YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Germans are totally capable of their own scams (see Dieselgate or Berlin airport or ...).

Seriously a laundry folding robot excites me much more than a CLI that can generate code. I enjoy generating code myself! I don’t enjoy laundry. Total killer app.

Eyerolling to anyone with half a brain.

But maybe most people don't have half a brain.

this one doesn't sound that evil though? Just a simple portmanteau that may not sound as stupid in German?

Edit : typo

Don't know about Lingotto. Looks Italian.

Cherry Ventures is the only German investor. ETC is EU.

I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vHfbUIQeW_A

You move to USA from a 3rd world country, take money from the Americans, Arabs and the Chinese, hire bunch of Israeli, Pakistani, Canadians, Romanians and Russian engineers and and you become an American success story.

You found a robotics company in Germany and you instantly fail the purity test, you are American company if you took too much US money, you are actually Polish if you hired too many Polish engineers etc.

It's just weird attitude.

It matters more where the money goes, in this case into European innovation.

People demanding the perfect isolated national champion that takes no foreign money, no foreign workers, no foreign inputs, and uses no foreign services are going to be disappointed.

I read it as confirmation that there is apparently no shortage of investor money in Europe, since US investors are willing and able to invest here.

It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.

They, per the article, have set up manufacturing there and a research lab in SF.

The co-founder has also relocated to the USA.

Much of the dismissal I think doesn’t come from a bad place - people see potential in europe, why can’t it a similar market?

Poking holes in every new idea is a pan-European pastime - it's how people in this region of the world managed to survive despite exhausting its resources.

https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/

And not sure what RobCo is doing exactly, but LLMs are probably part of it as well.

Research is using a lot of VLM (or whatever Jim Fan decided to call them this year) when it comes to manipulation (robot arm). For navigation it is still a little mixed bag, best to see self driving advancement for that. On the control side (cool jumping humanoid) it's a mixture of RL/IL and traditional control(MPC) and running a slow ass VLM/LLM is not an option.

SOTA is hard to say in the sense that there's just so much variation to the task you want to measure. This can be considered SOTA in one aspect https://youtu.be/3aQWvdCac9o As it's an robot that can lift a heavy unknown object without information about it, RL trained in simulation, but at the same time trained eye will see that the task is made simple by fridge being put on a pallet making the bottom of it exposed for grabbing. On the other hand you have PI (Chelsea Finn / Sergey Levine) https://youtu.be/cRZNwgvcWUg that can do nothing of the thing above but can cook food and fold shirts. Deformable objects and tools interaction is hard so their demo is more focused on understanding and interacting with the world compared to the fine motion like the Boston dynamics one. The latter is also teleoperated, and teleoperation tend to look good but have pretty sad deployment success %

Industry is... Depends on startup vs established. VLA/LLM is flashy but really even 95% success rate is not enough for factory/logistics automation if the failure is unrecoverable, and VLM/LLM is far, faaaaaaaaaaaar from that success rate. In controlled settings traditional pipeline of detection + motion planning often outperform VLM/LLM hybrid models by a mile. Established ones have run humanleess logistic centers for many years now and they're seldom VLA stuff, although there is an interest in using it for the 5% failure cases. But they're not interested in SOTA.

The next level up of decacorn is sub 100 so if we only tracked that it’d be a bit limited.

They probably just used the Germans because they are cheaper.

It's not necessarily a bad thing if there's balance to it. Maybe it's OK if Germans are great at industrial automation and Americans are great at writing word processors. But I'm not sure there's a nice balance to it. Especially if you're in a developing country which is good at neither of those things.

These are shitty job tbh. Friend of a friend worked on designing and testing windscreen wiper motors in Poland. Company did a round of layoffs and there are zero jobs in the country. There is one job in US - nobody will sponsor a visa. He doesn't know the language to work in Asia.

He switched to software.

A lifetime of working in mission critical environments taught me one thing. When people leave, nothing happens. People come and go, and everyone is replaceable, even those who believe the company will fail without them. Most departures barely make a ripple. With today's advances in technology, it's only becoming more likely that none of us will be needed down the road.

Do you have a source on this? I live in Germany and most people I know either invest into stocks (safe, boring ones), invest into a house/apartment/land or similar, or are too broke to even save anything at all (most people).