241
Personal aviation is about to get interesting (2023)
FAA is getting one enormously consequential thing right
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
242
Why you can't color calibrate deep space photos
Color is the most disputed part of astrophotography: Every image looks different and the internet is full of arguments over what colors are correct or natural.
243
New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes
Can optical illusions take you outside the human color gamut?
244
How does a screen work?
From electron guns to tiny electric crystals - digital displays have always been the unsung hero of computing.
245
Introduction to Digital Filters (2024)
INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL FILTERS WITH AUDIO APPLICATIONS
246
Get the location of the ISS using DNS
I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish). Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability…
247
Where is my von Braun wheel?
In 1962. There — that answers the clickbaity title right away.
248
There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets
LLMs were invented in four major developments... all of which were datasets
249
Continuous Glucose Monitoring
Continuous glucose monitoring has been a thing for a while. It's a probe that sits just inside your body and measures blood glucose levels frequently. Obviously this is most useful for type 1 diabetics, who need to regulate their blood glucose manually.
250
We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube
the existential crisis we all share imagine this: you've just spent $640 billion training the chonkiest language model known to humanity (lol) and decide...
251
Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff
Cliff-edged fitness functions and the evolution of schizophrenia
252
BusyBeaver(6) Is Quite Large
For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular scienc…
253
10 Years of Pomological Watercolors
A decade ago today I published a blog post calling for the US government to release its paintings of fruits. The Pomological Watercolor Collection, as I had recently come to know, is a beautiful and remarkable corpus of over 7,000 pictures of fruits and other biological specimens, made between the 1880s and 1940s…
254
255
Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience
Transit time of 6,600 years; that long ago, around 4,600 BCE, the state of human civilization was devoid of technology. Hard to imagine what would happen back home on Earth during a journey of that length.
256
How renewables are saving Texans billions
A dive into ERCOT data reveals how solar energy is driving down electricity costs for Texas
257
Requiem for a Solar Plant
"...requiring reconductoring of 1.71 miles at a cost of $795,150...limiting output to 3MW..."
258
I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning
The Fall of Civilizations podcast put out a 6¾-hour episode on the history of the Mongol Empire, which I eagerly listened to. After finishing the episode I wondered about contemporary Mongolian society, I wanted to learn what the lands that the Mongol Empire exploded from are like in our current day. There are many…
259
260
Endometriosis is an interesting disease
5k words, 23 minutes reading time
261
Worldwide power grid with glass insulated HVDC cables
Moving electricity around the world has huge financial and environmental benefits. Unfortunately, current power transmission systems are both lossy and expensive to build. This post explores an alternative design for cables to make undersea power transmission substantially cheaper.
262
The new Gödel Prize winner tastes great and is less filling
David Zuckerman The 2025 Gödel Prize has been awarded to Eshan Chattopadhyay and David Zuckerman for their paper Explicit two-source extrac...
263
Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to matter. Why?
3k words, 14 minutes reading time
264
Gaussian integration is cool
Brief discussion on gaussian quadrature and chebyshev-gauss quadrature
265
Why are smokestacks so tall?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] “The big black stacks of the Illium Works of the Federal Apparatus Corporation spewed acid fumes and soot over the hundreds of men and women who were lined up before the red-brick employment office.” That’s the first line of one
266
What methylene blue can (and can’t) do for the brain
Methylene blue is touted as yet another universal boost-all, fix-all drug, the ultimate biohacking tool. Find out why that's not exactly true.
267
Just how bad are we at treating age-related diseases?
Whether you believe in preventing damage (the core aim of the aging field, though that's not the focus of this post) or treating damage as it arises, our current best efforts in both treatment and mechanism selection haven't yielded promising results. None of the approved drugs for age-related diseases reverse any…
268
Deep learning gets the glory, deep fact checking gets ignored
AI, science, education, & ethics
269
A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine
How the Darwin-Gödel Machine rewrites its own code to improve, and whether we can trust it
270
A Lean companion to Analysis I
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a textbook in real analysis called “Analysis I”. It was intended to complement the many good available analysis textbooks out there by focusing more on foun…