Parenting is a wild ride, and today was no exception. It’s 9:30 PM, and I’m trying to convince my toddler son that sleep is a wonderful idea. We’re snuggled in bed, and I pull out my classic argument: "All your friends are already asleep, buddy. If you want to have fun playing with them tomorrow at school, you need to rest now so you’re not sleepy during playtime."

To my relief, he starts panning, tilting, and rolling—like a little camera drone settling into its dock. These are the telltale signs he’s beginning to wind down, his body finding its way to dreamland. Optimism fills the room; I imagine a smooth ride into his dreams and, for me, some quiet overtime work.

Then comes his first demand: more milk. I call his bluff immediately.
"Hey, we just had two bottles! No way you need more milk. Let’s go to sleep."
He insists, and just to spice things up, threatens to cry. Classic toddler. I cave.

I get up, tell him to hold onto his pillow, stay still, and wait for me. I return promptly with a bottle of 50% diluted milk—because, you know, compromise—and dangle it like the prize it is.
"Let’s go to sleep now," I say, feeling victorious.

It almost works. Almost.

Twenty seconds later, his sleepy little brain realizes the milk is still in my hand. He asks for it. Fine. I hand it over, thinking, Now we’re good. Surely this is the endgame.

But no. He clings to the last sliver of energy in his tiny body and declares he needs… water.

Now, this is absolute BS. He never drinks water in the bedroom, and the untouched milk bottle in his hands would serve the same purpose. I try reasoning.
"Hey, the milk will fix your thirst too! Drink that!"

He threatens to cry again.

And then it hits me: I’m the toy. I’m the shiny object keeping him from falling asleep.

So, I try a new strategy. I get up, ask him (once again) to hold onto his pillow, and make intense eye contact to double-confirm he understands: stay still while I get your water.

Here’s the twist—I don’t come back.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s sound asleep, and I’m laughing with my wife about the sheer absurdity of the bedtime shenanigans.

The Toddler:
Our little guy has mastered the art of trolling adults. He knows exactly when he has the upper hand—bedtime. Crying equals delays, and delays mean the grown-ups lose. It’s mutual destruction, and he knows we fear it. Does he enjoy this? Probably not. But he’ll use it to his advantage anyway.

The Adult:
I played the long game. By predicting his energy levels were critically low, I pulled a next-level troll move: walking away from the negotiation table. He ran out of steam without my distraction. Game, set, match.

For the Toddler:
Maybe trolling adults isn’t the best long-term strategy. It’s rude, inefficient, and ultimately a waste of everyone’s time—including his.

For the Adult (me):
Telling the toddler to wait and then not returning might not be the most trust-building move. Lesson learned.

For Both of Us:
Perhaps we’re better off skipping the trolling altogether and embracing some good, old-fashioned bedtime crying.

And that’s parenting in a nutshell: a chaotic mix of humor, tactics, and lessons learned (mostly by me).

Ariel
By Sylvia Plath in her own voice

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Since my twenties, Sylvia Plath’s story has captivated me. The Bell Jar (1963), often regarded as semi-autobiographical, deeply resonated with me. The protagonist’s journey into a glamorous yet alienating world mirrored my own struggles with identity as a twenty-year-old. Back then, I read Ariel, and its haunting intensity felt like a fantastical, R-rated dream, much like the rest of her work.

Life has since tempered me, pulling me through challenges that have deepened my empathy, particularly for those less privileged. Today, I can grasp nuances I previously missed. To borrow from South Park: I don’t get it, but I get it. Adding to this, the past two years of raising a child have brought firsthand insight into the societal expectation for mothers to provide unconditional care. When I stumbled upon Ariel yesterday while reading to my son at bedtime on my Kindle, its words struck a new chord. The poem vividly captures the physical and metaphorical experience of waking to a child’s cry—a moment of unease and entrapment.

Stasis in darkness.

She is asleep.

Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

Plath’s imagery describes the gradual awakening. Consciousness emerges, shapeless at first, like a tenuous thread extending into the distance.

God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! — The furrow

Her body begins to stir, and she regains control, as if piecing herself back together.

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Fully awakening, she senses a disturbance—perhaps the cry of her child?

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.

Thirst seizes her, intensifying the disorientation. She hallucinates berries, their taste and texture vivid.

Something else
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

At last, she is fully awake, tending to her baby—soothing, cooing, and comforting with all the exhaustion of countless nights before.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

Resigned, she lays the crying baby down, drained yet serene.

The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.

Relief washes over her as she collects herself, savoring a brief moment of peace.

And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive

She reflects on her life, caught in a suffocating present, with no escape from a past that burdens her or a future that feels equally oppressive.

Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.

And so, she rises, ready to face the morning’s demands.

Reading Ariel anew, I felt a profound connection to the relentless cycles of care it portrays, though Sylvia Plath’s perspective is far from celebratory. Her words reflect a sense of confusion and oppression, capturing the emotional toll of motherhood as a stifling, inescapable burden rather than a heroic endeavor.

I’ve always wished I had more time to dive into the intricacies of observational astronomy. I want to understand mechanisms that seem too absurd to reason about. What are the margins of error in our knowledge? What does it mean to have an acoustic wave in the early baryonic universe (Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation)? What does it mean to have an inflation of space itself happening everywhere at once (Cosmic inflation)?

A common version of the Big Bang theory goes like this: In the beginning, the universe was incredibly small and unimaginably hot—so hot that it existed in high-energy states where even light couldn’t travel freely. Then came rapid inflation, which cooled the universe. During this cooling, lower-energy particles like baryons (matter) and photons (light) began to dominate. For the first time, light could travel through the universe. Because the universe wasn’t evenly distributed, this light wasn’t evenly dispersed. We observe this uneven first light today as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Over time, the cooling baryonic universe formed galaxies, stars, planets—and eventually dinosaurs.

Over Christmas, as I sat in my living room with a toddler asleep on my lap, I found myself staring at the shadows cast by our mini Christmas tree in the corner. The warped shadows on the back wall baffled me—it was nearly impossible to deduce the structure of the object creating them. The light source was within the tree itself, small bulbs nestled among the leaves. The overlapping leaves caused the light to pass through layers of complete and partial occlusion. By the time it reached the edge of the tree, the light had lost much of its original shape.

To the human eye, the resulting patterns appeared fractal. Trying to capture the intricacies was overwhelming—an exercise in frustration that could easily induce a headache. Setting aside the view of the leaves themselves, and focusing solely on the shadows, the tree’s mystery deepened. I could discern the shapes of one or two branches, but describing the overall structure, size, or density of the tree felt impossible.

I believe astronomers face a similar challenge when studying the CMB. The patterns in the CMB are like the shadows of the early baryonic universe, just translucent enough for light to travel through. As light passed unevenly through this dense "baryonic forest," much like the branches and leaves of the Christmas tree, it left clues about the universe’s early structure.

But the universe didn’t pause. It continued inflating everywhere at once, carrying the baryons with it. A vast baryonic sphere of unknown shape and dimension emerged, giving rise to the observable universe. We’re made of those baryons and live within that sphere. Looking around, much like a squirrel inside my Christmas tree, we only see the distorted shadows on the wall—the light warped and twisted by countless occlusions.

I marvel at how astronomers make sense of the fascinating chaos of the CMB. How difficult it must be to draw conclusions from the shadowy fragments of the universe’s earliest light!

Hello and welcome! In this series, we’re diving deep into NVIDIA’s GR00T N1 model – a groundbreaking development that signals a new era for robotics. GR00T N1 is being hailed as the world’s first open, general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots. If that sounds like a mouthful, don’t worry – we’ll break it all down over the coming episodes. But first, let’s set the stage for why this is such a big deal.

For decades, teaching robots new skills has been a slow, painstaking process. Each new task – whether it’s picking up a specific object, folding laundry, or helping in a factory – often required crafting a specialized algorithm or training a model from scratch. Imagine having to retrain a child from zero for every single chore or job – not very efficient, right? Meanwhile, in other areas of AI like language and images, we’ve seen foundation models that learn from vast amounts of data and can generalize to many tasks. Think of large language models that can answer all sorts of questions after one big training journey. Robotics, however, lagged behind; robots were usually specialists, not generalists.

That’s why NVIDIA’s announcement of GR00T N1 in early 2025 created such a buzz. Unveiled at a major industry conference, GR00T N1 is a humanoid robot foundation model. In simpler terms, it’s like an “AI brain” pre-trained on an enormous breadth of data so that it already has a wealth of general skills and knowledge about the physical world. And here’s the kicker – it’s open and customizable. NVIDIA made it available to the global robotics community, meaning researchers and companies can use this model as a starting point and fine-tune it to their own robots and tasks. This collaborative and open approach is poised to accelerate innovation in a field that’s been traditionally siloed.

Why does this matter now? One reason is the growing demand for capable robots in many sectors – from warehouses and factories to hospitals and homes – especially in the face of labor shortages around the world. Industries are looking for robots that aren’t one-trick ponies, but can adapt to different jobs and environments. GR00T N1 aims to fill that gap by providing a kind of general-purpose intelligence for robots, analogous to human common sense and learning ability, that can be adapted quickly to new situations. NVIDIA’s CEO even proclaimed that “the age of generalist robotics is here,” highlighting the significance of this milestone.

Over the next episodes, we will explore what exactly GR00T N1 is capable of, how it was built and trained, and what it means for the future of robotics. We’ll discuss the clever architecture that gives this model both “fast reflexes” and “thoughtful planning” abilities, the massive and diverse training process that taught it about the world, and the early real-world tests that show its potential. By the end, you’ll understand why GR00T N1 is not just another robot algorithm, but possibly the beginning of a new chapter in AI for machines that move and interact with us.

So, whether you’re a robotics enthusiast, an AI researcher, or just curious about how close we are to having helpful humanoid assistants, stay tuned. In this first episode, we’ve set the scene and the motivation behind GR00T N1 – a push towards robots with a broader understanding. In the next episode, we’ll lift the hood and look at the brain of this robot AI: how does GR00T N1 actually work? Get ready to learn about its unique two-part architecture that’s inspired by human cognition.

Thank you for joining us for this introduction. See you in Episode 2, where we delve into the inner workings of GR00T N1’s “mind”!