$6,500 for OpenArm v2. Incredibly smooth movement, 4kg of load per arm. Its unclear how far the level of autonomous control has come so far. The video shows mostly tele-operated operation. I have to agree with other comments here that folding laundry is the killer app.

I don't understand why everyone wants to build a laundry folding robot that is humanoid when we generally build purpose built machines which can do a much better and quicker job.

I want to toss dirty laundry into a hopper and have it come out clean and folded at the other end.

There is no reason to use my existing washer and dryer that are designed for human use.

Yeah but nobody has had any successful ideas for sorting and folding random fabric and clothes in any other way. Its not that people wouldn't mind a non-humanoid laundry robot/device, the problem is nobody has found any other solution to solve the problem, human hands and minds and methods are the only currently known solution.

In the movie Idiocracy they have a dispenser with fresh clothes to put on covered in advertising — assuming free. I’m surprised that doesn’t exist and perhaps made of recycled plastic?

One would expect it to at least have calibration and inverse kinematics solved. That's still a massive pain point for the SO-ARM101 despite it being so common now, since there's no base_link to gripper calibration nor sag compensation and every center offset stacks.

Lerobot banked on having full DL control of each joint so they wouldn't have to do that properly, but now VLAs just use inverse kinematics as a crutch and predict gripper offsets, so we're back to square one.

Hi! do you have any references for VLAs using inverse kinematics? I'm very curious and can't find much

I'm not super up to date on new releases, the one I'm most familiar with is X-VLA which predicts gripper poses and relative movement deltas for kinematics to move to instead of joints, and trains on forward kinematic gripper poses. I think Intern and Octo have the same approach.

Respectfully, that's the corporate-washed killer app.

Intimacy between people in a long distance relationship: that's the killer app.

The term for that is teledildonics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics

... and the "at least historic" lack of "app/service" security related to this...

Uh, the main site appears to be down (and most wouldn't click on the link, given it's name) - but you can read about a project here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Haines

That's a niche inside a niche. It's a step up from existing solutions, but not an enormous one.

take "people" out of that equation would be even better

probably not quite.

intimacy over onlyfans with a guy in india pretending to be the woman is the proper killer app.

No it's definitely folding laundry.

My intimacy with my partner in a short difference marriage would improved it we could eliminate folding washing from the weekly chores.

Have you tried getting a folding board or folding table? Helps accelerate the process and produces neater results. I love mine!

So, uh, have you tried just not folding laundry?

I think it's funny how often "Folding Laundry" is brought up as the critical use case as if that's a labor function that needs to be done in the first place!

Some of us already live in the Utopia of not folding laundry!

I'm not advocating, but pointing out how silly it is that the supposed linchpin of the end of human labor is a completely voluntary and unnecessary task. I get why it can be a good example, because it's common and "hard" in that computery way that seems like it shouldn't be that hard, and that it's supposed to represent all the other hard problems of housework.

But we know what the household robot industry considers "solved" to look like, and I'm not that satisfied with roombas, and knowing that, is $6000 for something that could fold your laundry really that much better a proposition than just being wrinkly sometimes? Downey produces a product that you spray on a clothing item and stretch it and it stops being wrinkly. Totally unnecessary, but way cheaper than $6000.

how dare you suggest actually doing the work. outrageous!

folding laundry is an exemplary case of a lot of household work which involves carefully collecting items through the house, putting them into a machine to run a cleaning cycle, then putting them away in their right location.

folding is a hard middle step in the laundry process, but the job is end to end

It's cleaning the dang bathroom.

for those simply looking to try nostr for the first time, https://iris.to is a great way to get started.

Took a look and when I got there, the first post was about bitcoin, the second was an add for a cryptocurrency app, the next one was about nostr and bitcoin. The fourth was actually unrelated to either ! But then it was crypto or nostr again. Terrible way to make a first impression (unless you are into crypto I suppose).

Try following things you are interested. My topics are radio tech and my feed comes up with things that actually interest me.

it'd be nice to see a comparison to rayfish.xyz

Different animal altogether.

Rayfish, Tailscale, ZeroTier, Netbird etc are a different category of tool, designed to facilitate connectivity between you and your own pool of machines. They don't generally do much in the way of multi-hop routing, but rather they orchestrate VPN tunnels on top of another routed network (like the internet).

Reticulum would be better compared to Yggdrasil, cjdns etc as routing schemes for larger networks or true meshes, which can work independently of (and have no dependency upon) the internet.

It has nothing to do with that, like at all.

Not in a technical sense, no. But at a high level, in spirit, I can see some overlap.

In the same way that you can hack apart a loaf of bread with a spoon, yes, but they are very different things with different goals.

Maybe a better comparison is iroh.computer

Iroh is a framework that use QUIC to help create p2p software. It is not a mesh network.

even without trying it, its so cool this exists. I think this kind of voice interaction has been a dream of adventure game creators for so long, and now its possible. there was a game many years ago (in the days of messengers like trillium being popular), I forget the name, where one of the characters would make a landline phone call to you. The voice acting was great and it felt novel and exciting to see it work.

"How much of each payout was your own money handed back." very interesting premise but the site needs more explanation of what that means and how it computes those numbers.

Agreed. Right now I am writing parsing part though, since how they issue RoC is not standardized (they are required by law but format and how they do it is not a standard).

great looking website - the alphabet portion is fantastic.

I published a project this week to be a thai to english dictionary. Translation is easy to come by but I want a page to paste a paragraph of thai and have it break down every word. That helps me learn. The site uses Wiktionary data. https://thaikam.app/

This was fun to play...for about 2 minutes before all the manual work of moving processes around got very tedious, which may be the point of the game. What I would like is a little code edit window where i could code simple routines to handle the scheduling, then be able to watch the result.

This is why we must daily thank the elves inside our machines. It's tough work!

As an OS, I wish the user would launch fewer programs. What a chore.

Yeeeap. Was thinking about that and the Matrix mostly.

And also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

Yeah, it all makes sense now.

for those who aren't familitar with Meta's product line: "Meta Portal (also known as Portal) is a discontinued brand of smart displays and videophones released in 2018 by Meta." a tablet with feet, focused on video-calls.

I used to think Zig was the new C, but its different enough to be its own category, imho. For an actually "new" C, try https://c3-lang.org/.