tootie

We've built zillions of machines to automate tasks previously done by humans (or animals) and how many times did we design something based on humans work? Roughly zeroish? People used to do laundry with wash basin and a river, now it's a metal cube. People wash dishes with a sponge and a towel but the machine is a metal cube. People would cook over burning wood and now it's a metal cube.

For $800 I think it's pretty incredible. If something like this is plausible then you may see a future version built with rails.

The desire for humanoid robots is purely aesthetic and almost certainly suboptimal. Ceiling mounted is actually a much more plausible option. Next most likely is something more like R2D2. A rolling garbage can with an arbitrary number of specialized appendages. Humanoids seem like a real dead end to me.

Another slightly pricier option is buy a digital signage display. These are screens intended for use in like retail floors or even outdoors. They tend to be extra durable, resistant to burn-in, very bright and devoid of most fluffy end user features.

For-profit colleges blossomed explicitly because people were told "college = success". In the past, college was a privilege and mostly available to wealthy families or the smartest and most ambitious kids. There was probably huge selection bias in saying this cohort had successful careers. Getting more people into college was probably a net win but diploma mills really diluted the perception of college degrees.

It's a signal to voters sure but it's also a signal to AI companies and investors to hedge their bets because there's not going to be a backstop if they come crying. That's not puffery, it's forward guidance.

There is really no comparison. Frozen credit markets would have dragged the global economy into depression. A crash in tech stocks will just cause investors to lose some wealth. Nobody depends on AI for core operations. Not yet at least.

Also, we did a long-term fix for a 2007-style crisis already with Dodd-Frank. Government can now invoke "orderly liquidation" before a crisis happens. When commercial banks failed a few years ago, FDIC solved it in a matter of weeks with no outlay of money from Congress.

We have no idea if this is accurate or honest or if engineer did something negligent.

Gold is down YoY. I prefer banks and stocks.

Is that just code for "inside job"?

Holding assets in USD isn't the same as paying taxes.

That wasn't the campaign promise and isn't worth spending money on. Also they are deporting and detaining people who are here legally and even killing American citizens. Even if it isn't a official mission it's the inevitable side effect of funding a domestic law enforcement agency like a military and making them explicitly beholden to a political agenda.

It's funny because I just read about One Electron Theory which is a fun thought experiment. But if it's true then you'd assume there's also One Positron. And we've got it. So if anyone has had a successful PET scan in the past month, maybe the theory is disproven.

We know that X has absolutely chosen a side as a matter of policy. The others are probably just corrupted by money. Money coming from the same place.

First power hit the grid a few weeks ago

https://spectrum.ieee.org/fervo-cape-station-geothermal

It's still small scale but it's up and running and the site has plenty more capacity that can be added on bit by bit.

And we've sunk decades into small modular reactors and it hasn't born much fruit either.

Having been raised watching the Dukes of Hazzard, I'm not impressed.

Nice compared to the biggest flop of the century? Sure. I'd still instantly judge anyone driving this as an asshole.

Grid electricity generation is more efficient than ICE. Fossil fuel extraction is a major emitter even before the fuel is burned. Decarbonising the grid is underway.

A lot of people in general hate AI. Twitter is a bit of bubble in that regard (and many other)

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...

I had the opportunity to work with a lenticular display a few years back. Just takes an HDMI input and can render a 3d scene like you'd build in Unity and you'd be able to see at least a range of aspects of the image at once by looking from different angles. Not fully 360 but maybe 90 degrees of perspective at once. It was neat but we spent weeks trying to make an impressive demo and none of it was fun for more than 5 seconds.

My daughter likes coding and has a strong knack for it, but when she was applying to college, I advised her to lean towards EE. She can still study CS fundamentals and pursue it as a career or even in grad school, but engineering is hopefully a bit of a hedge where she can keep options open.

We made rope in boy scouts. You just need to braid three strings and you can splice in broken bits pretty easily. You can also work out kinks with just regular straight sticks and it only takes two people. The theory that these batons were for rope seems unlikely in that regard. Apparently the leading hypothesis is for spear throwing.

> four-hour storage is forecast to fall a further 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, displacing gas peaking on cost across every gas market in the region.

This seems to be specifically in reference to "gas peakers" which are on-demand gas turbines used to pick up slack in the main grid during peak usage. They typically only run for hours at a go and commonly on very hot days when ACs drain the grid. In those use cases, batteries could be a viable replacement. They're not necessary charged by solar but by the main grid overnight.

Stefan Milo did a long one on these objects:

https://youtu.be/Q8X9l42ZgsU?is=hW5M_JXqsPtiuHVk

Rope making is possible but not really likely.

Typically called a "perforated baton" in English. The theory of rope twisting is also not widely accepted. It's possible but it's an overly complex device given that you can twist a rope with regular sticks. These guys have contributed to the debate but it's absolutely not settled. They've also discovered hundreds of these across Europe.

https://youtu.be/Q8X9l42ZgsU?is=hW5M_JXqsPtiuHVk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perforated_baton

Note that these are all preprints. None are verified.

Is Israel the main concern? They gave tens of millions to Trump. They are now Republican media.

Seemingly none are vetted and reviewed yet

Especially with Mistral taking a fraction of the investment of the big guys. They can maintain the position pretty comfortably just by staying within a standard deviation of the leaders.