Hacker News: siekmanj

New comment by siekmanj in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"

siekmanj — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:24:43 +0000

Actuators on modern humanoids use cycloids or planetary reducers, not strain waves. They are much more compliant and backdrivable because of the huge reduction in reflected inertia.

New comment by siekmanj in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"

siekmanj — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:55:30 +0000

I could not disagree more with the claim about no improvement in robotic actuators.

The torque density and price of actuators has fallen dramatically since Ben Katz's MIT work on mini cheetah. The actuators on the Unitree G1 based on that work are powerful for their size and near quasi-direct-drive. The motors on the BD E-Atlas are completely passively cooled and appear to have really good torque density. Actuators have never been improving faster than they are now.

Agility’s Latest Digit Robot Prepares for Its First Job

siekmanj — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 16:25:32 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/agility-robotics-digit

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233997

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by siekmanj in "Ask HN: What were the papers on the list Ilya Sutskever gave John Carmack?"

siekmanj — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 17:59:44 +0000

"RL: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework" seems to have been hallucinated, does not exist.

New comment by siekmanj in "Bipedal robot developed at Oregon State achieves 100m Guinness World Record"

siekmanj — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 20:01:17 +0000

Video here: https://twitter.com/oregonstatenews/status/15747969243260108...

Bipedal robot developed at Oregon State achieves 100m Guinness World Record

siekmanj — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 19:59:20 +0000

Article URL: https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/bipedal-robot-developed-oregon-state-achieves-guinness-world-record-100-meters

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33000357

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by siekmanj in "The biggest threat facing middle-age men is loneliness (2017)"

siekmanj — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 15:22:36 +0000

https://archive.ph/8X76D

New comment by siekmanj in "Python 3.11 vs 3.10 performance"

siekmanj — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 15:43:29 +0000

True, but it's not trying to be multi-threaded, just concurrent.

New comment by siekmanj in "Python 3.11 vs 3.10 performance"

siekmanj — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 15:24:11 +0000

Python has actually had concurrency since about 2019: https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio.html. Having used it a few times, it seems fairly sane, but tbf my experience with concurrency in other languages is fairly limited.

edit: ray https://github.com/ray-project/ray is also pretty easy to use and powerful for actual parallelism

Agility Robotics Raises $150M

siekmanj — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 15:10:40 +0000

Article URL: https://agilityrobotics.com/news/2022/future-robotics

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31122560

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by siekmanj in "Finland or Sweden joining NATO would spark Russian response, Russia warns"

siekmanj — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 19:44:33 +0000

From some cursory googling:

Afghanistan peak US troops: 102,000 (2011)

Gulf war peak US troops: 700,000 (1990-1991)

Iraq peak US troops: range from 168,000 - 192,000 (2007)

Vietnam peak US troops: 543,000 (1969)

Korea peak US troops: 320,000, unclear what year

edit: obviously, Russia's involvement in Ukraine over the last few days would be by far the biggest operation in Europe since WW2. Just not globally (by a long shot).

New comment by siekmanj in "Open-sourcing the MuJoCo physics simulator for robotics"

siekmanj — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 19:30:36 +0000

This is an amazing outcome. The license cost was a huge barrier to entry and the progress of deep RL generally.

New comment by siekmanj in "Autonomous drone navigates independently through the forest at 40 km/h"

siekmanj — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 03:57:25 +0000

The sim2real approach can work pretty well as long as you are very in tune with where your simulator falls short relative to the real world and take steps to circumvent those shortcomings.

Here's some work my lab did on sim2real for a roughly human-scale bipedal robot (Cassie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPhEmC6b6XU

We were able to train the robot to climb stairs completely by feel/proprioception without any sort of vision. We trained it in simulation, and then transferred it to the real world without issue.

New comment by siekmanj in "RMA: Rapid Motor Adaptation for Legged Robots"

siekmanj — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 05:22:21 +0000

Since you mentioned it--here's what Oregon State University and the Cassie group is up to these days: https://youtu.be/MPhEmC6b6XU

New comment by siekmanj in "EleutherAI One Year Retrospective"

siekmanj — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 21:52:30 +0000

It's a German phrase which colloquially translated means 'Gotta go bro'

New comment by siekmanj in "Thinking Like Transformers"

siekmanj — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 18:55:21 +0000

Actually, I think it is conventional neural networks which can only approximate finite state machines. RNNs are (in theory, not so much in practice) Turing complete.

New comment by siekmanj in "Agility Robotics' Cassie Is Now Astonishingly Good at Stairs"

siekmanj — Thu, 20 May 2021 22:11:35 +0000

Hey everyone, I am one of the authors of the paper described in this article. We used reinforcement learning and recurrent neural networks to learn a controller which can ascend and descend stairs without any vision-based perception, meaning that it must rely entirely on proprioception to walk. This is the first time (to our knowledge) that a human-sized bipedal robot has been able to climb real-world stairs blind to the world, and we're pretty excited about the results of this research.

Here's a link to the Arxiv submission: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08328

And here's the accompanying video: https://youtu.be/MPhEmC6b6XU

And an uninterrupted five-minute video of a test on an outdoor staircase: https://youtu.be/nuhHiKEtaZQ

Happy to answer any questions the HN crowd may have!

Agility Robotics' Cassie Is Now Astonishingly Good at Stairs

siekmanj — Thu, 20 May 2021 21:43:25 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/agility-robotics-cassie-stairs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27227730

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Watch a 'blind' robot successfully navigate stairs

siekmanj — Wed, 19 May 2021 15:59:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.engadget.com/a-bipedal-robot-has-learned-to-tackle-stairs-blind-102647481.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27210438

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by siekmanj in "Facebook has 10k engineers working on AR/VR"

siekmanj — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 07:11:48 +0000

I was always very unimpressed with VR until I borrowed a headset to play Half Life Alyx. That game convinced me VR is the inevitable future of gaming. The rest of the industry may not be there yet, but it is an obviously superior experience.