Live Free or Die. East Coast US
Delaware
Joined July 2019
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speedwagom retweeted
The current plan to deal with declining fertility rates, rising sovereign debt burdens, uncontrollable government spending, regulatory accumulation, Baumol's cost disease, procedural barriers to development, and institutional capture by rent-seekers is literally deus ex machina
speedwagom retweeted
One of Trump's best lines was when he was asked what he would do to make golf more "accessible" to "non-traditional golfers" and he said "nothing" because golf should be an "aspirational sport"
The Barstoolification of golf, where slovenly guys in flatbills act like children on the course, has been a disaster for it. The same is true of everything made more "accessible"; some things should be aspirational. They should be walled gardens where dignified behavior is not just expected but demanded, and the cost of breaching that code of gentility is exclusion
Shrink golf substantially. Growing the game has ruined it
speedwagom retweeted
Energy is the currency of the universe
This is Dio - the captain of the boat we are on in Indo. He hardly speaks English
That doesn’t stop us from including him in everything we do. Hanging w the boys, going fishing, watching the World Cup
Sure enough, he says he loves our group. What does he say?
“Good energy.”
Energy means doing everything for fun without anything in return. Including people, even the “help” just because it’s the right thing to do. Everyone is a friend & included in the fun. It makes things more fun.
speedwagom retweeted
Less than 100 miles away, about 50 tons of steel and copper are spinning at exactly 3,600 RPM. A giant rotor slews magnetic fields through copper windings and, per Faraday and Maxwell, induces a synchronized 60 Hz sine wave across an entire grid.
That electromagnetic wave propagates through grain oriented silicon steel, laminated transformer cores, kilometers of aluminum conductor steel reinforced cable, SF₆ insulated switchgear, substations switching hundreds of kilovolts, distribution transformers, oxygen free copper wiring, silicon MOSFETs, ferrites, multilayer ceramic capacitors, and the USB C cable plugged into my phone.
There, power feeds a capacitive touchscreen. A transparent matrix of indium tin oxide is deposited on glass. The controller continuously scans the grid. My finger changes the mutual capacitance by a fraction of a picofarad, perturbing the local electric field just enough for dedicated analog front ends to detect before software reconstructs the touch.
Iron ore. Bauxite. Silica sand. Copper ore. Lithium brines. Rare earths.
Refined. Alloyed. Crystallized. Doped. Implanted. Deposited. Etched. Polished.
We purified sand into nearly perfect single crystal silicon, grew boules, sliced wafers, placed dopant atoms with nanometer precision, fabricated chips containing tens of billions of transistors, synchronized them with clocks billions of times per second, and engineered them to execute matrix multiplications at a scale no human could comprehend.
Somewhere along the way, matmuls started to look like us.
That is an astonishing thought.
The towers of abstraction are staggering. No one person built this. No one person fully understands it. Yet every morning millions of people wake up tired, answer emails, argue over specifications, chase margins, fix defects, make payroll, and try to cover their mortgages. Somehow the whole machine keeps humming.
A planetary Swiss watch assembled from physics, markets, bureaucracy, ambition, error, and human necessity.
And after all of that, I touch a piece of conductive glass and step into the Roman forum of modern thought, where millions of minds test ideas against one another in real time.
Clockwork humanity.
It staggers the mind.
Dad is watching a pirated copy of “backrooms”. The shit quality and real people obscuring the screen at random make it way scarier
speedwagom retweeted
there is still so much potential of neural network stuff in sensing applications, here is a 6-DoF force + torque sensor using a fiber bundle, with a diameter of only 1.7 mm.
sub 0.005 N and 0.02 N*mm RMSE, 3 ms inference latency, and decent model transfer between different probes.
speedwagom retweeted
The security guard at the San Diego Mosque who shot back at the Latinx groyper neo-Nazi couple appears to have himself also been a non-white Neo-Nazi.
Fascinating
The security guard Amin Abdullah, who was killed in recent attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, was himself a muslim extremist with jihadist friends. On Facebook, he glorified the extermination of the Jews by Hitler! @FBI
His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
speedwagom retweeted
I love robots that look like droids
Human form for humanity
Mechanical form for our robotic helpers
speedwagom retweeted
At Newburgh in 1783, Washington walked into a room of soldiers who wanted to march on Congress and install him as a constitutional monarch. He reached into his pocket for his eyeglasses — the calculated theater of a man who understood exactly what the moment required — and said he had grown not only gray but nearly blind in the service of his country. Some men broke into tears. The conspiracy died in that room.
Nichols asks us to sit with what Washington chose not to do in that moment. A lesser man, he writes, would have nodded and taken the throne. Washington had the army, the love of the citizenry, and a government too weak to stop him. He chose to go home instead.
Trump stood in Arlington National Cemetery and looked at the graves of the honored dead and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” He said that in the same country, about the same army, whose commander-in-chief he was.
The distance between those two men is not partisan. It is the entire argument for why the republic was designed the way it was.
Donald Trump was everything Washington feared and despised could happen to the American presidency.
theatlantic.com/magazine/arc…
