This blog post was thought-provoking:
www.orcasciences.com/articles/the...
It centers around "dematerialization": Materials with better performance tend to require more energy to make but allow us to use less raw material to make superior products, creating a trend where products become l...
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This video nicely illustrates why prepping relevant context for LLMs - rather than indiscriminately dumping a ton of text into the context - is important for LLM-based applications, even beyond optimizing cost and response times. This is because performance degrades more with increasing input length than a lot of devs ...
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Coal is way more problematic from a deaths / TWh perspective that most people would expect.
Our World in Data has a great breakdown if this here:
ourworldindata.org/safest-sourc...
“these estimates for fossil fuels are likely to be very conservative. They are based on power plants in Europe, which ha...
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I like these videos that make manufacturing look cool.
Although it’s very short on details, it’s interesting to see the collaboration between humans and robots as well.
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Humanoids might just be the most versatile form factor, not skeuomorphism.
I've seen a lot of people argue that humanoid robots are a form of skeuomorphism because there are much better form factors, even for homes (e.g. wheel base with arms, robot dog with an arm as the head).
I watched an interview where the roboticist Eric Jang shared his take on this. He believes that the humanoid form f
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Someone built a small VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft from scratch with no experience and shared how he designed and built it:
www.tsungxu.com/p/first-vtol...
Very cool.
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You love to see it: a foundation model for tasks related to pathogen detection and pandemic monitoring.
- Paper: metagene.ai/metagene-1-p...
- Huggingface: huggingface.co/metagene-ai
It’s trained on DNA and RNA strands from human wastewater, including samples from bacteria, viruses and other organ...
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There’s a podcast about materials science called “Materialism” and the episodes usually have a lot of interesting tidbits. They sometimes use technical terms without explaining them, so some prior exposure to MS (e.g. through engineering) helps but I think most of the content is very approachable and interesting noneth...
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Idk anything about this MIRA token but the ease of fundraising for public goods (esp. research and IP) on crypto infra is perhaps still an underappreciated use case of crypto.

Siqi Chen
@blader
1y
i just want to say that whoever said crypto has no legitimate use cases, you can tell them that funding for rare disease research is a pretty legitimate use case
(again, ALL proceeds from this will go directly to rare disease research at hankinson lab, my family and i will keep… https://t.co/diO9636V1V

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Quite approachable intro to molecular dynamics for anyone who’s interested:
www.owlposting.com/p/a-primer-o...
There’s also an interesting podcast episode with the author about the role of AI in this field.
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Interesting exploration of the improving economics of water desalination and its implications:
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/does-desal...
The author’s takeaways are:
- “Desalinated water now costs as little as $0.40 per ton […], likely to drop to $0.30 in the next decade.”
- chea...
Interesting case study of what can be done with cheap energy, especially in places with lots of sun and access to seawater.
The author basically proposes to:
1. Build a solar-powered desalination plant
2. Desalinate seawater at scale
3. Use the resulting brine for extraction of valuable minerals
This could be an impo
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Branch education dropped another gem.
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In case anyone is interested.
Idk why, but some university made the "bible of materials science" publicly available here:
https://ftp.idu.ac.id/wp-content/uploads/ebook/tdg/TEKNOLOGI%20REKAYASA%20MATERIAL%20PERTAHANAN/Materials%20Science%20and%20Engineering%20An%20Introduction%20by%20William%20D.%20Callister,%20Jr.,%20David%20G.%20Rethwish%20(z-lib
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