I highly recommend starting with the SO-ARM101 and the LeRobot tutorial. They're super cheap, its insanely quick to get started, and you can even buy pre-made kits like at https://partabot.com . It's the "Hello World" of robotics now, imo.
Don't bother with a Jetson Nano, you don't need that to get started, and by the time you need that you'll know a lot already. You can just drive the robot from your laptop!
Getting to training your own VLA fine-tuned model is a super quick and easy process. You can see examples of other people completing the tutorial and uploading their training/evaluation datasets here (shameless plug for my thing): https://app.destroyrobots.com
I wouldn't bother much with ROS at first tbh. It'll bog you down, and startups are moving toward using other approaches that are more developer friendly, like Rust-based embedded.
You can go far with a robot connected to USB though!
It's an ad only you can see, I don't see the harm.
> What were the privacy concerns of yesterday that we don’t need to worry about today?
The web/internet is a hell of a lot more private today than 10 years ago. Third party cookies are basically gone, mobile tracking is going out the door with Apple leading that charge, there are tons of relatively popular browsers and extensions that reduce tracking even more, there's enough privacy legislation that big companies have had to re-architect to preserve privacy as much as possible by default.
Hell, if we're just talking about Meta, they literally nuked a thriving third-party developer API ecosystem to appease people's privacy concerns, out right.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but this is kinda cool! As long as the user data doesn't leave the Meta ecosystem (no reason to think it does right now, the ad in question here is from Meta itself), it's not a privacy concern since only you are being shown those unique ads with you in them.
Even if other advertisers start using the system, as long as the generated resulting images are never shared with the advertisers and are unique to each user, its just a futuristic way to help you "imagine" what having XYZ product would be like, which is what most ads strive to do.
People have knee-jerk reactions to anything to do with ads because of the privacy concerns of yesterday, understandably. But if you actually step back and think about this, there's no reduction in privacy that I can see. If people are creeped out by it, I think they should maybe let people disable them with a setting.
But in general, making ads more effective without giving advertisers more data about us is a great thing for the continuation of free amazing internet services!
> There is a difference in ease of use. I could never use photoshop to fake something like that even if I wanted to.
You couldn't, but basically any VFX shop easily could. Point is, it doesn't make anything possible that wasn't already possible, it just makes it more accessible. That's an inevitability with technology, as time goes on. The counter is not to try and suppress it, that has never worked and never will.
> There is a clear risk from these sorts of models as they get better - I mean recreating specific individuals’ likenesses in compromising images (or even worse, video).
This has been possible without AI for a very very long time now (just open photoshop, etc). It barely ever happens, and society hasn't collapsed.
I keep seeing this argument come up and it baffles me that informed technologists take it seriously, as if it were impossible to convincingly manipulate images before DALL-E came around.
> We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself.
I believe there's a logical fallacy that described this thinking. I definitely don't think the smartphone revolution was inevitable, at least not on the timetable it happened on because Jobs pushed it forward.
Yea, Palm had large-screen phones, and yet most people didn't care and still didn't have smartphones. That could have kept repeating for a long time more, with just Blackberry holding the market and just for "business phones," if Apple hadn't come in with its consumer gravitas.
It's easy to look in hindsight and think the future was inevitable, but it often wasn't.
Garnet is a no-code tool that lets you build your custom community space online. Instead of having to weave together 10 different tools for interactions such as fireside chats, icebreakers, etc, Garnet supports all these interactions in one place. We allow you to compose all these different interactions and use-cases to make a home for your community that feels like it was made for you.
We're fully funded, founded by two engineers from Twilio and Airbnb, and looking to expand our team with both software engineers and product designers.
Software Engineers: looking for quick learners who are passionate about difficult architecture challenges that come from running untrusted user code to support custom apps on the platform. Frontend is a big surface area for us right now, but we also have a lot of interesting backend challenges.
Product Designers: Looking for experience building and maintaining a design system of composable components, and good evidence-based UX sensibilities. One of the trickiest parts of our platform design-wise is we have all these "apps" that can be arbitrarily composed together in community venues by users.
This is... really impressive actually. Such a simple mechanic, but well executed. I like how the red block concept is introduced to you after the first few points are scored. The details of the implementation are really impressive for a first project, or even for a game project in general tbh.