Hackaday Links: September 7, 2025
Two weeks ago, it was holographic cops. This week, it’s humanoid robot doctors. Or is it? We’re pretty sure it’s not, as MediBot, supposedly a $10,000 medical robot from Tesla, appears to be completely made up. Aside from the one story we came across, we can’t find any other references to it, which we think would make quite a splash in the media if it were legit. The article also has a notable lack of links and no quotes at all, even the kind that reporters obviously pull from press releases to make it seem like they actually interviewed someone.
Still, as speculative as this article appears to be, it’s an interesting read because it demonstrates the divide between what people think the future will look like and what it actually looks like when we get there. MediBot, presumably based on Tesla’s Optimus platform, is reportedly capable of “monitoring patient vitals in real time.” In a world of FitBits and other wearables, do we really need a humanoid robot to do that? And what about the touted ability to perform “basic medical procedures such as wound cleaning and administering injections”? Does anyone think anthropomorphic robotic hands are going to have anywhere near the kind of fine motor skills needed to handle delicate tasks like those in the foreseeable future? We don’t know what the future holds for robotic doctors, but we’re pretty sure it’s going to look like something other than a human being.
Did the ancient Mesopotamians have the equivalent of Bitcoin? Of course not, but according to this article, their method of recordkeeping was a form of distributed ledgering that predates the blockchain by about 4,000 years. The clay tablets that Assyrian scribes used to record everything from sales invoices to marriage contracts were the key to the system. While some of the tablets, with their cuneiform markings made by sharpened reeds, were just left to dry naturally, others were fired in kilns to literally set the records in stone. Add to that immutability the distributed nature of their scribe network, which kept copies of tablets in geographically distributed locations, and the use of cylinder seals, which were rolled across wet clay to form impressions that served as a sort of proto-2FA, and the sophistication of their form of recordkeeping really comes into focus. Blockchain analogies aside, one thing that really stands out is how early in history the mechanisms of bureaucracy were established; we’d barely learned how to grow enough food to run a surplus before the pencil-pushers popped up.
Back in July, we covered a really cool ASCII Moon phase tracker that had caught our eye. ASCII art is always cool, and adding in the astronomy angle and interactivity makes it even cooler. We stumbled across a similar project, ASCII Side of the Moon, which gives a lower-resolution but still accurate rendering of the current phase of the moon. What we like about this one is that you can call it up from a terminal, which makes it more consistent with our earlier discovery of a repository of Telnet games and demos. The other thing we like about this one is that it accurately tracks lunar liberation, which is the slight wobble in the Moon’s orbit. There’s a slider control on the ASCII Side of the Moon web page that lets you bounce through the phases and see the wobble over a period of two years. Pretty cool.
Also cool, albeit with a very “Web 1.0” vibe, is this “Atlas of the Universe.” It’s exactly what the name on the tin implies — a collection of maps of the universe, starting with our solar system and progressing all the way up to a 14-billion light-year view of the visible universe. We appreciate the 12.5-ly map the most, as it lists some of the star systems made famous in science fiction over the years, such as Tau Ceti, Alpha Centauri, the Eridani system, and the infamous Wolf 359. The larger-scale maps, showing where we are within our galaxy and just how far it is to even the next-closest galaxy, are pretty humbling, too.
And finally, we know we’ve plugged Tomáš Zeman‘s YouTube channel before, but in its infinite wisdom, The Algorithm has decided to push his airliner maintenance videos to us this week, and who are we to argue? What Tomáš shows in the videos is a mix of the extremely exotic and the strangely familiar. Like anyone working on a modern car, he spends a lot of time just getting access to the parts, but when he does, the procedures for replacing them seem very approachable. That’s not to play down his obvious encyclopedic knowledge of the Airbus airframe and engines, of course; it’s just that at the end of the day, it’s all about turning wrenches. We do wish he’d spend some time discussing why he’s replacing parts, like the hydraulic pump in the video below. Was it defective? If so, what were the diagnostic processes? Do jets have the equivalent of an OBD-II port scanner? Or perhaps the part was replaced simply because some service interval had been crossed. Inquiring minds want to know.
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