What I'm working on these days: A full suspension long tail all-wheel drive electric cargo bike since carrying your kids to school should not only be safe on bumpy roads but fun. Throttle only to allows safe starts on hills, integrated BT lock, giant 2kwh batt for 80mi range
It’s been crazy to see the way a lot techies have responded to this conflict. I thought the tech community would be this unbiased scientific community that only followed reason. But I’ve seen much doxxing , gagging and name calling for anyone not towing the “correct”line.
@Altimor
This is the issue with self driving cars too - in the end you are basically replacing a $20-25/hr Uber driver after having spent billions in research and tuning. It could be feasible at (extremely) crazy scale though!
@Robot_Brains
You literally make the world go round dude. This is awesome. I’m a software guy turned fabricator / roboticist and I always thought there was a team of hundreds who made these. But crazy that you do this all alone. Crazy!
Wife and I realized last night that a possible 5-day pge blackout is possible at midnight and started panicking. Then we realized that we grew up in Pakistan and this was like a Tuesday growing up 🤣
Lost my brother to alcoholism last year. He would’ve been 51 today. Alcohol abuse silently kills 3 million people like my brother in the world every year. 10x more than people dying in armed conflicts annually. Yet once you become addicted there is no real treatment that works.
@AleResnik
Calling people antisemitic for literally citing stats that doesn’t support your line of thought is similar to what a dictator would do. We aren’t in Saudi Arabia. Argue with him and disagree with facts if you want to have a unbiased discourse. Don’t call him names.
@kyleve
An “IT” admin once blocked my requisition for $300 headphones citing “too much extra hardware expense” while I was working at a audio chat app at a popular decacorn. Not only was I being paid $180k/year but they had recently paid millions to acquire us 😆 The irony.
@auren
This is the default in Pakistan and something I miss a lot in the US. The culture to schedule everything in life introduces so much friction that people don’t meet as often.
Reverse engineered the reverse engineering that folks at
@comma_ai
did! I can now turn on the Corolla radar and make it give valid tracks straight from python. Code coming soon. I now have a cheap automotive radar to play with (these cost like $250 on eBay)
Got a good sub 100ms latency video stream going over 4g lte using gstreamer -> electron. Now if we can fix our steering control lag we should be good to go driving around.
I've been heads down working on a custom construction robot alongside
@ti_am_i
for the past year. Not only did the robot materialize, it successfully did its job at a real live construction site in Oakland! 😱 A story on how it all came to be:
If you live in Oakland hills and don’t want your property prices going to zero due to low prosecution of crime go to the Montclair farmers market and get crazy idealistic folks out of office.
#recallpamelaprice
@jonty
Wtf? I really thought the token contained the jpeg data somehow. What’s the point here otherwise? Can’t someone make another token pointing to a different url with the same or slightly modified data?
@anshublog
@firstrepublic
Same! They gave me a mortgage when no other bank would when I was a founder with a w2 that didn’t go back enough. Awesome people. Supporting them through this and I hope everyone else does too!✊🏽
@thomasschiavone
My dude Oakland city planner personally delayed my house for a year because the exterior profile didn’t match the aesthetic he had set for the zone. Yes that’s a thing!
I got to sit inside Voyage's self driving taxi today! Tingly feeling as it stops at a stop sign, observes traffic and proceeds when clear, autonomously 😯😎 Thanks
@ericrgon
@voyage
They made the bathrooms gender neutral in the chabot space center by making one of them worse for 50% of the people (Both bathrooms are still operating). How is this helpful?
You don’t need a bipedal humanoid robot. If you can deliver a general purpose helper like this for < $50k people will develop their houses and offices to be free of stairs/steps and with elevators just so that the robots can get around on wheels only.
Introduce 𝐌𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐇𝐀🏄 -- Learning!
With 50 demos, our robot can autonomously complete complex mobile manipulation tasks:
- cook and serve shrimp🦐
- call and take elevator🛗
- store a 3Ibs pot to a two-door cabinet
Open-sourced!
Co-led
@tonyzzhao
,
@chelseabfinn
The construction robot I've been working on for close to a year is being deployed at its job site tomorrow morning. Now boasting 5mm of absolute accuracy at the worst using roof mounted 4k cameras and some pathfinding. This is one of the many test runs (with lasers disabled).
@ryanmjohnson
They also get us stuck in traffic jams, make us waste a lot of time finding parking and annoy kids who hate being in car seats but we love them! 🫤
Super excited to be joining
@voyage
to build self driving cars! 😎😮🤖🚗. Amazing team solving hard problems. Feels good to be doing something that'll make a direct positive impact on people's lives ✊
I've joined to help robots 🤖 see and react to changing real world environments. Lucky to have the chance to work alongside super smart folks like
@pabbeel
(amongst others) in figuring out one of the most impactful real world application of modern DNNs.
For reasons I cannot explain going to a remote area on a motorcycle through dirt roads to sleep in a tent and eat dehydrated food for days is extremely fun to a large group of people that includes me 🤷🏾♂️
@zebulgar
Dubai proves that democracies are overrated atleast for building cities and economies. But have you actually lived in Dubai? It’s hot af 24hrs a day! If Dubai existed near Hawaii / cali / Spain it would be a instant yes from me.
@Twolfrecovery
@SenecaSpeaks21
Interestingly shanty towns in Pakistan look way poorer (no expensive trailers or cars being used as shelter) but are much cleaner and have 100% sane, working and drug free inhabitants. Next time I go I’ll get a video - this is NOT the result of poverty as many in the US beleive.
@Austen
I guess kids still hate school (like we did)! Maybe we can make school more fun so it's not universally hated so much? Is that possible or will it always be a drudgery mankind has to go through?
@brezina
SUVs only make sense if you are going majorly offroad. For carrying families the minivan wins hands down. This is a niche that Tesla has cornered with the model X: a minivan for folks who wanna keep 50% of the ego 🤣
@ruemcclammyhand
I have a lot of friends with rich dads in Pakistan who say “eeww it sucks here”. But zero without rich dads. If you’ve fended for yourself anywhere in the world alone - the US is awesome.
I think this is going to be one of the most useful home robots I’ve seen this decade. No vision or AI just plain old mechatronics delivering fresh hot rotis (naans) from scratch on demand. Every desi household needs one. Good stuff
@rotimatic
Whenever I sell something worth < $100 on Facebook marketplace I’m mostly just doing it to recycle efficiently. Anyone else in the same boat? There should be a service that picks up stuff for free then gives me 50% whenever it sells!
Another startup making a simple and instantly useful product.
@Hoopfit_
catches, scores and returns the ball directly to you so you spend more time playing. Amazing to witness
@farhadnoorzay
go from a idea to an actual fully functional product. This stuff is hard.
Just donated to
@bilalmahmood
for state assembly and I finally understand why people donate to political campaigns: you must really believe change is badly needed.
@TheFederman
I always assume these folks fully understand the economics but sadly the average person does not - and they have to say stuff like this to get votes. Way easier for voters to comprehend a singular grouped enemy than the “system”.
Working with robotics these last couple of years has been a humbling experience. Coming from a pure software background it's easy to feel like god from time to time. You are powerful and anything you dream up can be implemented with near 100% accuracy. Everything is certain.
In 2017/2018 I was able to purposely change the direction of my life for the first time in 40yrs:
1. Had a baby 😮
2. Switched from native apps / saas developement to ML / Self driving cars / Robotics. 🤖
Excited about what 2019 has in store!
An update on my autopilot project: My kia now has MPC based jerk-minimizing longitudinal control 😍. This means it can maintain distance, stop and accelerate based on a lead vehicle. The green line below depicts a car moving at 6mph which I catch up to. YAS
#SelfDrivingCars
How do you hardware folks doing prototypes get small steel parts fabricated? parts that require a 5 axis CNC that is. Do you all just use xometry (slow / terrible), build it in house on converted CNCs or use that VC money to buy a Bridgeport/haas or something fancy?
@salahuddin
@paulg
It’s been crazy to watch how conformist the tech community in the valley can be. People are scared to cite these stats and I’ve seen one engineer and one VC being told to literally shut up or get fired on Twitter unless they say the “right stuff”. Insane.
My very first home made machined real part. It’s a alloy steel boss that will be welded to my bikes subframe. Complete with m5 threads. Making even tiny metal parts like this is crazy hard work but so extremely satisfying.
I envy people who can learn by reading books and listening to experts. The only way I learn anything is to low key fail 1000x and slowly converge onto an answer.
@AleResnik
PG with a documented history of bias? I know him personally and have worked with him and was not unaware at all or would expect given his nature. Regarding the death tolls what are your facts? I would respond with that other than calling him names.
Testing out our not so little autonomous racer at
@makerfaire
today. It completes a lap - albeit at very low speeds but baby steps! If you are at maker faire come check the autonomous power racing teams out (there are 3)!
You can build robots, work on self driving cars or low level networking stuff but the first time your family will ever care about any of that is when you 3D print a broken baby stroller part and save the day 🥇😅
Angle based steering control using a simplistic PID on the Arduino. I can now dial a angle for the steering. Thanks to opensource, the code was contributed by a project member and it "just works" on my car!
#SelfDrivingCars
#robotics
#OpenSource
This is a $150 medical grade FDA approved EKG device (with analysis) by
@AliveCor
that you can buy today. Super easy to use and works in 30 seconds. I was experiencing what i hope are panic attacks so I thought I'll collect some data for my doc without going into a hospital.
It's the polar opposite in robotics. Nothing ever is certain. The man made sandbox is gone and you literally have to deal with the Earth, nature and physics. There is no such thing as certainty and randomness is part of every algorithm.
@manishsinhaha
@stevegraham
It is true a lot of people care about how you look and it’s definitely not a optimal strategy around them - my solution is just not to hang too much with such people 😀once in a while though it’s okAy to dress up.
Why is the human body so damn efficient? I literally biked up and down multiple mountains for an hour and my fitness tracker tells me I maybe burned that burger I ate yesterday. But not the fries. 😑
Starting up something that I've wanted to do for a while: an opensource/open-data L3 highway autopilot system for normal cars. Currently rigging up a Kia Soul EV with the
@PolySync
OSCC kit. Join in if you want to hack on a real drive-by-wire car.
The PCL library is AMAZING! I literally had no idea what to do with my depth cloud a few days ago but now I can do this. Thanks
@jadalawa
@emrahadamey
for pointing me in the right direction! Segmentation done using just a RGBD camera's depth cloud and PCL 😇
It’s crazy how quickly your body adapts to the climate you live in. It’s 85F in the bay and I’m dying. I grew up in Karachi where 85F used to be an amazing winter morning 😅
@AleResnik
@ycombinator
If you call anyone who speaks against Israel antisemitic people will see through it. YC associates with the smartest people in the world and PG is one of them.
I would pay $25/month (or maybe even more) for a email service that intelligently categorize spam and growth hack marketing emails and just gives me useful actionable emails.
Getting started w/ web3 dev using
@_buildspace
!
The plan is to:
✍️ write my own custom smart contract
💰 build a "connect wallet" flow.
🚀 deploy it to Ethereum
Let's do this! Thanks for putting this together
@FarzaTV
@_buildspace
A random robotic platform I'm working on to help a client-friend (frient?). My first instinct was to solve this using code and reading robotics research papers. In the end I found out it's ALL about the correct choice of hardware.
It’s alive and working well. Toddler loves how he doesn’t feel bumps anymore. I love how it rides. You know it’s something people want when anyone with a cargo bike stops to asks what it is and whether it’s more comfortable / safer than theirs (it is by far)
Only in Silicon valley does a security patrol car pull up next to you and says: "no driverless testing allowed in this area guys, liability issues" 😮🤔🙄
After 2 successful 5-10x exits from investments I made in the last 5 years I can totally understand why everyone wants to be an investor. You make so much more money without doing any actual work 😂😂
@Suhail
Talking to users definitely doesn't work for products that open up new use cases or are too similar to existing ones. When prior to screenhero we asked users whether they would want awesome screensharing many responded "nah Hangouts works just fine".
@ImSamThompson
The HOA I used to live in San Leandro contracted one such tow yard for their “automatic towing” service. In this the tow yard patrols the HOA every night and auto tows cars that violate HOA policy. Needless to say many many cars were wrongly towed and lots of money made.
Every single time I have a friend or relative complain that they can't get a job even after they went to fancy school X for a non tech degree I just tell them to ignore the sunk cost and go to
@LambdaSchool
What a great idea!
Much respect for these guys. They just quietly keep shipping (and making money off of) extremely complex shit. They might be the most complex startup I know of that actually ships a usable consumer product. 🥇
Why is this salt called “Himalayan”? All my research suggests it comes from the khewra salt mine in Pakistan which is near Lahore and has been producing rock salt since the middle ages. These guys just skipped the refining process. It’s like calling Lahoris “Himalayan” 🤣
For the first 40 years of my life these numbers were mostly 0. Crazy it took a pandemic to get me off my ass. The absolute numbers don’t mean much but the growth from last yr is very encouraging- specially at 40 😅
@AleResnik
Having lived in a place where taliban have a strong hold (Pakistan) I can tell you that no capitalist country likes terrorists. They are always bad for business and bring nothing but doom. Only psychopaths work with and for them.
Is there a startup making good purpose built electric cargo bikes for the US? Most ebikes seem to target the EU market and end up being kinda gutless due to regulation. We need a US focused electric cargo bike - high torque, full suspension, more range, twist throttle, anti theft
I've recently discovered Python + pybind11 + C++ + cppimport. It makes extending your python with C code surprisingly easy (way easier than cython). Cppimport autocompiles C code on change and even links in external libs. Bliss!