Dan Lenz

manufacturing energy stuff //⚡️blocks // denver-based // 🇰🇷🤝🇺🇸

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@tenobrus Do it! You never know who’s mind is actually changing behind the screen…

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@denverbitcoin I can not fathom how long this must have taken to film (photograph?)

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@tenobrus @allgarbled “The Pope has priors” is true, but not an argument. Everyone in philosophy of mind has priors. Tim Cook has obvious priors about Apple, but if he makes a specific claim about Android, you still have to show why the claim is wrong.

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@tenobrus The pope represents an army of scholars/priests that have dedicated their lives to thinking about ethics and philosophy, and are building on ~2000 years of others doing the same. How are they not qualified to weigh in on these topics?

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@Pipe42uk @ObserverSuns This is a fun idea.

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of video games where being a top player required mastery of skills relevant to jobs we want filled, and the leaderboards became a way to get recruited. A few games that represent this idea today are Factorio for industrial systems design and Kerbal Space Program for aerospace design.

You can create games for pretty much any skill, including non-techie skills around persuasion, strategy, etc.

Gamifying education is on the horizon - why not expand that to professional development and recruitment?

[Zane Hengsperger @zanehengsperger]

request for startup: a job board that has 10,000 young Americans ready and eager for factory work

i promise you they exist, we just need to rally them

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@OA_paperclips What are you making this in?

Just stumbled onto your account - tons of cool stuff!

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@WillManidis @Willob This has echoes of the “Tool Shaped Objects” article, but if you applied that lens to people instead of products.

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

Obviously rack torture is terrible way to die.

But as they are winding you up, I bet there's like 5 seconds where you feel amazing as your spine decompresses (think inversion table or dead hang) - before you are pulled to pieces.

There is the kernel of some demented product idea here.

[Daniel Franke @dfranke]

You buy a German anvil. It contains 83 moving parts and requires winding twice a day. It's forged from excellent steel, holds tolerances across all three striking faces to within three microns, includes a beautifully indexed horn-adjustment mechanism nobody asked for, and requires a proprietary 11-point spanner should you need to replace the rebound calibration bushing. It runs flawlessly for years, but one day it starts up in limp mode because the onboard anvil-management system detects that it's overdue for its 50,000-strike inspection.

You search AliExpress for a Chinese anvil, and are presented with a multitude of offerings from such household-name brands as DUKXJYIBF, HDBTGMXI, AND UEJQIP. They're all priced to within a few pennies of each other, appear completely identical except for the nameplate, and obviously all came out of the same factory. You text your blacksmith friend to ask if they're legit. He tells you he got one like that from KIXJBU a few years ago, and that it's been great and a terrific deal. You thank him, but KIXJBU seems to have folded so you buy the one from UEJQIP. When it arrives, it feels suspiciously light. You scratch it and realize it's iron-plated aluminum.

You buy an American anvil. It's five times the price of the competition, but it comes from a brand that your great-grandfather used to love. It comes boxed with a warranty registration postcard, twenty pages of safety instructions, assay certificate, and a regulatory slip which lists its FCC certification and ITAR registration. It looks just like your friend's KIXJBU. There's a "Made In China" sticker on the bottom.

You buy a Russian anvil. It arrives coated in cosmoline, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, and weighing 40% more than advertised. The finish looks like it was machined with a shovel. The face is not flat, but somehow this does not matter. You drop it off a truck, accidentally leave it outside for six winters, and use it to straighten a bulldozer blade. It's fine.

You buy a Swedish anvil. It comes flat-packed in a long cardboard box with cheerful Neo-Grotesk lettering and a line drawing of a smiling man assembling it with an Allen key. The instructions contain no words, only pictograms showing the anvil face, horn, waist, feet, and 112 identical-looking fasteners. Halfway through assembly, you discover that the pritchel hole was installed upside down, but only because you used peg B17 where you should have used peg B71. Once assembled, it is clean, stable, and works better than it has any right to. You immediately wonder whether you should have bought two.

You buy a Japanese anvil. It arrives wrapped in rice paper inside a paulownia box, accompanied by a certificate bearing three generations of signatures and a photograph of the first production example being presented to the Emperor. The face has been hand-polished by a seventy-eight-year-old master whose family has made striking surfaces since the Muromachi period. You are given detailed instructions for oiling it with a cloth folded in a specific way. It is the most beautiful object you own. You never quite work up the nerve to strike it.

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@cyberplain You’re telling me a shrimp made this app?

[Eben Bayer @ebenbayer]

@magnushambleton Forums reward coherence. Reality rewards correctness. These diverge more than the forum people realize.

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@TaylorCSargent @LunarOutpostInc Would love to haul some moon rocks with that bad boy

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@MFG_SMB @reindsummit Modular infrastructure, power systems specialty

[Henry Shevlin @dioscuri]

@SelfSpidey “Post-Turing, pre-AGI” is a good heuristic for understanding our bizarre moment in history

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@sonofavondruk @MattZeitlin Yes, this is why each episode revolved around a family event. Weddings, funerals, birthdays, etc.

The implication is they do not see each other outside of these events (or want to).

The one exception was their attempt to run a business together in S4E1 which lasts like 10 mins.

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@WillManidis Inspiring, yet somehow saddening. It is so hard to imagine this playing out in the US.

There is the challenge of central planning. But more importantly, you must first define the character of America before you can preserve it.

Is that something our society can agree on?

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

https://t.co/C7LnyaFPsn

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

@stevehou Moral of the story - no one actually reads the documents

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

The pictures are of the same era.

Picture 2: Explorer 1 satellite launch (1958)
Picture 3: Unloading raw sugar at the Brooklyn docks (1950s)

[Dan Lenz @dm_lenz]

Great read. A big shocker was the astounding inefficiency of loading & unloading ships in modern times (up til the late 1950s) prior to the shipping container.

The US was launching its first satellites into space while the first shipping containers were still being piloted!