Posts like these really highlight how much there to think about in robotics. Below the surface of what immediately comes to mind there is just an abundance of topics to address to get an actually well working robot.

Yep. And when you get to an actual robot, you find it’s a distributed system with all the attendant challenges, so you build yourself up for that, and then your time, attention, and maybe your soul are crushed by connectors, cables and batteries.

So naturally the funnest work is multi-robot systems…

Especially your soul, I bet.

well, and your fingers.

In my opinion, it's not just robotics, there are so many processes involved in manufacturing a single high-performance bolt used in an F1 racing car.

Life of Bolt(2016)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iptAkpqjtMQ

Most high quality systems performance relies heavily on high-quality subsystems to achieve optimal performance.

Donald L. Unger got an Ig-nobel prize for cracking the knuckles on only one hand for 60 years. n=1 but evidence over a very long time

Agreed. Also being able to use as many aliases as you like (or a catch-all) is very nice.

I started hosting my email at home some months ago and it works great. However, my ISP blocks some ports necessary for running a mailserver (incoming SMTP), so I have to use an SMTP relay (which is on a VPS and does port 25 to some other port that is not blocked). Additionally, to not worry about deliverability, I let my mailserver send all outgoing mail through another service. The additional costs for this are about 2€/month.

I use Stalwart as a mail server and it was not too hard to setup (with some caveats to get it working with my SSL certs behind a reverse proxy. But nothing a bit of LLM chatting couldn't solve). All in all, it's not 100% self hosted, but works well.

However, I don't agree with the suggestion in the article to use a self hosted LLM. My mailserver needs a few hundred MBs of RAM at max, but with the spam filter this would increase like 10x-100x.

There is the --encode (and --decode) options for the `protoc` executable, e.g. `cat myobject.json | protoc --encode MyObject protofile.proto > myobject.bin`

Numberphile has a video with Persi Diaconis about the seven perfect shuffles. It gives a lot of insight and anectdotes in addition to the central theorem: https://youtu.be/AxJubaijQbI?si=ED7ufY4oPZnNxCbd

There's this numberphile video where Persi Diaconis tells a story about bridge and how the players got used to not totally random shuffled decks: https://youtu.be/RIGJH12vVCY?si=cMSx6YEr8MMFgYg6 (Starts at around 3:30).

Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591669

I interpreted it another way: the boxes are what connects the past to this written story. Without the boxes most details would be forgotten and this article wouldn't exist. The documents in the boxes were only thoroughly read by one daughter starting in 2024.

I didn't know CMake introduced this debug adapter. This would have been very useful to me at some occasions.

Instead, I used printf debugging (aka `message(FATAL_ERROR )` debugging in CMake).

With this debug adapter, there also seem to be integrations in VSCode and CLion. I will have to try them out soon.