rland

You need to have the right toughness, ductility, fatigue, etc.

Steel varies a lot. You can buy a 1000 page book that just lists different steels, along with their material properties.

Saying “just use stainless” is kinda like saying “just 3d print it” or “just make it out of carbon fiber”

- bio engineering -- predicting (?) or designing (?) molecules that are large chains to perform some particular function

- coverage path planning -- sort of a "roomba" problem -- find a continuous path, through a space, that covers the space

- 3-D printing -- find the extrusion path that maximally covers some area or areas with high strength with a minimum amount of material

Basically, around about 2016 (maybe?) the number of electric scooters in San Diego exploded. We had like 6 different companies dumping them by the pallet load, I guess as an availability tactic.

I imagine what they were doing was taking them off the road and into someplace where they looked accessible on the GPS but couldn't actually be accessed, depleting the battery by winding them down, and then deconstructing them enough to get them into Tijuana, where they would be stripped and the brain of the scooter replaced. Apparently, they had a guy in TJ who could basically "de-GPS" the scooters. Then, they would ship them back up and sell them cheaply.

On the one hand, my god what they are doing at SpaceX, Starlink, (and even some parts of) Tesla are incredible! And I suppose without Musk playing carnival barker, these things aren't possible.

On the other hand... the approach is so slimy and really should not be celebrated the way it is.

It's a similar feeling with Martin Shkreli. He did some fraud, but he also gave all the money back to investors and started the ongoing conversation about Rx pricing.

I mean Tesla P/E is like 209. 209!! GM PE is at 6.

Where does this tremendous difference come from? A Tesla evangelist would say, well Tesla is doing self driving, Tesla is doing electric cars, it's the future of technology! Then they go buy shares. Or join Tesla as an engineer and work 90 hour weeks.

Where does this enthusiasm come from? Surely it isn't from the actual technology in the cars, which is and has never been distinguished to such a degree from competitors. Before you go and say that Telsa had electric cars first, go look at how many units they shipped: while they were making promises, they were not physically manufacturing or delivering that many cars; by the time Tesla did ramp up production to the scale promised by their media image, consumers could buy electric cars from Ford, Toyota, GM.

Simply put, most of this stellar valuation is based entirely off of the media sensation of Tesla, which is completely and inextricably bound to the media sensation of Elon Musk. This $50bn or whatever Elon is paying for Twitter is basically fabricated from whole cloth not by technology or fundamentals -- but from Elon's Twitter itself!

This is a common pattern to Elon's business ventures, and I would argue, it's the primary reason for the success of Musk companies. The playbook is simple:

1. Be Elon Musk

2. Make an insane promise, probably on Twitter

3. Convince redditors to buy shares in the venture;

4. Meanwhile, convince redditor STEM people (engineers, programmers, and so on) to work like dogs to make the venture possible;

5. Stay in the news cycle [Post on Twitter] about the venture.

6. Keep doing (5) until the technology is possible (this can actually happen sometimes, because of step 4!). If it's not possible, extend the hype cycle due by doing more of (5); if it's never possible, either bail out the venture using shares from a different venture, or shutter it -- and make sure Elon newswire isn't paying attention to the fact that it failed, by doing another (2)!

If you can do a few of these things at once, you can get basically all redditors to give you their money to hire all redditors to attempt this insane shit (Mars? Humanoid Robots? Brain Computer Links???). I'm thoroughly convinced that nobody on planet earth except for Elon Musk can do it. It's actually incredible what he's able to accomplish. And no, I'm not talking about the technology.

What is your arm but a series of sensations and connections in your brain? Your arm is a physical thing; but to the extent that it exists to you, it exists in your brain.

So I think the loss of an arm is probably very similar in an actual not just a metaphorical sense. Although I would easily choose losing my arm over losing one of my loved ones.

Why risk it?

How many employers have used data on candidate salaries in violation of the law in California? How would we ever know?

There are many benefits of using cash: it's very secure, as long as I'm sensible. It's anonymous. It costs those that I do business with less to maintain (Visa charges 2%. 2 percent! of revenue!). People who I tip like me more because I tip in cash. Businesses I do business with like me more because I give them cash. Not to mention, I can do business with anyone I want if I deal with cash -- not so with electronic services.

Look to the case of Germany for why cash is so important.

For example, Elon's personal spending and the structure of his compensation. If he just wants to go to mars, why does the stock price and his share thereof matter so dang much?

Or Bill's net worth, which has curiously increased despite his mission of giving it all away.

You do not need to get the water at the surface to 10, or 100, or 1000 atm. You just need a long pipe that goes all the way to the bottom.

Likewise for transporting water upward.

Oh my god just stop taking yourself so seriously. Really. You don't need to do this. You're trying waaaay too hard.

It's opaque and mysterious and lovecraftian to you because you clearly spend all of your time making cool graphics and drawing tenuous metaphors between 16th century monks, pharaohs, and jeff bezos. I assure you, for everyone who works in a lithium mine or amazon datacenter doing the actual thing, it's actually pretty obvious. you just, you don't need to write this maam.

And also google "commodity fetishism" sometime.

It does look cool though. Wonderful typography and illustrations. I have a nitpick which is that it's a little bit monochrome, a pop of color (maybe a gold? or like neon red) would really take it to the next level.

I had no clue how to use blender before, but now I feel like I have at least a passable idea of how the UI works -- despite basically never having touched it!

Just say the quantity increased "from 0.0015 to 0.002" or something.

It's particularly prevalent in news announcement of scientific studies. "New drug decreases x by 350%!"

This was interesting. I really thought these things were just a relic.

1. go to about:config

2. find widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override

3. Change to some pixel value (I have mine set at 26).

voila!

I do not understand why the default is so thin. Really bucks the trend of every UI element being touch-screen large nowadays!

I can put a chart of lexical similarity over a chart of the number of employed airplane mechanics and probably pontificate that by golly, we need to stop fixing airplanes for the sake of intellectual diversity!

And that would be about as well-reasoned.

Basically, when you have hypoglycemia, you lose "fine" things first, and you sort of lose things in order, from "fine" (picking things up, balancing, seeing small details) towards "coarse" (talking, walking) and then of course to very "coarse" things, like being able to wake up/see.

And the physical symptoms are exactly mirrored by the mental symptoms. "fine" mental things are like the ability to formulate a complex thought with a lot of abstraction: do a math problem, talk about the future or the past, etc. "Coarser things" are like being able to think verbally or interpret the basic meaning of things -- like, what is that thing over there called? Then, you lose extremely "course" things, like being able to reason at all about what is going on in the world around you.

Oddly enough, the last thing that goes is emotion. Emotion is the baseline of how every piece of context is categorized. Things feel good or they feel bad at a level far below anything resembling what they are. At a level below speaking, having distinct thoughts about distinct objects or people, having any sense of time, place, or meaning. Emotion is always there.

It really is impossible to articulate, because words are a complete fiction.

I wish everyone could go through that, because it really makes you realize the fiction of your own "self" as a real thing.

> A goal for the build was to limit impact to the site during construction, and then to limit the footprint of the home after completion. In pursuit of this we planned an efficient mechanical design that would feature solar panels for electricity generation tied to the grid, geothermal for heat exchange, and no fossil fuels.

Oh, great, sound like you have some good environmental principles!

> However, we quickly ran into several problems with this approach.

Yeah, it can be a bummer to sacrifice your own comfort. But it is worth it for the environment!

> The bigger issue was that the energy demands for the house, which included hot water heating for the pool and hot tub, outstripped the electrical supply we could get on a rural residential build: 400A.

Wow, that's a lot of electricity. Like, a loooooot. Maybe we can pare it down a little bit -- limiting our impact is important, right?

> We eventually settled on supplementing our electrical generation with propane, which we had hoped to avoid

Right?

O-oh. Oh so you're using propane to heat the pool.

Yeah.

Instagram : millenials

TikTok : gen z

snapchat is sort of irrelevant from what I can gather.

What we really need is for every student to realize why math is useful -- so that if they want to, they can go learn it so that they can make some kind of technological contribution to the world. The fact is, you need to be good at math to make some new fundamental breakthroughs in technology. Those breakthroughs benefit everyone, even those who don't know any math at all. But you won't really get why that's the case until you know enough about sines and cosines to make sense of modern technological development.

The real issue is that we just teach the math, hoping that students will understand on their own that it's fundamental.

What we should do instead is try to instill that sense of wonder about the world that inspires people to study math. We don't need every person to know calculus, we just need everyone to understand why calculus is useful -- then they can be inspired to go further. Educators say that they're trying to do this, but I'm sorry "how many meters of fence does Farmer Bob need to keep the sheep inside the pen" is not inspiration -- it's drivel, no better than "find the perimeter given a=5, b=6."

If every person understood why math is so useful, we would have many more people who are motivated to work on improving the state of things.

The value of money is derived from moving against thermodynamic equilibrium. Cryptocurrency’s value comes from moving towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The conversion of work into heat — not heat into work!

I’m not talking about taxation or apps. Those are things built with the axioms of crypto-evangelism. I’m talking about the physical fundamentals underlying those axioms.

Of course, this virtual space is coupled with physical space, by hugely centralized entities called exchanges. To get your money across the border, you need to deal with them. In that case the physical value you can buy with your cryptocurrency comes about from the exchange, not the currency.

Value is a physical thing, not a virtual thing. That’s because we live in the physical, not the virtual world. But we’ll readily delude ourselves into believing that’s not the case.

Cryptocurrency can never be an abstraction of some physical process.† Therefore, I would argue, it can never be useful to us.

† Well, technically, it actually is an abstraction of a physical process: a heat engine with 0% efficiency.

This economy-scale decoupling is the dual of each and every one of our very own psychological uncoupling from our own physical worlds, which has occurred because of the computerization of work, socialization, and life itself (the shimmering neuralink dream).

Cryptocurrencies are what happens if you completely decouple the asset price from the physical world. To create the "value" of cryptocurrencies, we purposefully do nothing at all. The asset is valuable only because of the flow of entropy. Not the flow of energy (which generally has some physically useful function). But entropy itself -- a thing that exists only in the "map" of information, not the "territory" of the real world.

Typically, moving entropy around is useful to us, because it actually corresponds to changes in an underlying physical process. Like, your job doing excel spreadsheets for warehouse inventory management is just changing the flow of entropy -- to you, it is decoupled from the physical world. But there is a link to the physical world: when you change a cell in a spreadsheet, so too a physical good moves somewhere else in the warehouse.

With cryptocurrencies, not so. All this entropy is moving for the sake of itself. It's all virtual -- none of it can be coupled with the physical world (by design! if it could be, some physical force could go in and take your crypto-coins).

Now, here's the delusion: unfortunately for us, moving entropy around is actually still coupled with moving energy around. It actually has a tremendous physical effect on the world around us.

Something I've noticed about cryptocurrency people is that they are very, very plugged in. The evangelists never have a physical job; always a computer job, and they are always online, and believe in being online to the greatest extent possible. And I think, actually, there is a very obvious reason for that.

Defense usually wins if they have good documentation of putting employees on a PIP, even if the reason is obviously dubious*.

Maybe I'm cynical because I've only seen it in a lawsuit context, but if you're put on a PIP, start applying. There's no out.

* like, discrimination, company wants to fire long-term employee because of an injury, company wants to fire an employee for union organizing, etc.

For those who have some familiarity with Python, I found this to be a great resource for Kalman Filtering: https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Pyt...