We managed to successfully pass lighting regulations in Pittsburgh last year [0] which will result in about 40k city lights being replaced with much more dark-sky-friendly hardware.
My mother [1], an astronomer at CMU, has been very involved with this effort, and is tracking it with "before" and "after" photography courtesy of the ISS crew.
It is one area of environmental regulation that seems to be pretty easy to make progress on because it's not a partisan issue and the "right way" ends up being cheaper for cities as well as more pleasant.
Formant supports the most advanced robotics and autonomy companies in the world by providing open cloud infrastructure, remote monitoring and teleoperation tools, and collaborative support and operations workflows.
We are hiring for roles across the business including in design, engineering, sales, and customer success.
If you are interested in the future of autonomy (especially as a generalist engineer), this is the way to get the best vantage point in the entire world. We work with everything from fleets of quadrupeds inspecting nuclear power plants to gigantic automated farm vehicles to delivery drones, and have customers in every domain imaginable.
I've had a setup like this for years, but it's much simpler: monitor arm [1], ultrawide display [2], keyboard + trackpad lap tray [3], any couch. Been through many iterations and like this gear, but you can do it for cheap just as easily.
Mount the arm to something (like a desk) and swing it over the couch to lay down. In my case, I can actually pivot it between the couch and the chair on the other side of the desk.
Great for a few hours a day when you want to sink into focus mode. Super highly recommended it.
Ergomart actually looked at the specs of my monitor and recommended the right arm and parts to properly balance the weight. I'll happily recommend them recommend them.
The monitor moves easily on three axes, and tilts; cords are cable-managed through the pole. I just sit down and plug in a single USB-C cable to get video, webcam, keyboard/mouse, and power.
Same, I put my desk next to a recliner and the monitor on an armature and just swing it back and forth. The downside: the arrangement is kinda comfortable so I tend to play games in it. As a result, my mind associates it with non-work and have trouble focusing there. Also laying down all day is probably not healthy.
Luckily I've managed to associate it with more of a "deep focus" state, but a lot of people seem to feel like they'd get tired and fall asleep if they used a setup like this.
I actually think the biggest downside to the multi-station dynamic setup is that the ideal monitor configuration for that is a single curved ultrawide, and there are essentially no high resolution options.
So, is the keyboard tray resting on your legs just above your knees and your hands are resting on top, sort of at 170-180 degrees (if raised above your head was 0/360)? Or have you done something to raise up the keyboard so your hands are more like 90 degrees (like a normal desk pose puts them)?
Yes, keyboard just above the knees. It's similar to the angle you'd get if you were slouching and your forearms were resting on the desk. Generally quite comfortable.
I think raising my hands up higher (90 degrees as you say) would actually be a lot worse. Never understood that aspect of all the more "real" laying desks.
I should note that I purposely don't use a mouse with this setup, because it would end up being quite far away and would need to be on a solid surface.
I use a very similar setup, and I use a mouse because I've never found a keyboard I liked that includes a touch pad. I've simply taken another monitor arm + a laptop holder attachment. Flip it and put a firm pad on top and you have a mouse pad holder that you can position in 3d exactly where you want it.
I would love to use something with a TrackPoint, but I have an irrational fear of committing to a non-fullsize keyboards. It's regretful that they don't build different keyboard variants or license the tech out, but I assume the market isn't large enough to warrant more offers.
A few they mention are production systems at fairly high volume. The floor scrubbers from Brain Corp and shelf scanners from Bossa Nova are running in hundreds of Walmart stores, and the delivery robots from Starship are running in dozens of cities.
I'd be interested in how you'd propose to make that work when operators may be jumping in to a robot anywhere on the planet from one minute to the next. Require logging and reporting on when remote labor was used to support the tax jurisdiction you're operating in? It seems that would also require reporting to every locality you operate robots in individually, which is currently not necessary.
Would you propose to use the same method for other remote services such as call center support?
That would be a problem for these companies to figure.
> It seems that would also require reporting to every locality you operate robots in individually
Yes, exactly. That should be required. Also your call center idea is pretty good too, though I think not quite as clear cut as having remote laborers use robotic bodies to circumvent minimum wage laws.
The call center example is actually more relevant than you might imagine. The jobs often look very similar to remote tech support in practice. In fact, some companies running call centers have begun offering remote support to autonomous systems as an expansion of their market.
This type of labor falls pretty squarely in the "information work" category, and often (as in your Kiwi example) looks mostly like operators performing a high-level task like specifying waypoints on a map.
Our company [1] works with a large number of autonomous robotics companies of varying scales, tasks, and morphologies. Teleoperation is a regular part of the workflow for many.
It is an exceptionally good time to be building specialized hardware & autonomy systems for a task and then providing that system as a service to customers. This article went into a few examples, but by our count there are ~800-1000 companies currently operating with this model.
Happy to answer any questions about how people doing this deal with the myriad of issues (both business and technological). It’s a fairly new thing, but extremely well suited to the future.
One of the possibilities of teleoperation, labor arbitrage to low-cost countries, and a response by regulators, to protect the local labor force and only allow them to run remotely operated jobs.
Does it still makes ecojomic sense to use teleoperation extensively in this case ? Are there any new efficiencies besides in-country wage differences ?
Could this really become a big job category in the future ?
It's important to keep in mind that teleoperation is always paired with an (initially quite immature) autonomy system. Just as blakesterz called out in the sibling comment, the strategy here is to start with high volume of teleoperation and then scale up autonomy over time, essentially increasing the productive output of one teleoperator.
We see companies all across the board, from 1:1 (or even multiple people always watching at once) to over 1:100 in operator / robot ratio.
In practical terms, this usually takes the form of operators being notified of situations that they have to resolve, and switching between systems frequently.
Once you're above a certain level of productivity, the cost of the teleoperator is negligible... so it doesn't really matter where you locate the labor as long as you have a reasonable path to reaching a high ratio using autonomy.
Fortunately, getting robots out in the world lets you gather the data needed to improve your autonomy system, and so it's worth it to get out there early as long as it's safe.
Wouldn't this require the Ethereum community adopting a modification to allow paying for gas with ERC20 tokens, and thus purposefully making ether worthless?
If they were to do that, how would platform development be incentivized? Sounds pretty far fetched.
