Silvio Traversaro

How FreeCAD uses Pixi This is a guest blog post by Jackson Oursland - a FreeCAD maintainer and esteemed member of the conda-forge and Pixi community! FreeCAD uses Conda packages to build AppImages, DMG and Windows artifacts. Pixi greatly simplifies the developer workflow.

The FreeCAD project has pioneered the use of Conda packages to build AppImages, DMGs and Windows executables. Recently they made the switch to Pixi with great success. Read more in the guest blog post by Jackson Oursland:

prefix.dev/blog/how-fr...

1/ Can open-data models beat DINOv2? Today we release Franca, a fully open-sourced vision foundation model. Franca with ViT-G backbone matches (and often beats) proprietary models like SigLIPv2, CLIP, DINOv2 on various benchmarks setting a new standard for open-source research.

Frictional contact-implicit operational space control in SIMPLE, coming soon to an arxiv and git repo near you! 😃

Testing out implementing inverse dynamics in our new simulator (SIMPLE)

Amazing blog post about using Pixi for ROS 2 on Windows. We're happy about the shoutout – that's the kind of complex setup that we want to make extremely easy with Pixi.

The authors of robot utility models are running live demos of their e2e policies at ICRA. This is really hard stuff to do! You rarely see e1e policy execution at events like this

Today, we’re announcing the preview release of ty, an extremely fast type checker and language server for Python, written in Rust.

In early testing, it's 10x, 50x, even 100x faster than existing type checkers. (We've seen >600x speed-ups over Mypy in some real-world projects.)

Today we celebrate the 10th anniversary of conda-forge!

Our beloved Github organization was created around this time on Apr 11th, 2015.

More details:

- Blog post: conda-forge.org/blog/2025/04...
- Zulip thread: conda-forge.zulipchat.com#narrow/chann...

PEP 751 – A file format to record Python dependencies for installation reproducibility | peps.python.org This PEP proposes a new file format for specifying dependencies to enable reproducible installation in a Python environment. The format is designed to be human-readable and machine-generated. Installe...

PEP 751 has been accepted! peps.python.org/pep-0751/

This means #Python now has a lock file standard that can act as an export target for tools that can create some sort of lock file. And for some tools the format can act as their primary lock file format as well instead of some proprietary format.

I wrote a new blog post about using `conda` without any kind of shell modifications.

Just the Python entry point directly. No ~/.bashrc or Windows registry edits! Simply one more entry in PATH.

rjai.me/posts/2025-0...

Annoucement - Switch to nanobind · Issue #2616 · stack-of-tasks/pinocchio We are in the process of switching from Boost.Python to nanobind in Pinocchio. The overall objective is, among other objectives, to: reduce the size of Python modules with similar or improved perfo...

Software announcement: later this year, the Pinocchio rigid-body dynamics library will be switching to nanobind (from the legacy Boost.Python) for its Python bindings!
Read the announcement here: github.com/stack-of-tas...

GitHub - google-research/troyvis Contribute to google-research/troyvis development by creating an account on GitHub.

Real-time processing of sensor streams is crucial for robotics and AR. We introduce Troy-Vis, a real-time, open-vocabulary video instance segmentation method which will be presented in an oral presentation at WACV tomorrow.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2412.04434
Code: github.com/google-resea...

I love having cappuccino in the afternoon! The only annoying thing is to have to deal with reactions of other Italians.

This is interesting, which bioconda packages use defaults dependencies? As far as I know bioconda stopped using defaults a long time ago, see github.com/bioconda/bio... .

Pytorch Installation - Pixi by prefix.dev None

🚀 Great news for Windows users! The latest version of PyTorch is back! 🥳

🙏 Huge thanks to the @condaforge community for fixing the builds.

🧑‍💻 Installing PyTorch just got a whole lot easier!

pixi.sh/latest/feat...

MuJoCo Playground An open-source framework for GPU-accelerated robot learning and sim-to-real transfer

Introducing playground.mujoco.org
Combining MuJoCo’s rich and thriving ecosystem, massively parallel GPU-accelerated simulation, and real-world results across a diverse range of robot platforms: quadrupeds, humanoids, dexterous hands, and arms.
Get started today: pip install playground

Install a GPU enabled PyTorch on your machine (with all CUDA dependencies if on Linux) from @conda-forge.org in two commands with @prefix.dev's pixi: github.com/matthewfeick...

Integrating Contact Force for Delicate Robot Grasping Improving end-to-end learning with salient information

Robot end-to-end learning gets better when including force medium.com/correll-l...

Copyright without years <p>Like so many other software projects the curl project has copyright mentions at the top of almost every file in the source code repository. Like</p> <pre class="wp-block-preformatted">Copyright (C) 1998 - 2022, Daniel Stenberg ...</pre> <p>Over the years we have used a combination of scripts and manual edits to update the ending year in that copyright line to match the year of the latest update of that file.</p> <p>As soon as we started a new year and someone updated a file, the copyright range needed update. Scripts and tools made it less uncomfortable, but it was always somewhat of a pain to remember and fix.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">In 2023 this changed</h2> <p>When the year was again bumped and the first changes of the year were done to curl, we should then consequentially start updating years again to make ranges end with 2023.</p> <p>Only this time someone asked me <em>why?</em> and it made me decide that <em>what the heck, let’s completely rip them out instead!</em> Doing it at the beginning of the year is also a very good moment.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Do we need the years?</h2> <p>The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention">Berne Convention</a> states that copyright “must be automatic; it is prohibited to require formal registration”.</p> <p>The often-used copyright lines are not necessary to protect our rights. According to the Wikipedia page mentioned above, the Berne Convention has been ratified by 181 states out of 195 countries in the world.</p> <p>They can still serve a purpose as they are informational and make the ownership question quite clear. The year ranges add questionable value though.</p> <p>I have tried to find resources that argue <strong>for</strong> the importance of the copyright years to be stated and present, but I have not found any credible sources. Possibly because I haven’t figured out where to look.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Not alone</h2> <p>It turns out quite a few projects run by many different organizations or even huge companies have already dropped the years from their source code header copyright statements. Presumably at least some of those giant corporations have had their legal departments give a green light to the idea before they went ahead and published source code that way to the world.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Low risk</h2> <p>We own the copyrights no matter if the years are stated or not. The exact years the files were created or edited can still easily be figured out since we use version control, should anyone ever actually care about it. And we give away curl for free, under an extremely liberal license.</p> <p>I don’t think we risk much by doing this move.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">January 3, 2023</h2> <p>On this day I merged commit <a href="https://github.com/curl/curl/commit/2bc1d775f510196154283374284f98d3eae03544">2bc1d775f510</a>, which updated 1856 files and removed copyright years from almost everywhere in the source code repository.</p> <p>I decided to leave them in the <a href="https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/COPYING">main license file</a>. Partly because this is a file that lots of companies include in their products and I have had some use of seeing the year ranges in there in the past!</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Bliss</h2> <p>Now we can forget about copyright years in the project. It’s a relief!</p>

Remember: it is a calmer more chill life without copyright years. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/01/08/copyright-without-years/

Just migrate 3.13 . Adding free-threading support is a different migration that is currently paused: conda-forge.org/status/migra... . As you can read in github.com/conda-forge/... there are some problems in free-threading in some core python libraries that do not make sense to start that migration.

It's basically like Mujoco but with more advanced materials/rendering/solvers, written all in Python thanks to being powered by Taichi, which makes it much more accessible.
I like it a lot. It's very accessible.
They went too far with marketing, but willing to ignore it for now.

2024 Annual Report Website Membership Newsletter 🌎+3M visitors / year(~50% YoY) ❤️~5000 members(~80% YoY) ✉️~15000 subscribers(~50% YoY) Blog posts Events Talks Townhalls 📝100+ 🎟️25+ 🎤20+ 💻20+ The OSI published over 100 blog posts…

2024 was a busy one! We released v 1.0 of the Open Source AI Definition, among many other accomplishments across 3 grand areas: licensing and legal, policy and standards, and research and outreach: https://opensource.org/2024-annual-report

🎉 Our new work tackling long horizon low-level manipulation in apartments is out! ~500GB of demonstration data in sim (you can generate more) and RL/IL baselines all provided. ManiSkill helped make this project scalable and faster to run via GPU sim compared to alternatives

📢 Introducing ManiSkill-HAB: A benchmark for low-level manipulation in home rearrangement tasks!

- GPU-accelerated simulation
- Extensive RL/IL baselines
- Vision-based, whole-body control robot dataset

All open-sourced: arth-shukla.github.io/mshab
🧵(1/5)

unfortunately not yet. It is only fast for simple scenes but for more realistic scenarios (robust locomotion, manipulation) it seems to be slower (rendering or state only simulation) than NVIDIA isaac lab and my labs simulator maniskill. Sharing a report next week with accurate benchmark numbers

Unless I am missing something, as far as I know CUDA is not supported on macOS, so I am not sure if any package manager can help in that situation.

popular computer vision package ultralytics (home of yolov8 and yolo11) was compromised.

a crypto miner was injected into versions 8.3.41 and 8.3.42.

link: github.com/ultralytics/...

Show & Tell with Silvio Traversaro as a guest speakerAs a long term contributor every thing conda and maintainer of the RoboStack project he has a great view... Reproducible Robotics Research using pixi with Silvio Traversaro – Show & Tell – October 25th, 2024

Check out Silvio Traversaro's amazing presentation on using Pixi in robotics research!
Watch the recording here: www.youtube.com/live/fvgfTv...
#Robotics #Pixi #Research #TechTalk

I completely agree on this being a social problem (and on social problems being harder to solve then tech ones). Why do you think there will be an increase of pressure on PyPI to solve those problems, if the demand is already met by conda-forge ?

Interesting, do you have any reference for the work in progress to support dynamic linking in wheels?