flâneur

HudZah

171 followers · 53 following · 5277 views

on the atlas — 380

highlights — 196

  • It has a population of 30.
    Mountain_Pass,_California
  • Industry analysts describe Spruce Pine as a "single point of failure" for the semiconductor supply chain,
    Spruce Pine Mining District
  • I’ve taken agency in the treatment of my bone cancer
    Cancer - Sytse.com
  • List of people who disappeared mysteriously at sea
    Rudolf Diesel
  • RESEARCH TEAM Neel Redkar Yudhister Kumar Devansh Pandey Galen Mead
    The First Fully General Computer Action Model | blog
  • According to Tesla’s corporate disclosures, a worker at a Gigafactory in China produces an average of 47 vehicles a year; a worker at a Gigafactory in California produces an average of 20.
    2025 letter | Dan Wang
  • “It is still only spring. Wait until summer.”
    Reflections on 2025 - Samuel Albanie
  • One of the things Taipei 101 is famous for is its tuned mass damper:
    Notes on Taiwan - by Sam Enright - The Fitzwilliam
  • Me and Juan at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Inside, it looks strikingly similar to the Lincoln Memorial. If (hypothetically) you were a crazy person who had counted the steps as he went up, you would notice there are 89 of them, one for each year of the Generalissimo’s life.
    Notes on Taiwan - by Sam Enright - The Fitzwilliam
  • 'the most reassuring city for wives,'
    Exploring China’s former ‘Capital of Sex’ - Global Times
  • and you can show produces good policies by training some
    State of Robot Learning, December 2025
  • Noyce's earliest childhood memory involved beating his father at ping pong and feeling shocked when his mother reacted to the news of his victory with a distracted "Wasn't that nice of Daddy to let you win?" Even at the age of five, Noyce felt offended by the notion of intentionally losing. "That's not the game", he sulked to his mother. "If you're going to play, play to win!"[11]
    Robert Noyce
  • For even more sensitive workloads, the agent harness can tokenize sensitive data automatically. For example, imagine you need to import customer contact details from a spreadsheet into Salesforce. The agent writes:
    Code execution with MCP: building more efficient AI agents \ Anthropic
  • In order to learn how to reason about touch and friction and force, with dry objects, with wet objects, with soapy objects, with syrupy objects, we need to play with them. We need to learn how to play with an egg without dropping the egg. We need to play with a new type of lock on a new type of door handle we’ve never seen before. We “play” with a yo-yo. We “play” the piano or the violin.
    Physical AI: The Robotic Rise and Eventual Fall of the Stochastic Puppet | by Brad Porter | Medium
  • When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.[2]
    Clarke's three laws - Wikipedia
  • Otherwise you might end up feeling a bit like those military analysts who examined that Soviet MiG-25 in Japan back in 1976: Later they realized that its vacuum-based avionics could withstand the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear blast better than anything the West had in its planes. Only then did they begin to appreciate the value of a little nothingness.
    Introducing the Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing - IEEE Spectrum
  • The culprit is floating-point non-associativity. That is, with floating-point numbers: ( 𝑎 + 𝑏 ) + 𝑐 ≠ 𝑎 + ( 𝑏 + 𝑐 ) (a+b)+c  =a+(b+c)
    Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference - Thinking Machines Lab
  • SpaceX trademarked the name Starlink in the United States for their satellite broadband network;[33] the name was inspired by the 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars.[34]
    Starlink - Wikipedia
  • Qian Xuesen, the "father of China's space and missile defence programs", highly praised Song's ability and declared that Song was China's foremost control theorist, surpassing Qian himself. Qian personally chose Song to co-author the revised edition of his Engineering Cybernetics, regarded as a bible of Chinese military science.[9]
    Song Jian - Wikipedia
  • After graduation, Pera, who admired Steve Jobs, secured a job at Apple Inc., where he tested the company's Wi-Fi devices to ensure compliance with Federal Communications Commission standards for electromagnetic emissions.[5] While working at Apple, Pera noticed that the power sources that Apple's Wi-Fi devices used to throw signals were far below FCC limits.[5] Boosting their power, he reasoned, could increase their transmission range to over dozens of miles, which could facilitate Internet access in areas that telephone and cable companies do not reach.[5] When his bosses at Apple ignored his…
    Robert Pera - Wikipedia
  • He dropped out after his junior year to work at Shopify in Toronto in a marketing role and then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015
    What the US Can Learn from Engineering in China - Bloomberg
  • You watch the Empire State Building go up. The progress is so visible and tangible that you don't really question whether the city has improved because you can see it just did. Everything looks newer, more magnificent.
    Home | Substack
  • The irony: AI is driving mass job losses well before it has been widely deployed.
    Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy
  • These are not railroads—we aren’t building century-long infrastructure. AI datacenters are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities riding declining-cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins.
    Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy
  • Barriers also exist in non-safety-critical applications. In general, much knowledge is tacit in organizations and is not written down, much less in a form that can be learned passively. This means that these developmental feedback loops will have to happen in each sector and, for more complex tasks, may even need to occur separately in different organizations, limiting opportunities for rapid, parallel learning. Other reasons why parallel learning might be limited are privacy concerns: Organizations and individuals might be averse to sharing sensitive data with AI companies, and regulations mi…
    AI as Normal Technology | Knight First Amendment Institute
  • 01Explore NominalSee our platform in action with a demo02Ingest Data SecurelyIntegrate and protect your data04Achieve & IterateReach milestones with dedicated support03Accelerate TestingOnboard new teams and projects
    Nominal - Unified Industrial Data Stack
  • 01Explore NominalSee our platform in action with a demo02Ingest Data SecurelyIntegrate and protect your data04Achieve & IterateReach milestones with dedicated support03Accelerate TestingOnboard new teams and projects
    Nominal - Unified Industrial Data Stack
  • This is not a call for optimism; it is a call for determination.”
    Dr. Vannevar Bush Is Dead at 84 - The New York Times
  • But part of the job was also to fend off preposterous schemes. One was a British idea to chip off a huge block of ice from the Arctic to be used as an air strip in the middle of the Atlantic. It was to be fitted with diesel engines and a refrigerating plant to keep it frozen. Dr. Bush told the President the idea was “bunk,” and it was never brought again.
    Dr. Vannevar Bush Is Dead at 84 - The New York Times
  • It is estimated that two–thirds of all the phsyicists in the United States were working for Dr. Bush.
    Dr. Vannevar Bush Is Dead at 84 - The New York Times
  • U.S.A.I.D. was, to me, very revealing. Because there was no feedback loop. This is money we are spending to prevent bad things from happening to people in other countries — primarily poor people in other countries. And they can’t call up Elon Musk or their local member of Congress to get it turned back on.
    Opinion | What is DOGE’s Real Goal? - The New York Times
  • Why? Because you talk to seven, eight, ten wonderful entrepreneurs – people full of energy, amazing ideas, and in a domain where you’re scratching the surface. And so, you can be at the end of any given day feeling like: ‘Woof, this was a rich, wonderful day.’ It’s possible that you have not created any value, you’ve not done anything useful.”
    The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of | The Generalist
  • Sometimes the stickiness of the world is very sweet; it is like honey on the razor’s edge. You lick the blade and “Oh! how very sweet it is!” Then there is the sharpness, and the blood.
    As sweet as razor blade honey - by Sasha Chapin
  • We will not have bold, risk-taking offices and agencies until we depoliticize failure.
    2 years at DOE - by Charles Yang - Rough Drafts
  • if your task or job is legible enough to be put into a dataset, AI companies will find a way to automate it, sooner or later.
    pradyuprasad.com
  • HudZah likes audio books.
    The forward march of computer use, AI edition - Marginal REVOLUTION
  • It is also the second-tallest freestanding structure of any type in Canada, behind the CN Tower
    Inco Superstack
  • The Geiger counter was the original radiation detector, recording the total count rate from all energy levels of radiation. Ionization chambers and Geiger counters were first adapted for field use in the 1930s. The first transportable Geiger–Müller counter (weighing 25 kg) was constructed at the University of British Columbia in 1932.
    Uranium mining
  • I’m beginning to see the most popular idea of “agents” as dependent on AGI itself. A model that’s robust against gulliblity is a very tall order indeed.
    Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
  • nobody seems to have bothered to translate them into English.
    Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC - by Brian Potter
  • Unfortunately, both volumes have currently only been published in Chinese.
    Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC - by Brian Potter
  • Boba Guys Black Tea Pearls 32,571.4%
    Report — PlasticList
  • This significant innovation actually occured thanks to the romance between Dr. W. Halsted and his scrub nurse Miss Caroline Hampton, later his wife, Mrs C. Halsted. According to the antiseptic practice of that hospital the hands of the operating personnel had to be desinfected in mercuric chloride which damaged the skin of nurse Caroline who developed a bad case of dermatitis, and because of that she considered abandoning the hospital. This prompted Dr. Halsted to contract Goodyear Rubber Company to produce thin rubber gloves to protect Caroline's hands and to keep her in his vicinity. They pr…
    [The gloves of love] - PubMed
  • Orders delivered from the Portuguese President called for a scorched earth policy—that Goa was to be destroyed before it was given up to India.[72] Canadian political scientist Antonio Rangel Bandeira has argued that the sacrifice of Goa was an elaborate public relations stunt calculated to rally support for Portugal's wars in Africa
    Annexation of Goa
  • “They didn’t listen to A.I. when A.I. told them things they didn’t agree with,” Dr. Rodman said.
    ChatGPT Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness - The New York Times
  • The move to Falcon Heavy saved an estimated US$2 billion in launch costs alone.
    Europa Clipper - Wikipedia
  • There are plenty of good critiques of the ‘flat hierarchy’ stance -- The Tyranny of Structurelessness is a great one – and it largely seems to have fallen out of fashion in modern startups, where you quickly get CEO, COO, VPs, Founding Engineers, and so on. But my experience is that it worked well at Palantir. Some people were more influential than others, but the influence was usually based on some impressive accomplishment, and most importantly nobody could tell anyone else what to do. So it didn’t matter if somebody was influential or thought your idea was dumb, you could ignore them and go…
    reflections on palantir - Nabeel S. Qureshi
  • This has been tested and verified by us, having used these systems. They are generally: Cheaper than a H100 in purchase cost Have more memory and compute than a H100, and outperforms on a single node. Overall, they are great hardware!
    $2 H100s: How the GPU Bubble Burst - by Eugene Cheah
  • Today, however, unless you are absolutely confident you can surpass llama3, or you are bringing something new to the table (eg. new architecture, 100x lower inference, 100+ languages, etc), there are ~no more foundation model cos being founded from scratch.
    $2 H100s: How the GPU Bubble Burst - by Eugene Cheah
  • Hudhayfa Nazoordeen/Socratica Sympoium
    Student Builds Nuclear Fusion Prototype With Glowing Plasma Orb - Business Insider