TGower

It's disappointing that Gemma E4B seems to perform poorly on this (42% accuracy according to the GitHub). It would be nice if a $25 phone could be loaded up with this and stuffed in a EMP proof metal box with a small solar charger. Maybe a finetune or Gemma 5 will get us there.

That stained glass landscape video is pretty cool. I wonder if it would be possible to implement that effect in a real-time game engine.

Lonsdaleite looks like it should be harder than diamond based on simulation data, but we haven't actually measured a piece of Lonsdaleite that is harder than diamond.

It still amazes me that the rare shiny rocks humanity has appreciated for thousands of years also turn out to have amazing properties even compared to the synthetic materials we are now capable of creating. It's still the hardest material we have measured. It is the best thermal conductor, even though it's an electrical insulator.

For a lot of SIMD applications, overfitting isn't really a concern. In my use case I need to calculate the sum of absolute difference between two vectors for autocorrelation, there's no real possibility for overfitting, either it gets the correct answer or it doesn't. LLMs are good at reading through the CPU manual and trying different optimizations.

The resulting SIMD being illegible isn't an issue in my eyes, assembly isn't a language known for it's readability in general. If you want to really understand what the assembly is doing, ask your LLM to whip up a visualization and explanation tailored to your input data where you can see how each operation leads you to the final result.

JAXA does great work, they also publish the highest resolution open access global surface elevation model. Really impressive for a country with about 1/10th the GDP of the US.

Underactuated robotics are so cool. In the hobby BattleBots community, there is a design where the whole robot only has a single motor, but it's able to move in any direction and damage the opponent, all just by controlling the single motor's speed.

Most robots have at least three motors, two drive sides and a weapon motor. The trick to getting away with one is integrating an impactor into the chassis of your bot, using the single wheel to spin up to ~3k RPM, then by tracking the rotation angle of the bot as it spins, you speed up a little while the wheel is pointing where you want to go, and slow it down a little when it's pointing the other direction.

People often say this "I wish I could ignore politics, but if the other team wins it would be disastrous", but they rarely put their money where their mouth is. If someone truly believes that, you'd expect them to take actions that actually make an impact, working extra shifts to donate more, or volunteering with a party to help. Instead, everyone I've seen that says this just casts their own statistically insignificant vote and discusses politics with family and friends, resulting in no swayed votes but straining otherwise healthy relationships. Maybe you are the exception.

For what it's worth I completely agree with you. Engaging in politics is a complete waste of time, unless you happen to have a platform with enough reach to influence a meaningful number of people. Unfortunately, almost all of the communication you will see comes from people with such a platform, and boy do they want to convince you to vote like them.

Once the political climate is polarized enough, choosing to not engage in the discussion about how evil the other team is will get you lumped right in, because if the other team really is evil and you don't care, then you must be pretty bad yourself.

The "Oh, but it's your civic duty to improve your community/state/nation (which obviously means voting the way I want you to, not the way the other half the country wants you to)" tries to frame political engagement as some moral good, but if they redirected the time and energy from political engagement to working at McDonalds and funding charity with the paycheck they would have 1000x the impact, even if you assume there is a Good and Evil team and they are on the Good team.

Gemini 4 Argon was announced, but it isn't released yet.

OpenAI has Dots. I personally prefer the business model of subscription payments funding my AI assistant, instead of skimming a fee off the top whenever my AI assistant completes a purchase for me. The incentives are much more aligned with the user when the user is the customer. That said, based on the history of the web, Meta's approach will likely win out.

Yeah, that's what I meant by "immediate result", if you need to edit the generated model by hand it will be hard to beat having the model and timeline available in Fusion after using Fusion MCP.

If you just need to tweak the dimensions in the script, or are satisfied with describing the changes to the LLM and having it modify the script, there isn't much difference in practice between a generated OpenSCAD script and a Blender python script.

It would be interesting to see a head to head comparison of frontier LLMs building models with OpenSCAD, Blender scripting, and Fusion MCP. My intuition would be that blender winds up the best for the immediate result due to training data prevalence and RL tuning, but the concise nature of OpenSCAD could help.

I'll have to add this to my backlog of experiments to try when I have unused tokens near a reset...

Really cool! I did my master's thesis on this same problem, upscaling low resolution DEM, though my approach used a high resolution color image to guide the process.