Christian Henkel

"Alles zu seiner Zeit. Katechismus zu seiner Zeit und Käsekuchen zu seiner Zeit"
(Michels Mama) 😍

Tesla teleoperated robot failed while serving popcorn on first day of new diner Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, which CEO Elon Musk claims is ahead of the industry and will sell in the trillions...

I am indifferent about the humanoid hype most of the time. But what if it is actively damaging to the public perception of robotics as a field?

"[...] Again, Tesla employees at the event confirmed to attendees that the robot was teleoperated"

Studie: Bürgerentscheide sind meistens pro Flüchtlinge Wenn Menschen zu Flüchtlingsunterkünften abstimmen, stimmen sie in der Mehrheit dafür. Warum wir mehr über diese Good News sprechen sollten.

Unerwartet gute Nachrichten: Die meisten Bürgerentscheide gehen Pro-Schutzsuchende aus. Das ergab eine Auswertung von Mehr Demokratie e.V.
www.volksverpetzer.de/analyse/buer...

How Does One Even Program a Robot? - Christian Henkel I work in robotics research. This is my personal site, combining scientific publications, CV entries, and blog posts.

Getting a bit philosophical about robot programming 👉
buff.ly/ZwhmHdv
Please let me know what you think. 🙏

You can achieve f\*ck all if you really want it - Christian Henkel I work in robotics research. This is my personal site, combining scientific publications, CV entries, and blog posts.

On the self-help book I wish existed — and why borrowed goals might be worse than having none at all. 😆

I'll be trying out this robotics freelancing for a while. Let's see if I like it😆 #robotics #freelance knmcguire.github.io/blog/2025/04...

🤣

LLMs to support with coding are nice and all. But assuming that something that is good at generating text would be good at helping to code fundamentally misses the point. Imagine having an assistant that recommends refactoring, architecture improvements, making style more consistent.

You know, the European Union is not a country ....

Open Source Is Supposed to Be a Meritocracy—So Why Are Companies Trying to Buy Their Way In?

A recent survey by the Linux Foundation found that organizations contribute 7.7B USD annually to open source projects. #opensource

🔄 Oh wow. After seeing this, I feel even more validated in my choice of PhD topic! 🤣
This video perfectly illustrates a common failure in multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF): local optimization without global coordination.
Video Credit: reddit/RoyalChris

On Creativity in Software Engineering and the Role of Generative AI - Christian Henkel I work in robotics research. This is my personal site, combining scientific publications, CV entries, and blog posts.

🚀 Is software engineering creative? Most people wouldn’t call coding an art, but problem-solving, designing systems, and innovating all require creativity. 🎨💡

With AI automating more tasks, what does that mean for creativity in software development? 🤖✨

Read more:

walk time 🤖

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." — Elon Musk "The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism." - Hannah Arendt

Ja, wissen wir jetzt auch nicht, wer von beiden richtig liegt. Vielleicht mal Sandra Maischberger fragen:

❤️💯

ROS Meetup at #ERF2025 We are excited to announce the ROS Meetup at ERF 2025 on March 24, 14:00 – 16:00 CET. This session is a great opportunity to connect with industry experts, researchers, and developers working on…

🤖 Roboticists in Stuttgart 🤖
You are invited to join the ROS Meetup, 24 March - the day before ERF 2025.
Registration to the meetup is free!
📣 If you are interested in giving a short presentation, please reach out.
Thanks to Vishnu for making this possible. 👍
More information:

screenshot of search results on duckduckgo.com for 'rust', showing results on the programing language, Europa Park, and the game of that name.

Some words are hard to search for 🤣
Today: Rust

Sounds good. I think this would be nice for pyrobosim :)

I also strongly believe in starting new projects with type hints everywhere. But transitioning an existing project all the way to mypy being fully happy can be painful. How is your progress on the migration?

I am using a read-later service to collect things I want to read. Right now there are 130 things to read in the inbox. Additionally, there are 70 papers in my literature management program that I tagged at some point that I want to read them. Please send help. 🆘 🤣

See the code that powered the Pebble smartwatches The source code for the Pebble operating system in now open, to support the volunteer community maintaining Pebble watches.

This is cool! I really loved my Pebble. It was that smartwatch that would have an emergency mode where it would still show the time when the battery was dead. And that alone had a longer runtime on the last bit of battery than all other smartwatches.

🤣 Can we also have the acceleration? But please in m/s^2 also known as the time area density of baby giraffes called Meter!

How do Personal and Company Identities Shape Open Source Contributions? - Christian Henkel I work in robotics research. This is my personal site, combining scientific publications, CV entries, and blog posts.

Open source builds on individual contributions, yet companies play a key role in shaping projects over time. Balancing personal motivation, corporate strategy, and community governance isn’t always straightforward.

👉 Read here: https://buff.ly/4aAlyMB

Thanks for your great support, Sebastian 😊

TIL, what Tivoization is:
Building a product that incorporates GPL-licenses software and then restrict the user from making changes to the software.
I feel like many products do this in one way or the other, but my hacker-heart also loves to be able to modify things.
https://buff.ly/3E6QzM1

Yes! Exactly. I am also worried if the sixth small clarinet will be pink, yellow or green. It would look better it was green, I think.

Open Source Communities: The Sociotechnical Institutionalization of Collective Invention Open source development has become an integral part of the software industry and a key component of the innovation strategies of all major IT providers. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to…

I came across an interesting paper looking at open source software through sociology.

I just discovered a search engine that actually finds things! Searching "Parka" on DuckDuckGo gave me nothing but shops, but search.marginalia.nu showed interesting results instead.