Anthony Cowley
Functional roboticist. Robots, Haskell, Rust, nix, emacs, FPV… and the rest of life, too.
- As much as I think LLM coding assistants can be great aids, it is reaalllly hard to have it not come across as a Tobias take.
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- Mario Kart World seems to have a weirdly uncomfortable relationship with its platformer side. Why not make split screen Free Roam less hidden, and why not embrace the THPS influences and make charge jumps easier to activate?
- Related to this article, I wonder about RL training with rewards for successful compilations of generated code that pass tests from inadequate specs. That kind of feedback loop again creates superficial progress at the expense of insidious failure. spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-de...
- People who dismiss all the recent humanoid #robot demos as being preset choreography or teleop undervalue the advance in having these things balance so well. People who dismiss the choreography and teleop under appreciate the remaining challenges.
- New Too Many Zooz was very needed today! youtu.be/PyxTyxefeMA?...
- I can’t believe this is real, “The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)….” www.office.com
- Reposted by Anthony CowleyHappy 85th birthday to Hayao Miyazaki ♡
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- Reposted by Anthony Cowleyanother robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls
- Really nice to see so much shared on the Olaf robot: the paper covers physical design considerations and RL behavior training to accommodate physical constraints. arxiv.org/abs/2512.16705
- Reposted by Anthony CowleyMy 14-yo-son has recreated the climax of Back to the Future in gingerbread and I thought you should know.
- Reposted by Anthony Cowleythis is the greatest feeling, when the cord box proves its utility to a family member
- Reposted by Anthony CowleyMy "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".
- Rob Reiner’s output as a film director is just stunning… “cultural impact” really is the right scale. arstechnica.com/culture/2025...
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- Hah, really thought it was just me who has trouble starting workouts on the Apple Watch Workout app. Even worse now with running gloves for the cold weather. www.macrumors.com/2025/11/20/a...
- This is a really nice presentation of the efficiency challenges of reverse-mode AD!
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- Interesting how discussions about how the iPhone Air should/must have at least two cameras to be a compelling product differ so evenly as to whether the second camera should be wider or narrower (zoom).
- This skewering of the tech industry day to day is incredibly uncomfortable to watch. Too real. youtu.be/VCivp2qnhr8?...
- Best ad for computer programming I've seen in quite some time! youtu.be/GWXCCBsOMSg?...
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- Reposted by Anthony Cowley15 US states and territories have formed a new Public Health Alliance, which will counter the absence of federal leadership by tracking outbreaks, issuing guidance, buying vaccines and more. Members of the new alliance include CA, CO, CT, DE, GU, HI, IL, MD, MA, NJ, NY, NC, OR, RI, WA.
- This is a great interview. I really appreciate that despite the superficial bluntness of the term he's now famous for, Doctorow tries to highlight nuance and acknowledge universal human weaknesses.
- Woof, trying out a tutorial and it has all these nice steps for using hosted notebooks. Here's where we install the dependencies... but the tutorial is several months old and so the dependencies don't actually install properly and I guess that's the end of that.
- Oh, boy: an infotainment software update pushed on a Friday that shuts down a car while it’s driving. Lot of bad things coming together there. arstechnica.com/cars/2025/10...
- Reposted by Anthony CowleyThis two-parter below is exactly why it's hard to make clothes in the United States. Let's look at how much it costs to produce a button-up shirt in the US. 🧵
- Reposted by Anthony Cowley(forgetting the word for antibiotics) do i need cancel culture
- Figure's new humanoid #robot looks really impressive. It'll be really interesting to see if palm cameras and a little bit of tactile sensing in finger tips is enough for consistent performance in delicate manipulation tasks. www.figure.ai/news/introdu...
- The anti-anti-AI rhetoric in my feeds has reached a pitch that circles back around to demonization and conspiracies. I find memes like this to be a useful touchstone: you often have both banal interactions and insidious trends and influences at the same time.
- A question for folks who have felt the weight of the yoke of Jira: is it that you could make a better Jira, or is it that Jira reflects and amplifies certain management ideas to a point of self-injury?
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- Whenever I bump into Passkeys I'm reminded of how bad an impression that entire technology made by promoting a model that would further lock you into a big tech co’s ecosystem. Not only did the tech itself burn its credibility, but I lost trust in commentators recommending them, too.
- Reposted by Anthony Cowley"It looks like they’re pumping into a horse. You have a little child, a little fragile child, and you get a vat of eighty different vaccines, I guess. Eighty different blends, and they pump it in... So, ideally, a woman won't take Tylenol." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...
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- Reposted by Anthony Cowleyimagine if a family of beavers randomly showed up right now and finished whatever thing you've been putting off
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- Reposted by Anthony CowleyI am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN. It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package. Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats
- Reposted by Anthony CowleyI got tired of mashing together tools to write long threads with 𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 and ℳα†ℏ—so I wrote La𝑇𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑡! It converts Markdown and LaTeX to Unicode that can be used in “tweets”, and automatically splits long threads. Try it out! keenancrane.github.io/LaTweet/
- Fall weather coming in like the Kool-Aid Man.
- Reposted by Anthony CowleyHighest level of support since Gallup started asking this question a quarter century ago
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- I'm only something over 25 years, but I think the key part of the observation here is not age, but that the #emacs I'm using today feels so much different than the one I used 25 years ago. It's not stasis, it's the adaptation that's so remarkable.
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- Reposted by Anthony CowleyI can
- A commenter on this article suggests that disclaimers/reminders (e.g. "This text is generated by...") be periodically inserted in LLM chatbot interactions, and I do wonder how much that could help. I can imagine it helping some light to moderate users maintain their tether.
- Reposted by Anthony CowleyGame on.
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- The charts OpenAI shared are so devastatingly bad that they’ve stolen a surprising amount of the spotlight. I am genuinely curious how they came to be.
- I keep finding myself with complaints about the available basic Lean 4 tutorials. I think that relying on `rfl` too early is not helpful. Also don’t love how typeclasses are brought in so quickly and how unfolding the instance definitions is so hairy.
- OSS users being hostile to new users of the software is so bizarre. New users have questions, you think onboarding could be better to reduce those questions but aren’t able to (or don’t want to) invest in that onboarding, so you instead make it harder in order to discourage new users. What is that?
- Reposted by Anthony CowleyThis is one of the best ideas I've heard in ages.
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- My hot take is that Outlaws is amazing. It had a lot of technical problems (and it still requires babying to keep it working), and the gameplay wasn’t balanced for popularity at launch, but all that aside it’s a dream game for me.
- bitluni is amazing: 160 RISC-V cores acting as a GPU on an NVME PCBA. The combination of discipline expertise and sheer grit is awesome! youtu.be/HRfbQJ6FdF0?...
