A post I made 7 years ago on another forum that I think is worth sharing: There's so many lessons in thinking seriously about the technology of space settlement from the past human settlement. The most important one, though, is one I can barely put in to words. As recently as

Anyone here on the Amazon Kindle iOS team? For ages now, the iPad kindle app has locked up for many seconds at a time when downloading large media files. Maybe a second or two wasn’t considered a big deal for downloading a book you are going to read for ten hours, but when you

I view the proliferation of Halloween skeleton sizes through first edition AD&D monster manual heights: 3’ -> kobold, 4’ -> goblin, 6’ -> orc, 10’ -> ogre, 12’ -> stone giant. Waiting for the competition between Lowe’s and Home Depot to bring a storm giant!

Has Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) technology gotten dirt cheap enough that it is integrated into solar powered lawn lights? At some point, the tradeoff between “slightly bigger panel” and “added power electronics” crosses over.

Blindsight by Peter Watts (2006) is my standout fiction book of the year, by far. Grand, challenging, scary, and super autistic.

I helped fund the restoration of an old IBM S/34, and now I find myself occasionally thinking about what realtime games you could make run on a 5251 DisplayStation. Tetris would probably be the most engaging. Not sure if you could do it in RPG or COBOL; might require S/34

celebrating 25 years of Quake 3 CPMA: the most skillful, hardest, fastest, greatest FPS of all time. the world's best esport. the true start of the aim community and freeform movement. the first frag movies and the birth of montages. watch it all at once. holy shit! by entik

I expect AI to produce a lot of value while trying to make a coherent body of knowledge out of its training data, but on its own, AI is limited to a sort of ancient Greek philosophical process, where the method is rhetoric, rather than the experimental process of science. This

Numpy’s fromfile()/tofile() make me smile — no typing or byte order metadata, they just write/read the raw bytes. A joyful API! I wish PyTorch had them natively on tensors, so I wasn’t doing so many tensor.cpu().numpy() operations.

Sometimes I see papers with hyperparameter sweeps over 0.001, 0.003, 0.006, 0.01, etc. Many hyperparameters are better expressed in negative integral log2. Small values like learning rates directly, and values close to 1 like EMA factors and TD lambda / gamma with 1-2**val. It

Teslas displaced my exotic cars many years ago, but with the Roadster still an indeterminate distance in the future, I had been feeling an urge for something a little more… analog. I was initially thinking about a 60’s Camaro with modernized running gear, but a part of me was

Thank you so much for playing Walkabout Mini Golf over the past 5 years! We wanted to take a moment to look at some fascinating numbers and recap what our incredible players have been able to accomplish thus far! Read more here: https://t.co/XPbXKzYUuM

The audience for this is small, but we have an open source repository for the “Physical Atari” work we did at Keen. Working purely in the physical world is a huge burden compared to simulation, but it is important to have a reasonable grasp of the gap between the two. The

I recently learned about Cayley transforms. Similar to how you can parameterize a 3x3 rotation matrix by 3 Euler angles or a 4 element quaternion, Cayley transforms allow you to parameterize an N dimensional rotation matrix with just N*(N-1)/2 unique values in a skew-symmetric

This is a bit over engineered for my taste, but at least well documented:

The scrolling console has been a valuable paradigm since physical teletypewriters in the 60s, and millions of programs have coded directly to that interface. It feels like we missed a sweet spot in output options just beyond that. There are many times I use a jupyter notebook

Book list for street fighting computer scientists

Remember radiosity? There was a period where it was a hot topic for global illumination, but ray tracing based solutions proved so much more flexible and efficient at scale that it is now just a historical curiosity. https://t.co/DsPEoVDSfI

My distracting thought for the morning is that you could have actually made a decent rhythm game on 8 bit Apple 2 hardware, but I don’t recall any examples. Screen presentation and effects would have to be minimal, and you wouldn’t get any high fidelity audio, but you could

I wonder if the reticle limits in chip fabrication could be expanded if you were restricted to using less dense patterning in the periphery where the focus isn’t as sharp. Or if the quality of focus is radial, could you pattern slightly more circuitry in a circular die than the