Having brain teasers pop up while scrolling the feed is like having a drill sergeant randomly yell “DROP AND GIVE ME 20!”, and I feel a little lazy if I don’t actually give them a try.

As an AI researcher, ordering a trash can and it coming from “Qualia zero” seems like something is telling me I am still in the Matrix.

I regret not doing more to support and defend Palmer Luckey at Facebook. We were in different states and divisions, and I was largely out of the political loop, but when I became aware of the situation I should have made a clear and open statement of opposition to the witch hunt.…

I was aware of Archemedis’ mirror based death ray from antiquity (and the MythBusters replication), but TIL that solar mirrors were commercially used in the 15th century for soldering. From Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo:

This is so great!

I still get stuck thinking about reactionless space drives occasionally. I do always conclude that classical physics precludes it, no matter how you try to rotate or redirect forces, but maybe some special relativity effect, or somehow moving energy through EM fields…

As the eclipse passed 40%, it was basically the equivalent of martian sunlight. Quite pleasant.

A nice touch in the new Ghostbusters movie was that the stream of the brass-infused proton pack was green — the color of a copper alloy rocket combustion chamber eating itself.

I always wanted Meta to open up VR home environments and sponsor tools so any game environment on mobile or PC could be “environment shot” in full 3D.

I imagined a driver intercept hack that would capture all the drawing as you turn around, then sort out the static geometry, but…

This is a test of the claim that X is censoring posts with substack links in them.

This was the link that was supposedly censored (not an endorsement):
open.substack.com/pub/meaningnes…

As I understand it, Substack is considered a competitor, and X isn’t going to volunteer them any free…

I had some conversations back in the GearVR/Go days with Richard Garriott about making a mobile VR version of one of the early Ultima games. Not doing a fresh design, but taking all the beats of the original and just making it look decent in VR for a cost effective development.…

I wonder if there would be advantages to making some highly anisotropic processor/GPU/TPU dies — long and skinny instead of square-ish. The “shoreline” around the chip is often a limiting factor for memory/IO bandwidth, and the defect rate should be the same by area.

Contrarian and right. Palmer Luckey

It's only consciousness if it's from the Sapiens species of the Homo genus, otherwise it's just glorified pattern matching

Steve Rabin was kind enough to give me a deck of his new optimization cards at GDC last week. Very nicely done.
steverabindevdecks.com

It looks like Audible only pays a 40% royalty for exclusive content, and 20% for non-exclusive. That seems crazy for a digital distribution platform, where a 70% or better split to creators has been “standard”. Am I missing something?

I do think there are some strong arguments…

I often use “speed of light analysis” when talking about system engineering for a task, but I should probably find another term. I use it around questions like “what is the minimum latency for pass through video and synthetic frames in this architecture”, but “speed of light”…

A couple decades back, it used to be a distinguishing feature that I was immune to boredom because I was always thinking about something. Social media has basically solved that problem for everyone.

A state of the art fab today may be the most complex and sophisticated thing built by humans; you can’t “just go build one” and compete with TSMC given any amount of resources.

However, they are general purpose systems with a lot of flexibility. How much simpler could they get…

A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepneas in the Sky are two of my favorite books of all time, and I recommend them to everyone.