~ and it is the first victory of a weird investment mindset ~

TL;DR — The key vulnerability is always whatever would never happen, ‘because no sane investor would do that…’ [I can only point to the genius-in-bloom known as Florencio, for the most vivid demonstration that the right kind of wrong is perfect for breaking foes’ plans.]

Be clear — the Gamestop ‘prank’ is not a reliable way to earn a living! Rather, the madlads of Wallstreetbets are valuing a new parameter: PAIN. Just as much as entertainment, status, security, or all the other things that bestow amorphous value…

~ text-to-image lets creators gather diverse reference images and bootstrap concepts rapidly — we now enter the Cambrian of Culture ~

“Between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” — Lou Reed

We have arrived: you type whatever scene you wish into the box, and dozens of images arise. Many are mangled; you wouldn’t present them as a final product. Yet, they are good enough to act as your starting points. Especially when you feel stuck! It’s like the Pinterest-Tumbler of our collective unconscious. Please, take a moment to look carefully at them here. It imagined all these using only a…

~ if a timeseries’ latent space obeys rules, it formed abstractions ~

TL;DR —Add a loss to the encoder proportional to how un-*easy-physics*-esque the latent space’s own behavior is. Anneal toward a latent space which has simple rules for timesteps’ motion of the state vector, in that latent space itself. You can also substitute running-the-world-simulation with running-the-mini-physics on the state’s latent-space vector.

When a neural network is asked to encode the state of the world as a compressed feature vector, we often find that the space those feature vectors inhabit forms Cartesian coordinates. That is, if you measure the distance…

~ forget magnetic levitation — use static electricity for your bullet-train~

Yeah, the Hyperloop has gotten a lot of talk. And Japan, China, Europe all have bullet trains. Magnetic levitation at Disneyland. But, there’s one wrinkle to the design-puzzle that has gone unexplored: using static electricity to levitate in an evacuated tube. Why does that difference matter? First, if you want to travel as fast as a rocket, you MUST siphon all the air out of the tunnel. Otherwise, air resistance absorbs all your fuel, and it’s just not worth traveling more than a few hundred miles per hour. Then…

~ a weird way to feed mechanical power into magnetic fields, and back ~

Okay, you are accustomed to generating strong magnetic fields with a coil of wire around a tube. That seems normal. Or, you went-all-Tesla in your garage, and laid flat a pair of wires in a coil for a bifilar magnet. But, did you ever just spin a stack of ionized rods? Like twirling a length of bamboo on a lathe, yet you spin-up a magnetic field. You are moving charges. And, I’m not talking about capacitor plates that cancel their net current. Nope — a wood-grain…

~ a city built to fill an entire reservoir is incredibly valuable ~

Yes, a city that IS a reservoir.

Big cities reap enormous rewards. Yet, problems arise from that size; either you sprawl, and succumb to soul-numbing commutes, or you build taller. Taller cities are expensive, primarily because those tall buildings get thicker at the base so quickly — all that material, labor, equipment grows exponentially! …

[TL;DR — Neural Networks turn a program’s entire input →output into a compressed image file, which is regenerated ‘pixel-wise’ to emulate the program, for manifold speed-up. Never unpack the whole image; never run the actual software again.]

Every piece of software can be re-imagined as a single, massive image file. How? Each input to your software is a particular ‘pixel coordinate’ (this image exists in a many-dimensional space, equal to the number of different bits available for inputs and program state; still, it’s a static representation mapping input-coordinates to output-values, an ‘image’ from here-on). Meanwhile, the ‘colors’ at that particular…

~ bizarre & surprisingly efficient solar+wind paraglider/zeppelin/caravel ~

This one is definitely unusual. A pair of Zeppelins (rigid-frame ‘blimps’ with gas balloons inside, to better control lift and descent, protect the balloons, etc.) hold a massive aerofoil mast & sail taut between them, with one zep high above and the other, slightly-heavy zep below. This turns wind-gusts passing around it into forward thrust, pushing air beneath a pair of glider-wings jutting from the sides of each Zeppelin. It’s the best of blimps, and the best of non-jet planes, fueled by the wind! …