josh holder

A neverending holy war rages on Twitter over the future of the robotic form factor; legged or wheeled, highly general or hyperspecialized, Figure or ABB.

In which I make the argument that writing effective simulations will become vitally important to shipping code safely and efficiently in a world with coding agents.

In which I describe Waymo’s safety strategy, and why I think it could be good news for alignment and safety in domains like LLMs and humanoid robotics.

In which I draw lessons from classical control theory to argue that LLM attractor states are more dangerous, and less blissful, than they seem.

It’s May 2024: Falcon 9 is roughly on-target for a mind-boggling 144 launches this year, Starship continues its march to full capability, and thanks to various articles (most prominently Starship is Still Not Understood by Casey Handmer), many in the tech…

With terminal-phase Guidance Navigation and Control in the news lately with the (qualified) success of Intuitive Machines and JAXA’s lunar landers, I wanted to provide an approachable look at the mathematics of rocket landing, and the ways it’s both easier

Leveraging reinforcement, imitation, and supervised learning to beat humans at Judgement, a playing card game which I’ve played far, far too much of (repository here - try your hand at beating the bot!)

This piece aims to clearly and concisely lay out the bull case for a post-Starship space industry.

An obsession with finding the optimal strategy for a simplistic puzzle game leads me through an exploration of various fields of computer science.

To address the ever-increasing problem of space debris, I propose a solution involving electrically-propulsed Small-Sats.