Bo Laurent

日本語 OK Writing at

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

Symbolics was formed by people who left MIT; Richard Stallman did not join them. Symbolics later stopped sharing its Lisp machine improvements with MIT, and Stallman spent about two years rewriting their features himself so MIT’s system wouldn’t fall behind. This is the proximate cause of GNU.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A function catalog of LED

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

@bayeslord https://t.co/eRzIKCANXW

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

Each thread is anchored at the hub and free at the other end. When it spins fast enough, the outward centrifugal effect on the thread’s mass overwhelms gravity, so the thread lifts and stands up into a loop instead of hanging down. The exact curve is the equilibrium form of a spinning flexible string, where tension along the thread, the outward rotational force, and gravity all balance.

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

“You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”

J.B.S. Haldane, “On Being the Right Size,” first published in Harper’s Magazine (March 1926); collected in Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927), p. 19.

1985 Oxford University Press reissue: On Being the Right Size and Other Essays (ed. John Maynard Smith)

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

@ScriptingJapan My kuzushiji study partner and I laughed out loud when we decoded it.

https://t.co/8cRxvfeDaq

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

@ScriptingJapan This is the cover of 牛屋雑談 (Small Talk at a Beef Shop)、published in 1871. It contains the alias 奴論建 do-ron-ken, which I had taken for a pun on the English “drunken”. But Claude suspects this is a pun on the Dutch dronken. Nonetheless, pretty funny.

[創 自作楽器 @ 8/30 愛知県芸術劇場小ホール @kajiisou]

「音階を持つギロ」を遂に思いつきました！
打ってよし、擦ってよしの新型楽器ができそうです。
メロディックなものも作ります！

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

The Oldham coupling, invented in 1821 by John Oldham, is used to transfer torque between axles that don't exactly line up

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

This!

[Kyle Walker @kyle_e_walker]

There's so much focus on "how can AI do my work for me?"

I think the more important question is "what work can I now do with AI that I would have never attempted before?"

Earlier this year I wrote freestiler, a vector tiling engine for R and Python, with the help of Claude and Codex.

I knew what the ideal engine looked like and how it would work at a high level. I didn't know how to put it together, and I don't know Rust, the language I wanted under the hood.

Previously I would never have attempted this project as the ROI wasn't there. It would have taken me a year or more to learn the internals of a vector tiling engine and enough Rust to implement one.

With Opus-level models, I could take it on. freestiler now powers all my vector tiling pipelines, including the map below rendering 143 million jobs from LODES, and it has 114 GitHub stars.

Building this way has required a different set of skills. I don't review the code line by line. I set up adversarial agents to do that and write the test suites. What I review is the architecture, the behavior, and the results. Agent teams surface findings and explain their reasoning; I evaluate and critique. My job isn't to stress over code formatting, but instead to focus on questions like whether the engine is designed right, whether the output is correct, and if the UX makes sense.

This means that I haven't "replaced my work." I've taken on entirely new work, with the help of agents, that I would have never done otherwise.

It has taken some getting used to shipping code I haven't personally typed. In the old way of working, I built understanding through writing that code. Now I build understanding through managing the project - writing a spec, reviewing structure, evaluating UX. And that's helped me think a whole lot bigger in terms of what I can now do.

[We don't deserve cats 😺 @catsareblessing]

USING SHADOWS TO ATTACK A CAT

[Hank Green @hankgreen]

https://t.co/YUDy77LG0t

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

https://t.co/fLgEnEDkLS

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

In October 1996, intersex people and allies picketed the American Academy of Pediatrics. Read the letter they shared with AAP and press at the time.

[Berci Meskó, MD, PhD @Berci]

I wish we had anatomical models like this one when I was a medical student. Imagine future medical professionals studying anatomy on these without any limitation (such as access to anatomy models or the formaldehyde smell).

This highly detailed 3D-printed hand was made by Digital Anatomy Simulations for Healthcare, LLC using Stratasys 3D printers.

They can also create dental components, skulls and a range of models for assisting surgeons in preoperative planning too.

[Dead Wrong History @deadwronghist]

Björk on Icelandic TV, aged 22, explaining how a TV works: "An Icelandic poet told me it was millions of little screens sending light onto you... So you just swallow and swallow. But I read the scientific truth. You shouldn't let poets lie to you."

[Martin Bauer @martinmbauer]

It’s a pity the Higgs boson’s deep impact hasn’t been communicated better.
It wasn’t profound because it was unexpected, but because it gave overwhelming evidence that the vacuum of our Universe behaves, in a deep sense, like a superconductor. Permeated by a field that breaks a fundamental symmetry of nature and shapes the forces within it.
Democritus imagined atoms more than 2,000 years before they became experimentally real to us. That didn’t make the discovery any less revolutionary. The Higgs was that kind of moment.

[Science Magazine @ScienceMagazine]

The human brain can bring rubber to life with one simple trick: Cover a person’s hand and place a rubber hand next to it, then stroke their hand and its facsimile, and suddenly the person will begin to “feel” the touch in the fake appendage. The rubber hand illusion helps demonstrate how our senses work together to create the feeling of ownership over our bodies, a fundamental part of self-awareness.

A 2025 study demonstrated that octopuses also fall for the rubber arm trick—the first documentation of the phenomenon outside of mammals: https://t.co/1V5KVb1y1F #ScienceMagArchives

[Bo Laurent @bolaurent]

@amazingthings_ Surprisingly, Albert Einstein contributed to our knowledge of river meander dynamics.

https://t.co/6tPywCFN5B

[まだ面白い @madaomoshiroi]

捕食者を欺くために作りが複雑な巣を作り、安全のために卵を奥深くに隠す鳥、これは画期的すぎる