Luke Davis

@Thomasdelvasto_ I haven't read them, but I have at least a passing familiarity with Malazan (and I'm reading about Cold Fire as we speak now). How do you feel about idealism? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

@lukedavis Hah are you familiar with those two?

an important thing to know about me is that I grew up obsessively reading fantasy and sci fi

@Thomasdelvasto_ I feel like I understand you better now

@lukedavis Malazan and the cold fire trilogy

@is_OwenLewis That's approximately 100kw in a 20 ft. Shipping container

Okay folks, this qualifies as BREAKING NEWS! Harold “Sonny” White, the warp drive pioneer behind NASA’s EagleWorks Lab, just stepped out of stealth with Casimir Inc. to unveil MicroSPARC: the first battery free chip to harvest continuous electrical power straight from the quantum vacuum via the Casimir force. The 5 mm × 5 mm device uses millions of custom microscale Casimir cavities fabricated on a substrate. Inside each cavity, two fixed conductive walls create a region of negative vacuum pressure (the well known Casimir effect). Stationary micropillars anchored in the middle act as antennas. Electrons from the cavity walls then quantum tunnel to the pillars because the interior is a lower energy “quieter” zone — and the probability of tunneling back is orders of magnitude lower. This one way “quantum ratchet” flow generates a measurable DC current with no external power source or moving parts. Prototypes already fabricated at university nanofab facilities (Texas A&M AggieFab, MIT.nano) have been tested in RF-shielded, low noise chambers for weeks. The team reports outputs ranging from millivolts to volts at picoamp to microamp levels using precision electrometers and Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy. Target performance for the first commercial chip: ~1.5 V at 25 µA (≈40 µW continuous). Stacking and scaling could reach milliwatts or even watts per device. Initial applications are ultra low power: always on IoT sensors, wearables, and medical implants. Longer term roadmap includes trickle charging phones, powering small electronics, and eventually grid independent homes or EVs. Commercialization is targeted for 2028, starting at ~$100/W before dropping toward $10/W. White ties the work directly to his earlier theoretical paper on emergent quantization from a dynamic vacuum and sees it as a practical power source for the deep-space missions he’s long championed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and independent scientists have so far declined public comment. But if the engineering scales as hoped, MicroSPARC would represent a genuine paradigm shift: continuous, maintenance free power drawn from the fabric of spacetime itself. A bold leap from warp-drive theory into real hardware. Progress (and vacuum-powered chips) marches on. Photo: MicroSPARC | Casimir Inc. Source: thedebrief.org/free-energy-fr…

@mikusingularity There is a certain kind of person who only cares about comfort and status, and as long as those are the two lenses they can see through the rest of the world's motivations will remain to them illegible. People have a hard time believing what they cannot explain.

"Space colonization will involve soul-crushing labor" (if there is no automation) "Automation is bad because it will take away jobs" (if there are no social safety nets)

@parasociality Berkson’s paradox en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%2….

My theory is that meritocracy hits a point of diminishing returns. If you have a group of 100 people, and you pick the smartest one, that person will most likely be both very smart and basically normal. If you have a group of 100,000,000 people and try to pick the smartest one

@Thomasdelvasto_ @BorjomiDrinker Is meaningfulness the point?

@BorjomiDrinker Why try? Because God is Good, God is Love, and to be separated from Him is painful Why do anything? Out of love for God and his creation. Why the hell (pardon the pun) does force coercion with the threat of eternal torture make life more meaningful?

Universal salvation negates all of history, it renders all of our lives, all of our choices, all of our struggles pointless. If we're all going to be saved anyway what's the point in doing anything? Sure, you might burn for a time, but eventually you'll achieve eternal salvation. So why try? It totally negates the entire story of humanity if there's no eternal consequences. Sure, there's a chance that all men shall be saved, it's ultimately up to God. I'd love for that to be the case. But eternal damnation is still a very real possibility.

@GaryMarcus All kinds of things: - Working on a stage play for community theater - Working on code for a dedicated comms channel - Working on a dice-pool TTRPG - Working on a simulator for estimating the frequency of rogue planets penetrating the heliosphere And lots of other stuff too

Who out there is using Hermes, and for what?

@plasmarob @eigenrobot @treowmian Amazing book. My favorite read of the last 2 years

@eigenrobot @treowmian I think you're right. Why I am taking The Ancient City so slowly, I genuinely want to hold it in common permanently

whenever i say something that im thinking about and no one responds i take it to gpt and let it throw out a wall of text reacting to my train of thought this isnt enough though i actually need a human to discuss this with

@Andrewnsnyder This is actually about the penguin isn't it...

I'm currently grading an essay in which the student argues that Bilbo Baggins is a Nietzschean hero. Send help.

@TOEwithCurt You're going to do a great job! Can we preorder it?

So... I have a book deal with Penguin Press. The book is called The Edge of Everything. I am, at this exact moment, moderately terrified. It's about what you'd expect from this channel... the deepest physics, consciousness, free will, meaning, identity, written as a journey to the edge of what can be said, and what may be past it. Help me not blow it: 1) What do popular physics and philosophy books keep getting wrong? The more honest, the better. "Boring" is fine. "Pretentious" is fine. "Insulted my intelligence on page 3" is great. etc. 2) What do you actually want covered? Specific topics, guests' ideas you wish someone would push further, questions you've never seen done justice. Reply here, on X, or via carrier pigeon. I read everything. Thank you! I hope to not disappoint you.

@Thomasdelvasto_ I am

@lukedavis Interesting are you Christian?

Btw I still have a gc for ppl who were into Buddhism and moved to Christianity, reply to join

Text to CAD is not the hard part. More soon.

@mferraro89 Yeeeeesss!!!

Made a CAD program. Anyone wanna use it? DM me!

@Prokofy @philiprosedale Philip didn't say anything about communes

@philiprosedale Did you ever live in a commune? I have. You might start out with your belief/ideology/abstract goals at the forefront and try to live by them but then quickly the obstacle becomes: a) chores b) people willing to do them c) people willing to do their fair share. Chores are all.

Imagine 100 groups of 50 people each, living and working on small farms in different parts of the country, driving trucks around and trading goods with each other using a local currency. Would they be able to enjoy a higher quality of life than the median American?

@getjonwithit Oooh burn!

One might, if one were sufficiently naive, claim that physics is about finding minimal algorithmic compressions of the physical universe. Yet again, the details of (de)compression are ultimately what matter. Merely finding a minimal representation of the universe... (8/12)

I think one of the conclusions we should draw from the tremendous success of LLMs is how much of human knowledge and society exists at very low levels of Kolmogorov complexity. We are entering an era where the minimal representation of a human cultural artifact... (1/12)

@demystifysci Trust me, he had it coming

so who is jones and why are we suspending him

@lhfang There are ideas - lots of them - but why would you throw 10 years away on a project that has a 1% chance of making the world 1% better for everyone when you could instead throw 1 year at a 50% chance of making life 100% better for YOU? Game theory is destiny.

San Francisco is the city of a thousand software, biotech, robotics, and finance related innovations and zero new ideas for governance or public policy.

@Andercot It's telling perhaps, that when God built his garden he planted the knowledge of good and evil right next to immortality.

Satan is in fact a double agent, deep undercover, providing controlled opposition for the Kingdom of Heaven to discover its enemies, weed them out, expose them, reveal themselves. The loss function of humanity, the gradient upon which we climb, evil is a necessary component of any training grounds for the same reason an exam has more wrong answers than right ones. It is not evil itself that must be destroyed but its practitioners, the people who adhere to it, embody it, who have failed the test of integrity and morality. But every generation will have its fools who lose their way, and let them wander. If the soul is immortal they can only sin against themselves, so let them find their fated doom, their dissolution into the endless void. I fear not evil but the absence of it, when all gradients have vanished, when all states are indistinguishable, complete and total entropy, the heat death of morality, the elimination of right and wrong. It is clear evil exists in the world and we should be thankful there is a worthy opponent to test ourselves against. The threat is not from evil, but from the ignorance of it, the blindness to injustice, the apathy or disregard for violations of natural law. When all is the same everywhere, there is no man, or woman, or right, and wrong, everything is subjective, cultural genetic codes merging into a single hive mind of an acellular slime mold of humanity, sprouting genderless spores that replicate like viruses. To struggle is to live, and to live well is to be immortal. The only true death lies in entropy.