Philadelphia, PA
Joined November 2009
What are we looking at here? Well, aside from some used Fanuc robots, this is a Fanuc R-2000iB/165F, R30iA control. It's a 165kg payload robot typically used for heavy payload material handling, and spot welding. You'll see thousands of them in automotive plant body shops spot welding car bodies etc. Well, small secret, supply vs demand applies heavily with these robots. One can buy them on the used market for scrap value. This unit has 7k hours on the counter. It's hardly worn out. It's scratched up and cosmetically used. But it'll last 20 more years. So with that said - another small secret - they typically run HandlingTool or SpotTool OS software. They can also run ArcTool - so they can MIG weld just like any welding robot. Neato. Are they perfect? Well no. They have a massive wrist that would get in the way of itself in a lot of situations. They're big, slow (relatively) and clunky. But they have a shitload of reach, if you crash it, it won't break anything other than what you crashed into, and again, they're cheap. I use this unit for GreaseBot calibration, GreaseBot demos, and also for SolidBot development. SolidBot is self funded, my co-founder and I do not have venture capital, investors, grants, we invest our time and resources for zero pay as we develop it. I take zero pay from GreaseBots, which funds my shop and the ability to have these machines. Why did I buy that old unit sitting next to this R2000? Well, it came with a $20k+ welding power supply (that doesn't belong on that cell due to age - someone decided they needed it and spent way too much money on it and an analog interface)... I got that cell for a grand, with the welder. I don't want that cell. I want the welder. I can't use that cell for SolidBot because it's RJ2 and does not support ASCII Upload, which is needed. Anyone want a running ArcMate 100i with dual aux (one is shot) - $1k, I'll load your truck. So doing this on a shoestring budget, you have to be scrappy. I can find stupid deals and capitalize on them, if I am good at anything, it's that. Slowly we will build up to the point of having much nicer, newer equipment. It takes time, I am not accumulating debt to do this. I did it before and it evaporated my entire net worth (most of it..I didn't bankrupt when IR died, I sold most everything and paid my debt). Not happening again. Anyway - TLDR; that's a spot welding robot running ArcTool set up to now MIG weld.
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Matt Berk retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why. @log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners". A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below. What your TV is doing The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1]. What is insane: it happens on connected devices too. Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1]. He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device. xitter.cf/log4j/status/211376224… It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds. Step 1: Turn off ACR Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services LG: Live Plus Vizio: Viewing Data Roku: "Use info from TV inputs" Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open. Step 2: Give smart devices their own network Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network. Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former. 1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty) 2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image) 3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint 4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS) 5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it. Why they do this TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you. In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024. This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4]. TL;DR 1. ACR off 2. Ads + voice off 3. Smart devices on their own network 4. NextDNS filtering on the router Sources: [1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203 [2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t… [3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/… [4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
i own a relatively new (2025) samsung tv. i kept getting weirdly targeted ads. i tried reversing the firmware but it was aes encrypted and no keys unless tear it apart and do uart/jtag magic. zero days it is. root shell on new samsung TVs! discovered PRIVACY HORROR. write up?
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“A stable, prosperous, confident society is the collectivist's worst enemy. Chaos is his natural habitat.”
Once you see the world through this lens, a lot of things that looked random suddenly make sense. You understand why Macron recognized a Palestinian state at the UN. Not a state with borders it controls, a single government, or elections. A symbol. A gesture for domestic consumption, performed on the world stage. That's the politics of posture over reality, the obłuda I described earlier: what matters isn't what is true on the ground, it's the narrative you get to emit. You understand why Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France's hard left and a man trained in Trotskyist organizations in his youth, made Gaza the center of his politics and refused for months to call Hamas a terrorist organization. Look at the mechanism. He doesn't address French Muslims as individuals with their own jobs, families, ambitions and disagreements. He addresses them as a bloc. A mass to be mobilized. That's the collectivist reflex in its purest form: you don't speak to people, you herd categories. Yesterday the proletariat, today identity blocs. The individual disappears every time. You understand why Zohran Mamdani built his rise on the Democratic Socialists of America. The mayor of New York isn't just a progressive Democrat. He's a DSA member, and DSA doesn't hide what it is: an organization that openly calls itself socialist and treats the Democratic Party as a vehicle. His campaign promised a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses. Every one of those ideas has the same shape: the individual steps back, the city steps in. The price is set by the planner, the store is run by the planner, and voters are addressed as categories, tenants, riders, communities, rather than as free people who can build something of their own. And Mamdani didn't come out of nowhere. The same movement helped send Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018, and Bernie Sanders spent decades making the word "socialist" respectable in American politics. Different faces, same software. The lie isn't that they hide their ideology. It's the promise attached to it: that you can freeze prices without killing supply, that the state can run what entrepreneurs run, that someone else will always pay. That promise has been tested on every continent. It has never been kept. And you understand the most important thing: collectivists need chaos. This isn't a metaphor. It's their own doctrine. Lenin's strategy in 1914 was to turn the war between nations into a civil war inside them. The Soviet Union spent decades arming and funding movements across the Middle East and pushed through the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The KGB had an entire doctrine, "active measures," dedicated to amplifying every division inside Western societies. A stable, prosperous, confident society is the collectivist's worst enemy. Chaos is his natural habitat. Why? Because chaos is the perfect justification. It justifies emergency powers. It justifies more state. It turns citizens into frightened masses looking for a shepherd. It replaces individual judgment with tribal loyalty. A society at peace with itself asks the planner: what do we need you for? Look at the two great conflicts of our time through this lens. Russia's war in Ukraine was launched by a former KGB officer who called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe of the century. A man formed in the exact school that treated chaos as a weapon. He doesn't just wage war on Ukraine. He wages it on Western cohesion, feeding every division he can find in our elections, our streets, our feeds. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the perfect fuel for Western politics. It splits every campus, every party, every city. It lets politicians like Mélenchon build an electoral base on permanent outrage. And for everyone who lives off that outrage, a real peace would be a disaster. Ask yourself honestly: who in our political class actually has an interest in this conflict ending? That's the pattern. The people who live off chaos never solve it. They manage it, they feed it, they posture around it. Because a solved problem is a lost lever. Freedom produces order from the bottom up: people who own things, build things, trade with each other and have something to lose. Collectivism produces disorder from the bottom up and then sells you order from the top down. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
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Next time you think "this is impossible", replace it with "this will work out no matter what". Give your brain the space to adapt instead of shut down. The power of delusional optimism.
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With 10 year yield overlaid by @bot
China continues to dramatically underrepresent how much gold the PBOC is buying every month. According to trade data, China bought 25 tonnes (vs 20 officially) and another 23 tonnes in September according to the WGC. Meanwhile gold just dropped to a 3 month low below $4,000/oz
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Bioprinting Blood Vessels in Space Hard Tech Headlines: - America is getting a new robotic shipyard. HD Hyundai and Kiewit have announced plans to build a highly automated shipyard on an existing industrial site with deepwater access to the Gulf of Mexico (exact location undisclosed). The shipyard will use robotic welding, digital twins, and automated production systems to build U.S. Navy auxiliary and commercial vessels. Construction is targeted for 2027, with plans to create up to 3,000 American jobs at full capacity. - The U.S. Space Force has selected six companies to support space domain awareness, including Anduril, LeoLabs, Slingshot Aerospace, InTrack, Electro Optic Systems (EOS), and NorthStar Earth & Space. The agreements focus on providing surge capacity for tracking satellites and other objects in orbit during crises and periods of increased demand. - @G_Bionics, an Italian robotics startup, plans to build a network of three facilities for collecting humanoid robot training data, starting with a 5,000-square-meter site in Italy. The facilities will recreate real industrial environments to train and test humanoid robots using physical data and digital simulations. - @OrbitalOps_ has secured a DoW award worth up to $35M to develop and demonstrate a reusable spacecraft designed for rapid in-orbit logistics, transporting satellites and other payloads between orbits. - American aerospace company XTI Aerospace has launched Evolver DFR, a drone-as-first-responder program utilizing French-made Parrot drones, autonomous docking stations, and command-and-control software. - Leonardo and Rheinmetall have reportedly secured over $4 billion in contracts with the Italian Army for new main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, according to Italian media reports. - Red Cat has introduced two new autonomous unmanned surface vessels, including an 18-foot vessel designed for one-way attack missions, ISR, and deployment from larger naval ships, and a 39-foot vessel designed for extended autonomous ISR, maritime defense, and logistics operations. - NASA astronauts aboard the ISS began bioprinting blood vessel tissue yesterday, mixing thawed cells with biological printing material. - @AustinSensingCo has announced the deployment of drone detection sensors at 10+ major university campuses across the South and Midwest to secure college football stadiums and surrounding airspace, enabling campus police to detect, track, and identify drones and locate their operators in real time. - Japan is providing the Royal Malaysian Navy with a $10.5M counter-drone system to strengthen its naval defenses against unmanned aerial threats. - KUKA Robotics' industrial robotic arms are being deployed in car washes, using 3D scanning to generate customized washing paths for each vehicle. Unlike traditional systems, the robotic arms adapt to each vehicle's unique contours, cutting wash times from 8 to 4 minutes, with projected water savings of up to 80%. Autowash, the car wash chain piloting the technology, plans to roll it out across all 26 locations.
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The problem is the Dems corruption cost us a lot more. . . .and it's MY money and not Saudi money. 😂
The corruption that is putting money in Trump's pockets is costing all of us.
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Matt Berk retweeted
Ever wondered what it’s like to learn robot autonomy @Stanford? Now you can. Today, we’re opening up the robot autonomy teaching materials that my collaborators and I have been developing over the past several years—for anyone, anywhere, completely free. At the heart of this effort is Principles of Robot Autonomy (PoRA), a textbook inspired by the Stanford robot autonomy course series I’ve been teaching since 2017. Robot autonomy has evolved from a research discipline into a technology deployed in the real world. Building capable autonomous systems requires more than understanding individual algorithms: it requires understanding how perception, state estimation, planning, control, and learning work together in a complete autonomy stack. That’s what we set out to teach with PoRA: bringing classical robotics and modern AI together in one coherent framework, grounded in both theory and practice. Coming soon in print from Cambridge University Press, Principles of Robot Autonomy is also freely available online and comes with a comprehensive collection of open educational resources: 📖 Textbook, arxiv.org/abs/2608.03496 — Foundations of robot autonomy, from classical methods to modern AI-based approaches. 🎥 Video lectures, porabook.com/lectures/ Lectures from my Stanford courses on robot autonomy and on optimal and learning-based control. 💻 Interactive exercises, porabook.com/exercises/ — Hands-on Python implementations and Jupyter notebooks. 📝 Teaching materials, porabook.com/instructors/ — Lecture slides and resources for instructors. 🌐 Explore all PoRA resources, porabook.com/ — Including Ask the Book, an AI study assistant integrated throughout the textbook to answer questions, explain derivations, and connect ideas across chapters. 📣 Read the Stanford announcement: news.stanford.edu/stories/20… Our goal is simple: to make high-quality education in robot autonomy accessible to students, researchers, engineers, educators, and anyone curious about how autonomous robotic systems work. I believe that sharing knowledge is fundamental to the mission of a university. Autonomous robotics—and Physical AI more broadly—are among the defining technological frontiers of our time. We want to help more people understand these technologies, build with them, and advance the field. A huge thank you to my co-authors, @DanieleGammelli, Joseph Lorenzetti, @katielulula, and @GioeleZardini, and to everyone who helped bring this project to life. Explore the resources, use them in your own learning or teaching, and please share them with anyone who might find them useful! #Robotics #PhysicalAI #ArtificialIntelligence #AutonomousSystems #Education @Stanford @StanfordEng @StanfordAILab @StanfordHAI
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robots need control panels too engineered and built this one for @aseonlabs robotic AV servicing pod
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Matt Berk retweeted
if you moved to el Segundo send me ⚙️ in dm, let’s chat
If you’re a talented engineer, moving to el Segundo will guarantee you a job. We’re at the point in the cycle where there are far more job postings than people.
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Matt Berk retweeted
The biggest industrial irony in one photo. Left: Oliver Blume, CEO of VW. Right: Wan Gang, the man China calls the "Father of EVs." In the 90s, Wan spent 11 years as an engineer at Audi. In 2000, he went back to Beijing and told the State Council: "We will never catch Germany on ICE. So let's change the game.” He became Minister of Science and Technology and architected China's entire EV push. Result in Q3 2025: VW China sales: -38.5% to 405k cars The biggest drop since Covid. The student didn't just beat the teacher, he rewrote the whole exam. Credit : Philipp Raasch
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Where to make money and come back home able to start your business or start compounding by investing. Yes, the US and Switzerland are "expensive" in terms of cost of life but many underestimate how much money you can sill make and set aside. In many other places simply you can't set aside and you never start investing.
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The beating will continue until your wages are zero.
🇺🇸 H-2A farm visas hit a record 318,317 in FY2025 📈 🇲🇽 Mexico: 286,820 (90.1%) 🇿🇦 South Africa: 15,512 🇯🇲 Jamaica: 4,681 🇬🇹 Guatemala: 4,653 🇳🇮 Nicaragua: 1,344 Source: US State Dept
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Matt Berk retweeted
Commissioning of the HSPT sintering furnace has commenced at the @iperionx Virginia Titanium Manufacturing Campus. This cold wall furnace will be used primarily for HSPT powder to part processing, increasing capacity, throughput and production flexibility. IperionX's patented HSPT technology enables conventional press-and-sinter powder metallurgy to transform titanium powder into semi-finished or near-net-shape components with wrought-like properties without melting. HSPT develops an ultra-fine-grained microstructure that incumbent titanium supply chains generally obtain through forging and extensive hot working, resulting in low-cost, high quality titanium parts.
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Matt Berk retweeted
The advanced 300-ton, six-axis powder metallurgy press has been successfully commissioned at IperionX’s Virginia Titanium Manufacturing Campus. This press can triple IperionX’s existing powder metallurgy capacity and materially expands the range of component geometries and production rates available for customer programs.
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The cultural/architectural decline of London: This vandalised phonebox is/was in honour of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who designed Britain’s iconic red telephone boxes during the 1920s/30s. It symbolically sits in front of the hotel that his grandfather designed. Now look at it. What sort of a mindset would want to sticker, graffiti, and vandalise what is essentially a symbol of London, and of course, Britain? This phonebox wasn't in use but purely a tiny museum dedicated to the birth of the red phone box. I hope that whatever your political laning may be, you agree that this is a diabolical shame. 🤝 @PubHistoryTours
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Yesterday we visited Shenzhen InnoX Academy, a hardware incubator founded by Li Zexiang, often called the godfather of robotics in China. His student Frank Wang started DJI out of his HKUST lab, and Li backed it early. Most hardware incubators give you access to 3D printers and CNC machines. InnoX also has stress testing rigs for corrosion, drop tests and sustained use, so you find out how your product fails before shipping. But what I found most interesting is that they help with the first step of manufacturing. Going from a prototype to your first production batch is hard for a lot of hardware startups and where it's easy to lose speed. InnoX has manufacturing people on site who build that first larger batch for you AND help you write the standard operating procedures to go to efficient larger scale production. They also have a large network of manufacturers, and some of them invest in kind by putting up the capital and the people to make your product. For a hardware startup, that can mean your seed round isn’t only cash but someone providing you with 35 of their workers and factory space to produce your first 100k units.
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I'm excited to launch Relational Capital, a $50m solo GP fund. I spent the last 8 years as a founder, building @usekojo into the largest US construction procurement platform. Now I'm backing founders at the earliest stages with $1m-$5m checks. An abundant future lies ahead 🇺🇸
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This table speaks for itself!
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Never liked the paperwork side of business much anyway. Can’t wait.
Wake up. Every profession deemed white-collar, the middle class dream, is about to be decimated by AI, at a much faster pace than anticipated, with monstrous social consequences.
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