Classical control theory is often sufficient for dealing with changing loads, terrain and wear and tear. Rejecting unknown disturbances is what a control system does. No training is required. Perhaps somewhat less than impressive due to the choice of robotics platform, but:
Yeah, a lot of this tends to be "Let's try CNN on ... ", and it ends up doing about as well. It's bound to be a general purpose tool that's easy to use and doesn't require a classical approach.
Like RRTs instead of visibility graphs for regular-old polygonal environments. The RRT is just easier vs hand-tuning obstacle boundaries, etc.
I have some experience on this, as we are building a system like this with similar constraints, and there's really no "need" for anything other than classical control.
"Our only monetization strategy so far has been LocomotiveHosting. We had big hopes for it, but it has gained little traction and too little interest from our users."
It's too bad that the longer audio recordings of Boyd's briefings that exist are stuck in some military or private archive. (I'm not talking about the stuff that's currently available on Youtube.)
Last year someone mentioned an 8 hour recording of Patterns and Conflict that was apparently distributed among some of the participants of Boyd and Beyond 2012. Googling the write-ups of that event should give you more information on which archive the audio recording should be located in (at the Marine Corps museum?).
Or, you know, it could be the fact that Sweden's industrial capacity survived WWII largely intact and so the country in general was better positioned than the rest of Europe to make money.
The same thing helped out post-war America as well. Was isn't good for the economy on average, but when all of your industrialized competitors get bombs dropped all over them and/or occupied your relative advantage in manufactured goods goes way up.
This theory doesn't hold up at all. Germany nearly flattened, and yet, they had the Wirtschaftswunder ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder ). In fact, it wasn't just that Germany was bombed, but after the war their machinery and even their top talent were ruthlessly pillaged by both the West and the Soviets. And yet, Germany emerged just as well (or better by some measures) industrially than Sweden or the US.
If you want more counter-examples, look to Japan, nothern Italy, or Austria, whose industrial capacity and economy became exceedingly powerful after the war.
A lot has to do with the stability of your society; as long as your government and talent is relatively intact, you can rebuild quite quickly even from extreme catastrophes. Its only when you start "liquidating" the intelligentsia (Cambodia, Soviet purges) where you begin to take steps back, or maybe a prolonged multi-decade war or colonial occupation (Afghanistan, India).
I would wonder if the Marshall Plan didn't contribute greatly to the post-war success of Western Europe (as was the intention of the program). A cursory glance over the Effects section of the Wikipedia page shows that the effects of the plan greatly increased Western Europe's industrial and agricultural standing.
It sped things up, but I doubt much more than that. Look at the money we pump into Africa and the developing world; without the right society in place, that money just evaporates into short term fixes along with a lot of corruption and waste (not saying we should stop, but we have to do it better than we are).
Entirely possible, but the fact remains that those three companies are not proof that high tax rates still start big companies. Forget about "why", the simple fact is they were not started in times of high tax rates.
IKEA opened their first store outside of Scandinavia in 1973, H&M in 1976 and according to wikipedia Tetra Pak had financial troubles until they became successful in the mid 1960s. Of course Sweden had a major advantage in that its infrastructure wasn't destroyed in WWII.
That's true. But I think while the "infrastructure" argument explains a lot why Sweden has done well "in average", it does not explain why there are more billionaires than average. I think that is more due to individual drive and entrepenureal spirit of Persson, Kamprad and Rausing.
It's apparently been a much longer journey, starting in the 1800's as detailed by http://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/how-laisse...
The part about John Hierta is especially interesting; he's the obvious entrepreneur who managed to change politics.
The book reads like an extended rant written by a high-schooler on how the system, like, forces you to conform, and stuff. The anecdotes that are given in support of the "thesis" are seemingly randomly thrown in and range from long quotes about how one student had a bad advisor to some stuff on racial profiling and frisking on the streets. I am not typically a very discerning reader, but I had to put the book away after a brief amount of time. That almost never happens to me. Returning to the review with the above in mind the satire should become obvious as you get midway into the review:
"In developing his critique of professions, Schmidt draws on his own experiences and uses extensive quotes from correspondents, such as graduate students who became aware of the political nature of their training. This makes for an engaging account that feels authentic rather than remote in the conventional academic style.
Readers familiar with literature on the sociology of professions and the sociology of education may be surprised that Schmidt has few citations to it. He makes no mention of works on the professional-managerial class, such as Alvin Gouldner’s well known The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), nor of critiques of professions such as Randall Collins’ The Credential Society (1979). Actually, Schmidt knew about such works but decided not to mention them because he found that they were not necessary to his argument. This may reflect his physics training. A social scientist would naturally become familiar with "the literature" and refer extensively to it, in order to show how their contribution relates to it. A theoretical physicist, on the other hand, may start out with a theoretical framework, such as Schrödinger’s equation in quantum mechanics, and derive logical consequences from it, without having to cite prior or related work.
That is essentially what Schmidt has done in Disciplined Minds. The book’s analysis is quite rigorous in its own terms. Schmidt has set various challenging fundamental questions for himself, such as why theory is more prestigious than practical work, systematically examined possible answers and then made a conclusion based on logic and evidence. His intellectual framework for this task can generally be characterized as a critique of domination and inequality coupled with support for egalitarianism and democratization. The result is bold and refreshing. While Disciplined Minds misses the more elaborate structural theories and empirical evidence from works in the sociology of education and professions, it redresses a key shortcoming in these works, namely a concern for analysis without ideas for change. Schmidt’s voice has the authenticity of experience and concern, and thus has a much more subversive quality."
"But the researchers believe that a more refined version of their system could prove useful even at something like its current scale. Armies of mobile cubes could temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, or raise and reconfigure scaffolding for building projects. They could assemble into different types of furniture or heavy equipment as needed. And they could swarm into environments hostile or inaccessible to humans, diagnose problems, and reorganize themselves to provide solutions."
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/simple-scheme-for-self-as...
"The terms and conditions did not seem to forbid this."
Why would they forbid that? Do you realize that you are paying basically nothing for a dedicated server with a 500GB harddrive and an unmetered 100Mbps connection?
You got in on the server deal of the year and yet you are still thinking about canceling when the three months are up?
You come very close to being an example of a pathological customer.
Haha. It is a very cheap server.
I was thinking more along the lines of how some unlimited plans actually just end the contract with you if you use "too much". I've never heard bad things about OVH but I've never really heard good things either. I just felt a little uneasy when I had a slightly bad first impression of them.
A cheap server is good but I'd rather pay more if they're going to be bad. (Not that OVH were).
I was just interested to know what experiences others had had with them.
Achieving natural behavior in a robot using neurally inspired hierarchical control Joseph W. Barter, Henry H. Yin Paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427862v1
Movie 8: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2021/01/25/202...
Movie 9: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2021/01/25/202...