Writing


Deep dives

  1. How Squint learns

    19 October 2026 · interactive ↗

    Reinforcement learning from zero to every part of Squint, told as a story on our own arm's numbers, with the maths derived and the code beside it.

    Know the basics already: start at §3, the critic →
  2. Learning to Fold, end to end

    17 October 2026 · interactive ↗

    AWR and RECAP from the ground up, then how Larchenko used them to teach two arms to fold clothes, traced through his released code.

    Just AWR and RECAP: start at §8 →
  3. Deriving Success Guided Sampling

    12 October 2026 · interactive ↗

    Why setups a policy always or never solves teach it nothing, and the sampler that fixes it at a million environments.

Posts

  1. Sim-to-real, debunked

    16 October 2026 · 12 min ↗

    We trained a pick-and-place policy entirely in simulation and ran it on our SO-101. Most of what broke was not the physics.

  2. A VLA is not the policy

    4 September 2026 · 7 min ↗

    Action chunking is what made behaviour cloning work. It is also what leaves the policy blind for two seconds at a time.

  3. SmolVLA, explained from the ground up

    5 August 2026 · 18 min ↗

    A 450-million-parameter robot policy that beats a 3.3-billion-parameter one, and only about 1.6 million of its weights are new. We took it apart on our own arms.

  4. Diffusion Policy, Transformer explained

    7 July 2026 · 11 min ↗

    The transformer variant, taken apart one shape at a time on our own arm.

  5. ACT policy, shape by shape

    10 September 2026 · 9 min ↗

    Wrist, top and front cameras plus six joint values go in. A coherent chunk of future robot commands comes out.