FWIW, I used to love this phrase but over recent years have come to understand it is quite damaging. We live in a society where evil frequently hides behind a ‘stupid’ label, and people bring this quote up to defend or soften actions that are indeed done out of specific malicious intent.
Yeah, I think this needs to be update for the modern age. "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by greed." Seems to fit vastly more situations.
Seems like a hallucination to me; note that the context contains “unmarkBlock” as the function name, which invites a connection to Minecraft. Still shouldn’t happen of course.
The alternative explanation is that the inference engine, which batches several unrelated requests for parallel processing, messed up the unpacking and returned an unrelated user’s query. This one would be very scary as it will leak arbitrary content, but it seems much less likely here.
I agree with this. I recently went back to writing more code by hand again for this reason: the amount of effort / mental toll it takes me to steer the LLM is sometime just not worth it. I might be slower but I enjoy my work much more again.
- There is no double taxation if you just pay yourself a salary (since it’s a normal business expense). If you want to take money out of the company flexibly, a GmbH is the wrong structure.
- I’ve never heard of anybody doing an UG/GmbH + KG to get started. This is highly unusual. Most people either do just a simple UG or maybe they set up a holding structure with two separate GmbH / UG entities.
- Related to the above: if you go with a simple, standard structure you will incur minimal legal fees. You don’t need a lawyer, you just directly task a notary and tell them you want a standard setup.
- If you don’t want the complexity of a limited liability company, the standard way to reduce liability risk is to get liability insurance. Many, many people do this instead of having a GmbH.
The valid criticism is the a) lack of digital processes and b) sequential processing of steps that could happen in parallel. For example, I sped up my own GmbH process by driving to the register court and paying in cash on-site. For whatever reason that’s much faster and saves about a week.
> The standard way to reduce liability risk is to get liability insurance
Exactly! That's what I do in the Netherlands. It's also common to cover this contractually too - you can negotiate where liability falls for many cases.
Getting a limited liability company for a one-person operation is just overkill.
The Netherlands changed the rules 14 years ago to allow a BV (equivalent to a German GmbH or US LLC) with zero starting capital. If suppliers want to check company capital, the data is public with the companies register (KvK for locals).
There are two reasons not to go this way in NL, 1. There are tax discounts for small businesses that only apply to a sole proprietorship kind of structure and 2. Administrative costs for a BV are slightly higher because the legal entity itself needs to file taxes, instead of only the owners having to do so.
But the difference is now very small, #1 has been reduced the past few years and #2 is quite simple. It's an online portal to submit the numbers, if you know what you're doing you don't need an accountant.
And I think this is the key criticism for the German system. They don't seem to have a simple online portal for this and they still require 25k starting capital. That makes it harder for a small business to get started.
Like he said the GmbH is just the wrong legal form of his company. You can register a Kleingewerbe online over night and an UG within 2 weeks and that waiting period is only 2 weeks because it's such a simple and cheap process that notaries won't make time for you and they are busy people so you just take the next free slot they have in their calendar. So if you are lucky you can get an appointment the next day.
My wife works for a notary and most of the time people are really pushing to get an appointment but then fail to register a bank account on time so they have to wait a couple of weeks anyway without anybodies fault but their own.
Also this is not some secret knowledge. Like, these are not some tricks you learn over time this is something you could technically just ask a tax consultant or a notary. In fact the notary even likes it if you do that because if you try to be clever on your own you are most likely going to cause them more work. Like, you can literally go to a notary and say "this is my business. What should I do?" and they are either going to just do an UG with you or sent you to a tax consultant just to be sure.
Like, we have notaries because and they are as expensive as they are because they are supposed to consult you in legal matters and they are required for so many things so that you don't accidentally mess something up that is complicated.
Going to a notary really makes this so easy. You just sit there, dude's gonna read his legalese text and then sums it up in 2 sentences for you. Didn't get something? Ask questions. That's why you are there. That's their job.
It's really only difficult if you need a lil something for the AppStore for a side hustle and then try to get a GmbH straight away without ever consulting anybody that is literally only there to consult you and make it easier for you.
Cool story bro. But this shouldn't require a notary.
A sane country would handle this with a handful standardized forms of incorporation with clear rules, so that the majority of use cases that a normie might need is covered. All of this should be a few clicks on a gov webpage at most. Maybe some fee/deposit/whatever.
Lawyers and notaries should only start showing up when people want complicated setups.
(Yes I'm bitter with German notaries because so far they only took my money for some very mid service and couldn't even take two seconds of their time to answer an email with normal German words or clear instructions.)
This holds for Belgium too. The notary class here are overpaid self-dealing monopolists selling you mediocre service at best. We were just required to pay 801€ for a bog standard piece of paper. A web form would have served us better and more quickly. At least they've recently become a bit less hereditary than the last 200 years.
When I saw "600 comments" I knew this thread would be full of Germans falling over each other, explaining how this is ackshually the God given right system and you are very suspicious for wanting to conduct business or something. Was not disappointed.
Yeah I tried to use ROS / Gazebo about 10 years ago (it was still ROS 1) and getting it set up was an immense pain. I remember that creating new modules required writing CMake files. Maybe this is better now, but I decided to skip that.
I also agree on the need for a simple, easy, extensible open source framework. LeRobot IMO is some of this but also contains the dataset + ML code. I think Flask is nice because it's so singularly focused on just one thing with extensibility if you need extras.
So I really like the idea. But being an OSS maintainer these days seems... intense.
Did you ever a late RGB vs RGB-D? I haven’t seen that much in the literature.
Also any thoughts on action space representation? Seems to me people are settling on flow matching mostly, but pi still uses discrete tokens to supervise the upstream backbone VLM. I also like the simplicity of discrete bins and used that successfully in the past.
Adding a depth channel rarely yields a massive performance gain, likely due to data scarcity and the fact that modern VLAs are good at guessing distance directly from RGB. I have used multiple RGB-D cameras, but it is hard to get stable images without jitter. Depth can still be useful for high-level reasoning. PI also uses bounding-box or segmentation data from PI-05 for that.
PI smartly combined discretized tokens with flow-matching for efficient training, and it works well in most cases. Still, end-effector representation may be better for teleop with devices like a SpaceMouse, VR, or VibeTracker. PI-07 also supports EEF, but I am not sure how much data is needed to fine-tune PI-05 for that.
I'd suggest starting with the default pi05 model. Data strategy is probably more important than model improvements. Since VLA performance is highly dependent on the data/action distribution and it's easy to modify. After that, you can add high-level reasoning like PI05. I visited a Chinese VLA company that already adopted the PI-05 approach, and it works quite well in practice.
For depth I agree on the VLA route but for ACT / DP-style imitation learning from scratch it seems more feasible (since you’re not fighting a pretrained model that was not trained on this modality). Might also increase robustness since you naturally end up with an input that’s invariant to colors / textures. Plan is to try both paths: the from scratch (and then ablate RGB vs RGB-D) and the VLA + fine-tuning one.
If you're using depth, you're better off starting with a diffusion policy (DP). We benchmarked ACT, DP, pi0,pi05 on the same task, ACT underperformed in most cases.
There is already plenty of research around multimodal diffusion policies. While DP typically doesn't require pre-training, you can boost data size by depth estimation model+Open data.
Yeah I can see that. Especially the rotation part is pretty awkward (hence why I currently do the axis parallel to table surface trick and only use the yaw angle to rotate the gripper). The space mouse was super easy to get started with though, so in terms of getting something up and running quickly it has an advantage.
Oh very cool! Looks a bit like the TRLC-DK1 (I was looking at this one for a bit).
I think pushing the sota is quite hard to do solo but we'll see. Mostly I want to get back up to speed after having not done much robotics during the last 6 years. Best way for me to learn is to just do it, so here we are. We'll see how far I get (I suspect at some point compute will be the main bottleneck)
