Hasbro wasn't quite sure whether to advertise this expensive toy until the fans forced their hand. To understand Transformers fiction, it is important to understand that it exists to sell toys. Hasbro and TakaraTomy are toy companies, and they are primarily interested in continuing to sell toys to children and adults. The cartoons, comic books, etc., mostly exist to make this happen. To be sure, they normally make a profit in their own right, but this is regarded as mere gravy. The "to sell toys" effect often distorts the fiction in interesting ways. Primarily, since you can't (usually) sell someone the same toy twice,[1] Hasbro and Takara constantly introduce new toys, and often require the creators of the fiction to introduce the new characters into ongoing storylines. Older characters (whose toys are no longer being sold) are shoved aside to make room. Another effect of "to sell toys" is when the toys have gimmicks which must be explained in the fiction. Sometimes this is relatively easy, while other times it requires a lot of imagination on the part of the writers. Japanese-original shows such as The Headmasters, Super-God Masterforce, and the various instalments of the Unicron Trilogy often structure their casts and storylines around a single specific play feature, which is highlighted in just about every episode. The UK movie-based Transformers comic took this to more blatant heights. For its first year, it had a specific four-page feature every week called Top Gear, which existed solely to promote the newest Transformers merchandise. Any merchandise. This led to readers being told how great Optimash Prime was. For the 2010 Transformers: War for Cybertron game franchise, Ironhide himself opened letters pages by telling readers how awesome the game was and how you should buy it. “ Truly, I'm speechless. Your species characterizes the infinite wonders of the churning, whorling, chaotic cosmos through the lens of... merchandising? I can see why Swindle loves you idiots. ” —Sideways on the concept, Ask Vector Prime. Contents 1 Casting 1.1 Huge casts 1.2 Random casting 1.3 Limited casting 2 Plot 2.1 Forced explication 2.2 Gimmicks 2.3 Strange developments 2.4 Awkward continuity 2.5 Power levels 2.6 New bodies 2.7 Character pimping 2.8 Abrupt conclusions 3 Death 3.1 Killing off old product 3.2 Hi-and-die 3.3 Resurrection 3.4 Untouchables 4 Notable exceptions 4.1 Toys not released in the relevant market 4.2 Post-Marvel, pre-2013 G1 comics 4.3 New toys, same basic design 4.4 Killing off characters with new toys 4.5 New toys with minimal fictional appearances 5 References Casting Huge casts Gotta catch 'em all! Hasbro makes a lot of toys at once, and they generally want all of them to appear in their fiction. This can force writers to bring in vast numbers of characters all at once, sometimes with awkward results. Examples include: The first issue of the Generation 1 comic, "The Transformers", in which twenty-eight different robots appeared and introduced themselves, even though only a handful are important to the plot. "The Special Teams Have Arrived", a free mini-comic given away with issue #54 of the Marvel UK comic, notoriously introduces the reader to twenty-four new Transformers in just three pages. Granted, four of those are the combined forms of the other twenty, but that's still a lot of new names to remember. The 1987 Headmasters Limited Series, which introduced over sixty characters in the course of four issues, including all the first waves of Headmasters and Targetmasters, all their Nebulan partners, the Technobots, Terrorcons, and Monsterbots. The cartoon episode trilogy "The Rebirth" likewise abruptly introduced well over forty of the 1987 toyline characters, mostly the same ones seen in Headmasters. In both cases, this wasn't helped by the fact that the nature of Headmasters and Targetmasters meant every new toy had to effectively get two introductions. In the first four episodes of the 2001 Robots in Disguise cartoon, eighteen characters are introduced in quick succession. From #9 onwards, Titan's movie-based Transformers heavily bumped up the cast with new toys. In one example, #17 brought in nine new toys in eleven pages; only one of the five Decepticons got any real focus or dialogue. Random casting The Hasbro-induced need to show all the toys can also cause stories to suddenly focus on a new character, sometimes dropping ongoing plot threads about older ones. Examples include: Season 2 of the cartoon introduced many new characters/buyable toys with no explanation; despite never having been seen before, the story treats them as though they have been there the whole time. One episode even hinges on this idea. After seven issues, it's finally time for these six dudes to do something! Apparently, the Triggerbots didn't make much of an impression on Prime. The comic issue "Pretender to the Throne!" suddenly introduces a dozen Autobots and Decepticons that we've never met before, and follows their adventures. The story adds nothing to the long-range plot that couldn't have been accomplished by using existing characters; these teams were added to the mix to promote their new toys. Many issues of the Marvel comic had cover blurbs in the form "Introducing the _______!", where the blank was whatever the latest line of toys was. The following issues specifically introduce new toys on the cover: #8, #10, #11, #19, #21, #29, #30, #40, #42, #46, #47, and #60. Throw in a few covers where new characters were pictured but not named, and that's 1/5th of the series. In issue #36 of the Marvel comics, when Wheeljack decides that he needs help in dealing with Grimlock's inept leadership, he doesn't turn to any of the dozens of Autobots aboard the Ark, which include two combiner teams and Omega Supreme. No, he has to call in his "old buddy"/new toy, Sky Lynx. In the prelude to the Underbase Saga, Optimus Prime and Megatron were the lead characters in a story set before the Transformers came to Earth. But rather than palling around with the likes of Jazz or Soundwave, they are instead shown alongside the newest "gimmick" characters, the Triggercons and the Triggerbots. Mainframe Entertainment planned to use Wolfang in Beast Wars, but Tigatron appeared instead because he had an upcoming toy, and to save money as his CGI model was only a slight tweak of Cheetor's.[2] Rather than revealing stuff about the Vok and Tarantulas, a long-running subplot, "Other Victories" spends much of its time telling us how great Tigerhawk is and how we should buy his toy. Then, when it looked like Tigerhawk's toy would be canned, he was almost immediately killed off. Material released by both 3H and Fun Publications tends to release characters from various series and continuities and then write stories featuring every character (usually with a particular focus on that year's box set), which often leads to some bizarre casting choices. Sky-Byte, Strika, and Obsidian were all retroactively added to Generation 2 and Machine Wars because they wanted to do toys of them that year. The Shattered Glass version of Tracks is introduced from nowhere, has minimal characterization, and doesn't do anything, because they wanted to do Tracks's 2010 toy in Diaclone/Road Rage colors. And pretty much every story taking place in the Classicsverse, ostensibly a Marvel G1-based series, will introduce or reintroduce characters who were dead (the various Underbase Saga casualties), not even implied in the original stories (Overlord, Metalhawk), or don't make sense in that universe to begin with (Elita One). Sometimes this gets a token justification, other times not. The sixth issue of The Arrival stops following the regular cast so it can flag the awesome cool out-now-in-shops Safeguard toy. Prominent generals in Titan's movieverse Decepticon army change frequently and without any acknowledgment as new toys jostle for (and gain) space. Dark Cybertron and its lead-ins were packed with Thrilling 30 toys, so suddenly Beast Wars characters Waspinator and Rattrap are in G1. Things got worse in later issues when Tankor and Crosscut needed a comic; Tankor berates Starscream for a few panels in Dark Cybertron #6, while Crosscut and Swerve briefly halt the plot in Dark Cybertron #7 to tell you who Crosscut is. Then he vanishes. They did end up getting increased roles in IDW fiction later, though. For "Combiner Wars", several Autobots had to abruptly depart the Lost Light for Cybertron so they could appear in their combiner teams. In the case of First Aid, this was despite him having just become the Chief Medical Officer: a long-running plot! Seaspray and Beachcomber appeared in the IDWverse after a seven-year absence in Starscream: The Movie and Another Mine. The fact that those two oft-ignored characters had new Titans Return and Power of the Primes Legends Class toys released recently probably had something to do with the matter. Limited casting On the opposite side of things, Hasbro doesn't want to pay to depict characters that aren't selling toys. This can force a story, particularly an animated cartoon, to have a smaller cast than it otherwise might. The full might of the Decepticon army. The original cartoon and early Marvel comics both featured an oddly lopsided cast, particularly at the beginning, with the Autobot forces on Earth outnumbering the Decepticons two to one. This difference was never really acknowledged, though the cartoon also used generics to make it look like Megatron had more than four guys, three pets, and a camera under his command. The early episodes of Armada featured only the toys available on the shelves. This resulted in two ridiculously small teams going to Earth for the all-important mission of gathering Mini-Cons, rather inexplicable in story terms. Both the Dreamwave and Panini comics suffered exactly the same problem, but it gets worse: The first Armada episode reused models of older Transformers as generic background guys to bump numbers up. The comics didn't. So Megatron apparently conquers all of planet Cybertron with an army of three guys, whereas the city/planet defending Autobots are just five blokes. Dreamwave would also feature a scene on Cybertron, where the only Autobot who seemed to exist was Jetfire. For the movie prequels, IDW got around this by deciding that Dreadwing was going to be a series of drones instead of one guy, allowing for really big battle scenes despite a then-limited number of toys. (It would later turn out there was also a Dreadwing who was one guy.) Titan Magazines would borrow this, and turn other Decepticons into drone series too. It seems unlikely that four bots and their human partners would be sufficient to handle every emergency on Griffin Rock, but those four bots were the only ones on shelves at the time (other than Optimus and Bumblebee, who were needed elsewhere), so they were the ones who went into the show. As the toyline expanded, toy characters Blurr, Salvage, High Tide and Quickshadow were introduced into the cast. Kingdom acts as a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Beast Wars, but only includes characters who were slated for the first three waves of the accompanying toyline (with the exception of Tigatron, likely due to the ease of retooling Cheetor's animation model into a spare character). This means that notable cartoon characters like Waspinator or Tarantulas who didn't have toys in the first three waves never put in an appearance in the season. To compensate for the Predacons having depleted ranks as a result, Dinobot stays with the Predacons for most of his screentime while Scorponok was turned into a group of generics; Predacon Megatron also says many Predacons have been lost in his war with the Maximals. Plot Forced explication Main article: Introdump Rather than simply showing up in the background, new toy/characters often overtly introduce themselves, often with a ridiculous description of their special abilities. The Marvel comic is rife with examples, but it shows up across numerous fictions. Reflector is actually here, he's just buried underneath a pile of speech bubbles. Again, Transformers #1 has two huge splash pages in which 28 characters do nothing but stand around and tell each other who they are and what they can do. Towards the end of "More than Meets the Eye, Part 1", Jazz puts together a strike team. Naturally, he does this by calling out their names one by one, so that the camera can cut to each Autobot in turn and show them transform in noticeable detail. The two-part original Transformers cartoon episode "Dinobot Island" features many new 1985 characters getting their own short little introductory scene, often with a characteristic bit of self-description (Tracks: "I'd rather stay in my stunning auto mode!" Inferno: "I'm always ready for action!" Beachcomber: "Wow, like, I hope we don't destroy this place before we can study it!") "The Rebirth" has three different sequences in which large new groups of characters form a lineup and introduce themselves to viewers one after another. Strangely enough, much of this screen- and dialogue-time is given over to Nebulan partners; the "main" Transformer characters get no such introductions, even though they are the items kids would have to purchase to acquire the Nebulan accessories. For instance, Spasma, Monzo, and Peacemaker (all speaking characters) are introduced by name as part of various lineups, but their in-store hosts Apeface, Weirdwolf, and Pointblank are never named (and Weirdwolf never even speaks). "Beast Wars (Part 1)" has the Maximals walk on one-by-one admiring their beast modes, loudly explaining their names and showing character traits. This even gives the impression they deliberately changed their names to fit these new beast modes for no apparent reason. Crosscut and Swerve fill in Crosscut's backstory and job during a fight. That's all Crosscut does in Dark Cybertron #7. Gimmicks Main article: Gimmick When the toys can do something special, fiction writers must often go out of their way to show the gimmick in action. The Scramble City category of G1 combiner teams have the ability to freely swap around their limbs. Because of this, an unusual amount of Japanese fiction focuses on the idea of characters swapping limbs, best shown by Scramble City: Mobilization, with rather variable consequences, and sometimes resulting in the creation of whole new combiner characters. Sometimes, this purportedly results in some kind of increase in power or the combiner gaining different traits, but these changes are almost invariably told more than shown. In some cases, simply changing the arrangement of an existing set of limbs is cited as something that can vastly alter a character's capabilities, with little real explanation. The Headmaster gimmick got an entire Limited Series comic book devoted to it. The comic issue "Pretender to the Throne!" features Scorponok proudly creating the Pretenders, gloating that they will hide the Decepticons' identities from the Autobots "until it is too late". Not only does the plan not actually work, it's also a plot point with absolutely zero lead-in or build-up—at no point has Scorponok ever expressed concern about his troops being detected by the Autobots (if anything, considering the altmodes of his troops, he seems to be the least concerned with stealth), nor has he demonstrated the science skills to pull this off, and we've never even met the Pretender characters before. It was brought about solely because the new toys had to be jammed into the story. (The, uh, story of returning Optimus Prime's character to the comic book because he had a new toy.) Rotor Force made their debut in "New Dawn", and both here and in subsequent Generation 2 issues would primarily fight enemies not with guns like everyone else, but by firing their giant rotors at them. Page 3 of New Dawn actually shows them having to stop and reattach their rotors before they can carry on fighting. It's Morphin Time! MASTODON! The 2001 Robots in Disguise franchise Megatron had six alternate modes and the cartoon really wanted you to see them, which is why his first appearance was as a giant hand punching through a building for no apparent reason. The series would also make it routine for him to use different modes for specific purposes: He would arrive to battles in Jet Mode, observe fights and command his troops in Robot Mode, personally engage his foes in Dragon Mode, and retreat from battle in Bat Mode. His Car Mode and Hand Mode would be used far less often than those four, but situations that deliberately called for their use would still crop up. Things got even sillier when he turned into Galvatron and gained four more modes. In "Mistaken Identity", he turned into his "Iron Mammoth" form to brace himself against a hostile Fortress Maximus... only for the form to prove useless when Maximus called off his attack. His griffin form was later made out to be his most powerful form, which he used prominently during the series' final episode, while his Pteranodon and hydrofoil modes would each only be used once, in cases where Galvatron barely did anything in those modes (much like the case with his mammoth mode). Jetstorm and Jetfire are the only Autobot jets in the Animated line. (Not counting the toyless Omega Supreme.) To fully big this up, their origin story has it that there have never been any flying Autobots before, despite them having been in (and won) a long and bitter war with enemies who often fly. This one was silly enough that a later episode explicitly joked on this, pointing out that there were multiple Autobots before and after Jetfire and Jetstorm with some kind of flight capability. The second season of the 2015 Robots in Disguise cartoon coincided with the release of the Deployer toys, which fire smaller Mini-Con figures. Suddenly, every Decepticon in the cartoon was partnered with a Mini-Con or two, even Decepticons who'd appeared in the past as solo operatives. The Unicron Trilogy, noted for its gimmicks in all three toylines, was particularly notorious in this regard: The quest for power-enhancing Mini-Cons practically defined the plot of the Armada cartoon, with both factions out to recruit or capture all the Mini-Cons. Powerlinxing is shown again and again and again in Energon, despite having comparatively little relevance to most episode plotlines. In fact, due to the fact much of Energon's action was firefights, Powerlinxing seemed to be a disadvantage, since it resulted in a single larger Autobot shooting instead of two smaller ones. Cyber Key powerups are likewise shown repeatedly in Cybertron. In this case, while most characters had basic weapons, the Cyber Keys were necessary to unlock hidden weaponry or special techniques. So, for example, Optimus might be able to shoot at the Decepticons with a smaller firearm or his cannons, but to fire a more powerful attack from his cannons, he would need to summon his Cyber Key. Some characters, however, needed their Cyber Keys to activate what one would expect to be their main weapons (e.g. Starscream activating his larger Null Ray Cannon in his giant form). All three series were also marked by lengthy transformation sequences which highlighted the gimmicks in very toy-accurate animation (and also made production cheaper, thanks to recycled footage). Strange developments Shoehorning loads of new characters with new powers can compel the writers to do things with the plot that, in all probability, they otherwise wouldn't. Marvel UK had to promote the Special Teams toys before they knew how they'd be appearing in the US reprints. To get around this, Simon Furman wrote a story arc titled "Second Generation!", where Buster Witwicky, Optimus and Shockwave watched an advert saw a Matrix-induced vision of the Special Teams in action. These events were previewed in "The Special Teams Have Arrived", nine issues earlier, with no indication that they were part of a vision, making their place in continuity uncertain. In the US Marvel comics, the simultaneous introduction of the Aerialbots and Stunticons and the introduction of the Pretenders both saw a lot of rigamarole involved in explaining why both the Autobots and the Decepticons had new members with identical numbers/gimmicks at the same time. Season 3 of the original The Transformers cartoon almost completely ignored the characters of the previous two seasons that were no longer on toy shelves. The 1985 Autobot cars, for example, are not seen at all. Bumblebee and the 1985 Mini-Vehicles, by contrast, show up now and again, as their toys were still shipping. Even Starscream, who was dead, managed to get a couple of Season 3 episodes all to himself; again, his toy sold through 1986. One season later, "The Rebirth" — the last episodes of the entire series — was almost entirely spent on introducing new characters and giving old ones upgrades, leaving just barely enough time to provide any kind of conclusion. The Headmasters was absolutely crazy about this. Optimus (whose toy was long gone) kicks the bucket only three episodes in for the sake of a sacrifice that would be nullified only a few episodes later, putting new(er) toy Rodimus Prime back in the command chair for a short while. In the tenth episode, Rodimus departs the series and hands the title of Supreme Commander to brand-spanking-new toy Fortress, who's had a few months, tops, of combat experience. Much like Season 3, Headmasters also ignored most of the Season 3 regulars (Springer, Perceptor, the Dinobots, the Quintessons) or removed them altogether, sometimes fairly dubiously (Blurr and Kup leave with Rodimus, Ultra Magnus gets shot a bit and dies, Galvatron is buried in ice and nobody digs him up until Battlestars). By the end of the series, the only remaining Autobots from the first three seasons were the Special Teams, Twincast and his cassettes, Wheelie, Metroplex, and Arcee. Transformers Comic-Magazin #2 wrote an entire story devoted to Optimus sternly explaining which Autobots and Decepticons were on sale in Germany in 1989. The reason he had to? Quickmix had shot an Autobot! The first thirteen issues of the Armada comic were focused around the Mini-Cons, with plots often revolving around their desire to be seen as equals and not be enslaved. Then without any prior set-up, the last five issues turn into a dimension-spanning battle against Unicron—who had just had a new and expensive toy. Tigerhawk debuts in "Other Victories", where he's the reason the Predacons lose their base and Tarantulas is killed. This disrupts any ending for the Tarantulas/Vok storyline, as the episode is left with little time to properly explain the mysteries of either character and the plot of last episode, Tarantulas trying to destroy the whole Ark, is reduced to two lines about the Tripredacus Council. Upgrades are bad. Upgrades are GOOD. We have always been at war with Eurasia Eastasia. "A Fistful of Energon" has Prowl learn not to use upgrades, and he gives up using powerful samurai armour. But whoops, Hasbro thought "hey, we could make a toy out of that armour"! And so in a later episode, Prowl regains it and the show hurriedly claims that the upgrade is fine now because Prowl realizes now that it's the Autobot, not the upgrade. The French decided to be good sports and start using propeller-driven nuclear bombers again in All Hail Megatron #11, just so Tankor could be used. Ransack has been on Earth for a while, in hiding from other Decepticons while he waits for orders from the Fallen in "Turnabout". Ransack is a member of a race that can scan any object and take its form as a disguise. Ransack moves around in the cunning disguise of a 100-year-old plane. (At least, unlike the previous example, the oldness of the alt mode was pointed out.) In Titan's Revenge of the Fallen comic, Skids and Mudflap go from being Bumblebee's responsibility to bugging Ironhide to being Sideswipe's responsibility in the space of three issues, all to allow each issue to focus on a specific toy-bearing movie star. Similarly, only one or two Decepticons per issue are sent on a mission, when presumably the Fallen might want to send loads of guys to silence the twins. In Dark of the Moon, nearly all of the Transformers switch from built-in weaponry to handheld weaponry. It just so happens that the gimmick of the Dark of the Moon toys was that they had "MechTech" weapons that could be held by any other figure. Also in Dark of the Moon, most Autobots transform into Stealth Force mode, a weaponized vehicle mode that allows them to access various weapons in their otherwise defenseless disguises, an incredibly useful combat mode that's never used in any prior or later films. Uniquely, this was something Hasbro came up with for the toyline on their own; director Michael Bay decided to incorporate it into the film only after seeing what they were working on for the then-upcoming toyline and taking a personal liking to it. The subline imprint of the Prime toyline was the Beast Hunters line, which took hold at about the time of the show's third season, which was given the subtitle of the imprint. In the episode "Project Predacon", Optimus Prime awkwardly redubs Team Prime as the "Beast Hunters", when they begin looking for Predacon fossils. The Autobots must've felt the same way as we did about the sudden name change, since really only the protocol-obsessed Ultra Magnus begins using the term. Thanks to behind the scene troubles and the whole concept being a late addition to the series, the team never actually hunts any beasts, as only three Predacons ever take a central role in the story. Talk about "shoehorned in". In Spotlight: Trailcutter, Trailbreaker has an existential crisis, and worries that everyone only sees him as 'the forcefield guy'. Deciding to revamp his image, he decides that he'll now go by the much slicker(?) "Trailcutter"... just as Thrilling 30 Trailcutter hit store shelves. The subline imprint for the Generations line from 2015 to 2016 was Combiner Wars, hence IDW's tie-in comic had to introduce a heapload of combiners in a universe that regarded combination as a lost art with unpredictable side-effects. (Devastator, Menasor, Superion, and Monstructor were around, but they had each been introduced separately, and each with their own unique explanations, over the course of ten years.) Enter the Enigma of Combination, an artifact of Nexus Prime with the power to merge any Transformers into a combiner. Not only is this artifact used on Superion, Menasor, and Defensor, it is also used on Optimus Prime and other selected Autobots to create Optimus Maximus. The fact that Optimus had two Combiner Wars toys (one released, one upcoming at the time of the story's publication) might have influenced this decision. Also, the big toy of 2015 was a Titan Class Devastator... in his classic configuration instead of IDW's newly introduced 'Prowlastator' form. Unfortunately, Scrapper had been long dead and hence was unable to take his spot as the combiner's leg. However, IDW had another bulldozer-bot conveniently lying around — Scoop. Naturally, he was merged with the other Constructicons by the aforementioned Enigma, restoring Devastator's classic silhouette. A long-running plot thread of More than Meets the Eye, starting all the way back in issue 5, was Ratchet preparing First Aid to succeed him as the Lost Light's Chief Medical Officer. Issue 40 finally sees Ratchet stepping down and leaving the ship (so he could participate in the events of Drift - Empire of Stone), officially declaring First Aid "the new Chief Medical Officer"... but after only two issues in his new position, issue 43 sees First Aid himself leave the Lost Light under a flimsy in-story pretense so he could participate in the events of Combiner Wars, appointing Velocity as his own successor (although he would later return to the Lost Light following the conclusion of Combiner Wars). In a follow-up story, Galvatron creates two combiners out of random soldiers and foes. To plug the new merch, these are called Galvatronus and Sky Reign but most of the characters that made them up in toy form were either on Cybertron, the Lost Light, or dead at the time. Unusually for this page, Hasbro allowed IDW to use random limbs as long as the names were right but this leads to the comic pimping a toy you can't buy (though you could make it with others), and in Galvatronus' case a toy that doesn't even have the same face as in the comic. Awkward continuity This happened... er.... look just buy the toys, ok?! Sometimes the requirement to feature new toys can be so strong that continuity takes a major backseat and stories are produced that feature combinations of characters that make the story very difficult to slot into the main continuity. The Marvel UK comic was especially prone to this as it could not always foresee where, when and how characters would be introduced: The Transformers Annual 1985 contains many stories featuring toys from the 1985 release long before they were formally introduced in the regular comic, often interacting with other characters who would be out of action by then. As a result, few of the stories easily fit the continuity of the weekly comic. The demands of Hasbro UK for the Headmasters and Targetmasters to be featured heavily even before the US Headmasters mini-series was available meant that both the Transformers Annual 1987 and the regular strip "Worlds Apart!" contain a slightly different set of events that are at odds with the mini-series. The requirement to give prominence to the rereleased toys in the Classics range resulted in one of the biggest continuity trainwrecks of all, Earthforce. Over three decades later fans are still uncertain where it fits in continuity, and even Simon Furman admits to being unsure.[3] Germany's Transformers Comic-Magazin started in 1989 and

Today, Google DeepMind and A24 are announcing a first-of-its-kind partnership focused on research. The collaboration pairs a world-leading research lab with the industry…

Deeper understanding of the code and software systems we work on, is not only pragmatic and practical but highly enjoyable as well ... But, if it is both joyful and powerful, why are we so often prone to skip the struggle to understand and take shortcuts, accepting copy-pasted/generated solutions and generic answers, not analyzed?

I have to use a Unitree Go1 with a jetson AGX orin strapped to it for a university project. It's so hard to iterate because as soon as I get close to making progress, I have to power the whole thing off and replace the battery. Now I know you should run heavy processing offline and communicate with the robot over a network, but what I am doing is basically ROS2 troubleshooting for which I need the setup exactly as it will be during deployment. Exactly how is this "robotics revolution" powered by vision-language-action models supposed to work, when the most popular quadruped cannot even power a jetson for more than 15 minutes standing still??? I always thought VLA was an impractical idea, but now I am even less convinced. submitted by /u/EchoImpressive6063 [link] [Kommentare]

I’m still here. Not selling unless things really go off the rails, but I just need to vent for a minute because I’m honestly exhausted by this market. I bought SOL in the low $20s, but I also bought ONDO above $2 at the top. I’ve ridden the ups and downs, took some profits here and there, but nothing significant. And now here we are again, supposedly “bottoming.” I’m tired of hearing respected voices like Tom Lee talk about how we’re in the bottoming process, while at the same time watching things like MSTR struggle. The mixed signals are mentally draining. To be clear, this isn’t the kind of struggle where I’m thinking about selling everything and walking away. It’s more the psychological side of it. The bears feel louder, the FUD feels stronger, and the uncertainty seems heavier than it did in previous cycles. I’m not looking for hopium or reassurance. I know everyone in this market deals with these emotions at some point. Just wanted to share where my head is at and see if anyone else is feeling the same. Thanks for listening. 🙏 submitted by /u/NoSleepDad2023 [link] [Kommentare]

let’s raise Wendy’s to $30 at a minimum peeps! submitted by /u/Abject-Ad778 [link] [Kommentare]

Money Money 💰 Money! Wendy’s is going to $100 submitted by /u/Abject-Ad778 [link] [Kommentare]