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This robot has one job and it’s really good at it. DEWALT and August Robotics have commercially launched DALE, a fleet-capable autonomous drilling robot designed specifically for data-centre construction. In a year-long pilot, it drilled more than 230,000 holes with 99.97% accuracy, worked at up to 10× the speed of traditional methods, and cut a combined 190 weeks from project schedules across 26 construction phases. Video via DEWALT and August Robotics.

My old high school is coming down. This little corner that is gone now is where I learned calculus after hours with my incredible math teacher. This launched my programming career in a very strange and roundabout way. Feels weird man.

The apprentice started this week. I usually have them under my wing to start but I'm trying something a little different. After he gets cycled through the plastic, metal, and knife blade operations I'm going to have him work the warehouse. When he gets the flow, then we machine.

its very easy to blame the people who raise VC money. call them grifters. say that kind of money is completely out of reach for regular people, especially in manufacturing. obviously the AI bubble and the huge AI rounds just add fuel to the fire and get people mad. but just a reminder: no, it's not easy to raise money. especially the first time. it's never easy. and you have no idea how much harder it is outside the US. sometimes 10x harder. you also have no idea what happens to you if you, god forbid, fail your company. the US is the only place where failure isn't quite the end of the world. it's experience, and people actually cheer for you to do better next time. and even here, for someone who moved from outside, building a network from nothing and raising money is extremely hard. 99% fail even when they try damn hard. i raised my first 25k after two years of endless drives to SF, hundreds of meetings, accelerators, and 1000s of no's. and the thing is, i was building this silly little saas in manufacturing in 2017 to 2020, back when 99% of VCs couldn't care less about the space. not to mention my confidence and my english at that point were... well, sub-optimal. so no, it's not like you show up to the market, it rolls out a red carpet, you say "i need VC money," the money arrives by the boatload, you take it and build another dumb saas. instead of truly struggling for decades, poor but true to the work, moving atom after atom, never taking a dollar of VC out of principle. most people i know who raised did it through pure grind, after 1000s of no's. and then spent 10 to 20 years building something that may or may not turn into something big. either way they went through every possible up and down. ran out of money. almost sold. lost the big customer. all that kind of shit. maybe i was just lucky to only know people like that. don't get me wrong: a VC round isn't the biggest achievement compared to say revenue. but it still matters. you create jobs. you develop the market. you build something people actually benefit from using. and i respect (and you should too) that kind of person and that kind of grind.