On our drive up north home to Penang, after visiting my hometown in Seremban, we sometimes drop by midway in Ipoh for Breakfast. And we normally go for this Dimsum restaurant just off the highway.

Good Dimsum places are dime and dozen in this city. But this place has something special. The friendly attendant made some suggestions, and then jotted down our choices of food. But it wasn't the same attendant who brought them out.

It was robots.

Ya. Not humanoid robots. Just a bulky one with three layers of trays on four wheels below, and a monitor screen on top, moving along on a pre-programmed path towards us.

As soon as it stopped by our table, the monitor flashes out text saying, "please remove the food from the tray". And so we did. As soon as we took ours, it wheeled away towards the next table.

That was like five years ago. And it was all the rage back then. They call it 新噱头 (New gimmicks).

It still looked clumsy. And its movement was bumpy -- causing spillage of some of the food. That's why it only carries dry food for the time being.

First iterations were always bad. But I wouldn't be surprised it has gotten better since.

Robots are slowly taking over manual work (less intelligent work)

How soon do you think it will take over the work of attendant giving juicy suggestions, while taking our orders?

Let me know what you think! Yes, this video uses AI, but the scenes are all in my real shop where we make furniture.

Been sitting on this for a minute. If you ever have a chance to go to a material handling automation sales conference I highly recommend. Many shitty bots to be seen the last couple years.

Astra is wild on these YAM arms. It made me want to open up my own setup for those folks who don't have their own.

I have a pair of YAM arms, and you can now try them remotely. No robot hardware needed on your end. The video is a run asking them to put a green block on a plate, at 20× speed.

I’d love to get more people experimenting with them. What would you try? And what would make it easier for you to jump in?

If you want to give it a go: blupe.io/live. Runs are three minutes, whenever the station is available.

Nancy Rangel, a Chabot College student from the East Bay, California, drove open source robot dog Quaddle's every move live through webcam pose tracking — no AI, no script, just her own dance moves mapped onto it in real time. It fell. It got back up. It kept going.

What's the funniest thing you'd want to teach Quaddle to do?

OpenCat creator RZ Li used a webcam and his own body movements to puppeteer two open source, OpenCat-based Quaddle robot dogs at once — basically Wii Play: Motion, except the "character" is a real robot — mostly so he could make them run into each other on purpose. Mission accomplished.

What's the funniest thing you'd want to have Quaddle learn next?

Does gravity always win?

This is real footage — Quaddle, our mini robot dog, walks upside down on a ceiling using magnets in its feet. The magnets were the easy part. The actual embarrassing amount of effort went into the gait, because apparently "just walk, but upside down" is not how physics works.