Alex Van de Sande (avsa.eth)

Physicist Michio Kaku suggests dark matter isn’t matter at all. It is gravity leaking from a parallel dimension.

Particle masses are harmonic ratios In 1951, Friedrich Lenz published what may be the shortest paper in Physical Review history: 27 words noting that the proton-to-electron mass ratio equals 6π⁵ to high precision. What about the mass of the remaining 18 particles? What about of them as functions of pi, Euler's number and basically integers??? A neutron is an electron + e??? Help me double check this, please! Link in the comments!

Ex Machina is no longer sci-fi. China has finally built it. The company is AheadForm, founded in Shanghai. The product is the world's most hyper-realistic robotic face. Silicone skin you can't tell from human, 25 micro motors hidden underneath pulling the face into real expressions. And RGB cameras embedded inside the pupils so when it looks at you, it actually sees you from where its eyes are. They raised $28.5M to "give AI a head," which is also where the name comes from. AheadForm = a head form. This is the opposite of where everyone else in robotics is focused. Unitree, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics: all about the body. AheadForm chose the face because they think trust is the harder problem to solve, and trust gets decided at the face. The reason nobody else has tried this is the "uncanny valley." It's the creepy zone where a robot looks almost human but not quite, and looking at it just feels wrong even when you can't say why. Most roboticists believed no amount of engineering could make a face realistic enough to escape it. So they gave up and kept robots cartoonish on purpose: big anime eyes, exaggerated features, clearly synthetic. But AheadForm decided to treat it as an engineering bug instead. Add enough motors, tune the silicone, fix the timing, the valley closes. And they're pulling it off. A few crazy details about how this actually works: 1. The robot learns its own face in a mirror. You put it in front of a camera, let it fire every motor randomly, and it watches what its face does and builds an internal map of "if I send command X to motor Y, my eyebrow does this." Same exact process a human baby uses staring into a mirror. The robot teaches itself who it is by experimenting. 2. It predicts your smile 839 milliseconds before you smile. By watching the micro-tells in your face that precede a smile, the robot starts smiling 0.8 seconds ahead, so its smile lands at the same moment yours does. Most robot mimicry happens half a second late, which is exactly why it always feels artificial. 3. The pupils are the cameras. When the robot makes eye contact, the gaze and the sensor are the same physical thing. Most humanoid robots stick the camera on the forehead or chest, so they aren't actually looking at you when their eyes are pointed at you. 4. The founder, Yuhang Hu, did his PhD at Columbia under Hod Lipson. Lipson is the guy who in 2006 built a four-legged robot that figured out it had four legs by experimenting with its own movement, nobody told it the body shape, it discovered it. He has spent 25 years trying to build machines that know what they are. AheadForm is that 25-year research arc productized. 5. NetEase Games already paid them to physically embody a fantasy video game character. That opens up a brand-new category: robotics as the physical embodiment of fictional IP. Every character-rich studio, Disney, Riot, Hoyoverse, Pokemon, Netflix, now has a question to answer about when their characters get bodies. AheadForm believes whoever ships the first robot you'd actually want around your family wins. That's the bet behind the most realistic robot face on earth.

This theorem (left) means, the only way you can make proofs for two different things in the same position in the same Merkle tree, is by breaking the underlying hash function. As a reviewer, you don't have to verify how Merkle branches are implemented or how the theorem is proven (right), you just have to verify what the theorem says, and that Lean verifies it. And the beautiful thing is that you can even write live production code (including eg. CLI tools) directly in Lean.

Here are some “Nice words”. This token was made to test the token capabilities of Mist and ERC20 as a whole (gas was so cheap!). There’s NO inherent value. If you’re a collector or like slot machines do your thing, but you probably will be someone else’s greater fool.

Brazil 🇧🇷 becomes the first major American country to offer visa-free access to the Chinese! Colombia 🇨🇴 and Venezuela 🇻🇪 still offer only e-visa I expect a huge wave of Chinese Birth Tourism

Protein shakes? 3.4 oz or less, but rotisserie chickens??? As many as you can fit in your carry-on.

Polychromy is archaeologists finding traces of the underpainting layer and then pretending finely crafted sculptures were handed to pre-schoolers to paint by number. They even get frustrated by how much “red hair” they find- red is used in underpainting to build warmth for brown.