Archive · September 2026
Who pays for the robot's mistake? Reinforcement learning, from the cliff to the boiler room
From Sutton & Barto's Cliff Walking to BOPTEST and DeepMind's data-centre cooling - why RL's real question is who absorbs the cost of the agent's mistake.
Distributed Autonomous Systems: The Site That Keeps Building After You Lose a Machine
How swarms build without a centre: consensus math, degrade-don't-die, and the Swiss procurement clause to read before you buy autonomous site machinery.
Six centimetres over 29.1 km: the Brenner's real deliverable was the survey net
The Brenner's real deliverable was a traverse that closed 6 cm over 29.1 km — and why the as-built survey net belongs in your next BEP as a signed deliverable.