Mike Barker

@aurelwuensch @ukhadds Please post this over at 𝗜𝗕𝗣𝗦𝗔 - 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 linkedin.com/groups/75552 >11,040 members - carefully curated spam-free resource

@NewStreetsSA @BryceAllies Time to involve @UrbanCourtyard 🙂 4 story walkups, but only with courtyards. How can that be kickstarted ?

@BryceAllies There would need be some nuance to such a policy, however, most suburban and urban areas could benefit from some apartment blocks intermingled within them. This would be better than current strategy of apartment complexes in fields on the outskirts of town.

All of Cape Town should automatically be zoned to allow for four storey apartment blocks. The gate keeping of well located suburbs through zoning needs to stop, we are in a housing crisis.

@SEA_UrbanEnergy Just curious, do you publish your curriculum? By the way, every Southern African Municipality needs your support 🙂

Strengthening the foundation for #DistributedGeneration (DG) in Lesotho As part of the DG support program, a recent DG tariff training in Lesotho brought together the national utility and regulator to build capacity on designing effective distributed generation tariffs.

@c4talyst @w_kitching How can we tell how many South Africans are using paraffin for cooking / heating water

@w_kitching 👀 we can group by ward or small places 👀

I love a map

@zack_overflow @_clairepan Building Physics for sure. But full spectrum including quantity surveying. Green buildings designed in seconds

So it looks like essentially every branch of physics is going to have an AI model that approximates computations in milliseconds instead of trying to accurately simulate the physics perfectly We first saw this with the generative AI videos and images which basically just skipped raytracing which is literally shooting a ray from every pixel and making it bounce a fuck ton of times and collecting multiple samples per pixel Now with electromagnetism, I know nothing about this field but quick wikipedia search shows the classic way of computing it is by solving a bunch of differential equations I wonder what's next

@lsindjowt @NoahChrein We need better models faster in order to keep up with construction timelines. We need architectural superintelligence to replace the many different models - 3D geometry, Thermodynamics, Structural, & Human Interaction. Google did it with AlphaFold & now @arenaphysica with EM

@buildingphysics @NoahChrein Why do you need this? Does the modelling take too long to compute, or is it more an issue of it giving insufficiently accurate predictions?

Starting to feel the omnimodality again. I kinda went hard on pure category theory for a few months and almost forgot the whole goal is to tame the zoo of modalities. Language is one modality, images another, actions yet another, here you see some basic physics as modality

@andrew_leach @JigarShahDC @MichaelEWebber @voltusinc Real Estate can flex. Instead of #USGBC's focus on total energy consumption, the hallmark of the best buildings should be load flexibility. Every building will have a microgrid

@JigarShahDC @MichaelEWebber @voltusinc But, why not put the burden on load in general? Broader market, lower cost, etc.

I completely understand why grid operators want datacenters to operate flexibly. BUT....their use of each MWh is very valuable (well, at least I hope it's valuable someday). So shouldn't we be looking for flexibility from less-valuable uses of electricity (e.g. things that are easy to schedule, so as water treatment, water heating, EV charging, etc.)?

@arenaphysica @AMD @anduriltech @BauschLomb @SiversSemicond Please help. We use #EnergyPlus to model buildings. We now need a superintelligent building physics foundational model. How would you describe that ? IBPSA.org

Introducing Arena Physica. For years, we've been quietly building alongside the teams defining the frontier of hardware — embedding with @AMD in AI compute, @anduriltech in defense technology, @BauschLomb in advanced manufacturing, and @SiversSemicond in satellite and 5G communications. Atlas, our platform for agentic hardware workflows, is only the beginning. We believe a new class of foundation model will let humans push further into the physics that shapes our world but remains fundamentally unintuitive to us. Read our thesis here: arenaphysica.com/thesis. Thank you to @packyM for capturing why electromagnetism secretly runs the world - and what it means to build electromagnetic superintelligence. Our foundation model launches in 7 days. Link in the comments to be first to know.

@PratapRanade @taps @arenaphysica @AMD @anduriltech @SiversSemicond Please help. We use #EnergyPlus to model buildings. We now need a superintelligent building physics foundational model. How would you describe that ? IBPSA.org

Today, I’m excited to introduce @arenaphysica. For the past few years, we’ve been quietly partnering with companies pushing the frontier of hardware like @AMD , @anduriltech and @SiversSemicond  – deep in the guts of their most complex machines. Where applied physics, specifically the laws of electromagnetism, dictate performance. Electromagnetism is a domain poorly suited to LLMs, and a domain I spent most of my physics PhD trying to understand. At Arena Physica, we are in pursuit of electromagnetic superintelligence. We believe that a new class of foundation model will let humans push farther into our understanding of physics and will let us wield forces like EM that shape our world, but are fundamentally unintuitive to humans. It was an honor to partner with my favorite essayist, @packyM to explain how electromagnetism secretly runs the world

@_i_am_arya Next, the world needs a foundation model for the thermal performance of the built enviroment. #EnergyPlus was a good simulator, but its time for something better. #IBPSA

Today, we're announcing Heaviside, our foundation model for electromagnetism. Trained on tens of millions of designs and over 20 years of proprietary simulation data, Heaviside predicts electromagnetic behavior from geometry in 13ms, which is 800,000x faster than a commercial solver. Heaviside is not a language model, and it’s not a surrogate model. Heaviside marks a new class of foundation model for physics which understands the fundamental relationships between materials, the geometries and the electromagnetic fields they generate. We’re releasing a research preview of Heaviside in Atlas RF Studio, an interactive agentic sandbox where you describe the EM behavior you want and the model generates the physical structure that produces it. @arenaphysica , we believe the implications of this class of model extend well beyond RF, as the frontier of exquisite hardware is electromagnetically-governed: wireless communication, radar, power delivery, high-speed computing, and the interconnects inside every chip on earth. In the months ahead, we’re excited to scale up Heaviside to broader frequency ranges, design spaces, and to support silicon-level designs, and deploy it with our closest partners and collaborators in service of their biggest design challenges. If you’ve read our thesis, this is just Step 2 in our pursuit of electromagnetic superintelligence. Read the full announcement and try Atlas RF Studio…tell us what you think: arenaphysica.com/publications/r…

@Skistar15 @NewStreetsSA @freqflyer @tacticallyurban @CityofCT I fly in to events at the CTICC. Used the bus service way back and it worked well. Hop on hop off. I don't trust private taxis- dirty, poor maintenance. Ride-hail not the answer

@NewStreetsSA @freqflyer @tacticallyurban They must be happy with the uber/ taxi options I guess, I mean no point bragging about a world class airport and increasing numbers then no public transport, really really poor by @CityofCT

While Gauteng is set to expand the Gautrain to another airport, Cape Town's only public transport connection to its only major airport is shuttered. *CT runs public transport better than many, but it is not immune to failures and political apathy towards public transport.

Who needs world renowned, tranquil winelands when you can have highways, traffic and gated-community sprawl instead?

@stef_schiavon #IBPSA need to hear about this 🙂

We will develop view clarity metrics and a corresponding rating scheme for fenestration systems. We have been awarded the ASHRAE research project titled “ASHRAE 1925-TRP: Development of View Clarity Metrics for Fenestration Systems.” linkedin.com/pulse/view-cla…

@stef_schiavon Check out the 24/7 Carbon-free Energy initiative 😀 #247CFE cc @247CarbonFree

We are in an era in which when you use energy is just as important as how much you use. linkedin.com/pulse/temporal…

"Sunlight travels 93 million miles to reach the earth. None of them through the Strait of Hormuz." Bill McKibben quotesof.me/edit/0e7684cf-…

@JimRosenthal4 @Paleonut_ @grok provide a list of alternate PC-type cooling fans that are run from 12V

@Paleonut_ I used 4 -10X10X2 MERV 13 filters from Tex-Air Filters and a modular fan from AC Infinity.

My Corsi-Rosenthal Modular Mini Box with new filters! This is a great unit for a bedroom. Compact, quiet, uses very little electricity and provides 5-6 ACH.

@JimRosenthal4 How do you know when to replace the filters ?

@LFCKRWIII @wrathofgnon When inside, does it feel like you are wearing tinted glasses all the time ?

@wrathofgnon The library I work at has a similar glass design built in 1979. It's some sort of very expensive ($15,000/pane) German glass and it is dark and mirrored from the outside. Does a good job with UV although we don't have books near it. Also kills a few birds a day. Thud.

This is what happens to the books in glass facade modernist library: UV light radiation leaves only blue colors. Yet virtually every library or office on Earth being built right now are of the exact same "open" design. How gullible we must be to believe these "architects". #Japan