7 min read
Do you remember when AOL tried with its walled garden to compete with the Internet? There are benefits to a closed, proprietary system, but less so in the robotics industry of heterogeneous devices and software, when an open ecosystem is crowdsourced to be greater than what any tech giant can build on its own.
6 min read
What if you wanted to try out programming a robot without buying or building one? So you look for drone simulators, and they're all either: for human pilots ...and that's it. I'm almost exaggerating. There's one open-source simulator for robots, Gazebo. It's great, except it only runs on Ubuntu, and setting it up with a simulated programmable quadcopter to develop code you can then transfer to a real quadcopter is so hard it's basically impossible.
7 min read
AI Robots are a staple of science fiction, but surprisingly difficult to find in real life. For example, if you want a quadcopter that performs arbitrary tasks without a human pilot, you'll have to build one yourself. And if you build it wrong - one wrong wire or one wrong software configuration - it won't fly. Or worse, it will flip over and dash itself to pieces, as if to spite you. Ask me how I know!
10 min read
In 1981, Bill Gates famously said "640KB ought to be enough for anybody,” the most quoted example of failed technology predictions. Foretelling the future of technology requires a combination of hubris and ignorance. So in that spirit, here's my prediction for AI and the use of the large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT, the subject of so much hyperbole this year.
