Are long haul power line voltage limits set by actual hazardous arcing, or just increased inefficiency from field losses? It could easily be the case that power generation can be cheap enough that higher losses still cost less than large scale distribution infrastructure.

Many such responses from people with specific hardware desires.

A magical hardware feature that doesn’t cost anything, weigh anything, take any compute resources, or require extra effort from developers will always be welcome, but the tradeoffs are usually severe.

It isn’t…

Sensible thoughts on AI: open.substack.com/pub/aiascendan…

For decades you would see no-longer-used TV antennas still up on rooftops, but it has mostly transitioned to no-longer-used Direct TV satellite dishes. Will be interesting to see if Starlink dishes gain a similar ubiquity in rural areas.

Meta Horizon OS

Meta already sells the Quest systems basically at production cost, and just ignores the development costs, so don’t expect this to result in cheaper VR headsets from other companies with Quest equivalent capabilities. Even if the other companies have greater…

I sometimes worry that I am not paying enough attention to all the exciting things going on with LLM development, but I always conclude that there are plenty of smart people already working on them, and other things are still deserving of effort.

It isn’t immediately obvious, but if a product’s success metric includes retention, it usually has to be BETTER when the price is lower, because the more casual users are less invested. VR users with multi-thousand dollar systems put up with more janky crap than the marginal new…

This is a fantastic value!

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.