Systems engineer Yacine jokes about dense academic papers, prompting Chris Paxton to pitch the RoboPapers podcast
Story Overview
A systems engineer’s meme about wrestling with dense robotics papers drew a direct reply from researcher Chris Paxton, who pointed to the RoboPapers podcast he co-hosts as a way to hear authors walk through the same work in plain conversation.
Episodes focus on concrete research threads
Weekly talks cover topics like vision-language models for manipulation and sim-to-real reinforcement learning, letting listeners follow the authors’ reasoning without needing to parse the original text themselves.
Reach and details stay limited so far
The show appears on standard podcast platforms with no reported listener numbers or funding figures, leaving open how widely it has landed with builders outside the initial X thread.
Many users dismissed robotics research papers as boring slop or dishonest, arguing they prioritize flashy claims over real progress amid publish-or-perish pressures.
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@yacineMTB me reading chinese robotics research papers
@yacineMTB This is why we have a podcast @RoboPapers
Me any time I read robotics research papers
@yacineMTB Reading papers with your own eyes? Don't you have clankers for that?
@yacineMTB bro hank green blocked me because I replied to someone saying they are what's wrong with the world
@yacineMTB it's pretty bad out there
@yacineMTB Now make the YT video where you say the same thing 😆
@yacineMTB They're boring. We need brainrot editions.
@yacineMTB "we made a model that fails on 19/20 tasks but it's sota on 1/20 task!! Yayy paper!!
@yacineMTB papers are written by undergrads and other students btw
@yacineMTB Then you aren't reading the good papers, lots of so called scientific papers are just slop
@yacineMTB They do a whole bunch of nothing
Companies making meaningful change keep their stuff unpublished
@wavefnx @yacineMTB So far, they are much easier.
@yacineMTB All papers lie. It takes skill to find the ones that lie least.
@yacineMTB When I was a teenager I liked the larp of the aesthetic weeding through papers but I think if there's a youtube video/codebase/article explaining the concept that usually is better, unless you're doing something truly novel that the lit is too niche
@yacineMTB Publish or perish
Has done almost irreplaceable harm to research
@yacineMTB f'ck research papers. its like they are all written by the same group of cult members. same phrases, etc. really annoying they all have the same unreadable formats.
@yacineMTB Scientific papers are bad btw