Oren

observing. experimenting. evolving. physics behind AI

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

I've never seen the LHC disaster explained this well. Nine days after its first beam, one bad electrical joint knocked CERN's €7.5 billion collider out for 14 months, and no beam was even running.

Each of its 1,232 main magnets pushes over 11,000 amps through superconducting coils at 1.9 kelvin, and that current stores energy like a flywheel: E = ½LI². When one splice smaller than your hand failed, the energy had nowhere to go. 6 tonnes of helium burst into the tunnel and 53 magnets had to be pulled out.

11 minutes. bookmark & watch today. the most dangerous thing in a collider isn't the beam

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

I've never seen anyone explain this better: a £200 million London skyscraper melted a parked Jaguar. The tower wasn't even finished, and people were frying eggs on the pavement below it

A curved glass wall works like a giant mirror: it collects sunlight over a big area and squeezes it onto a small spot. The glass face of 20 Fenchurch Street curves inward like a bowl, aimed straight at the street, and the spot it made was hot enough to melt a car's wing mirror and badge

10 minutes. bookmark & watch today. one ratio tells you how hot any curved building can make the street

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

This is the explanation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa that finally makes it click. Italy spent 11 years and tens of millions to move its top by just 45 centimeters, and the obvious rule for when a tower falls is wrong by a factor of four.

A tower stays up as long as a line dropped from its center of mass lands inside its base, which should have given Pisa plenty of room. But it stands on soft clay, and every bit of lean presses the low side down and adds more lean, so a tiny tilt kept feeding itself long before the textbook limit.

10 minutes.bookmark & watch today. half a degree was the difference between a landmark and a pile of marble

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

If you only ever watch one explanation of how the Titanic sank, make it this one. The lookouts saw a dark shape maybe fifteen meters tall, about a minute before impact. They were looking at the small part.

Anything that floats sinks until the water it pushes aside weighs as much as it does, and ice is only a little lighter than seawater.
So about nine tenths of every iceberg hides below the surface, and the part you see tells you almost nothing about what’s reaching out underneath.

11 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. A rule older than two thousand years that could have told them what was waiting under the water.

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

Every pressurized cabin, every scuba tank and every soda can obeys one line: wall stress equals pressure times radius divided by thickness. For the first jet airliner that came to about 97 megapascals - comfortable. Cut a window into that wall and the number triples at the edge. Make the corner tight and it climbs higher still.

Stress concentration is the multiplier nobody sees. A round hole multiplies the stress by three. A sharp tip multiplies it by far more, because the factor grows as the tip radius shrinks. Near one window corner of the Comet, the stress ran past 80% of the alloy’s breaking strength on every single flight. Each pressurization cycle pushed a hidden crack a little further, until one day it tore the roof open after 1,290 flights. Neural networks now read ultrasound scans to catch fatigue damage long before a crack can be seen.

11 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The multiplier hiding in every corner of every machine that flexes.

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

Every battery and every chemical reaction obeys one exponential written in 1889. Temperature sits inside the exponent, not in front of it. That single placement is why 10 degrees can double a reaction, and why 60 degrees on a car dashboard can make it run almost ten times faster.

The mechanism is the Arrhenius equation plus feedback. Heat raises the temperature, the temperature raises the reaction rate, and the reaction releases more heat. Cooling grows in a straight line, heat production grows exponentially - past a tipping point the exponential wins. That is thermal runaway: the separator melts, the electrodes touch, the electrolyte burns. It pulled 2.5 million phones off the market and got one model banned from every US flight. AI materials search now screens tens of millions of candidate electrolytes looking for a higher hill to climb.

11 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The exponent that decides whether a battery stays warm or catches fire

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

On January 15, 1919, a wave of molasses about 8 meters high tore through Boston's North End and killed 21 people. Witnesses said it moved at around 35 miles an hour. Molasses is one of the slowest things in your kitchen.

A storage tank 15 meters tall split open and released about 12,000 tonnes of it. The tank had leaked for its whole short life, and the company painted it brown so the leaks were harder to see. Gravity alone explains the speed: liquid falling from that height reaches about 12 meters per second. The cold explains the deaths. Boston was just coming out of a deep freeze, and syrup thickens exponentially as it cools, so the wave that hit like a wall turned into glue within minutes. Harvard physicists later found that about half the victims died because they were stuck.

One number tells you whether you're dealing with a wall or glue, the Reynolds number. The molasses that hit at around 17,000 had fallen to about 3 by the time it had spread out and cooled, the same liquid on the same street. DeepMind and Stanford have since trained AI simulators that handle both water and thick goop, though a model that has only seen water would never predict this flood.

11 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The company first blamed anarchists, then paid $628,000, about $12 million in today's money.

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

In 2003, a block of foam weighing about 1.7 pounds, less than most laptops, broke a hole in the wing of the space shuttle Columbia and killed all seven people on board. Many inside NASA doubted foam could do that, until investigators fired a block of the same weight at a real wing panel at 777 feet per second and tore a hole 16 inches across.

The two formulas behind it are kinetic energy, ½mv², and momentum, p = mv. What mattered was the speed of the wing relative to the foam, and that speed gets squared. NASA now trains AI to spot impact damage in photos instead of trusting an old lookup table built for small, bullet-like debris.

11 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. Something soft becomes a weapon once you square the speed

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

The Hindenburg was designed to fly on helium. One law in Washington made it fly on hydrogen. Usable helium came mainly from American gas wells, and Congress had banned its export. The Germans expected the ban to be lifted, it stayed, and the engineers switched back to the gas that burns. On May 6, 1937, at Lakehurst, a ship almost as long as the Titanic was on the ground in flames in a little over half a minute. 36 people died.

What makes the choice so cruel fits in one line: lift = (ρ_air − ρ_gas) × g × V. Hydrogen lifts only about 8% more than helium. Across 200,000 cubic meters, that comes to about 17 tonnes, almost exactly the margin between a fully loaded Hindenburg flying and sitting on the field. Hand an AI optimizer the same formula today and it picks hydrogen every time, because nothing in its score mentions fire.

10 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. Sergey Brin's new airship flies on helium, and the video shows how it wins back those 17 tonnes

[Oren @0xorenx]

@larwick deere reported around 59% less herbicide on average with see and spray, and that saving is what pays for the cameras

[Oren @0xorenx]

@0xEvrenn worst group accuracy is the number i’d want on every model card right next to the average

[Oren @0xorenx]

At 1:23 in the morning on April 26, 1986, an operator at Chernobyl pressed the button meant to shut reactor 4 down. Within seconds, the reactor sped itself up.

The physics is one number, k: how many new fissions each fission causes. At exactly 1 the power holds still. At 1.001 it almost triples in a single second. Chernobyl’s design let boiling water push k up instead of down, and the rods took 18 to 20 seconds to go in. Power jumped from 200 MW to about 30,000. Estimates of the total cost run as high as $700 billion.

10 minutes. Bookmark & watch today. The wrong sign for three seconds was enough

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

@0xzivo enron invented the startup pitch, book the whole tam today and explain the revenue later

[Oren @0xorenx]

@0xBenjamine today that’s level 3 assets, valued off a model whose inputs nobody outside the company can observe

[Oren @0xorenx]

@corsaldi shannon’s own estimate from that game was roughly 0.6 to 1.3 bits per letter, against about 4.7 if every letter were equally likely

[Oren @0xorenx]

in 1915 Albert Einstein published general relativity and every GPS-powered Waymo depends on his math to know where it is

Δt/t = GM/c² × (1/R − 1/r) where R is Earth's radius and r is the satellite orbit

gravity is weaker up there so satellite clocks run about 45 microseconds a day fast

their speed slows them by about 7 microseconds so the net drift is 38 microseconds every day

every nanosecond of error moves your position 30 cm so uncorrected GPS would drift over 11 km a day

a satellite launched in 1977 carried the first cesium atomic clock into orbit and proved the shift was real

GPS has added about $1.4 trillion to US business and one day without it costs around $1 billion

5 minutes of physics your robotaxi bets your life on, save it and watch ↓

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

@0xzivo if everyone runs some version of this schedule the slices get predictable, and predatory traders look for that

[Oren @0xorenx]

@0xEvrenn how do you catch this when nobody tells you the filter exists? most datasets don’t come with a note on who got left out

[Oren @0xorenx]

NASA Lost a $125 Million Mars Mission Because Lockheed Martin Forgot One 4.45 Conversion Factor ↓

NASA spent roughly $125 million on the Mars Climate Orbiter, flew it 669 million km, and lost it because two teams read the same number differently

Lockheed Martin's software reported thruster impulse in pound-force seconds while NASA's navigation team expected newton seconds, and the factor between them is 4.45

so every thruster burn looked about 4.45 times weaker than it really was, and the error kept stacking up in the same direction while the software did exactly what it was told

NASA aimed to pass about 226 km above Mars, the orbiter came in at roughly 57 km and was lost in the atmosphere, nothing exploded and nothing broke, the units just didn't match at a software boundary

every part looked like it worked while the whole system was flying into the planet, and SpaceX, NVIDIA, Google and OpenAI all run pipelines where one bad unit can pass through thousands of steps before anyone notices

a number without a unit is a bug waiting to happen, so before you ship run five checks:

1. define the units for every critical input and output
2. convert values explicitly at system boundaries
3. validate dimensions before doing any math
4. test extreme values and mismatched units
5. log your assumptions so errors can be traced before deployment

the next time your code passes every test, ask whether the tests checked what the numbers mean

save this five-step checklist before your next deployment ↓

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE

[Oren @0xorenx]

Boeing Lost $20 Billion After One Faulty Sensor Helped Bring Down Two 737 MAX Jets and Kill 346 People

boeing built the 737 max to fight airbus, and one piece of flight software ended up at the center of two crashes that killed 346 people and became one of the most expensive crises in aviation

lion air flight 610 went down in october 2018, ethiopian airlines flight 302 in march 2019, and within five months regulators around the world had grounded every 737 max

the physics starts with lift = ½ρv²SCₗ, and boeing's bigger engines changed how the plane handled, so engineers added mcas to push the nose down at high angles of attack

the original mcas could listen to just one of the plane's two angle of attack sensors, so one bad reading could keep shoving the nose down while the pilots fought to hold it up

that's what happened on both flights, a faulty sensor fed bad data, mcas kept firing, and the crews couldn't get control back

groundings, airline payouts, lawsuits and lost orders pushed the bill into the tens of billions, and airbus picked up the business boeing couldn't deliver

boeing's fix made mcas compare both sensors, limited how hard it could push and stopped it from firing over and over

two truly independent sensors at 1 in 10,000 each can drop the chance of both failing the same way to 1 in 100 million, though real failures often share a cause

self-driving cars, surgical robots and AI agents with access to a trading account all run on sensor data that can be wrong, and any of them can turn one bad reading into an action you can't undo

watch this 10-minute breakdown to understand the physics behind the 737 max crashes and why a second sensor is only worth having if the software checks it before acting ↓

[Oren @0xorenx]

microsoft is resurrecting three mile island just to keep its ai running

the physics nobel went to ai pioneers and now physics decides who wins the $1 trillion race ↓ https://t.co/ctInlu51tE