Drew Felker

Anyone have a HeNe laser a friend can borrow this week in the Bay Area? They need a Gaussian distribution, so HeNe or similar would work.

@Jordan_W_Taylor @CurtisPool2 @DrunkRepub Yeah Jordan, but your healthcare is efficient and you don’t spend 12% of your gdp on it… could you help a homie out and send some healthcare efficiency our way?

@CurtisPool2 @DrunkRepub I understood the point fine: It was nonsense, which is easily extrapolated by looking at the difference in magnitudes. Is there 'some' subsidization? Sure, but the healthcare thing is a red herring: It's funded regardless. Whether it's private or social is a policy choice.

The only reason Europeans have “free” healthcare is because Americans have spent the last few decades paying for this shit

@Robotbeat Yeah, people drastically overestimate the cost once they know how to do it themselves.

Nomadic hasn’t discovered SpaceX, yet, which is producing the equivalent of SSMEs (one of the most advanced turbo machines ever built) for approximately a hundredth the cost the usual US aerospace contractors can do it for.

@DustinMulvaney In Livermore we have similar resistance to most project, from solar to storage to industrial to housing. I like the idea of the state designating areas that are pre-approved, along with some other permit speed improving language in the code.

Great piece by Todd Woody on the battery backlash in California. Our conversation went way deeper than what made it in; easily a dozen more articles worth of material at the intersection of planning, policy, and renewable energy development in California alone. Dig in. Let’s see more! bloomberg.com/news/features/…

@3D_Orville What state is it in? California doesn’t allow these.

A potential new job wants me to sign an agreement that says I cannot work for another additive manufacturing company within 5 years of leaving them. Is this unreasonable, or just new to me? It feels unreasonable. This is my trade, if they terminate me, I SOL???

@1curlybill @cspan @ChrisCoons @SecScottBessent Yeah, same question, would love to learn.

@cspan @ChrisCoons @SecScottBessent BS @ChrisCoons only stupid ppl pay that amount who take the fast cash loans to get their monies the same day when you can file much cheaper and get your return back in a week i paid $65.00 for fed state and rent rebate in PA

Sen. @ChrisCoons: "Why'd you shut down Direct File when it was free and easy to use?" @SecScottBessent: "It wasn't free and the—" Coons: "Direct File was free to taxpayers." Bessent: "Not to the American people. It was … $72 million for about 300,00 taxpayers."

@j5_jazzy @Elex_Michaelson Of prop 13 gets eliminated it will push my dad to move out of his 5 bedroom home that he lives in alone, and likely reduce the tax burden on young families who have just bought homes. My dad moving out is bad for him, but good for the family that will value it more than him.

For any one fortunate to own a home in CA — which is the main asset most of us have — why would you vote for Tom Steyer? He’s running on a platform to eliminate Prop 13. That will steeply increase property taxes for homeowners and eventually price many out of their homes. Can any Dem say with a straight face that Democratic leadership in CA over the last 10+ years has been financially responsible? Who gets stuck with the bill? It’s definitely no longer the multitude of multi-million dollar businesses and individuals, who have left the state that were paying the bulk of those taxes. So who gets the bill????

If you were a Democrat supporting Eric Swalwell for Governor in California, who are you thinking about backing now?

@MattMahanSJ Will you stop your building department from filing frivolous lawsuits against building owners in SJ so you can steal the properties and sell the to your developer friends?

Eric Swalwell is done. Done abusing women. Done climbing the political ladder. Done. He does not get any credit for doing less than the bare minimum. Exiting a race you should never have entered deserves no credit. It is an overdue acknowledgment of what the brave survivors who came forward already made clear: Eric Swalwell represented the worst of politics. California deserves better. And now, California will get better.

@Robotbeat I think we consume less than 1kg/day, so this would be a one person unit then, right?

Rough guess on payback time: those cables are about awg 2, so probably up to 94 Amps. Regolith electrolysis usually takes about 3.2V, so that's 300W or so. heat of formation of silica is ~900kJ/mol, so to make a tonne of oxygen with that setup would take... at least 3 years?

@LaFrogman @DanielleFong got any Argon? Also, @LaFrogman Danielle needs three phase power if you have it.

Need help - looking for welding Argon on short notice. Please let me know if you have!

@LaFrogman You’re in SF right?

do i know anybody with 30 kW of three phase power in SF somehow

@gabriel_horwitz Maybe this is a dumb question, but does it matter if the optimizer takes 13ms or 10 minutes? How often are these designs made? Not that I don’t think it’s super cool, I just don’t understand if that’s the bottleneck

this release is going under the radar and it probably shouldn't be. A company called Arena Physica just released a foundation model for physics. for electromagnetics. it predicts how a physical circuit will behave before anyone builds it, in 13 milliseconds. a commercial solver doing the same thing takes 4 minutes. they're doing it 800,000x faster. that sounds like a niche engineering problem. sounds boring right? Think again. Electromagnetics governs everything in hardware. Every antenna in your phone, every chip-to-chip connection inside a data center, every radar on a plane. the reason those things don't improve faster is that the tools to design them are 50 years old and they learn nothing. every simulation starts from scratch. what Arena shipped is the AlphaFold moment for physics. before AlphaFold, protein folding had dozens of narrow models, each for one specific problem. then DeepMind built a foundation model that learned the underlying biology and four years later it won a Nobel. Arena's claim to learn the physics itself, not just the specific task. Their inverse model generates physical geometries no human engineer would design. you describe the electromagnetic behavior you want, and the model produces a structure that creates it. some of those "alien structures" actually work. nobody would have tried them. Founders Fund and Peter Thiel backed this. Anduril is a customer. They're targeting silicon-level designs and plan to tape out the first AI-designed chip this year. if it works the way they say it does, the constraint on hardware design just changed.

@DaneWillette @OrganizerMemes I’ll have to check Mayan out then, I know Steyers son and he’s a nice and reasonable person and supports his dad (didn’t know his dad was a billionaire when we became friends, he doesn’t act like it) so he’s got me leaning his way but happy to look at others! (Not swallwell)

@drewfelker @OrganizerMemes I'd vote for steyer but my preference is Mahan

California governor is top 3 executive positions in the most powerful nation on earth and nobody cares about the race including California voters

@mqwfbdnkcq @OrganizerMemes Voting for… Steyer maybe? 😊

@OrganizerMemes I care!

@DaneWillette @OrganizerMemes …. Steyer? Eh? Eh? :)

@OrganizerMemes I care

@sdamico You don’t even need to plant it. Diablo Canyon has fish species near it that typically live 1000 miles south.

Plop an AP1000 at the potrero power plant site and use the existing interconnect. Plant a coral reef in the artificially warm water next to it.