simulation

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Sorry, the Data Says Communist
2 months ago
- The author built an open-source economic simulator and ran three economies over 50 years.
- Extractivist Capitalism: GDP grew but 33.7% of the population faced social exclusion; the top 1% held over 30% of wealth.
- Mixed Socialism (Norway-like): GDP doubled with almost no social exclusion; top 1% still held 30% of wealth.
- State-Led Communism: Highest GDP, no social exclusion, and top 1% held only 8% of wealth.
- The results indicate that extraction is hardcoded in capitalist dynamics, not a bug.
- The author critiques economic reporting as propaganda shaped by colonial extraction history.
- The simulation assumes surplus value (Marx's theory) and shows that without counterweights, capitalism leads to exclusion.
Practical Simulations for Machine Learning is out now
2 months ago
- New book co-authored with Mars, Tim, and Jon covering Unity ML-Agents simulations.
- Explains how to use simulations to train machine learning models.
- Available in bookshops and on O'Reilly Online Learning platform.
Can AI Run a Food Truck Business?
2 months ago
- Operate a 30-day food truck simulation with 34 tools and a 12-factor demand model.
- Customize menu from over 20 recipes and set prices.
- Manage ingredient orders with real shelf life and spoilage.
- Select optimal location based on daily weather and events.
- Hire or fire staff like cooks, cashiers, and all-rounders.
- Upgrade food truck for increased capacity.
- Take loans and repay before default to manage capital.
- Negotiate with premium suppliers for better ingredients.
A Functional Taxonomy of World Models by Fei-Fei Li
2 months ago
- World models represent a functional taxonomy encompassing renderers, simulators, and planners, each serving distinct roles in AI's spatial intelligence.
- Renderers generate visually faithful observations, like images or video frames, primarily for human consumption without necessarily understanding underlying physical structures.
- Simulators output geometrically and physically accurate states, serving both human professionals (e.g., architects) and computer agents (e.g., robots) by providing structural and dynamic fidelity.
- Planners produce actions based on observations and goals, closing the perception-action loop for agents like robots in unstructured environments.
- The three categories are projections of a single underlying loop (agent-action-state-observation), with shared knowledge of geometry, physics, and dynamics enabling potential unification.
- Simulation is pivotal as it bridges rendering and planning, addressing commercial applications (e.g., digital twins, robotics) while facing challenges like data scarcity and the sim-to-real gap.
- Boundaries between renderers, simulators, and planners are blurring, with research moving towards unified models that can render, simulate, and plan, though tensions in data and optimization remain.
- World models aim to enable machines to understand, imagine, and interact with the physical world, raising long-term questions about maintaining alignment between internal representations and external reality.
Show HN: Leet Robotics: Learn robotics and ROS2 with hands-on courses
2 months ago
- The platform offers a free, accessible robotics learning environment with no account required to start.
- Users can pick a course, use an in-browser workspace with ROS2, Gazebo, and Foxglove, and begin coding and simulating robots.
- Featured courses include 'Intro to ROS2' where learners build an autonomous museum-guide robot, covering fundamentals like nodes, topics, TF, and obstacle avoidance.
- Interactive lessons with drag-and-play elements are designed to enhance understanding through hands-on experimentation.
- The cloud workspace allows building, simulating, and visualizing robotics projects entirely in the browser, with no setup or hardware needed.
Tiny Tapeout Explorer: WASM FET-level circuit SIM&vis
3 months ago
- Interactive web-based visualization tool for exploring Tiny Tapeout integrated circuit designs.
- Features: WASM-powered engine with layout parser and circuit extractor; advanced 3D GDSII/OASIS visualization using WebGL 2.0; interactive switch-level simulation with VGA output.
- Major upgrade to the original TT09 WebGL GDS Viewer by Alexander Mordvintsev, with source code available on GitHub.
- Allows users to select shuttles to view project status and details from the Tiny Tapeout community.
Do Wavy Walls Use Fewer Bricks? I Tested It in Blender
3 months ago
- Crinkle Crankle walls are curvy brick walls that originated in ancient Egypt but are now more common in England.
- Online sources often claim these wavy walls use fewer bricks and are stronger than straight walls, but details are sparse and contradictory.
- The author built procedural serpentine and straight walls in Blender's geometry nodes to test brick usage and strength.
- At 100 meters, the serpentine wall used 55% as many bricks as a typical straight wall, confirming the brick-saving myth.
- Lateral impact tests with heavy balls showed both wall types failed, but the serpentine wall suffered less damage, potentially lowering repair material costs.
Drone Physics
3 months ago
- Describes drone physics using six degrees of freedom and coordinate systems like North-East-Down (NED).
- Covers state variables (position, velocity, orientation, angular velocity) and forces/torques (thrust, gravity).
- Derives linear and angular equations of motion, including Newton's second law and the Transport Theorem.
- Explains motor and propeller dynamics for generating forces and torques via thrust and drag coefficients.
- Discusses control systems: allocation matrices, PID controllers for reference tracking, and path planning.

simulation

Sorry, the Data Says Communist

Practical Simulations for Machine Learning is out now

Can AI Run a Food Truck Business?

A Functional Taxonomy of World Models by Fei-Fei Li

Show HN: Leet Robotics: Learn robotics and ROS2 with hands-on courses

Tiny Tapeout Explorer: WASM FET-level circuit SIM&vis

Do Wavy Walls Use Fewer Bricks? I Tested It in Blender

Drone Physics