rotexo

Once you finally meet up with the person on the other end “oh my god, I hate my AI dating concierge too!” Then you have an actual connection.

Almost 20 years ago I helped my mom make a hole for a deep pond in her backyard—a previous occupant had a concrete shallow pond, and her attempts to add goldfish only resulted in turning it into a buffet for the raccoons. The deeper one just needed pond liner and a pump, and it was good to go. Now the only thing that can get to the goldfish is an occasional heron, which is far more enchanting than raccoons. Also the gulf coast toads make for a wonderful spring/early summer soundtrack.

I’ve been reading Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep where that is a characteristic of one of the species in the novel, and had the exact same thought.

Isn’t the problem of robotic kinematics very much unsolved? I seem to remember hearing that kinematics are a major barrier in the path towards effective robots. Are there promising ml approaches to the problem?

Second this book recommendation. He is a very engaging author (and his music is amazing too).

I really want to play microscope, I bought the pdf but I couldn’t successfully tempt my gaming group with it on one of our off-nights. Wish I had a bunch of time and my friends did too. I also want to use it for generating a homebrew world for some other game system.

Some really incredible stuff there!

I was reflecting at lunch today on how grateful I am that we are at least trying to decarbonize. All of this activity still seems fragile to me--Trump (or a similar Republican) could win and implement Project 2025, the geopolitical situation with China could deteriorate and we find that we can't produce things domestically and economically after all, etc. And it seems there is more momentum on decarbonizing power and transportation than industry, chemicals, building and ag. Maybe a carbon tax and dividend could move things along on that front (it is interesting to contemplate the possibility of an old-style Republican winning the presidency, reading the room. and going for a cabon tax--probably a fantasy, though). And maybe this is all too little, too late. But I'm glad we are trying.

Yeah, very probably fraud. Only puzzle is why they would choose something so easy for other labs to try (and fail) to replicate.

This is a really good point. I wasn’t at all aware of this case study. Makes me suddenly very pessimistic about carbon dioxide removal efforts as well.

Yes, though as I understand it, that still leaves a public record. Also, I looked into it when I got married, and the sense that I got was that name changes for men are logistically challenging.

Yes it is an interesting set of trade offs. I have first-hand experience. Six years ago, people on one end of the political spectrum mistook me for someone on the opposite end, and doxxed me. My name is similar to theirs, but I have an additional part of my name that makes it more specific. Now, my google results are polluted with the residue of that doxxing event.

For a while, I actively tried to remove my google results, but there are still archive and social media sites that have my info up, despite my best attempts to take it down. There are also people’s personal sites that have my info, but I don’t want to contact them, because I doubt that these people would believe that this is a case of mistaken identity, and I don’t want to draw attention to myself all over again. I have family who had a similar thing happen, and they counseled me not to take legal action, since it would probably lead my harassers to double down.

So now I am trying to rebuild my actual, positive online presence, except for contact information, because I still fear for my physical safety all these years later. It is a delicate balance. The political situation here (US) is so unstable, the memory of the internet is so long, and developing technology (generative AI) is making it so that there might be a point in the future where a sufficiently motivated individual could exact political retribution on a whole set of perceived enemies at once. This would make my entire life a hellish experience (or end it), no matter the fact that I wasn’t an extremist. I feel that this makes my online presence as essential to my well-being as things like exercise, investing for retirement, etc.

Quick google indicates that a 1MW solar array yields around $40k revenue per year [1]. (I might be misinterpreting that, and also might not be the best source, but multiple hits gave the same ballpark.) With that route, you don’t pay up-front for the electrolyzers, DAC plant, and Sabatier reactor (cost unknown to me for all those components). Maybe add some batteries (Li-ion? Flow?) and you can probably increase annual revenue a fair bit (again, I don’t know how the initial outlay would compare between the terraformer and solar-plus-batteries). I know the two options aren’t totally comparable, because you get an easily transportable fuel with the terraformer. Still, my intuition is that just from the economics, this might be slow to take off. (then again, I know almost nothing!)

[1] https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-....

A nice cheap (as modular synthesizers go) testbed for logic noise circuits is the AE modular format made by Tangible Waves (https://www.tangiblewaves.com/). It all operates on 0-5V, so experimenting with CMOS chips (as well as microcontrollers like Arduino Nano etc.) is easy, and there are quite a few modules available. They also have a breadboard module where you can experiment with small circuits directly on the module. I have had a blast with it (though I am by no means a musician), it was a gateway into Arduino for me.

Shipping from the manufacturer can take a long time (they are a small operation). There are a few third-party manufacturers, with more emerging. If you are in the states, Noisebug in California sells their stuff, and they ship quickly.

One chip I am personally interested in is the CD4089, a multiplier (https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/cd4089b.pdf?ts=16824136787...).

Also Pisound (https://blokas.io/pisound/) which has the benefit of built-in din MIDI, but without the active community sharing software (you kind of have to build everything yourself with PD or SuperCollider). Some people have gotten Norns running on pisound, but I could never get it to work.

Just finished this book and I agree wholeheartedly. It is pretty mind-bending for me to consider the extent of the technological changes that happened in my grandmother’s lifetime, and how quickly those changes just faded into the background. I particularly liked how the author presented several different viewpoints at the end on what made bell labs such fertile ground.

Not so much fatigue as extreme anxiety. I keep trying to think of ways for creative professionals to use it as a tool, but of course the rewards that will go to creators (tiny compared to the rewards going to suits and engineers) will all go to the taylor swifts who already have a brand and can hoover up all the remaining value. Even then, the community that consumes the content seems to toxic that it will make the life of the creator who tries to make a living a living hell.

On the subject of Caracaras, want to plug “A Most Remarkable Creature (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/251787/a-most-remar... ) by Jonathan Meiburg, lead singer of Shearwater

As a biologist with nearly no physics knowledge, this sort of work seems to have more in common with setting up quantum computers than it does with thinking about self-replication in living organisms, at least in terms of the lack of robustness to environmental noise. Maybe that is just overly metaphorical thinking on my part.

Also made me think of the parallel universe to the show “Silicon Valley” where Richard Hendricks sells Pied Piper to Gavin Belson for like $10 million and happily retires in La Veta, Colorado.

On a tangent, and I’m just spitballing here, how is this for a business idea. I: have a PhD (which is not to say I’m smart, it is just to say I have been exposed to lots of facts that other people may not have been exposed to), and I have a bunch of ideas that may or may not be good ones, but I’m too risk-averse to act on any of them and start a business. You: have a bunch of money and are open to ideas. So you pay me, say, $100 bucks to just vomit my ideas out during a 15 minute phone call. Like a cheap loot box of ideas, most of which have a low probability of success, but there may be a nugget of gold in there.

The response I saw on Twitter that made the most sense: “sell your button press for $5 or 10 million to a person who has $100 million”

Soon to evolve into “bird remembering” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/05/220505114633.h...

Yeah I can imagine no circumstance in which winning that kind of money in full view of the public could be good for anybody. Like even if you said “I am giving it all away,” either a) people don’t believe you and want some money and think you are a bad person if you don’t give it up and you are publicly shamed or b) you obsessively document where the money is going and people don’t agree with how you have it away and you are publicly shamed.

I was the target of an online harassment campaign, and very soon afterwards I got a bunch of emails confirming registration on a whole range of forums I had never heard of. Seemed like people were using my email address for forum spam. I’ve been trying to migrate to a new email address ever since, not sure what else to do about it.

I had that experience with some pieces in this work: https://mikiplayspiano.bandcamp.com/releases A lot of it is sparse, and then there are moments that remind me of the black MIDI genre.

Thanks!

So does anyone have a sense of what this means if you have an account with Varo? I mean, they are FDIC insured, so if they go under, is it just a matter of time until one gets their funds back?

Thanks, will have to read up on it.

So you would recommend Optery? Some of the paid opt-out services seem to me to be essentially extortion schemes, want to make sure any service I use wouldn’t be like that.