mattparlmer

The Chinese have drug discovery completely locked and already did well before research cuts started under the current admin

It’s far more dire for pharma returns than anybody is willing to let on

A selection of historical small-world (~0.05-0.3 Earth masses) SSTOs of the far future.

The "dusk chorus" - as evening falls on Mangala, its binary companion's infrastructure belt of orbiting power stations catches the sun, brightening to become a ring of stars circling the little Mars analog. (mocked up in Celestia)

We see here a view from a dirigible cargo robot, taken in the far northern regions of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. In the foreground, a peninsula of ice-and-tar 'wetland' terrain stretches off into the distance. On it, a settlement made up of habitat modules of varying sizes - from longhouse-like parks to long twisting arcades, all raised on stilts like the old research bases of Antarctica (most of these stilts are obscured under the bulk of their structure, from this angle), curves off along the more orderly lake-facing shoreline. Looking further afield, past the jumble of braided rivers that makes up the inland side of the peninsula, we see a far shore occupied by a sprawling industrial city - pale plumes of steam rise from the cooling towers of nuclear fusion reactors, chemical plants, and water refineries. The sun, smeared into an orange blur by storied layers of photochemical haze - drifts of complex organics formed from unfiltered sunlight smashing into methane molecules at the top of the Titanian atmosphere - sits low on the horizon at this time of the Saturnian year, casting a ruddy glow comparable in brightness to a bedside lamp.

Lunine Beach, a sleepy seaside town on the shores of Kraken Mare - a sea of liquid hydrocarbons at the north pole of Titan, largest of Saturn's retinue of icy moons.

Sorry guys but “i fing <3 science uwu” isn’t getting us anywhere, we’re rapidly industrializing space or we’re not going at all

Disassemble Mercury for Dyson swarm materials or go home

This is silly, the moon is a readily available ball of feedstock for 1000km radius habitat rings, we have every reason to strip mine it as soon as possible

This is an immediate goal as we fix the heavy lift problem over the next decade fwiw

if you spend enough time away from X all the controversy posts there start looking like this to you

I think the assumption that AI will always mean something proprietary is shaping attitudes powerfully.

The corollary is: when we do get a competitive mass-market product that runs locally and can be customized, attitudes may shift to a degree that shocks those of us who already expected that. +

Two ducks sit in the back of a police cruiser.

quack dealers

To solve this, the key resource threshold is to have multiple open labs with 10000+ GPUs each.

Multiple labs makes it so we are not beholden to big technology co's good graces to want to release models. These institutions increases innovation + derisks this crucial technology.

China's lead is also effecting R&D and those who build with open models. The US and EU used to share the lead, now China has a clear majority in the new finetunes uploaded to huggingface (about 40% come from Qwen models alone, the leading family today)

Crucially this "flip" on open model dominance is about more than adoption, its about performance as well. Chinese models have passed and extended their lead on American open counterparts in the last 12 months.

America needs to take open models more seriously. Just this summer the early lead in open model adoption of Llama & co has been overtaken by Chinese models.

With The American Truly Open Models (ATOM) Project we're looking to build support and express the urgency of this issue.

The purpose of the roomba is what it does

Extremely based, congrats to the Oxide team

You can't begin to imagine the brutality of the conflict between the pointy-hatted and crumple-hatted gnomes. Gardens soaked in entrails. Trench warfare out of flower beds

The reason that javascript has semicolons is because newlines are invisible, so the compilers couldn't see the ends of the statements. Then around 2016 computer vision got good enough that we could drop them though.

slurpee machine with one crashed screen

I'm drinking the Bios Crash slurpee I hope it crashes my bios I hope I blue screen

Hell yeah

Transamerica building in fog

Puncturing the sky

Total centaur victory

I remember Terry Bolea as a quiet hero of the queer community

He stood up to bullies who outed people with non-normative lifestyles for clicks, and got tangible results

Hulk Hogan, rest in power

Ron Wyden best democrat senator

exposing YIMBY's true color and their displacement agenda

oh my god another Balenciaga hat wearing left-NIMBY just dropped

Huh

The kind of person who is thinking of ordering 1000ft of cable is not the kind of person for whom 1000ft of cable is a lifetime supply

"Social media users are tired of losing their identity and data every time a platform shuts down or pivots. In the ATProto ecosystem, users own their data and identities. Bluesky is the first big example, but a new wave of decentralized social networks is just beginning."

Good work @inanna.recursion.wtf