As a Viennese, I missed appropriate options, like rules and their mutual negotiability by lateral maneuvers (AKA dissimulation) and a general sense for disgruntledness. Moreover, smalltalk as the core of any negotiations (which should be understood more as mundane paperwork after the fact) isn't even mentioned! Now I do need some coffee, for real. ;-)
My understanding is that Austria was the Germans who ended up running a multi ethnic empire ruling over Slavs also, while Germany was the Germans who didn’t do that.
Then once the Austrian empire fell apart only the German part was left in “Austria” and it basically has no reason to be separate from Germany anymore because the Slavs are no longer part of the same territory and there is no “top of the caste system” benefit anymore to the Germans there.
Feel free to chime in if I’m wrong. I’ve found topics related to Germany to be hard to actually figure out due to a lot of morality noise that gets injected into those topics (the Nazis wanted to unify and Nazis bad etc stuff like that).
Both Prussia and Austria made their names outside of the historically German lands and ruled over non-Germans. It was in the end Prussia that unified Germany in 1871 having previously defeated Austria. Both settlements following WWs 1 and 2 forbade Germany from unifying with Austria. And now in any case there is no appetite for it regardless of legality.
I can say that the German spoken in Germany and the one spoken in Austria aren't exactly the same; there are some regional differences. But they still understand each other without issues.
It may or may not be useful for you but I've been working for a while on converting ORBSLAM3 into a self contained standalone program, without the need for ROS to be useful.
The "UI" for saving/loading the map and calibrating the camera is exposed through a built-in crude webserver. Visualization is done via threejs instead of having a dependency on pangolin.
If your robot can expose the camera feed as anything opencv can ingest ( i.e. mjpeg via http ) you could just point it there and then receive the pose stream via HTTP/SSE
The whole thing is distributed as an AppImage so you just run it and connect to it
Looking through the website and github, it looks a bit premature to post at all.
I don't have too much love for ROS personally but that claim the title is making is quite bold
And are you sure about your claim? Every time I hear anything about China and Solar the core of it is that solar in China is growing more than anywhere else on the planet ( 40% increase in 2025 and creating ~11% of China's energy already )
And that there is no sign of that trend slowing down anytime soon. And why would it. Solar panels are dirt cheap and they have more than enough space for it.
China is also really strong in the battery space, so they have everything they need to ditch oil/coal eventually
They also are building more coal, gas, and nuclear than anyone else at epic yearly increases.
That they have the internal political means to get large infrastructure projects done is laudible - they can actually build transmission lines that make unreliable energy sources like solar and wind feasible. In the US that is effectively impossible due to the NIMBY legal situation.
That they lead in battery production is going to be pretty interesting to watch. I admit I was skeptical that current battery tech could be scaled up enough to make it financially doable, but China is very close to making me wrong on the topic. If they can be the first to truly seasonal storage that works without hand-waving games like pretending you can "just use another source" when you run out of storage I'll be very impressed.
They seem to understand that you need to back unreliable sources with reliable sources - and have the political means to build a coal plant that will sit idle 95% of the time.
No other country is close - it's parlor tricks at the moment. China seems to understand how energy works, and that you need a reliable grid to run an industrial economy. They are very much being pragmatic in how they are building out everything they possibly can. The West has forgotten this.
They’re building more dirty plants than anyone, but they’re STILL making their mix cleaner at an impressive clip. Over 80% of new electric demand growth was met by renewables in 2024.
> They also are building more coal, gas, and nuclear than anyone else at epic yearly increases.
Are they really? Coal use for power generation stopped growing, so newly built coal plants are replacing older, not adding to them. Nuclear while still being built does not seem to be accelerating anymore.
There's plenty to criticize about China, but as far as energy production goes they are a leader and have demonstrated what can be done when the country is aligned (albeit by force in this case) to provide cheap and clean energy to power their economy.
The US, under the current admin, is literally the opposite of that.
The more I think about openclaw, the more it seems to be for AI agents what ROS is for robotics.
openclaw defines how to interact with distributed nodes ( how those provide the capabilities to the "orchestrator" ) but the real benefit are many task specific nodes that when put together make up something much bigger than the sum of it's parts
> openclaw defines how to interact with distributed nodes
Does it actually? AFAIK, there is no "specification" or "protocol", it's a cobbled together "platform" you run, with a bunch of integrations, but none of that is specified by openclaw itself. Happy to be corrected though, I only spent one weekend with openclaw before tearing it down.
> AFAIK, there is no "specification" or "protocol"
The protocol is english. You want your claw to check a hacker news comment and let you know when it gets a reply? You tell it "Check every 5 minutes if this comment has a reply", which then generates an english message to save and send to the agent each time, resulting in a browser tool invocation.
The claws live in a post-API world, where the API is english which turns into bash invocations or browser tool calls or such.
I've only just started to dive into it from the documentation side of things. They have ( maybe recently? ) started to create this Gateway Protocol https://docs.openclaw.ai/gateway/protocol to connect the stuff together.
It may be a "we are changing the wheels while driving" thing, but if enough people make nodes for openclaw it will become somewhat of a standard. And then we probably see 100 different claw offshots that all use the same nodes but with a different claw in the center
That's a communication protocol between openclaw server and clients authenticated to that server though, it's not a communication protocol between different openclaw servers, is it? More like defining a HTTP+JSON protocol between a web server and a browser side client application. It's not a "protocol defining how to interact with distributed nodes", again, unless I misunderstand something.
Yes, that's why I compared it to ROS. I didn't mean multiple openclaws communicating with each other but openclaw communicating with nodes ( which are self contained programs running on your desktop or phone providing capabilities like webbrowsing to the claw server )
> openclaw defines how to interact with distributed nodes
When one talks about "distributed nodes" that usually means N nodes talking with each other, and being somewhat homogeneous between each other, unless the protocol temporarly can lift/lower some functionality.
You typically don't say "distributed nodes" when you're talking about a server<>client architecture, which seemingly is exactly how openclaw operates, both according to what I saw myself, and what you wrote in this comment.
Depends on the country; US, probably not. Many european countries, probably yes. Asia? Your gov will ask you why you would bother them with a stupid and meaningless question like that in the first place.
As an Austrian I am not sure how to feel about that
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