Question scoped to software in physics: Do you currently use PPC64LE architecture hardware for anything in your scientific workflow and is it important to you to have binary builds of software for that machine? Are there high impact examples that you can think of? Or is everything x64 or aarch64?
Posts by Silvio Traversaro
What ROS at an Airport Apple Store?!
Pixi makes installation so easy, we can install ROS anywhere now.
#ROSCon2025 #ROSCon #ROS
I guess that you installed on Linux with ffmpeg from your package manager. That usually works. It often isn't plug-and-play on Windows or macOS. What I am afraid that "just use uv" can misleading for beginners: uv is great, but it inherits PyPI limits (pypackaging-native.github.io).
Ever wondered where all my GitHub contributions come from? I have document a week's worth of @conda-forge.org contributions: uwekorn.com/2025/09/18/w...
I plan to do this for 2-3 more weeks to get an overview where I spent my time. I hope there is also content in there that helps others.
Just a curiosity, how can you install ffmpeg (a dependency for example of torchcodec/torchvision) in a cross-platform way without conda or pixi?
There were some design discussions on this in github.com/RobotLocomot...
The FreeCAD project has pioneered the use of Conda packages to build AppImages, DMGs and Windows executables. Recently they made the switch to Pixi with great success. Read more in the guest blog post by Jackson Oursland:
prefix.dev/blog/how-fr...
1/ Can open-data models beat DINOv2? Today we release Franca, a fully open-sourced vision foundation model. Franca with ViT-G backbone matches (and often beats) proprietary models like SigLIPv2, CLIP, DINOv2 on various benchmarks setting a new standard for open-source research.
Frictional contact-implicit operational space control in SIMPLE, coming soon to an arxiv and git repo near you! 😃
Testing out implementing inverse dynamics in our new simulator (SIMPLE)
Amazing blog post about using Pixi for ROS 2 on Windows. We're happy about the shoutout – that's the kind of complex setup that we want to make extremely easy with Pixi.
The authors of robot utility models are running live demos of their e2e policies at ICRA. This is really hard stuff to do! You rarely see e1e policy execution at events like this
Today, we’re announcing the preview release of ty, an extremely fast type checker and language server for Python, written in Rust.
In early testing, it's 10x, 50x, even 100x faster than existing type checkers. (We've seen >600x speed-ups over Mypy in some real-world projects.)
Today we celebrate the 10th anniversary of conda-forge!
Our beloved Github organization was created around this time on Apr 11th, 2015.
More details:
- Blog post: conda-forge.org/blog/2025/04...
- Zulip thread: conda-forge.zulipchat.com#narrow/chann...
PEP 751 has been accepted! peps.python.org/pep-0751/
This means #Python now has a lock file standard that can act as an export target for tools that can create some sort of lock file. And for some tools the format can act as their primary lock file format as well instead of some proprietary format.
I wrote a new blog post about using `conda` without any kind of shell modifications.
Just the Python entry point directly. No ~/.bashrc or Windows registry edits! Simply one more entry in PATH.
rjai.me/posts/2025-0...
Software announcement: later this year, the Pinocchio rigid-body dynamics library will be switching to nanobind (from the legacy Boost.Python) for its Python bindings!
Read the announcement here: github.com/stack-of-tas...
Real-time processing of sensor streams is crucial for robotics and AR. We introduce Troy-Vis, a real-time, open-vocabulary video instance segmentation method which will be presented in an oral presentation at WACV tomorrow.
Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2412.04434
Code: github.com/google-resea...
I love having cappuccino in the afternoon! The only annoying thing is to have to deal with reactions of other Italians.
This is interesting, which bioconda packages use defaults dependencies? As far as I know bioconda stopped using defaults a long time ago, see github.com/bioconda/bio... .
🚀 Great news for Windows users! The latest version of PyTorch is back! 🥳
🙏 Huge thanks to the @condaforge community for fixing the builds.
🧑💻 Installing PyTorch just got a whole lot easier!
pixi.sh/latest/feat...
Introducing playground.mujoco.org
Combining MuJoCo’s rich and thriving ecosystem, massively parallel GPU-accelerated simulation, and real-world results across a diverse range of robot platforms: quadrupeds, humanoids, dexterous hands, and arms.
Get started today: pip install playground
Install a GPU enabled PyTorch on your machine (with all CUDA dependencies if on Linux) from @conda-forge.org in two commands with @prefix.dev's pixi: github.com/matthewfeick...
Remember: it is a calmer more chill life without copyright years. daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/01/08/copyrigh...
Just migrate 3.13 . Adding free-threading support is a different migration that is currently paused: conda-forge.org/status/migra... . As you can read in github.com/conda-forge/... there are some problems in free-threading in some core python libraries that do not make sense to start that migration.
It's basically like Mujoco but with more advanced materials/rendering/solvers, written all in Python thanks to being powered by Taichi, which makes it much more accessible.
I like it a lot. It's very accessible.
They went too far with marketing, but willing to ignore it for now.
2024 was a busy one! We released v 1.0 of the Open Source AI Definition, among many other accomplishments across 3 grand areas: licensing and legal, policy and standards, and research and outreach: https://opensource.org/2024-annual-report
🎉 Our new work tackling long horizon low-level manipulation in apartments is out! ~500GB of demonstration data in sim (you can generate more) and RL/IL baselines all provided. ManiSkill helped make this project scalable and faster to run via GPU sim compared to alternatives
📢 Introducing ManiSkill-HAB: A benchmark for low-level manipulation in home rearrangement tasks!
- GPU-accelerated simulation
- Extensive RL/IL baselines
- Vision-based, whole-body control robot dataset
All open-sourced: arth-shukla.github.io/mshab
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