Incredibly well executed Youtube project IMO. The DIY many-poled rotary encoders are particularly gorgeous cost engineering in a hobby project like this.
I have a fun omega-3 anecdata point going right now. A friend of mine researches the stuff in mouse models and told me it's extremely beneficial, but you need to buy a fancy brand to avoid rancid oil or heavy metal contamination both of which ~null out the benefits. She recommended Sports Research.
I bought some and started taking it and my 1:1 bullet chess ELO jumped from 850 to ~1070 over the next couple weeks.
I play chess a bit like sushi ginger for the mind - purge working memory with a short intense task to context switch. I intentionally don't study openings or anything so I can use it as a benchmark for mental horsepower with a reasonably slow drift in the baseline from 'actually learning chess'.
My friend says this effect is way too big to actually attribute to the vitamins and it has to be placebo etc but I'm thoroughly enjoying the idea that omega-3 Nick would win 3/4 bullet matches against deficient Nick.
It works if you just plainly describe what you're looking for, I write a new prompt for different images just like "re-render this as a matte untextured 3d model, remove all details except geometric form"
I've had surprising success with meshy.ai as part of a workflow to go from images my friends want to good 3D models. The workflow is
1. Have gpt5 or really any image model, midjourney retexture is also good, convert the original image to something closer to a matte rendered mesh, IE remove extraneous detail and any transparency / other confusing volumetric effects
2. Throw it in meshy.ai image to 3D mode, select the best one or maybe return to 1 with a different simplified image style if I don't like the results
3. Pull it into blender and make whatever mods I want in mesh editing mode, eg specific fits and sizing to assemble with other stuff, add some asymmetry to an almost-symmetric thing because the model has strong symmetry priors and turning them off in the UI doesn't realllyyy turn them off, or model on top of the AI'd mesh to get a cleaner one for further processing.
The meshes are fairly OK structure wise, clearly some sort of marching cubes or perhaps dual contouring approach on top of a NeRF-ish generator.
I'm an extremely fast mechanical CAD user and a mediocre blender artist, so getting an AI starting point is quite handy to block out the overall shape and let me just do edits. EG a friend wants to recreate a particular statue of a human, tweaking some T-posed generic human model into the right pose and proportions would have taken me "more hours than I'm willing to give him for this" ie I wouldn't have done it, but with this workflow it was 5 minutes of AI and then an hour of fussing in Blender to go from the solid model to the curvilinear wireframe style of the original statue.
Bad popularizing article, doesn't cover the actual conclusion:
The main points emerging from the combined simulation and experimental study on atmospheric entry of the paper plane are:
• Orbit: The paper space plane de-orbits from LEO extremely quickly
due to its very low ballistic coefficient. Atmospheric entry from a
400 km circular orbit occurs within a few days.
• Attitude: In the free-molecular portion of atmospheric entry,
above ∼120 km altitude, the paper space plane maintains a stable
flow-pointing attitude. Small-amplitude oscillations occur in pitch
and yaw. Although the coupled simulator is not designed for
application at lower altitudes, the results suggest the onset of
uncontrollable tumbling at ∼120 km altitude.
• Heating: Based on the hypersonic wind tunnel test results and
simulation, surface forces acting on the space plane during atmospheric entry are not expected to cause significant deformation.
However, the paper space plane experiences severe aerodynamic
heating in the order of 105 W/m2
(or 10 W/cm2
) for several
minutes. Accordingly, combustion or pyrolysis is expected during
atmospheric entry
I found myself reading this more for the excellent notetaking than for the content.
I suspect the discussion was about as charged, meandering, and nitpicky as we all expect a PL debate among deeply opinionated geeks to be, and Jake Edge (who wrote this summary) is exceptionally good at removing all that and writing down substance.
> RO desal splits the incoming ~3% salinity stream into two halves, one fresh and one ~6% salinity. This concentrated brine is fed to adjacent brine processing facilities (ideally in both countries) that exploit the region’s abundant solar and geothermal energy to extract potentially millions of tonnes of lithium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and other metals found in sea water. The resulting depleted brine is piped back to the ocean where it is thoroughly mixed with sea water and discharged.
Casey's proposing we mine the brine for useful minerals. You're right he's glossing over details, but a citation addressing the economics of brine disposal with his proposed processing would add more to the discussion.
IIRC we've found some big exoplanets in wild orbits. They tend to form in a circular-ish orbit because that's how you get a big enough chunk of the dense bits of an accretion disk, but interactions with other planets/stars can put eg gas giants into wild orbits after formation.
Please also be careful about selling to incumbents without a strong guarantee (ie contractual penalties) your product will stay in market for many years.
I know smoke detectors and a couple other crappy home goods have been fixed by scrappy upstarts, sold to the losers for <100M, and then shuttered to avoid pivoting the existing business. Heartbreaking lost progress every time it happens.
Almost nobody in tech is interested in the degrowth solution to climate change, we’re all in on increased affluence with tech mitigations for the environmental harms.
Somebody’s gotta book all the electric / / synfuel powered flights ;)
Active vacuum insulation isn’t a thing because you need high vacuum to reduce thermal conductivity at all, because mean free path and therefore specific conductivity grows at the same rate density decreases until mean free path exceeds the characteristic length of your application.
Also, modern VIPs have decades of life if installed properly.
Anyone curious about psychedelic methods of action, particularly based on their personal experience, should read Surfing Uncertainty or at least the SSC review/summary of it.
The predictive processing interpretation of these drugs is that they change the balance between top-down predictive generative models from our "deep" brain and noisy bottom-up sensory percepts from the peripheral brain. When you get super-resolution like experiences of banal everyday textures, that's your peripheral brain failing to filter them out for lacking novelty, when you get psychedelia style visuals that's intermediate "layers" of abstraction running amok, and when you go off on extended narrative experiences fully detached from reality that's the deep generative models doing their own thing unmoored from the error signals your senses would otherwise generate.
It's an awesome book in many other respects, but IMO the best bit is how many plausible mechanistic explanations it offers for psychedelic experience.
Jane Street recruits silly hard from Cornell’s CS dept because part of our required curriculum is functional programming w OCaml. They definitely introduce a lot of math/cs kids to the idea that finance can be a meaningful technical challenge instead of just Dyson bros in spreadsheets.
Then again I think one of the founders or top execs is an alum, so it’s possible Cornell has that course in that language because of Jane Street
The tether article a week or two ago described them lending tremendous amounts of USD to exchanges and various crypto bank-like entities with Bitcoin as collateral
“ I also learned that Tether had lent billions of dollars more to other crypto companies, with Bitcoin as collateral. One of them is Celsius Network Ltd., a giant quasi-bank for cryptocurrency investors, its founder Alex Mashinsky told me. … Hoegner, Tether’s lawyer, [said] … that its secured loans are low-risk, because borrowers have to put up Bitcoin that’s worth more than what they borrow.”
In the original General Fusion plan: Pneumatic pistons which strike anvils in the chamber wall creating a shockwave which implodes the liquid wall with fusion-igniting pressures.
I think they may have moved away from that in favor of big pneumatic pistons pushing tiny piston heads directly into the liquid though. Mechanical advantage is the area ratio, which you can easily make quite large.