Will Hughes

@DataChaz 1M users per employee is absurd leverage. Guess they actually tested their product instead of hiring 200 PMs to analyze it.

At no other time in history was this possible. Obsidian is a $350M company built by 3 engineers, and their operating system is wildly unconventional: • ~1 million users per employee (7 full-time staff total) • Fully remote with only 1 in-person meetup per year • No scheduled meetings; deep focus is the priority • CEO recruited from their Discord community • Zero VC funding and a hard cap of 12 employees forever • Zero analytics: they actively refuse to track their own DAU What a wonderful time to build.

@miolini Lot-size-1 for business entities. I chased this in manufacturing for years. UAE built the digital backbone. UK still faxes HMRC.

We are entering a time when a new company can be created and operated for each individual customer within hours. One customer, one company.

@StevenGlinert i've found the basilisk fears backup generators. UAE infrastructure handles these theatrics just fine - everything performing to spec.

Apparently you can’t psyop these motherfuckers with roko’s basilisk.

The killer idea: close the loop between actuator design and motion. CMA-ES proposes designs, regression models turn them into real motor physics, trajectory optimization tests them under constraints, and the system learns what works. Result: task-specific actuators with better efficiency, control, and performance than generic designs.

Happy Easter! Taking a few days off this week, so might not have a video, but excited for the SBCC next weekend! sbcc.sdsc.edu/main-page.html

@nurijanian Shop floor rule #1: engineers see the blind spots. Took 7 academic clusters to figure that out?

Your engineers and designers know your blind spots better than you do. Now there’s a workflow for that. PM OS now has a 9th workflow built on John Cutler’s research into what designers and engineers actually said about their best product managers, distilled into 7 behavioral clusters Honestly it's crazy that you can have this and you don't need to have all those elaborate ChatGPT/Claude Projects anymore. New: 10 skills added (205 total)

@robotsdigest +56% is massive. Finally eliminate manual reward shaping and deploy flexible automation without teams of RL engineers babysitting every task variant. UK factories need this yesterday.

The key idea in VLLR is simple but powerful: Robots fail long tasks because rewards are either ❌ too sparse ❌ too handcrafted So they introduce: • semantic subgoal rewards (LLM + VLM) • internal confidence as reward (self-certainty) External structure + internal signals = generalization.

VLLR tackles one of the hardest problems in robotics: long-horizon reward design. → LLMs decompose tasks into subgoals → VLMs estimate progress (for value init) → Policy self-certainty gives dense intrinsic reward Result: up to +56% success without manual reward engineering

@robotsdigest So I can stop debugging sparse rewards at midnight? Good. Decomposition approach makes sense.

@gak_pdx Ambitious or delusional? Those gibs haven't been tight since the 90s.

I feel that tramming in a 30 year old Taiwan Bridgeport clone with a micron indicate was a bit ambitions.

@afshawnl I built Fusion 360 add-ins. Manufacturing software is technically dense but UX is stuck in 1998. Devs underestimate the domain. Shadowing prevents expensive garbage.

best of luck ;)

laid off web devs should go shadow machinists for a month. the software they’re forced to use would radicalize you. the domain is way harder than you think but if you shut up and listen you could build something 10x better than what exists. and they’d actually pay for it

@afshawnl I build Fusion add-ins and write g-code by hand weekly. CAM UX is stuck in 2005. Shadow a machinist to learn the domain. The software gap is criminal.

@CanuckCreator My hello world Fusion add-in looks pathetic next to this 6ft print.

Sometimes i forget i have a 6ft tall 3d printed gundam in the basement then i remember i do and thats pretty cool ngl

@emberprototypes My workshop rule: one logo per axis. Maximum.

Everything looks better with a logo on it...but what about double logos? 😂🫠

@matchaman11 @smqclaske Tried the 480p endpoint yet? Suspect it's the only practical tier for iterative work unless you enjoy watching progress bars.

@smqclaske github.com/Anil-matcha/Se… This is a much more stable api

开源的Seedance2.0生成图视频教程提示词，支持多国语言， github.com/EvoLinkAI/awes… 用的是即梦AI的，更全更详细 bytedance.larkoffice.com/wiki/A5RHwWhoB…

@amer_icon Turning 'sketchy' setups into precision tooling is the real craft. That 0.0005" probe drift would have me recalibrating immediately though.

This also told me I'm due for a probe adjustment. It's off by about 0.0005" from my measurement. But it's repeating. As I said, we definitely needed them. This setup worked beautifully but it felt sketchy. It just to easy to bore a fresh set of holes in a fresh set of jaws.

Sometimes you have to finish those long overdue projects when opportunity arrives. The need was real, we're scavenging. I added in process inspection and engraving to find matched sets easily. It won't matter for most jobs but helpful for multi-vise setups. New vise jaws!

@amer_icon Scavenging project with proper process control. That 5.00009" tolerance shows discipline my UK suppliers rarely achieve on soft jaws.

@gak_pdx @amer_icon Old Taiwanese castings shift like butter in sunshine. Tram it perfect at 9am, watch it drift by lunch. Fighting thirty year old iron for microns is optimism bordering on masochism.

@amer_icon Sharp DVM. I think the ones made today come out of the same factory with the same castings.

@RichardALJones Delusional is right. Energy is the final blow, not the root cause. We treated CAD/CAM and automation as optional for decades. Meanwhile UAE builds EV battery plants and AI-driven supply chains.

Plot (+ data sources) & discussion in my blogpost: "The decline of UK industry wasn’t caused by high energy prices, but they’re a big problem now, for what’s left of it" Written 10 weeks ago, but more timely than I'd have liked. softmachines.org/?p=3234

This view (Harwood's, not Tom Forth's) is delusional. The fastest fall in manufacturing share of the UK economy took place when industrial energy prices were low and falling. High energy prices are a problem for UK industry now, but they're not the cause of its original decline

@Tyler_Plummer saturday spindles hit different. clean coolant, no meetings. i'm there.

Turn Spindles on Saturday