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Gravitylosson Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue declines

Ah, this could be a great study in organization design! Conway's law suggests that the software architecture resembles the organization. So there might not be any designers making such decisions. Probably lots of organizations can't use each others' toolbars but are expected to add their own toolbar?

Gravitylosson Antimony: CAD Software Evolved from Lisp Machines and Not Drafting Tables (2015)

The excellent youtube video deserves its own submission. It's incredible how much one can learn in 43 minutes.

I'm certainly not an expert in these fields, but what's your angle on techniques like raymarching?

Gravitylosson Jailbreaking my car's navigation system just so I can change the time

We have this in the kitchen with the stove and the microwave, both from this decade! Apparently still a very hard problem.

Gravitylosson Why Don't We Live in an Art Nouveau World?

I went to Sagrada Familia and then to Mies van Der Rohe Pavilion.

The latter had a bikini fashion shoot ongoing.

Maybe something to do with it. The world and society completely transformed. Mass media, fashion, loss of religiosity, sexual liberation, globalization, social mobility...

Gravitylosson No Vehicles in the Park

> I don't yet have enough data to give an answer on whether the names affect anything, but stay tuned

Gravitylosson William Nordhaus has died

https://web.archive.org/web/20141211111849/http://www.econ.y...

This 1992 paper has a section that 3 C of warming leads to 1.2 % of GDP loss globally. Quite an assumption to put it lightly. I don't know how much the rest of the paper then makes any difference...

Gravitylosson The US added a record 20.2 GWh of battery storage in just 3 months

China, the electrostate

Gravitylosson Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World

I think this is similar now in most things. Music or blog posts etc. Yet when you try to discover something, for some reason it's really hard to find good quality material.

A few years ago there was mathematics progress in recommendation algorithms. Those could better things a lot. I foolishly disparaged the progress, as yet another way to sell us more content. I'm sorry for that. I've changed my mind since.

Gravitylosson Peter Thiel, the tech oligarch who believes in the Antichrist

And some are born to that privilege. This is made painfully apparent in the Netflix social issues documentary "Outer Banks".

Gravitylosson World Wars I and II Military Aviation Museum Collection

Eclipse used friction stir welded aluminum for its very light jet.

Gravitylosson Peter Thiel, the tech oligarch who believes in the Antichrist

I assume it's a natural thing to happen if somebody gets a lot of power. If not being extra careful, they will automatically get surrounded by yes men and start drifting in odd directions. Happens to dictators too.

With democracy at least there's changing some of the people in power on a schedule.

Gravitylosson Two Million Hornets

Good. Too bad they're not in Ireland. The country might lack woodland for them to breed in. Artificial nests perhaps? (I think many countries should invest in biodiversity also, on a strategic level, for multitude of reasons, but resilience to pests is one.)

Gravitylosson Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline

The Hate Amplifier

Gravitylosson Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)

If you squint a little you can probably make a claim that any particular country X is a true successor of Rome: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F7...

Gravitylosson Where the Romans Fought (interactive map)

Might be because of land travel in those days. I wonder how besides the large scale geography like mountains, the smaller scale and biotopes also affected it. Open farmland or steppes are different to travel than dense forests or cliffs. Even today, trade by land is still more constrained than by water, if you look at large container ships vs trains, and where most GDP is concentrated. Thomas Pueyol makes some nice twitter threads about this, how geography has shaped history. Of course simplified and with a chosen narrative, but something that the typical "great man theory of history" doesn't do.

Gravitylosson Two Million Hornets

Wouldn't some birds love to eat hornets?

Gravitylosson Sony Retires Its Last 4K Blu-ray Player in Japan, PS5 Is All That's Left

Hard to find a good cassette player nowadays too.

Gravitylosson Wolves enter Finnish villages after Google clears 1300 acres for AI data centers

I mean if 0.3% of your home was invaded by a cabinet, you could probably still live there. In reality it's a bit more since the 1000 square km involves fields and lakes, so maybe 1%.

Gravitylosson Wolves enter Finnish villages after Google clears 1300 acres for AI data centers

A wolfpack territory is typically about 1000 square kilometers. The forest cut was 3 square kilometers. So while there might be effects, need to set it in context.

Gravitylosson The alien space of science: Coherent but cognitively unavailable directions

A bit of a tangent, regarding innovation. It's interesting to think about counterfactuals in history. There are questions like what if solar panels became widespread 100 years earlier? Could we have avoided global warming and all the wars over coal and oil? (Not possible because lack of purity technology in materials and understanding of matter.) But are there other things where some easy discovery was waiting just around the corner but it wasn't discovered for some reason? Or something was discovered in one society but not in another for a long time, from similar starting conditions. Washing hands certainly is something that one could go back with, probably thousands of years, to bring immediate benefits. Some cultures have done it but some have absolutely refused it for a long time.

And then applying that kind of thinking to today. Looking back to 2026 from 2126, what would a historian facepalm over? Or what is already being done in one field or social scene but not in another, that would be greatly beneficial? The classic recent example of success is applying airline pilots' checklists to surgery. Airline pilots probably are a little bit like aliens, from surgeon point of view. How many people had already tried similar things, but failed with the institutions and people's inability to receive innovation? Maybe with AI tooling we can facilitate better innovation diffusion. It's not without its dangers of course.

Gravitylosson The Robot I Didn't Expect to Build

Very nice video. Comparing to the channel's latest, I guess the channel itself experienced evolution, with the Algorithm and clicks as its fitness function...

Gravitylosson The Robot I Didn't Expect to Build

Very beautifully written.

Gravitylosson Faster than earcut: triangulating 3.7M map polygons in 489 ms

Not familiar with triangularization algorithms but is it causing issues when it picks long and narrow triangles? I assume a human doing it would in general try to go for more "balanced" ones?

Gravitylosson No more icons in every menu by default

Ahistoricality is a problem. On the other hand it might be that a small group that worked on some paradigm among the sea of many thinks they're the official forebearers of a large field - while in reality influence came from many places.

Gravitylosson A million orthopteran singers from a year of continuous field recorders

https://github.com/carbonranch/brooks The repository. There's even a demo (have not tried it).

Gravitylosson The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable

Renewables and nuclear in China and other countries have really made a dent in emissions. I never expected to see it during my lifetime, very positive. Also electrification is making a lot of fossil fuel less relevant every year. It will take time though since there is so much friction. What works in one country can take decades to diffuse into the neighboring one.

Gravitylosson Linus Torvalds on "don't use AI for X"

I think this answer from Paul Lyude to Linus gives a good contextful opposing argument: https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/10/19/2698

Gravitylosson What shall I teach my son?

I think it's hard to have the kind of meta-skills as a child, it's kind of hit and miss. (Ie discovery, learn what to learn, how to learn, make learning pleasant). As an example, music is one thing that works best if parents, siblings and friends are into it and you can do it together or if it's somehow ambiently present most of the time. But if it's something that you only go to lessons for, decided by someone else, that you don't enjoy etc - then it's often like pouring water into a dry well. Yet those mechanical even if less enthusiastic skills can then be useful later, if the inspiration comes, with a new social circle etc. Or similar with sports. In some families, it's more "present" in an ambient way. When waiting for something outside, the kids have some hockey sticks and a tennis ball lying around and just start playing, maybe with adults who also find it fun. Or talking with the family about the news in an analytical way: that person leads that party and they have these values, while that other person drives these other things. If you have these available then different kids are exposed to things and can pick up things they are more inclined to. I've read lots of mathematician and scientists' stories how Martin Gardner's problem books drew them in to the field. So parents exposed them but didn't force. And their exceptional inclination did a lot of work.

Gravitylosson Gold is now the top U.S. export

And not just "waste" but it's extremely destructive to the environment. A large part of Amazon is destroyed because of gold mining.

Gravitylosson I built a drone with only one motor [video]

Nice work! It's good to see things more from first principles also (although incremental improvements to mainstream things are also good). Also there's lots of historical things that could be revisited with modern technology. For example this is slightly similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dornier_Aerodyne