Ratnesh Neema

Entrepreneur. Audiophile. Bookworm. Coder. Gamer. Otaku. Blogger. Writer. Artist. Traveler.

[Ryan Hickman @ryanmhickman]

Everyone in Embodied AI is talking about Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Almost no one is talking about the physical nightmare of collecting the data to train them. You can't scrape a kitchen table or a warehouse shelf from a web browser.

To get to millions of hours of diverse, real-world manipulation data, you need hundreds of rigs. But you can't buy them. If you build them out of off-the-shelf developer kits, they weigh 15 pounds, overheat in an hour, require bulky cabling, and break the first time an operator wears them on a job site.

At the Instawork Robotics Lab (IRL), we had to build our own. Meet the Instacore: a rugged, 4lb wearable egocentric data-capture engine designed specifically to survive a full shift on a standard power pack.

We didn't build a flashy humanoid. We did hard, blue-collar systems engineering:

💾 THE COMPUTE — A custom MediaTek Genio carrier board that runs completely fanless, routing 5 camera streams directly to on-board storage.

⚡ THE I/O PIPELINE — We ditched USB for industrial GMSL. Thin, ultra-flexible coaxial lines route high-speed data down to the backpack and Power-over-Coax (PoC) back up, completely eliminating batteries on the wrist.

⏱️ UNIFIED SENSOR CLOCK — The MediaTek Genio SoC drives a shared master clock straight to the ISPs driving our 5 global shutter sensors, stamping metadata at the microsecond of capture to ensure zero-drift temporal alignment.

👁️ OPTIMIZED OPTICS — 95 DFOV lenses on flexible PCB ribbon modules keep the wrist cams flat to prevent snags. A 145-degree chest camera captures the macro workspace, while a 50mm baseline rectilinear stereo head pair preserves close-up 3D mapping.

To build hundreds of these, we took over a warehouse in Mountain View in April, called it the Instalab, and brought in talented Pros with assembly backgrounds from Tesla, Apple, and Meta.

To test the systems, we had our Pros wear active rigs while assembling more rigs. The video below shows the raw, time-synchronized Foxglove playback of that exact loop.

Now, we’re shipping these units globally to scale data collection for real Pros on the job.

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

When my personal usage hit these numbers, I realized managing AI spend across a whole engineering org is a massive blind spot. TokenMaxxer syncs Anthropic & Cursor APIs hourly to track token spend per engineer, catch rogue agents & alert Slack
🔗 https://t.co/wrNORl4lLx

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

If you're not burning a billion tokens a month, are you even tokenmaxxing? #tokenmaxxing @cursor_ai @AnthropicAI

Repo link below 👇

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

🫧🗯️⁉️

[Sumir Meghani @sumirmeghani]

Just returned from a fascinating couple weeks in China meeting robotics teams/manufacturers and retail/Internet operators. Found @ericjang11 and @vhmth's reflections useful and wanted to share themes/tradeoffs I've been reflecting on.

Came home with more questions than answers!

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

@SwiggyCares Is this the best your support can do. It's 2330, I was hoping to make food at home, you all shipped spoilt food, and then offered a refund? Am I supposed to place another order, and wait till midnight while you make more money through platform & delivery fees?

[Sumir Meghani @sumirmeghani]

https://t.co/zur7nwDOJy

[Sumir Meghani @sumirmeghani]

Today, we're opening @Instawork Robotics Lab (IRL), connecting the robotics industry with > 10 million skilled workers. IRL is offering the first certified workforce program for the physical AI economy ... with 20,000 @Instawork Pros already certified! 👷

Read more from @alistairmbarr @BusinessInsider

https://t.co/57Jwyabf2P

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

@EmiratesSupport @EmiratesSupport Please let me know how to reach out!

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

@EmiratesSupport My wife was supposed to travel from BLR to SFO on 1st March and come back on 6th. The travel was time sensitive and there's no point in rescheduling it. Not sure how we are supposed to request a cancellation with a full refund.

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

these days the word SDLC triggers something primal in me

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This @waitbutwhy illustration is 👌

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

@antigravity you folks having a downtime? the model selector is not showing any models to pick from.

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

@expedition33 winning GOTY is simply what you deserved.. first game I've completed in years, and loved every moment!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

It must reach 69%, as foretold in the prophecy

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

@mcdonaldsindia @zomato I can't believe it takes three video recordings & 20 minutes to get a resolution on a spillage issue. And by the time I'm done doing this, the burger is also beyond cold and inedible. Great experience!

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

@help_delhivery Isn't there some way to ask for a delayed delivery? I had to travel out of town for a personal emergency.

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

Celebrate #MSI2023 with a chance to win RP from @SurfGiveaways, presented by Amazon @PrimeGaming! 🙌 One lucky winner could win 295,000 RP to use in League of Legends! 🤯 Enter now: https://t.co/5HH0U0S9UF #giveaway

[Prime Gaming @primegaming]

It's time for #MSI2023 😤

Let's kick off the bracket stage in style w/ a chance to win 125k RP each remaining broadcast day + a chance to take home the grand prize of 295k RP from @surfgiveaways!

Enter now 👉 https://t.co/urxt8RRQUz

[Ratnesh Neema @ratneshpkn]

@DrinkPrime I raised a relocation request and then never heard back. None of your chat or phone agents seems available.

And I just paid for a 3 month plan.