Giovanni Toffetti

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." –Justice Louis Brandeis

Words spoken many years ago that are just as relevant today.

We must continue the fight to get big money out of politics.

"OH but they cant do anything useful" here's the same robot building its own actuators

How to Fake A Robotics Result Since that deadline is coming up

Haha @cpaxton.bsky.social is on fire:
open.substack.com/pub/itcanthi...
Some useful tips in there even for non-roboticists looking to make their paper artificially look good

Anne Applebaum on Trump's betrayal of Europe "They’re bewildered we’ve allowed this to happen."

New in PN: @anneapplebaum.bsky.social on Trump's betrayal of Europe

"They’re bewildered we’ve allowed this to happen. And yes, you do hear Europeans saying, 'why aren’t people protesting?' This all comes as a real shock to people who had a different expectation of what America was."

Spoke with a PI whose postdoc is trapped abroad because of social media vetting. It appears the postdoc missed disclosing one account and it's unclear if they can come back… ever.

This is the country we live in now.

WBC not working on new version of G1 robot · Issue #23 · NVlabs/GR00T-WholeBodyControl Hi! First of all many thanks for the work put on this project. We have had the most progress with our G1 thanks to this wbc stack compared to many others we tried. The issue we face now is that we ...

We're having trouble with Gr00t WBC on a newer Unitree G1.
Robot is unbalanced. Anybody else encountering issues?

github.com/NVlabs/GR00T...

This is really helpful, and the most complete description I have seen. Cheers to the Wayback Machine!!

It's so hard to be calibrated about robotics companies. I've been blown away by so many demos only to speak to an employee of the company and discover they're doing terribly

Democracy dies in billionaire hands. [Cartoon by Michael de Adder]

The Trump era exposed how badly Congress erred over decades by granting the president emergency powers in certain situations while also making the president the one who decides when we’re in those situations.

ICE can’t mask except when ICE’s boss says it’s necessary? Repeating that same mistake.

Don’t know how many more examples it’s going to take for people to realize that billionaires are an existential threat to democracy and its institutions.

ohhh ‘democracy dies in darkness’ was aspirational

Jeff Bezos took over the Washington Post Editorial Board and turned it into a mouthpiece for pro-corporate, pro-billionaire propaganda.

Now, WaPo is laying off hundreds of *real* journalists — including the reporter covering Amazon.

Democracy dies in billionaire hands.

always bears repeating that this is NOT a financial decision. jeff bezos is worth over 250 billion dollars. he can afford to lose many millions and never even notice it. this is, at its core, a political and personal decision by bezos to destroy the post

“Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).”

I can’t stress this enough. The state of 4th Amendment law is that the cops can’t force you to type in a passcode but they can force you to swipe your finger or present your face. Never stop using passcodes/passwords to unlock your devices. And consider additional code to unlock Signal.

Epstein is the most garish and harrowing manifestation of this but oligarchy makes life miserable in a thousand other ways. A core point of democracy is that no one should have so much power that they can make themselves everybody's problem. We should have a political party that believes that

Elon Musk is betting Tesla’s future isn’t about cars at all | CNN Business Tesla dominated the electric vehicle industry by the mid-2010s with sleek, fast cars that helped combat the public perception that EVs were severely limited by short ranges.

Ken Goldberg is right.
“People think of space travel as extraordinarily difficult and it is, no doubt, but it turns out that getting a robot to reliably tie a sneaker is harder than getting a rocket out of the atmosphere,” Goldberg said. www.cnn.com/business/tec...

Talking to lots of folks across various professions using Claude Code, it is genuinely surprising, even to me, how much of a leap they have seen in the ability of LLMs to do real work in the last six weeks.

I know people on this site are sometimes skeptical of AI, but worth paying attention to.

Fauna is launching a safe, capable humanoid robot for builders, designed to be used in real environments.

A thread of MAGA protesting with guns and not getting murdered for it...

Arizona, November 2020

The extent to which UK and other European policy elites seem intellectually or psychologically unprepared for scenarios where the US is no longer able to function as a geopolitical actor is rather worrying

“Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses — because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, after visiting liberated concentration camps in April 1945

Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.

Judge William Young ends his order protecting noncitizen students targeted for deportation for their activism or speech with this quotation.

It’s by Ronald Reagan, who appointed him to the bench four decades ago.

A screenshot of a map showing that most Bluesky accounts are hosted in the US, but not all of them. There are a number in Canada and Europe as well.

Launching their new social network, W, the EU posted a map of where other social networks are hosted. It showed nothing in Europe.

But their map is wrong.

Here's what Bluesky and the broader Atmosphere actually look like

arewedecentralizedyet.online/map/?source=at

this guy was almost attorney general of the United States and he would have been if he’d been slightly less of an asshole to his Republican colleagues

A Better Practices Guide to Using Claude Code A comprehensive guide to getting the most out of Claude Code

I wrote up an internal guide to Claude Code use, then I cleaned it up and made it public. It's wicked long, but use the TOC and use it more as a reference library than a singular article, and I think it should be really helpful!

Yep. Had the same thought. Starting to build a set of European services and apps

"The challenge is to line up all of these vectors of progress in order to achieve large-scale structural change. It can feel like every biomedical breakthrough is absorbed by a black hole that renders it invisible to any metric of progress."