Writing
Deep dives
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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 → -
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 → -
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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Diffusion Policy, Transformer explained
7 July 2026 · 11 min ↗
The transformer variant, taken apart one shape at a time on our own arm.
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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.