Rusko Ruskov

Physics PhD student, interested in plasmas & fusion.

[Rusko Ruskov @rusruskov]

@StephenPiment @tszzl Belief is a psychological state and has no bearing on whether something is true or not — philosophical, mathematical or physical. Popper has shown this.

[Rusko Ruskov @rusruskov]

@StephenPiment @tszzl Yes. It’s a philosophical problem. And philosophical problems do have solutions. It’s not just belief as you say.

[Rusko Ruskov @rusruskov]

@StephenPiment @tszzl Not all knowledge is scientific. E.g. mathematics.

[Jodi Beggs @jodiecongirl]

i look forward to landlords requiring the whole year of rent up front

[Looking for Growth @lfg_uk]

Meanwhile, in the UK, this is what we consider "new".

We do not have to live like this.

Different things ARE possible. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

They are lying to you.

Which one do you prefer?

[Owen Lewis @is_OwenLewis]

Life aboard the colony ship. Life in the colony.

Work by Ron Cobb, Syd Mead, Paul Alexander, and Charles Schridde

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

The sheer amount of energy it takes to defeat gravity is humbling, but a powerful reminder of what humanity is capable of.

My photography is to hopefully provide an optimistic perspective of humanity's future among the stars.

[John Cochrane @JohnHCochrane]

You must be kidding. AI might have big effects. It could have risks. So “policymakers,”  must "act now,” before they have any idea what they’re doing, to "build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society?” Boy I’m glad no self-appointed “policy maker” decided to “steer” the development of the steam engine. The ones who “steered” nuclear power destroyed it. Preemptive dirigisme is killing tech in Europe. If said “policy makers” could do something about the dumpster fires of US social programs, building restrictions, appalling costs of public infrastructure, broken tax code, failing schools, maybe I’d think about "calling" to unleash them on some vague AI crusade. (Previous essay on this here https://t.co/dHJDXU0cwM)

[Synthetic_soul @Synthetic_Copy]

they used to let you smoke in orbit

[Tom Hyde @tomhyde_]

"To feel warmed when one is cold; to feel cooled when one is hot; to spark fire; to melt ice: these are not material luxuries heralding cataclysm—they are not signs of hubris, or vanity, or egoism—they are holy rites for the rational and industrious."

New article linked below:

[Britain Remade @BritainRemade]

One stat where England is getting nowhere near Norway.

We spent more on the planning application for the Lower Thames Crossing alone than it cost Norway to actually build the world's longest road tunnel, the Lærdal Tunnel.

[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.

[Synthetic_soul @Synthetic_Copy]

we automated work but kept the office

[Element115 @Element115art]

Space Docking Operations

[Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook]

The problem is never technology, it's the way people who don't respect themselves use it; they use AI to outsource their thinking instead of improving it and getting smarter themselves; they use productivity tools to get themselves even busier instead of building a healthier lifestyle rooted in freedom; they use social media to argue with each other and feel envious of some others instead of connecting with like-minded souls; they use games, music, movies as an escape to an unsatisfying reality instead of getting inspired by them to write a better life scenario for themselves; there has never been a better time to be alive, but the quality of your life will inevitably follow the quality of your taste and the quality of your mind.

[Sam @Sam_kuyp]

I sympathise with Nozick.

[Bernt Bornich @BerntBornich]

Introducing NEO’s 25 Degrees of Freedom, tendon-driven hands — nearing or surpassing human-level dexterity, strength, speed, and reliability.

For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse: it lives or dies at the fingertips.

[Gris 🇩🇰 @Graesplaene_]

Democracy is when a mass surveillance law gets rejected multiple times so you force it through with an emergency vote right before summer recess

[Peter Todd @peterktodd]

Yes, you read that correctly: the majority present voted _against_ chat control.

But due to the absurdly undemocratic, illegal, procedure they're using, it comes into law anyway after being rejected multiple times before in previous votes.

Insane.

[Sunday Sport @thesundaysport]

'Burnham urged to roll out National Arse-Wiping Service'