They really went all out haha. They also have a linked website with a video and a tutorial. The tutorial has an easier to understand explanation of what they are doing.

It seems they use simple motion flow of the video to train the neural net, but they also use some kind of volume rendering to train the AI to predict and reconstruct the 3D scene with your robot. And they use cheap depth cameras but apparently it also works without depth. And this works for basically any robot you can imagine which is really brilliant.

Looking at all those pneumatic soft robots, now I wonder if you could invert this to use for an 3D input device. Like a kind of 3D printed pneumatic joystick that simply measures the resulting air pressure at the end of internal channels when you tilt or twist or move the joystick. No wiring or assembly, just 3D print a joystick and glue it to a board.

I suspect it might even be easier (forward vs inverse kinematics).

If you could combine both (pressure sensors and pistons) you could do force feedback input devices that can be 3D printed. Which could be useful for serious applications, like controlling a vehicle and "feeling" the road, or feeling the air pressure on the wings of a plane. Or controlling an excavator and "feeling" the earth by measuring feedback in the pneumatic pressure. Currently things like that is really expensive.

I agree with this 100%.

Capitalism is exceptional at finding ways to provide value when there is a new market. The issue comes when capital gets accumulated and concentrated in the hands of a few.

We've seen it dozens of times throughout history where a healthy merchant class with lots of opportunity for upwards mobility ends up in an oligarchy as the market becomes saturated then monopolies, duopolies, and cabals (guilds) form.

The state needs to use the "P" and "L" in PESTEL forces (Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal) that businesses (from single to large multinational) to identify new markets that need investment.

An examples would be new clean renewable electricity and one way of giving preferrence to this green energy by minimally taxing profts on this energy sold in the national market or international market via grid-interconnect networks ("Gridternets" if you will) with a clear plan to increase the tax to a normalised amount slowly overtime as the green share of the market approaches 100%.

It also has to be used to more aggressively dissuade markets that are more harmful than good now. An example of this is dirty power.

Coal, Oil, and Gas have done wonders for increasing people's quality of life because they unlocked a new energy density previously unattainable. Now we have alternatives that are by every metric better; more efficient and less polluting.

Therefore, these industries need to be taxed out of existence by using a logarithmic energy carbon tax that keeps increasing year on year. Corruption needs to be rooted out like a weed as much as possible using a politically independent organ of the state to keep it healthy.

Then there's markets that are stagnant in some state of capture: crumbling infrastructure, food retailer hypermarkets, etc. Windfall suprise taxes on incumbents and grants / zero interest loans for new competitors would reignight competition in those markets and the additional tax revenue can be used to fix the crumbling infrastructure these markets rely on.

And finally, I'd like to see a strong preference for co-operatives where ownership in a free market is much more evenly distributed by making them the least taxed commercial entities with businesses that have a higher concentration of ownership are taxed more through some sort of profit tax multiplier.

It's much harder for a business to act in a pure profit motive to the detriment of society if the employees have more ownership as it allows morality to be expressed through political power within this business. These employees also then benefit from the profit share as well which gives stability and upward mobility in exchange for their labour.

There, that's three proposals that could help towards decarbonisation, investing in underfunded infrastructure, and reducing inequality.

I am not a policy expert and there's bound to be problems with each of those proposals that I haven't thought of, but we have so much more to gain by working cooperatively together to build a system that aims to better humanity as a whole by using the best tools correctly and safety.

Until we reach an energy density which unlocks technology that enables things like a resourceless economy (a la Star Trek luxury space communism), we're stuck with the tools of money and capital as the ways to transfer value.

I personally can't wait for the day where "reputation" rather than money becomes the currency of society, I am willing to work with the tools we have right now to build that future, and I have faith that others are willing to build it with me.

Fact based education standards.

Teaching a bunch of lies about American exceptionalism and how imperialism is actually good isn’t what I’d call “fact based”

Stop racism in policing

Right like how democrats in nearly all major cities increased police funding and almost none passed any meaningful reform.

Expanded healthcare subsidies

But don’t remotely consider universal healthcare

Preserve democracy

Preserve the status quo which I wouldn’t call a democracy. A democracy enacts the will of the people, democrats don’t even have a democratic primary for their own party.

You've certainly whitewashed Dems quite a lot. You're fundamentally not wrong though. As bad as the Dems are, and they are very bad, MAGA is undeniably worse. If we had some other electoral system, we could safely explore other options. But we don't. We have FPTP, which makes it a binary choice between bad and worse.

And worse is just so, so much worse. That doesn't make bad good, but it's still a binary choice. You'd have to be evil or stupid to try to muddy the waters so that bad seems close enough to worse that people don't feel the urgency of choosing bad to prevent worse.