Amaryllis

Some girl on the internet messing around with compilers. If you are in Portland and want to come over for dinner, DM me. Fan of VGF2P8AFFINEQB. 🏳️‍⚧️

[Amaryllis @am8ryllis]

Status: Living in my ten foot square hut writing immutable data structures.

[Amaryllis @am8ryllis]

https://t.co/AhnmIiGuI5

[Quinoah 🔍⏸️ @NoahTopper]

claude shannon was really committed to the bit

[Andrew McCalip @andrewmccalip]

Less than 100 miles away, about 50 tons of steel and copper are spinning at exactly 3,600 RPM. A giant rotor slews magnetic fields through copper windings and, per Faraday and Maxwell, induces a synchronized 60 Hz sine wave across an entire grid.

That electromagnetic wave propagates through grain oriented silicon steel, laminated transformer cores, kilometers of aluminum conductor steel reinforced cable, SF₆ insulated switchgear, substations switching hundreds of kilovolts, distribution transformers, oxygen free copper wiring, silicon MOSFETs, ferrites, multilayer ceramic capacitors, and the USB C cable plugged into my phone.

There, power feeds a capacitive touchscreen. A transparent matrix of indium tin oxide is deposited on glass. The controller continuously scans the grid. My finger changes the mutual capacitance by a fraction of a picofarad, perturbing the local electric field just enough for dedicated analog front ends to detect before software reconstructs the touch.

Iron ore. Bauxite. Silica sand. Copper ore. Lithium brines. Rare earths.

Refined. Alloyed. Crystallized. Doped. Implanted. Deposited. Etched. Polished.

We purified sand into nearly perfect single crystal silicon, grew boules, sliced wafers, placed dopant atoms with nanometer precision, fabricated chips containing tens of billions of transistors, synchronized them with clocks billions of times per second, and engineered them to execute matrix multiplications at a scale no human could comprehend.

Somewhere along the way, matmuls started to look like us.

That is an astonishing thought.

The towers of abstraction are staggering. No one person built this. No one person fully understands it. Yet every morning millions of people wake up tired, answer emails, argue over specifications, chase margins, fix defects, make payroll, and try to cover their mortgages. Somehow the whole machine keeps humming.

A planetary Swiss watch assembled from physics, markets, bureaucracy, ambition, error, and human necessity.

And after all of that, I touch a piece of conductive glass and step into the Roman forum of modern thought, where millions of minds test ideas against one another in real time.

Clockwork humanity.

It staggers the mind.

[Amaryllis @am8ryllis]

@JeffLadish Mazel tov!

[Amaryllis @am8ryllis]

That said, while Pope Julius II may have been excluded from heaven, Bird will be remembered fondly by us all.

[Amaryllis @am8ryllis]

As one of the primary leaders of the coalition to declare his eminence's election invalid and elect our own pope in Valladolid, and shortly thereafter the leader of an attempt to rejoin the church in Rome, I have somewhat complex feelings about his legitimately.

[bird @birdpathy]

Two days ago I was elected Pope Julius II as part of the "Pope LARP" at Lighthaven https://t.co/8tv9QCtRLi

Here is me accepting Cardinal Birdie's oath of loyalty at my coronation (the first of many)

Shortly afterwards I began my wars of conquest

[Nate Soares ⏹️ @So8res]

The founding fathers pulled off a peerless feat of institutional design. They created the greatest nation in all of history. The world needs more of the ideals America was founded on.

[Girl Lich 🏳️‍⚧️⚢💀 @girllich1]

The United States is at the very least the best country because it's the one my wife is in.

[Aella @Aella_Girl]

the more i learn about history, the more I appreciate America. America is actually an extremely cool and special anomaly in the timeline of civilizations. It's so successful that it's allowed the people inside it to lose touch with how bad things can truly be

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

happy 250th. I am forever in awe of the genius, virtue and luck it took to build something that endured this long and grew this much. I suspect we'll need just as much strength for our own time.

[Jay Daigle @ProfJayDaigle]

Found myself wanting to say that "consuming text is easy and passive, unlike video which requires active effort to watch" and then realized this is the opposite of what basically every other human being would say.

[Gone Scholarknighting @promptandearly]

I can't believe it's only been a week since we lost Fable. I've been so depressed every time I fire up one of the other LLMs instead. For Fable itself, for the things I didn't get to ask it, for the end of an era.

[EigenGender 🔸 @EigenGender]

the fireflies here always make me happy

[Amaryllis @am8ryllis]

@NoahTopper @coeff_giving Congratulations! May you do good and enjoy doing it.

[Patrick McKenzie @patio11]

Coming out to the SFBA is always a bit of living-in-the-future for me, and while I very much appreciated a lot of great conversations about AI, the thing I’m staring at this moment is a far-UVC lamp next to an explainer for why there are far-UVC lamps in all corners of the room.

[smooth normie @smooth_normie]

@TheZvi unfortunately I am once again useful :(

[Amaryllis @am8ryllis]

(I do not recall the origins of this screenshot and cannot vouch for its authenticity. It has been bumping around in my image archive for some time. It felt appropriate to post it finally.)

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

Back in the Armadillo Aerospace days, our liquid oxygen loadouts were 50 to 100 gallons, and the tanks only weighed about a tenth of the propellant, so cooldown effects didn’t dominate. I have an effort going on now dealing with several-gram quantities of multiple cryogenic fluids, and it is an enormous pain when your valves and plumbing mass tens of times the fluid you are trying to deal with. I wish there was a viable cryogenic peristaltic pump!

[EigenGender 🔸 @EigenGender]

Just went to Costco for the first time.
Praise god and Costco