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All Your Robots Are Belong To Us: You Just Rent Them

May 29, 2023 by 34 Comments

Monthly bills. Everyone has them. Except if you go far enough back, not everyone had them. After all, you might live in a home your family has owned for generations. You might be able to produce all the basic necessities using your homestead: food from a garden, water from a well, textiles, soap, and candles. You might have to buy the occasional animal, but your recurring bills could be modest outside of the ever-present tax burden.

But as people moved to cities, they had to pay rent. Buy gas or coal and, eventually, electricity. Water and trash collection are pretty essential, too. But at some point, everyone realized that being in a position to bill you monthly is a good idea. Now we pay for the internet, movie subscriptions, meal plans, alarm monitoring, shopping clubs, cell phones, spa memberships. Soon we might be paying a monthly fee for our robots, too.

Rent To (Not) Own

In industry, this is a common occurrence. You often don’t buy a robot arm or similar device. That, after all, is a capital expense, and most tax codes require you to count it as an asset that slowly depreciates. Instead, you hire a robot from a service provider. Not only does that make it a pure expense, but the provider worries about software, repairs, and all that.

But at home, it is different. There’s no tax advantage in most places between owning a car and leasing it. Yet vendors want to adopt a rent-a-robot strategy. Case in point: a startup named Matician wants you to sign up for a robotic vacuum. For $125 a month, you get a super smart robot vacuum. You could, of course, buy a Roomba, but — according to Matician — the Matic robot uses computer vision to map your house and automatically finds messes. You can also voice command it to clean up areas. It also avoids wire and furniture. They didn’t mention if it can avoid presents left by your pets or not. It will avoid pets and kids, though.

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Open-Source AR Hack Chat

May 29, 2023 by No comments

Join us on Wednesday, May 31 at noon Pacific for the Open-Source AR Hack Chat with Raj Nakaraja!

We may live in a soup of electromagnetic waves that range in wavelength from the diameter of Jupiter down to a fraction of the radius of a hydrogen atom, but our eyeballs have evolved to only let us sense a tiny slice of that spectrum. That’s too bad, really, because there’s a lot going on in the rest of the spectrum that could potentially inform our ROYGBIV-centric view of the world. Think of the possibilities of being able to see UV the way an insect does, or being able to watch the radiation pattern of an antenna and make adjustments on the fly. Sounds like a job for augmented reality.

join-hack-chatIf seeing the world with different eyes sounds as cool to you as it does to us, you won’t want to miss Raj Nakaraja’s stop by the Hack Chat. Raj is head of engineering at Brilliant Labs, an augmented reality company that’s looking to bring AR into the mainstream. They’ve got some cool ideas about AR, and we’re going to take the opportunity to talk to Raj about open-source AR in general, Brilliant’s products specifically, and how AR can be incorporated into not only our projects, but into our lives as well.

Our Hack Chats are live community events in the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, May 31 at 12:00 PM Pacific time. If time zones have you tied up, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

ChatGPT V. The Legal System: Why Trusting ChatGPT Gets You Sanctioned

May 29, 2023 by 67 Comments

Recently, an amusing anecdote made the news headlines pertaining to the use of ChatGPT by a lawyer. This all started when a Mr. Mata sued the airline where years prior he claims a metal serving cart struck his knee. When the airline filed a motion to dismiss the case on the basis of the statute of limitations, the plaintiff’s lawyer filed a submission in which he argued that the statute of limitations did not apply here due to circumstances established in prior cases, which he cited in the submission.

Unfortunately for the plaintiff’s lawyer, the defendant’s counsel pointed out that none of these cases could be found, leading to the judge requesting the plaintiff’s counsel to submit copies of these purported cases. Although  the plaintiff’s counsel complied with this request, the response from the judge (full court order PDF) was a curt and rather irate response, pointing out that none of the cited cases were real, and that the purported case texts were bogus.

The defense that the plaintiff’s counsel appears to lean on is that ChatGPT ‘assisted’ in researching these submissions, and had assured the lawyer – Mr. Schwartz – that all of these cases were real. The lawyers trusted ChatGPT enough to allow it to write an affidavit that they submitted to the court. With Mr. Schwartz likely to be sanctioned for this performance, it should also be noted that this is hardly the first time that ChatGPT and kin have been involved in such mishaps.

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Hackaday Links: May 28, 2023

May 28, 2023 by 20 Comments

The Great Automotive AM Radio War of 2023 rages on, with the news this week that Ford has capitulated, at least for now. You’ll recall that the opening salvo came when the US automaker declared that AM radio was unusable in their EV offerings thanks to interference generated by the motor controller. Rather than fixing the root problem, Ford decided to delete the AM option from their EV infotainment systems, while letting their rolling EMI generators just keep blasting out interference for everyone to enjoy. Lawmakers began rattling their sabers in response, threatening legislation to include AM radio in every vehicle as a matter of public safety. Ford saw the writing on the wall and reversed course, saying that AM is back for at least the 2024 model year, and that vehicles already delivered without it will get a fix via software update.

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3D Model Subscriptions Are Coming, But Who’s Buying?

May 25, 2023 by 51 Comments

We’ve all been there before — you need some 3D printable design that you figure must be common enough that somebody has already designed it, so you point your browser to Thingiverse or Printables, and in a few minutes you’ve got STL in hand and are ready to slice and print. If the design worked for you, perhaps you’ll go back and post an image of your print and leave a word of thanks to the designer.

Afterwards, you’ll probably never give that person a second thought for the rest of your life. Within a day or two, there’s a good chance you won’t even remember their username. It’s why most of the model sharing sites will present you with a list of your recently downloaded models when you want to upload a picture of your print, otherwise there’s a good chance you wouldn’t be able to find the thing.

Now if you really liked the model, you might go as far as following the designer. But even then, there would likely be some extenuating circumstances. After all, even the most expertly designed widget is still just a widget, and the chances of that person creating another one that you’d also happen to need seems exceedingly slim. Most of the interactions on these model sharing sites are like two ships passing in the night; it so happened that you and the creator had similar enough needs that you could both use the same printable object, but there’s no telling if you’ll ever cross paths with them again.

Which is why the recent announcements, dropped just hours from each other, that both Thangs and Printables would be rolling out paid subscription services seems so odd. Both sites claim that not only is there a demand for a service that would allow users to pay designers monthly for their designs, but that existing services such as Patreon are unable to meet the unique challenges involved.

Both sites say they have the solution, and can help creators turn their passion for 3D design into a regular revenue stream — as long as they get their piece of the action, that is.

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Linux Fu: Making Progress

May 24, 2023 by 12 Comments

The computer world looks different from behind a TeleType or other hardcopy terminal. Things that tend to annoy people about Unix or Linux these days were perfectly great when you were printing everything the computer said to you. Consider the brevity of most basic commands. When you copy a file, for example, it doesn’t really tell you much other than it returns you to the prompt when it is done. If you are on a modern computer working with normal-sized files locally, not a big deal. But if you are over a slow network or with huge files, it would be nice to have a progress bar. Sure, you could write your own version of copy, but wouldn’t it be nice to have some more generic options?

One Way

The pv program can do some of the things you want. It monitors data through a pipe or, at least through its standard output. Think of it as cat with a meter. Suppose you want to write a diskimage to /dev/sdz:

cat diskz.img >/dev/sdz

But you could also do:

pv diskz.img >/dev/sdz

By default, pv will show a progress bar, an elapsed time, an estimated end time, a rate, and a total number of bytes. You can turn any of that off or add things using command line options. You can also specify things like the size of the terminal if it should count lines instead of bytes, and, in the case where the program doesn’t know what it is reading, the expected size of the transfer.

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The Art And Science Of Making Beautiful Transparent Ice

May 24, 2023 by 43 Comments

For most of us, ice isn’t something we’ve thought about in detail since our high school science classes. For most of us, we pour some tap water into the ice trays, slam it in the freezer, and forget about it. Then we lob the frozen misshapen cubes into a beer and enjoy a quite literally ice-cold beverage.

However, there’s so much more fun to be had with ice if you really get into it. If you’ve ever wondered how pretentious cocktail bars make their fancy ice spheres or transparent cubes, read on!

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