Dan Grover
@DanGrover
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Product @standardbots. Prev. Meta, Tencent.
Portland, OR
Joined February 2007
So I am back in China this week for first time since pandemic! Hitting up old stomping grounds in Guangzhou and then going to Yangshuo for the hell of it. Excited to see what has changed.
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Train more controls engineers.
here's the most basic supply chain to even start a robotics renaissance in america: upstream materials: rare earth separation + magnet manufacturing (sintering → machining → magnetization) (for high-torque motors) silicon carbide boule growth (for efficient power electronics)
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While I am very much in the “US needs more robots” camp due to nature of my work, the trouble with these comparisons is that it is better to view “number of robots” as proxy for “general amount of industrial automation”, which is downstream of many other things.
In 2023, China installed 276,000 robots. America installed 38,000. We can't let China win the robotics race.
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The new PopOS/Cosmic DE thing is really, really nice. I keep thinking to give up on Linux and just go back to Mac like a normal person, but this is pretty much the ideal desktop UX without all the tweaking.
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The idea that we will automate work by building artificial versions of ourselves to do exactly the things we were previously doing, rather than redesigning our old workflows to make the most out of existing automation technology, has a distinct “mechanical horse” flavor
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Just completely different universes.
have spent the last 6 days in silicon valley. here’s some manufacturing related insights: >lots of ai founders are really intrigued by factories >lots of them know they are building slop but going for big outcomes (wishing they were more mission driven) >lots of investors care
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Every industrial automation UI.
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I am all for them *and also* my favorite hack for making them less wishy washy that I wish I'd learned sooner in career is tying ship goals to some meaningful larger structure, sometimes called a "maturity framework."
@shreyas What's your take on non-metric goals (ship X, do Y)? I've encountered a lot of resistance to goals like that, especially for OKRs which bias towards metrics-based goal-setting. There have been a lot of instances where "just do it" is the right product decision, but the org
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The next big thing in robotics isn’t some flashy humanoid or sci-fi drone. It’s consistency, reliability, and affordable deployment in the real world. A robot that just *works* every time everywhere that's worth 100 that only perform well in a lab demo
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Remember the ads in the 90's for "*66", where it would automatically call you back? I feel like I need that for every Google Meet I'm in -- some checkbox to ring me once someone has joined.
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Figma needs, like, a way to quickly add notes and musings alongside groups of mocks (when you're doing explorations). Comments isn't quite right -- I use text boxes but there's friction in having to style the text and discard whatever formatting was applied by default.
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I would consider myself a tech bro and have listened to the usual tech bro podcasts since podcasts were invented. Somehow, now, in AI age, they make me kind of nervous and feel more like work instead of fun. Maybe I need more true crime.
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Just dictated 9 pages of single spaced text to describe picking up a steel bar, loading it to a saw then loading cut parts to racks with robots. If you think factories ops are easy, sit down and write out every possible move, decision, signal, and position. Thoughts?
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Swapped out the old robot in my WeWork cube for the new model RO2 my company makes! Exciting to finally upgrade!
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Novel hardware design choices aside, I feel like more robots should be wearing straw-boaters.
Your bimanual manipulators might need a Robot Neck 🤖🦒 Introducing Vision in Action: Learning Active Perception from Human Demonstrations ViA learns task-specific, active perceptual strategies—such as searching, tracking, and focusing—directly from human demos, enabling robust
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It's like the "Pray tell, Mr. Babbage..." anecdote. I feel like I'm on crazy pills.
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I feel utterly confused when people speak of generating PRDs with a prompt. If you don't know the requirements, how would the AI? If the prompt is meaningful, then just make the prompt the PRD.
Prompting is the new wireframing. The most valuable PMs in 2030 won't be those who write the best PRDs, they'll be those who can "talk" to AI most effectively. Start treating prompts like code: precise, testable, version-controlled.
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I wonder if the danger with people relying on AI for personal problems isn’t that they’re sycophantic or randomly tell you unconstructive things but that people shouldn’t have *that* much therapy. Like there should be a bit more friction.
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