iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Word rotation has proven incredibly effective as a paradigm, which leads one to wonder what it might mean for a shape to be involuntarily celibate

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Bsky butchered the transparent png, so I reposted with a background. It's from www.thorlabs.com/certified-la...

thorlabs.com

Thorlabs

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Goggles with high optical density in the laser's emission band. Nd:YAG's fundamental wavelength is 1064 nm, but you can cut the wavelength in half, 1/3, or 1/4 (532, 355, and 266 nm) using nonlinear crystals. A Nd:YAG laser can have any of these emission wavelengths depending on how it's configured!

https://www.thorlabs.com/certified-laser-safety-glasses?tabName=Overview

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Assuming that your cheap/fast/idealized model will take you from point A to B is a surefire way to go from point A to NaN, and the closer-to-correct models all have like n^4 scaling

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I am an experimentalist who likes numerics (a.k.a. a sick, sick man), and I can report from the front lines that all models are approximations, only some of which are valid in any particular context

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

"All science is either physics or stamp-collecting", but the world is built from stamps. Sometimes you just need to go out and measure stuff and add it to the stamp collection. Without that catalog of physically-realizable configurations with such-and-such properties, you're in spherical cowland

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

OTOH, very expensive in delta-v to put something on the moon with enough fuel to get back to earth, and comparatively easy to loft an interceptor. Not much mystery about where that RV is going to be in its 3-day Newtonian trip from moon to earth, so you can just send something out to greet it

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

The Europe PHEV study is skewed by corporate/fleet vehicle tax incentives and a principal-agent problem for fueling vs charging. Talking to people locally with PHEVs, my use pattern seems typical. Renting a gas car for long trips would be wildly more expensive than the PHEV price premium.

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I bike-commuted daily for seven years, but that doesn’t work for my current commute. You can hate PHEVs all you want, but I’m going to shrug and continue enjoying my vehicle.

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I love my PHEV. I filled it up last week for the first time since February. All of my daily driving can be done with cheap overnight L1 charging. It lets me drive diagonally across the Great Plains to visit family without needing to take an extra day off work to navigate chargers.

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Makes me think that maybe our retirement system should get the incentives pointed in a direction that aligns present choices with future needs. Social security is intergenerational security! Money for moms!

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

We habitually clack-clack a pair of tongs upon picking them up, and that tells us enough about slop, tolerances, force-feedback, etc. to manipulate inhomogeneous non-rigid bodies in a hostile environment (turn brats on a hot grill)

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

(In partial response to the other reply-er) current LLMs can deal with single-component geometry by poking and prodding, but the world is built from assemblies of dozens or hundreds or thousands of closely-coupled parts where poking any given thing doesn’t do anything

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Or really anything where spatial relationships and the behavior of objects in space needs to be grappled with. LLMs are very good at writing code to solve spatiotemporal PDEs, but very bad at, for lack of a better phrase, shape-rotating on their own

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I swear, if I see another media hit that focuses on the 2006 JASON report summary and devotes a single sentence to the 2019 report (if it’s mentioned at all)… Or another “this heavily-redacted classified report reveals no information, therefore no information exists, and gov decisions are baseless”

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

You can just leave that part out, though! Much easier to stick to the UCS line that pit production is unnecessary if you don’t broadcast the parts of those reports that come to the opposite conclusion. The reporting has already been determined and will not be updated in light of new information.

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Also in WI: the private resort complex of the 5th-generation family-owned corporation that makes Windex and Draino

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Source: just spent six months renovating a planned-development duplex that was shat out in the 70s without regard to topography or drainage (or common sense)

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Sites also differ in all but the lowest land-value locations. You can shit out four dozen identical slab-on-grade ranch houses in prairieland without breaking a sweat, but life gets harder when your lots are weirdly-shaped or there’s topography and drainage isues

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

I joked, but apparently this is becoming a thing bsky.app/profile/70sb...

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Magnificent wildfire sunsets make you go “how bad can PM2.5 be for the lungs, really?”

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

It’s one thing to operate in sparse, high-dimensional latent space where you can be a ways off and still top-k select the right thing, and another to represent in a dense low-D space where things aren’t automatically orthogonal and you actually need to be precise about relationships

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Writing a custom GUI to speed up an image processing task - would’ve taken me at least a few hours to write myself, but I got something usable from the first prompt, and something better than what I’d have written myself within 15 minutes. Extremely worth the $6 in token cost

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Yeah, I think there are definitely some guardrails to put in place to keep people from being stupid with usage (e.g. a token budget of a few % of monthly salary cost by default), but the few hundred dollars of Sonnet 4.5 API usage I’ve incurred over the past few months has been extremely worth it

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

People make these criticisms of LLMs (“they cost money! their performance is unreliable!”) that are equally applicable to knowledge workers

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Isn’t this true of asking people to do work, too? Estimates of time required for task completion are notoriously unreliable. If my time costs $200/hr with overhead and I go a couple days over on a monthlong project, that’s like $5k in cost

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

The U.S. melting pot is indeed a huge advantage, but we’re entering an era of global sub-replacement fertility. Maybe the U.S. will remain sufficiently attractive to be an island of stability for a century in a hollowed-out, declining world? But eventually you run out of other people’s children.

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

It is cool as hell, but also the IT systems you use to set up the experiments are very duct tape & bubblegum, and part of the job is getting woken up repeatedly in the middle of the night to check target alignment, so you need to take a step back occasionally to remind yourself how cool it is

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

This would be something like an x-ray backlighter for radiography, whacking a tiny manganese foil with 30 kilojoules of UV laser energy over less than a nanosecond to capture dynamic images at ~8 micron spatial resolution of a target moving at dozens of kilometers per second

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Fun NIF fact: all the timing for the lasers and diagnostics assumes everything is aimed at the center of the target chamber. If you have something sitting a few centimeters off the center of the 10 m chamber, you need to manually correct for the speed of light to get the timing right

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

When you left Google, I figured it would be followed in a few months with an announcement that you’d started at Anthropic, and I’m surprised that hasn’t happened yet unless I missed something

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

Mostly true, but counterpoint:

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

You have been skeeting for hours on a Saturday, “busy” my ass

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Also a problem in Asia, South America, and Europe, and probably Africa too once African economies are more developed! Explain to me how caring about a long-term global issue is actually racist, because I’m missing the connection there?

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

This drives me nuts!! “This problem is fake and if it’s real, it’s our kids’ problem” is *precisely* the right-wing response to climate change. Ignoring problems because you don’t like the proposed solutions is exactly what the right does, and it’s bad. Just come up with better solutions!

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

I just watched a team lose most of their funding through the FY due to OMB fuckery immediately after successfully executing a high-profile experiment. They received a morale pizza party as compensation.

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

On the other other hand, it’s fun to accelerate quickly, so the higher tire cost is worth paying

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

Language models *do* make mistakes, but so do software engineers, which is why software testing exists (and predates LLMs by many decades). Journalists also make mistakes, which is why fact-checkers and editors exist. Perfection is not the bar that needs to be cleared for a tool to have utility.

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 18/04/2026

There's a concept in software development called "testing" - you verify the outputs of your code match the right answers for some set of inputs. The code will also fail to compile and/or throw runtime errors if it's written incorrectly. This makes verification much easier than for, say, journalism

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

They absolutely can, it’s just a question of whether they’re needed often enough to be cheaper than alternatives. Daily cycling - great! Twice a decade, not so much

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

We should also be building lots of HVDC backed by hydro, nuclear, or similar firm capacity. Lines are expensive, you don’t want to build them as insurance against very occasional events, but as the backbone of a grid with high utilization factor

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

China has huge coal plants colocated with their wind & solar to stabilize their HVDC lines. We do not want that. Their grid buildout is driven in large part by a desire for energy independence, and to a lesser extent clean energy, which is why they keep on building new coal plants.

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

The continental shelf is so much smaller in CA than on the East Coast. Why would you export that limited resource at great expense across the vast center of the country instead of using East Coast wind that can be hooked up almost directly to load?

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Keep building wind and solar, but you gotta plan your system in those regions around the assumption that variable renewables won’t show up for days on end, and infrequently enough that it doesn’t make financial sense to fill that gap with battery capacity that’s only needed a few times per decade

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

California has it easy - they don’t really need as much firm capacity (mild winters, great solar potential). It’s regions like the Midwest and Northeast with long-tail winter doldrums events where you have very little wind, very little sun for a week, and cold weather that reduces heat pump COP

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

“Writing software” is not a niche field in the same way that quick & dirty prototyping for manufacturing is, and doesn’t have the same physical constraints

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

I have used both. 3D printing is most valuable for quick prototypes and building certain geometries that’d be challenging for conventional machining operations, but it’s too slow for volume production. LLM tools for sw dev aren’t similarly domain-limited and are faster & cheaper than hand-coding

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Alex Ames @alexmames.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Also did all his homework in careful LaTeX just to make the TAs deduct that many more points for everybody else’s chicken scratch 12000.org/my_courses/u...

12000.org

HW 3 diﬀerent solution

EMA 542 advanced dynamics, Fall 2013, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Fall 2013. Web page of Nasser M. Abbasi

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