Creative Midwife™ and Joiner-of-dots. Designer. Doer. Generalist. Founder. Pronouns? All welcome, you do you.
South East, England
Joined December 2007
- Tweets20.9K
- Following6.2K
- Followers2.2K
- Likes589
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
A legal tsunami is heading for government. They system is not built to handle the volume of input that agents are now able to produce. Without new infrastructure, our institutions will be under permanent DDOS attack. Who wants to build this?
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
Gonna re-post this post again because I think of it EVERYTIME my I instinctively/subconsciously reach for my phone (like a baby reaching for its binky or stuffy)
Cell phone addiction is an absolute thermonuke to the brain and nobody 'takes it seriously' because it is not clear that there is any solution in a world where the revealed preference of everyone across the globe, regardless of income, race, age, any factor whatsoever, would rather be on their phone than do *anything* else. Deciding "I use this too much" and meaningfully altering one's behaviour doesn't seem to have much success for any of the very small minority of people with the sentience or self-reflection to realize how bad it is. Most people seem to think of it as an unproductive habit at most, rather than an addiction. Any attempt to speak seriously about this is met with derision, accusations of pretentiousness. There is no real solution to it. The future of human cognition fifty years down the line is horrifying if you stop and think about it for even a moment.
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
The most important thing we can apply AI to is improving medicine and human health - very excited about this partnership with the CZI and the Virtual Biology Initiative!
Today, Isomorphic Labs joins the Virtual Biology Initiative (VBI) as a founding member.
We are helping build an open resource for the global research community to accelerate how we understand and treat disease.
Read more here: isomorphiclabs.com/articles/…
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
Elon one-shotted multiple multi-billion dollar efforts in stealth aircraft with one tech tree
Lesser known things about Starlink.
Whatever you want to call it, on top of being an illuminator of opportunity for detection below, the mega constellation can detect everything *from above*.
A giant, phased array radar in space.
Stealth's dead btw.
xitter.cf/AWeirdPhysicist/status…
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
This is one of several startups using robotics and standardized designs to vastly accelerate installation of utility-scale solar. Modules are so cheap, they're only a fraction of solar capex now. Attacking installation costs is a huge lever. Innovation to make clean energy cheaper hasn't stopped.
Gritt AI is now installing 1 MW of solar capacity per day at 4× the speed of a typical installation crew. And our daily installation rate keeps accelerating.
At our active site, each day’s installation adds enough solar capacity to meet roughly 200 homes’ annual electricity needs once operational.
That’s the milestone: every day, more infrastructure built. Every increase in speed, more capacity to meet America’s growing energy demand.
Solar is just the beginning. Next, we aim to bring Gritt’s construction superintelligence to data centers, water treatment plants, and pipelines.
Our mission: enable humanity to build centuries’ worth of infrastructure in decades.
Civilization. Accelerated.
@Jason @andrewbeebe @albertwenger @hayleybay @CleanVC @rebeccakaden @Rajil @GrittRobotics
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
This is a big win in the battle for the future business model of the Internet!
Today, Cloudflare is announcing a new Disallow AI Training setting that lets you easily stay indexed for search while refusing to let that same crawler train on your content. cfl.re/4yGTL8b
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
Can you recreate a 3D wind turbine from public satellite imagery?
I've been experimenting with detecting turbine rotation from Sentinel-2 satellite imagery. It works by exploiting the time difference between each spectral band captured during a single pass. When stitched together this creates an animation long enough to see the turbine rotating.
That got me wondering; could I go further and recreate a full 3D model from the same imagery?
And it turns out, yes!
The semi-automated approach I've come up with allows for reconstructing not only the tower, nacelle and rotor orientation, but also the blade rotation as well.
It uses the geometry of the satellite image and known constraints about turbine design to fit a 3D model to the view, including the nacelle yaw angle.
I've tested it on many turbines across different dates, and the results seem accurate. I can't be 100% certain from imagery alone, but visible shadows and other clues make it possible to sanity-check whether the model is a reasonable match.
So far the results are very promising and I'm excited to see what else I can use it for…
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
Air & Space
Two amazing transit shots from the legendary @AJamesMcCarthy sharing a frame. Absolutely love how this turned out!
“The Traveler” & “Defeating Gravity” – at Brownsville, TX
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
Every lighthouse on the New England coast blinks on its own timing.
That's how sailors tell them apart in the dark. This map runs all of them on their real cycles.
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
What the TV does by design:
— scans your entire home network continuously. in their test: one TV identified 38 unrelated devices including phones, smartwatches, printers, and thermostats belonging to people not involved in the test.
— collects the names and signal strengths of every nearby WiFi network, plus location data. all sent to LG Ad Solutions.
— runs ACR (Automatic Content Recognition) on everything displayed on screen. including HDMI inputs. your laptop, gaming console, or work monitor connected to the TV is being fingerprinted.
— one TV exchanged roughly 4GB of ACR-related data per month.
What the TV does that LG says it doesn't:
LG publicly stated their TVs "do not collect, record, or store ambient conversations."
Gamers Nexus found:
— the TV converts speech to plain text and stores it in on-device logs
— the microphone window stays open 10 to 15 seconds after talking stops, capturing bystanders who never addressed the TV
— the TV recorded room audio while the screen appeared off and the Ethernet cable was unplugged, then exfiltrated the file the moment it reconnected
The security vulnerabilities on top:
Beyond the designed behavior, researchers found remote code execution vulnerabilities in webOS that could allow a compromised TV to be weaponized as a covert listening device.
these sets are in hospitals. waiting rooms. boardrooms. hotels.
a surgeon asked Gamers Nexus where that leaves patient confidentiality.
Gamers Nexus has no answer. neither does LG.
What to do right now:
— disconnect your LG TV from your network entirely. route streaming through an Apple TV, Roku, or Fire Stick instead.
— if you must keep it connected: put it on a separate IoT VLAN or guest network so it cannot reach your other devices.
— disable the built-in microphone in settings.
— check your privacy dashboard and opt out of ACR and ad personalization.
— after every firmware update: recheck all of the above.
Credit to Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and other independent researchers.
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
$5300 in $100s please. That's what we said at the bank this morning.
See, whenever you have a free IRL event, you tend to get a lot of no-shows. Plenty of people sign up and RSVP, but ultimately far fewer show up.
This isn't a big deal if you have unlimited space and anyone can just show, but if you want to have an event at a small venue, and you can only host, say, 80 people, you need to have a sense of how many are coming. That's why you require signup, that's why you require RSVPs.
But still, many don't show. We've run into this with our own free events over the years. You "sell out" of space, but you end up with 15 extra seats because people don't show. Those seats could have been filled with people who really wanted to be there. We could charge, which might help, but we really want this to be a free event.
So what to do? How can we find a way to bridge the gap between who says they'll show, and who will really show? How do we shrink the delta?
We're trying something tomorrow.
Tomorrow we have a Breakfast with Basecamp IRL event in Chicago. It's entirely free. As long as you show up. 53 registered.
When you register you're charged $100. And if you show up, you get a crisp $100 bill at the door. So you're made whole, it's entirely free. If you don't show, you forfeit your $100. It costs you money not to be there. A little incentive.
This isn't a new idea. Some restaurants have been charging for reservations, essentially asking you put down a deposit which can be applied to the meal if you show. If not, you lose the deposit.
So we're doing the same thing, except for a free event, and rather than apply the deposit to the meal or ticket price (which we don't have), we just literally hand you back the cost of admission, with a smile.
I'm really curious to see if it works. I'll comment back with the no-show rate and compare it to our last event where we didn't do this at all.
Carl Jeffrey retweeted
Von Neumann would be proud
Rainmaker just produced ~19M gallons of water in Alaska via next-gen cloud seeding over 3 hours of operations.
We are the first company to provably produce precipitation in Alaska. As promised, we’ve linked our white paper and relevant data.
In the future, Rainmaker will protect and restore glaciers with man-made snowfall.
Immediately, this demonstration shows how Rainmaker will add new water to the Colorado River and Great Salt Lake in the coming months.
We turned around this analysis and white paper just a couple days after operating. There are many data sources I want to deepen our understanding of the atmosphere and increase our provable production; we’re building the instruments to collect that data in subsequent operations. But at Rainmaker, we won’t tout LOIs, simulations, or lab tests. What matters is physically measuring that you’ve affected the atmosphere; proving that we’ve produced water. We prefer sharing only the tech that has proven to make more water for farms, industries, and ecosystems in need.
Expect a regular cadence of these from us as we build the best atmospheric science lab in the world. Feedback is welcome in the interim.
Rainmaker Century.
rainmaker.com/blog/alaska-va…
