Today's writing tip: work in a distraction free enviroh my toast just popped! I'll be right back...

Maybe your hand was cozy and warm, until it was just a bit too cozy. :(

I'm proud to say that my books are written 100% by a human. All clunky sentences, hackneyed clichés, and plot holes are genuine human incompetence, not that simulated AI version.

That's not to say they're not worth tinkering with. Every time we try to make one, we learn things, but mostly about ourselves.

So humanoid robots are a very hard problem to solve, that don't solve many problems. Why bother? Marketing! They may be broadly useless, but dang they're cool.

Humanoid robots also aren't very good solutions to many problems. There are better body plans and manipulators than biped with hands for almost any task. You don't make a robot to operate a vacuum. You make a vacuum operate itself...

The form factor also doesn't leave a lot of space for power and processing. Both are getting smaller and smaller, but neither fit well into a human shaped space. At least not yet.

Next, humans have this weird brain thing, connected to thousands of sensors. It has many flaws, but a thing it's very good at is interpreting and reacting to the environment. We have some pretty cool sensors and processors, but nothing can even approximate what our brains do casually...

The few dozen actuators we can fit into a robot have a hard time managing that. We just don't have anything that adequately simulate muscles. Our motors and pistons can to incredible things, but they just don't behave like muscle...

Humans have hundreds of skeletal muscles dedicated to locomotion and balance. Even those not directly related are sometimes needed to stabilize us. We need that because our body plan is fundamentally unstable. Falling over is the default state of human...