Statuses

Assembling an Ikea chair in 20 minutes, rather than the 5 that a person takes, doesn’t seem like much of an advance. But while computers excel at trigonometry and logic games like chess, evolution’s billion year head start on interacting with the physical environment means that advances like this are drawing us (very) slowly closer to a world where robots can perform menial but unpredictable physical tasks.
https://rob.al/2F2tgPg
Cower before your silicon overlords, puny humans

Apple’s new robot, Daisy (an upgraded version of a robot announced in 2016), can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour, sorting the parts for reuse and recycling, extracting parts which traditional recyclers are unable to safely or cost effectively remove.
https://rob.al/2HOCTnO
Apple has created a new robot – not for building products, but for ripping iPhones apart. The robot, named Daisy, can take nine different iPhones models apart and extract the important parts of them,…

The move to paperless movement of goods in these extraordinarily complex logistics chains has the potential to unlock massive benefits, reducing the cost of movements, by shortening the time it takes for goods to cross checkpoints and borders – an example 32 day journey of perishable goods could be completed in 20.
https://rob.al/2JZagVB
Globalization has brought the most advanced trading networks the world has seen, with the biggest, fastest vessels, robot-operated ports and vast computer databases tracking cargoes. But it all still…

I have no idea about the game that the author is engineering manager for, but this is a good write up of a framework for assessing technical debt, including the value of resolving it now vs later (never)
https://rob.al/2ELJgox
Bill Clark discusses classifying and managing tech debt at Riot.

While I’m sure that eventually, the process could have been automated, anyone who’s tried this even at a trivial scale would tell you to get the process working first, then to automate. So I don’t get how Tesla ended up in this position.
https://rob.al/2IW0qCf
Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, who’s built up an aura around how automated his car assembly plant will be, has good news for humans: We still need your help.

The clothing industry has long relied on low cost labour in developing countries, but advances in industrial robotics and machine learning and vision, at reducing cost, mean even those jobs are now at risk.
https://rob.al/2JGpjTO
Georgia Tech spin-off SoftWear Automation is developing ultrafast sewing robots that could upend the clothing industry

"For the past two decades, it was China who learned more from the US," he says. "But in the next 10 years, we'll ride on each other's successes. There's no point thinking who will surpass who."
https://rob.al/2EIUv0S
The head of China’s ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing says his team is young, idealistic and full of surprises.

An interesting move from hardware vendor to PaaS provider: The NVIDIA GPU Accelerated Cloud (NGC) for Deep Learning and HPC
https://rob.al/2tnW3gH
A GPU-accelerated cloud platform with access to catalog of fully integrated and optimized containers for deep learning and HPC frameworks. Learn more.