Reading List 11/8/2025

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at gathering robot training data, “love letters” sent to home sellers, the Napier Deltic diesel engine, jumps in electricity demand from electric teakettles, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.

Robot training

We’ve previously noted that one major bottleneck in making robots more capable is a lack of training data. LLMs have the benefit of the entire internet as a source of training data, but there’s no such pre-existing “movement” dataset that we can use to train robot AI models on, and finding/creating a source of robot training data has become an important aspect of robot progress. The LA Times has a good piece about some of the companies working to collect this training data:

In an industrial town in southern India, Naveen Kumar, 28, stands at his desk and starts his job for the day: folding hand towels hundreds of times, as precisely as possible.

He doesn’t work at a hotel; he works for a startup that creates physical data used to train AI.

He mounts a GoPro camera to his forehead and follows a regimented list of hand movements to capture exact point-of-view footage of how a human folds.

That day, he had to pick up each towel from a basket on the right side of his desk, using only his right hand, shake the towel straight using both hands, then fold it neatly three times. Then he had to put each folded towel in the left corner of the desk.

If it takes more than a minute or he misses any steps, he has to start over.

Privatized air traffic control

In response to the ongoing government shutdown, an air traffic controller shortage is forcing a curtailment of airline flights across the US. Air traffic controllers are having to work without pay, and there are about 3500 fewer controllers working than needed. On Thursday 10% of flights across the country, around 1800 flights, were ordered to be cancelled.

Air traffic control seems like an obvious service for the government to provide, like police or firefighters, but apparently private or semi-private air traffic control systems aren’t all that uncommon. Marginal Revolution has an interesting, short post about Canada’s privatized air traffic