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So You Want To Do Robots: Part 8.    Learn why the world is a giant hairy ball of unobservable global state, how to log everything, and how to write robot code that doesn't make you gouge your eyes out when you look at it three days later.
over a year ago

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More from General Robots

Correct vs Good

Part 2: Can we have it both ways?

a week ago 10 votes
Correct vs Good

What's the difference?

a month ago 20 votes
Humanoid Robots: Dollars and GPTs

Whats With All The Humanoid Robots? Part 2

10 months ago 94 votes
What's With All the Humanoid Robots?

If you follow robotics at all you may have noticed that there has been an explosion of humanoid robot startups. What's with that? Why humanoids? Why now?

11 months ago 75 votes
The Mythical Non-Roboticist

What if everyone could do robotics? That would be great, right? We should make a software framework so that non-roboticists can program robots.This idea is so close to a correct idea that it's hard to tell why it's a mistake.

a year ago 53 votes

More in programming

Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine!

A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good.  And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well.  So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.

12 hours ago 2 votes
[April Cools] Gaming Games for Non-Gamers

My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club

yesterday 1 votes
What Is Software Quality?

Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server

2 days ago 5 votes
Name that Ware, March 2025

The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]

2 days ago 3 votes