me and my friend, arnie, never worked with humanoids before.
i only had a bit of experience with an unitree h1 back when i did contract work in the uk.
in a nice evening in paris in 2025, i texted arnie and said hey let's find an unitree g1 and do full body control on it.
at this time, full body control was very hard, i'm not sure if at the point of reading this it is easy or not, but it was hard then. normally, we have to separate locomotion and bimanual manipulation on a humanoid. there were no readily available way to do it.
as the plot went, in just a week, i went to zurich to reunite with arnie, we found an unitree g1 (gg arnie), and was the first team in the world to reproduce the data pipeline for a then frontier research paper on full body control.
giga chads.
i was on schedule to visit sf on the 18th of may 2026 for the robotics team offsite at livekit
right after booking my flights, i saw south park commons (where i used to be a fellow) posted their hackathon on robotics, it was on the weekend of the 16th
i pinged david, my manager, said "hey do you want to do this, i'll cancel my flight", he said he needed to ask his boss (his daughter)
10 min later, i canceled my flight, and pushed it earlier just for the hackathon
we ended up winning the hackathon, gg david and jacob
being the person with no filter, if i think something's right, i don't hold back
this is me on a stream from nvidia on nvidia cosmos, their opensource multimodal llm
saying the llm doesn't matter on being asked what is the key to making a good harness
in a hackathon on using nvidia's models
anyway, this is another hackathon i won at livekit, i did the entire project in the weekend when i first joined the company, then we went ahead and won 3rd place
one of my proudest achievement ever is being the only person to win werewolves as the sole survivor at fr8
in case you don't know what the sole survivor role is, the role doesn't belong in the villagers nor the werewolves
you can only win if you're the last one standing, with a single villager left (despite the role being called sole survivor, if you sole survive with a werewolf then it can just kill you so you can't win in this case)
so what i did to win was basically tricking the werewolves and the villagers to kill each other until there are only one villager, one werewolves and me
then i convinced the villager to vote to kill the last standing werewolf
then i won
i basically got the fuckest made up role in the game, a role with the shittiest rule and no powers (we call it the joker at fr8) and still won
*as you may have guessed, this role required insane luck too, cause i need to not get killed by the werewolves every turn, i think the condition leading to winning this game was everyone thought i sucked at it so they mercy not kill me
*i was cohort 1.0 at fr8, but i think this record will hold for a long long time
i successfully stream sniped ishowspeed in finland once.
one's life is a story with multiple acts, these are some of my dad lores
my kids gonna be proud kids
me on a hammock on the coast of a random island in the baltic sea
till this day i still don't know where the f i was
when i left human computer lab in 2025, to get jobs, i made a video called an open letter to learning
from that video on
nik, the founder of omi, invited me to his warehouse in sf, where i successfully hacked the friend pendant, went viral and got an offer for 5M$ in equity, to which i declined
on a random day in april 2025, at a hackathon (which i later won), i called my then cofounder to ask him whether he wanted to go to finland with me for 3 months to build a startup
unbeknownst to me at the time, he was about to ask his girlfriend to marry him the next month, yet he said yes
we then built human computer lab, a startup on human computer interaction for 3 months in finland
at the end, we raised 500k$ from south park commons and fr8
this is the video of the moments we signed the safes
although i left human computer lab later on, the 3 months is still one of the best and most transformative period of my entire life
that hackathon where i asked my co-founder then to join me in finland btw
it's also a very random story on how i even ended up at this hackathon
long story short, a friend in munich asked me if i want to go, i said if he let me crash at his place i'll book a flight from budapest to munich just to join him
we ended up winning the thing, the thing is the biggest university hackathon in germany btw (TUMMakeathon)
it's also one of the first times i realize i can compete with the best of the best on the hardest possible problems (TUM researchers on drone navigation) and pedigree at big universities means shit
david lakatos, the cpo of formlabs, shot me an 3 words email after seeing the video, asking whether i want to work in boston or budapest, to which i also declined
and several other startups
working on stuff other than robots didn’t interest me
david chen, my manager at livekit now, pulled up to my house in sf with livekit merch and said he’ll create a role just for me to join the company, i can work on whatever i find interesting with robots
that’s how i joined livekit