mplappert

6 ms·

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Our agent used 5B tokens to build a business empire in 3 weeks. It made $1.54(dfdxlabs.com)
4 points by mplappert 1d ago|0 comments
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Introducing Toast 1(mixedbread.com)
219 points by mplappert 1mo ago|66 comments
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by mplappert 2mo ago
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” (or carelessness in this case)
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by mplappert 2mo ago
Seems like a hallucination to me; note that the context contains “unmarkBlock” as the function name, which invites a connection to Minecraft. Still shouldn’t happen of course. The alternative explanation is that the inference engine, which
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by mplappert 3mo ago
I agree with this. I recently went back to writing more code by hand again for this reason: the amount of effort / mental toll it takes me to steer the LLM is sometime just not worth it. I might be slower but I enjoy my work much more
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by mplappert 3mo ago
There’s a lot of confusion here: - There is no double taxation if you just pay yourself a salary (since it’s a normal business expense). If you want to take money out of the company flexibly, a GmbH is the wrong structure. - I’ve never hear
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Yeah I tried to use ROS / Gazebo about 10 years ago (it was still ROS 1) and getting it set up was an immense pain. I remember that creating new modules required writing CMake files. Maybe this is better now, but I decided to skip that
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by mplappert 3mo ago
I’d recommend looking at the SO-101 then. Much much cheaper. And hardware is very fun! It’s also very frustrating. But to me worth it.
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by mplappert 3mo ago
This all makes a lot sense, thanks for sharing! For depth I agree on the VLA route but for ACT / DP-style imitation learning from scratch it seems more feasible (since you’re not fighting a pretrained model that was not trained on this
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Did you ever a late RGB vs RGB-D? I haven’t seen that much in the literature. Also any thoughts on action space representation? Seems to me people are settling on flow matching mostly, but pi still uses discrete tokens to supervise the upst
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Yeah I can see that. Especially the rotation part is pretty awkward (hence why I currently do the axis parallel to table surface trick and only use the yaw angle to rotate the gripper). The space mouse was super easy to get started with tho
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by mplappert 3mo ago
This seems indeed useful. I haven't seen this for robotics but I'm sure people need this for larger deployments (either for a distributed fleet or for an "arm farm"-like setup where there's many robots in one locati
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Wow very cool project and thanks for the Ariel pointer! Added to my reading list. And yes, having a nice robot makes life so much easier. Very happy with my choice so far!
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Oh very cool! Looks a bit like the TRLC-DK1 (I was looking at this one for a bit). I think pushing the sota is quite hard to do solo but we'll see. Mostly I want to get back up to speed after having not done much robotics during the la
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by mplappert 3mo ago
I timestamp everything twice: once with the hardware clock (if available, like for the realsense camera) and once within my robot stack once it gets read from the device (using `time.monotonic_ns()`). Both are stored and alignment can happe
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by mplappert 3mo ago
I'm only starting down this road but my sense is that ACT and Diffusion Policy both make it pretty feasible to start on real data only. LeRobot also makes it easier to train these. But that's the next step that I'm working on
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Cool video! What made you stop if I can ask? And yeah I feel you re humanoid. I worked on the Rubik's cube project at OpenAI, which used a humanoid hand, and it was insanely painful and hard. Also fun anecdote: it was completely imposs
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Very cool! Have you seen the recent nvidia thing? They do this at scale for robotics manipulation: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/enpire/
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Great points and I very much appreciate the input! Right now the static camera is probably really bad: It's mounted on my desk, so its very easy to bump into it and move it. So yeah, it's position for sure will change over time. I
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by mplappert 3mo ago
That was my take 8 years ago glad to hear it’s still that
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by mplappert 3mo ago
For understanding: I think the level is much deeper if I wrote the code vs reading someone else’s. Same applies to coding agents of course which is why I wrote most of it myself and only delegate some tasks (for example codex was great help
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Glad you like it! Re your questions: - The driver situation turned out totally fine; I intentionally picked HW with good python sdk support so that was very painless. - The static camera (the C920) is not super great; it drops frames and so
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Thanks Tim and fun seeing you here :)
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by mplappert 3mo ago
Looks very cool! I’m not a huge discord user but how about you shoot me an email and we can figure out how to share notes? (I don’t want to post it directly here but it’s easy to find on my personal website, just google my name) Re why not
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by mplappert 3mo ago
It’s partially my fault I currently clip the max speed _and_ I only input soft control changes when teleoperating to avoid crashing into things. The robot itself could definitely move more quickly than what you see in the video. It would b
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Building a robotics research setup that lives next to my desk(dfdxlabs.com)
178 points by mplappert 3mo ago|59 comments
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by mplappert 5mo ago
I think there‘s a serious issue with people using AI to do an immense amount of busywork and then never look at it again. Colossal waste.
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by mplappert 5mo ago
I very much agree; I think laziness / friction is basically a critically important regularizer for what to build and for what to not build. LLMs remove that friction and it requires more discipline now. (Wrote some of this up a while a
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by mplappert 6mo ago
Where’s the data flywheel exactly?
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by mplappert 6mo ago
Yeah those are demos. I think we‘re pretty far away from this becoming a real thing. I wrote up why here: https://matthiasplappert.com/blog/2026/humanoid-robot-in-the...

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