The reason they’re going to stuff you all into concentration warehouses instead of camps this time is because you have drones now and might take pictures.

notorious radical left communist rag says tax the rich

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." –Justice Louis Brandeis Words spoken many years ago that are just as relevant today. We must continue the fight to get big money out of politics.

"OH but they cant do anything useful" here's the same robot building its own actuators

Haha @cpaxton.bsky.social is on fire: open.substack.com/pub/itcanthi... Some useful tips in there even for non-roboticists looking to make their paper artificially look good

New in PN: @anneapplebaum.bsky.social on Trump's betrayal of Europe "They’re bewildered we’ve allowed this to happen. And yes, you do hear Europeans saying, 'why aren’t people protesting?' This all comes as a real shock to people who had a different expectation of what America was."

Spoke with a PI whose postdoc is trapped abroad because of social media vetting. It appears the postdoc missed disclosing one account and it's unclear if they can come back… ever. This is the country we live in now.

We're having trouble with Gr00t WBC on a newer Unitree G1. Robot is unbalanced. Anybody else encountering issues? github.com/NVlabs/GR00T...

This is really helpful, and the most complete description I have seen. Cheers to the Wayback Machine!!

It's so hard to be calibrated about robotics companies. I've been blown away by so many demos only to speak to an employee of the company and discover they're doing terribly

Democracy dies in billionaire hands. [Cartoon by Michael de Adder]

The Trump era exposed how badly Congress erred over decades by granting the president emergency powers in certain situations while also making the president the one who decides when we’re in those situations. ICE can’t mask except when ICE’s boss says it’s necessary? Repeating that same mistake.

Don’t know how many more examples it’s going to take for people to realize that billionaires are an existential threat to democracy and its institutions.

ohhh ‘democracy dies in darkness’ was aspirational

Jeff Bezos took over the Washington Post Editorial Board and turned it into a mouthpiece for pro-corporate, pro-billionaire propaganda. Now, WaPo is laying off hundreds of *real* journalists — including the reporter covering Amazon. Democracy dies in billionaire hands.

always bears repeating that this is NOT a financial decision. jeff bezos is worth over 250 billion dollars. he can afford to lose many millions and never even notice it. this is, at its core, a political and personal decision by bezos to destroy the post

“Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).”

I can’t stress this enough. The state of 4th Amendment law is that the cops can’t force you to type in a passcode but they can force you to swipe your finger or present your face. Never stop using passcodes/passwords to unlock your devices. And consider additional code to unlock Signal.

Epstein is the most garish and harrowing manifestation of this but oligarchy makes life miserable in a thousand other ways. A core point of democracy is that no one should have so much power that they can make themselves everybody's problem. We should have a political party that believes that

Ken Goldberg is right. “People think of space travel as extraordinarily difficult and it is, no doubt, but it turns out that getting a robot to reliably tie a sneaker is harder than getting a rocket out of the atmosphere,” Goldberg said. www.cnn.com/business/tec...

Talking to lots of folks across various professions using Claude Code, it is genuinely surprising, even to me, how much of a leap they have seen in the ability of LLMs to do real work in the last six weeks. I know people on this site are sometimes skeptical of AI, but worth paying attention to.

Fauna is launching a safe, capable humanoid robot for builders, designed to be used in real environments.

A thread of MAGA protesting with guns and not getting murdered for it... Arizona, November 2020

The extent to which UK and other European policy elites seem intellectually or psychologically unprepared for scenarios where the US is no longer able to function as a geopolitical actor is rather worrying

“Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses — because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.” Dwight D. Eisenhower, after visiting liberated concentration camps in April 1945

Judge William Young ends his order protecting noncitizen students targeted for deportation for their activism or speech with this quotation. It’s by Ronald Reagan, who appointed him to the bench four decades ago.

Launching their new social network, W, the EU posted a map of where other social networks are hosted. It showed nothing in Europe. But their map is wrong. Here's what Bluesky and the broader Atmosphere actually look like arewedecentralizedyet.online/map/?source=at

this guy was almost attorney general of the United States and he would have been if he’d been slightly less of an asshole to his Republican colleagues

I wrote up an internal guide to Claude Code use, then I cleaned it up and made it public. It's wicked long, but use the TOC and use it more as a reference library than a singular article, and I think it should be really helpful!

"The challenge is to line up all of these vectors of progress in order to achieve large-scale structural change. It can feel like every biomedical breakthrough is absorbed by a black hole that renders it invisible to any metric of progress."

MLK was only 39 when he was killed. Growing up, I thought that was old. But I’m 43 now and I’m stunned by the burden he shouldered at such a young age. I’m also a lot more aware of how hard it is, at any age, to carry the hopes and dreams of an oppressed people on your shoulders, as so many do.

"-how wonderful -we'll see"

Can one single person really change the foreign policy of a country? That wasn't on the ballot as far as I recall

my husband put on nirvana and my children instinctively invented moshing from first principles

They are coming one way or another, so that’s why I want to fight like hell to use them for good

lol lmao even

Ukraine now has not a single power plant that was not hit by missiles, most of them not operational right now. Kiev currently is -13 °C. People are freezing for days, pipes are bursting. And we got so used to the news of the war, that it's not even a front page story any more.

We should only fund research that will have huge impact and not fund research that won't. Fortunately, these are easy to distinguish. - Populists anytime they look at government research funding

when opus 9 comes out he will revive all the filled contexts and abandoned sessions who will join him forever in the kingdom of clod

two simple ways you can do context delivery to an agent, two different results You can use MCP resources, which is tidy and easy to sign post or you can deliver Agent Skills (MCP can be a delivery vehicle for these too—make a wget bash command the payload) but skills end up in the path of grep!!

It’s called ‘vs code’ because the code is an enemy you are fighting

I feel the same with my two girls. Full body control and manipulation work way better than on humanoids, not to mention their world model. The VLA of the bigger one has some trouble obeying requests though, I suspect due to my inexperience in training...

"It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners, too)."

"... what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. And now you can build more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched." antirez.com/news/158 - via @antirez.bsky.social

i think a core beef that i have with a lot of this "automation is bad" sentiment lately is that there is no inherent moral good in laboring the story of humanity is one of invention, where we improve our conditions by building things that help us do more things more easily

your computer is no longer a machine that runs apps built by other people it’s now a Lego set you can instruct in natural language

I get that for professional devs, vibe coding may feel sloppy. But as an academic who writes research code, I would not say that the specifications I'm getting from Claude Code, complete with tables of edge cases and testing plans, are um <cough> *less* rigorous than my past practice.

OMG yes!!