly as they are. sfstandard.com/2024/10/10/daβ¦
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This is crazy, the right wing Twitter troll who walks around San Francisco and films our homeless neighbors for clout threatened and slashed the tires of a local journalist.
These MAGA freaks are emboldened and dangerous.
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Who did this?
strftime.org/
This person has saved the world a thousand years of human effort.
This person deserves a beer.
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I just looked at how much it would cost to take a Waymo and a Lyft to the same restaurant in SF.
They were the exact same price (sans tip) and identical wait times.
So we're simply building this technology to eliminate human workers and reap larger profits?
Shocking!
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IDK, maybe not the best time for this press release.
Researchers develop an ultra-compact injectable temperature-sensing chip, powered by ultrasonics: bit.ly/2SCye1t
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My boyfriend won't commit. For real, I've asked him like three times to check in the firmware source code for this project and he won't do it.
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Just saw an ad for an undergrad assistant role in robotics at a university that is paying $10 / hour. Requires Tensor Flow, ROS, and Docker experience.
Like what the hell? People flipping burgers usually make more. I was making more as an undergrad in a lab 20 years ago.
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Shhh, don't tell anyone, but I think I just put together a robotics conference that was close to half women speakers.
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I spent most of my free time in Harlem volunteering at our community garden.
Worst take ever. This YIMBY chud doesn't know what he's talking about.
It isn't about food. This is where women with three jobs relax, their children play safely, and where the neighborhood gathers.
Growing turnips just doesn't seem like a great use of land in Manhattan so close to multiple subway lines?
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I shit you not, I walked right into a conversation today between a guy who builds advanced prosthetics and a VC.
The VC asked if they have recurring revenue FOR A MEDICAL DEVICE.
To the guy's credit he started making jokes about Repo Man the movie. VCs are trash people.
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Recruiter: You would call yourself a full stack engineer right?
Me: We'll I did study VLSI in college. Made a few chips from scratch...
Recruiter: I don't understand...
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I found this weird old computer in our neighbor's garage.
I'm going to throw it out unless anyone wants it.
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Just had the #ROS PMC meeting.
Big news!
We're changing the project name to Physical AI Operating System (PAIOS) and raising $1.7B in venture capital to sustain our open source project.
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Holy shit, a KiCAD plugin to source parts from existing e-waste. If you have a ton of e-waste this would be very helpful.
github.com/humancomputerinteβ¦
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Nancy Pelosi has a town hall for constituents today at 5. Maybe we should all call in and ask why she won't debate @ShahidForChange.
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Please stop making up new names for existing technology!
We already have a concise word for the combination of sensors, actuators, and software.
We call it robotics!
Everyone already knows what the word "robot" means.
"Embodied AI" is just a made up marketing buzzword.
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"The AI Company Zuckerberg Just Poured $14 Billion Into Is Reportedly a Clown Show of Ludicrous Incompetence"
The company is Scale AI. I want a "I told you so" medal.
futurism.com/scale-ai-zuckerβ¦
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Tech Bros: humanoid robots will soon be doing every job.
Me, an actual roboticist: single purpose robots will soon be doing dull, dirty, and difficult tasks with human assistance.
sfchronicle.com/bayarea/artiβ¦
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Never, ever, ever, under any circumstances let an engineer price a product.
Engineer: calculates out all costs except engineering costs, adds 3% for "profit".
Sales guy: It costs whatever the customer will pay for it.
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I seem to have fallen into the absolutely unhinged side of Twitter with no ability to detect satire.
Fun stuff.
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When the Google recruiter "just wants to talk" so you ask if they want to talk about pay discrimination based on gender.
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The kid who cried to Garry Tan because he heard some fireworks in Fisherman's wharf is now boasting about building private spy satellites.
Absolutely incredible. This new generation of tech bros have lost the plot.
We are so fucking back.
Gonna make SF way safer. Currently designing satellites constellations to track everyone and everything coming in and out of the city, will develop souveillance tech for mass-criminal-countermeasures made available to everyone.
π°οΈποΈ
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I'm sorry his investment didn't pan out. He could simply sell the property and cut his losses. There's no law granting landlords a guaranteed return on their investment.
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I really appreciate that the FFmpeg crew is going knives out for Microsoft.
Multinational corporations are making billions off the backs of FOSS developers and tossing the projects peanuts, if anything, for support.
The xz fiasco has shown how a dependence on unpaid volunteers can cause major problems. Trillion dollar corporations expect free and urgent support from volunteers.
@Microsoft @MicrosoftTeams posted on a bug tracker full of volunteers that their issue is "high priority"
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I knew this looked familiar.
If you want to reuse or reproduce open source hardware that is great, that's what it is there for, but it seems a bit disingenuous to not credit the original authors.
umi-gripper.github.io/
Sensei Robotics (YC S24) helps robotics companies generate high-quality robotics training data at scale. Their platform collects human demonstration data at a tenth of the cost and twice the speed of current approaches.
ycombinator.com/launches/Ljfβ¦
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I've worked in lab automation, the real problem there, and across manufacturing really, is that no one wants to release open APIs or standardize at all.
Everyone wants to make puzzle pieces that don't fit together unless you're in their ecosystem.
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At this point I consider my job to be 95% building tools to scrape, mine, move, annotate, review, and preprocess data sets, and about 5% doing the actual "machine learning".
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What women wanted: a robot that cleans bathrooms and kitchen counters.
What women got: Alexa on wheels with an awesome upskirt camera.
theverge.com/2021/9/28/22697β¦
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Real talk America: three day weekends are great, let's cut the crap and go to a 4x10 system. Not like we aren't working 10 hour days already
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The cult of personality in tech is really strange.
You've got guys, and it is overwhelming guys, who couldn't care less about movie stars and sports heroes, fawning over VCs and CEOs like they're pop stars.
These tech barrons don't build tech.
They're bankers and hype men.
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The 48 is my bus.
This could have been me or my partner.
When is SF going to take Vision Zero seriously?
A couple of bollards could have prevented this. For all the bitching about more money for cops, things like bollards actually save lives.
sfchronicle.com/sf/article/wβ¦
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Every time I see the words "edge", "serverless", "AI", or "IoT" I die a bit inside. We let the marketing people run roughshod over our profession. They are all just computers, connected to each other, doing computer things. Ain't nothing new since 1993.
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I watched @ShahidForChange at the @cwclub over lunch. Pelosi botched the impeachment and continues to support policies I don't believe in. Shahid is a valid alternative. I just sent him $100. You should watch this and decide for yourself. piped.video/h0_vRq3-9bA
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.@SFGate @sfchronicle @kqed will you please organize and sponsor a virtual debate between @ShahidForChange and @SpeakerPelosi? It is the right thing to do. #PelosiDebateShahid
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This anti-Chinese rhetoric is getting rather old. Good thing I have lots of voting options for this election...
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You can tell men are providing the training data for this robot by the half-assed folding going on.
If you tossed this robot a fitted sheet it would almost certainly ball it up into a mess and hide it in the linen closet behind the towels.
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God damn I hate the phrase, "Serverless." It is such marketing jargon like "the cloud." If it is "serverless" what do you call the computer that runs your code? I'll tell you what I call it; a god damn server.
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I was in Denmark a few months ago and it sure beats this shit hole country.
If they throw in some free Ozempic I'm in.
Thousands of Danish citizens are launching an effort to buy California as a response to Trumpβs attempt to take Greenland.
They say they will provide Californians with βrule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics, and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries.β
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TechBros: "ZOMG WE NEED HUMANOID ROBOTS TO TAKE CARE OF THE ELDERLY."
Meanwhile in China they use a simple solution that minimizes one of the most common ways human nurses and patients get injured.
Have any of these humanoid bros actually talked to healthcare professionals?
China has smart transfer beds that makes moving patients effortlessβless pain and no secondary injuries
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Now that #ROS 1 is winding down we're kicking off ROS 3 planning at today's PMC meeting.
The consensus seems to be we're replacing C++ with Rust, Ament and Cmake with Bazel, and making Mac and Arch Tier 1 platforms.
All the current ROS 2 users will pay for the development.
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There were a ton of us making a fuss that right wing VCs were trying to take over politics here in SF over the past few years.
A lot of liberals and Democrats were aiding and abetting the whole process and dismissed these concerns as conspiracy theories.
Everyone called parents like me crazy when we said the San Francisco school board recalls were an attempt by VC Tech Bros and DeVosβs partners to dismantle public education. Media ran to Thiel and Sacks payees for quotes because they claimed βcommon sense.β And now:
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Lynn was one of the few female computer engineering professors when I was an undergrad at Michigan. She was also the PhD advisor to my boss at my first job and would periodically drop by the office.
The world has lost an understated trailblazer. I hope she lives on in history.
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Dear engineering students,
Don't take life advice from VCs. Take life advice from gray beards of all genders. VCs don't have your best class interests in mind. Statistically you're more likely to turn out to be a gray beard than a VC/billionaire.
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"Open Robotics, we're like OpenAI but our software projects are actually open source."
#ROS
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I made this gif at work today. I used my PyCon talk Jupyter notebook to do it. read more here: medium.com/planet-stories/anβ¦
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