the fact that a caterpillar dissolves into SOUP inside the cocoon and reassembles into a butterfly using the SAME genome and we're out here acting like we understand gene expression is genuinely hilarious to me
New kinds of caravan/nomadic culture will evolve. Economics will push it. The young will want to jump on for a few years to see the country paying their way via seasonal and remote positions. Skilled trades will swarm disasters and migrate through smaller towns arbing labor supply shortages.
Today is the fourth birthday of Terraform Industries @TerraformIndies. Here @lucie_nurdin and I have climbed up onto the full scale synthetic methane reactor, which has just been loaded with catalyst. It actually makes a pretty chill meeting place.
What an incredible privilege to get to build this technology, the wellspring of the next ten millennia of our material wealth.
Many opportunities listed at https://t.co/vMMus0exNz. Join us!
Largely unelected public fund participation in corporate governance is extreme overreach and should be banned federally. The government has the power to legislate and enforce law already.
Okay here's the first thing I did with THRML by @extropic
It's just a basic sudoku solver. Thermodynamic computing is a bit overkill for this task but I think since humans can actually do sudoku, it's a good intuition for what's going on under the hood.
With sudoku, there are many overlapping constraints. You start with a partially filled puzzle, which are the initial conditions, but then other rules are: no duplicates on any row, column, or square.
Now, with a sudoku problem, you know there is ONE singular solution, or a "low energy state" i.e. where there are no rule violations or collisions.
So then what you do is you program those "clamped" initial values into the TSU, and you bake in the rules (no duplicates) and then, due to the laws of thermodynamics and electricity... it just sort of settles into the correct solution (this is "annealing")
The reason I think this is such a good example of what TSUs do is because for humans (and classical computers) it's more or less a "guess and check" process. No matter what method you use with classical computation or human computation, it's an iterative refinement process of sequential steps.
But, with sudoku, as you can see in the output below, it's a single step. That's because the TSU looks at the whole problem globally.
Here's how I did this: ChatGPT PRO 🤣
No joke, ChatGPT pro one-shotted this entire problem. There were several refinements we made, though it was mostly around UI and validation (not the core logic). However, we did do an optimization step to make sure we were using the correct block batching from the THRML library.
You may have heard of The Gundo, along with all of its controversy...
But how did it start? Who started it? And where is it headed?
All of that in today's video, link below.
The brass was easy to work with. Cut the brass a little over sized, scuffed it to give the epoxy a better surface to adhere to, then trimmed and smoothed with a Dremel and progressively fine files.
Built a replica of this turn of the century mission piece. Used cherry and 1/4 brass for the dowel pin joinery. It's sized a little smaller and lighter than the original to be more useful around the house. The brass will contrast nicely as the cherry ages and darkens in time.