Brandon helped me solve an interesting problem during my PhD. I was building a sun-tracking sensor for a solar-powered lunar rover, and I needed to calculate the vector from the robot to the sun.
Brandon showed me how to use skyfield to solve the problem for a robot on Earth, and then he went back and forth via email to show me how to solve the problem on the moon.
In the end, we used skyfield to generate lookup tables for the places and times that we cared about, and it worked out great!
Surprisingly you can solve massive TSPs using heuristics. The solutions are not guaranteed to be optimal, but they can get very close to optimal without a crazy amount of computing power.
The Concorde TSP solver can apparently solve instances with 85.6k cities to optimality. Pretty amazing!
Could it be that the examples of “good” architecture were selected over centuries by the communities that chose to preserve them, while the “bad” examples were chosen by pretentious hacks who don’t have to live and work near these buildings?
I love the author’s point, but I wonder if there are better examples of modern architecture that just aren’t being celebrated by the in-crowd.
Cool! Check out the textbook “Probabilistic Robotics” for great explanations of the Kalman filter zoo. Bayes Filtering, Kalman Filtering, EKF, UKF, Particle Filter, etc.
I love my X1 Gen 7, but the black soft-touch coating started peeling within a week of buying it. I hope they've fixed that because it is otherwise my favorite laptop I've ever owned.
I emailed Ralph Baer when I was about 13 to ask if he knew where I could get an original pong chip to build my own video game. He sent me an extremely nice response explaining that he didn’t have any of the chip any more, but that I didn’t need it to build my own version of pong.
Nope. The Lidar pulses are encoded uniquely to each sensor, so one sensor can filter out an (already unlikely) direct hit from another lidar. The cameras are IR filtered and also unlikely to get hit by the lidar. Radar is pulse encoded in a similar way to lidar, although possibly more likely to lose performance if surrounded by a lot of other radar units. In general, dirt on your sensor lenses is a lot more annoying than interference from other cars.
Brandon showed me how to use skyfield to solve the problem for a robot on Earth, and then he went back and forth via email to show me how to solve the problem on the moon.
In the end, we used skyfield to generate lookup tables for the places and times that we cared about, and it worked out great!