A selection of historical small-world (~0.05-0.3 Earth masses) SSTOs of the far future.

The "dusk chorus" - as evening falls on Mangala, its binary companion's infrastructure belt of orbiting power stations catches the sun, brightening to become a ring of stars circling the little Mars analog. (mocked up in Celestia)

Lunine Beach, a sleepy seaside town on the shores of Kraken Mare - a sea of liquid hydrocarbons at the north pole of Titan, largest of Saturn's retinue of icy moons.

This is silly, the moon is a readily available ball of feedstock for 1000km radius habitat rings, we have every reason to strip mine it as soon as possible

if you spend enough time away from X all the controversy posts there start looking like this to you

I think the assumption that AI will always mean something proprietary is shaping attitudes powerfully. The corollary is: when we do get a competitive mass-market product that runs locally and can be customized, attitudes may shift to a degree that shocks those of us who already expected that. +

quack dealers

To solve this, the key resource threshold is to have multiple open labs with 10000+ GPUs each. Multiple labs makes it so we are not beholden to big technology co's good graces to want to release models. These institutions increases innovation + derisks this crucial technology.

China's lead is also effecting R&D and those who build with open models. The US and EU used to share the lead, now China has a clear majority in the new finetunes uploaded to huggingface (about 40% come from Qwen models alone, the leading family today)

Crucially this "flip" on open model dominance is about more than adoption, its about performance as well. Chinese models have passed and extended their lead on American open counterparts in the last 12 months.

America needs to take open models more seriously. Just this summer the early lead in open model adoption of Llama & co has been overtaken by Chinese models. With The American Truly Open Models (ATOM) Project we're looking to build support and express the urgency of this issue.

The purpose of the roomba is what it does

Extremely based, congrats to the Oxide team

You can't begin to imagine the brutality of the conflict between the pointy-hatted and crumple-hatted gnomes. Gardens soaked in entrails. Trench warfare out of flower beds

The reason that javascript has semicolons is because newlines are invisible, so the compilers couldn't see the ends of the statements. Then around 2016 computer vision got good enough that we could drop them though.

I'm drinking the Bios Crash slurpee I hope it crashes my bios I hope I blue screen

Puncturing the sky

Total centaur victory

I remember Terry Bolea as a quiet hero of the queer community He stood up to bullies who outed people with non-normative lifestyles for clicks, and got tangible results Hulk Hogan, rest in power

Ron Wyden best democrat senator

oh my god another Balenciaga hat wearing left-NIMBY just dropped

"Social media users are tired of losing their identity and data every time a platform shuts down or pivots. In the ATProto ecosystem, users own their data and identities. Bluesky is the first big example, but a new wave of decentralized social networks is just beginning."

This is sick

Mamdani millennials are interesting bc they got closer to elite status (if not standard of living) than their same age peers of equal or greater merit who stayed in flyover country for one reason or another, the latter definitely regards the former as ladder-pulling elites themselves

Ran this morning and didn’t feel like I was having an asthma attack, which is a dub now I guess lmao

This piece on industrial financing by @interfluidity.com is a really good and important read There’s probably a way to package this in MAGA-speak and force it thru Congress in the next year or two drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/04/i...

I would be totally fine with having Apple as my bank tbh

Extremely based, axial flux motors are gonna eat the market in the next 5yrs

Neat example of AI in the humanities. A Google model trained on Latin text fills in lost parts of Latin inscriptions & identifies related texts. Historians increased their accuracy by 44% when working with the AI (Though AI alone beats historians, historian + AI was usually best by a small amount).

Every company that has worked out has had phases where 70-80hr weeks back to back were necessary, but if it’s the norm then that’s a strong ngmi signal Note that you’ve never heard of any of the startups mentioned

I've written a new post about "ChatGPT psychosis". Includes a detailed timeline of events leading up to the latest incident with Geoff Lewis. minihf.com/posts/2025-0...

Making a kind of steel that rusts as fast as possible and calling it "stainful steel"

“We and our 316 partners”

platforming

Only decision trees are truly thinking. Everything else is just pattern matching.

Major own goal here

San Francisco pubtrans makes me yearn for Lee Kwan Yew

This has convinced me that we should cut down substantially on the RLHF

One of the reasons I don’t think smoking cigarettes (or whatever else) in moderation is *that* bad is that when I’m having a few cigs a week there’s ~0 impact on my cardio performance, but when I’ve had no cigs but have suffered from a moderately bad cold I get knocked back to square one

The historical architecture you love was decorated by developers who had to compete for buyers in an abundantly supplied housing market.

The overwhelming majority of San Francisco’s Victorian homes were built with facade elements that were mass produced in off-site factories and ordered from catalogs. Basically none of them were “hand carved.”

Great thread if you’re looking to spike your blood pressure

Chinese factory videos with morning coffee

caveman: wanna go hunting with me? wife: can I bring my sister? caveman: no, she'd be a third wheel wife: a what? caveman: never mind, just something i'm working on

Moore's law lifts all techbros.

tfw

Hybrid perovskite-organic solar cells that can absorb near-infrared radiation and increase efficiency from 20.4% to 24% by adding a sub-nanometer layer of B3PyMPM at the perovskite/bulk heterojunction interface, to fix a 0.24 eV band mismatch: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

A very fast interplanetary hydrogen tanker, propelled by a DHe3 fusion Z-pinch drive that can deliver 450,000 tons of liquid practically anywhere within 6 months. #space #art by Michel-Lamontagne. www.deviantart.com/michel-lamon...