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Aaron Kimball

@gremblor.com
459 followers 539 following 1.2K posts

I like circuitry (synth DIY), software, bio stuff, and sailing. aka Firefly )'(. Roar!

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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/09/2026
Increasing rate is a response to inflation. Even inflation is not bad for everyone (it's good for people with loans, for example.) Rates rise (fall) for many reasons. The real question is "*why* are rates moving today?" That underlying thing is what you need to analyze and understand.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/09/2026
In and of themselves rate rises (or decrease) isn't good vs bad. Good opportunity for someone with cash to buy a bond and get more interest. Bad for existing bond owners (yields fall). Its a big move for bonds but in absolute terms (0.07% for the day) is not some meteoric crash or whatever.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/09/2026
I feel like I have heard high / low decoupling before but, uh, now I guess I have to go look up wtf they're really talking about.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/09/2026
... Said article was also written by someone engaged (temporarily) to Curtis Yarvin himself, so she is uh, maybe not the most reliable narrator here.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/09/2026
Regarding "the monks and the neoreactionaries get along" -- can you explain this? The long read from June about Leverage Research (lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/the-inside...) also mentions this harmony but never elaborates. I don't get how the whole nazi thing isn't an anathema to all the EA ppl.
lydialaurenson.substack.com
The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0
Between 2011-2019, Leverage Research explored the deep psychology of Effective Altruism and Silicon Valley, then suddenly dissolved among rumors of "demons." What happened?
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/09/2026
There is a special class of latency-minimizing DC demand for financial services / high frequency trading. These users pay a huge premium for DC usage fees / rent vs the rest of the market. For basically every other use case, the extra half-millisecond is fine to run the fiber 50mi into the country.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/09/2026
Reading that post makes me think I'm having a stroke
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 27/09/2026
I think lots of folks assume that fares just cover everything. (Without really thinking about the value to society of maintaining lightly-used routes / times of day at the same fare as more heavily traveled corridors.)
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 27/09/2026
/Technically/, mineral oil is famously safe for human ingestion, but that would put a whole different spin on the end product...
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 27/09/2026
Also drilling! Drills and drill bits are *covered* in machine oil. That stuff is not food safe! And if you strip it off, your drill is going to be unhappy. How do you safely do this at mfg scale? Can you lubricate a drill with canola oil? (It does have a high smoke point, and similar viscosity...)
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 27/09/2026
The engineering of the post-bake filling step now makes me ponder how Costco can sell PB-filled pretzel bites where the ends of each bite have been pinched down and sealed -- obviously pre-bake. I guess peanut butter just holds its original flavor better than cheese after going in the oven?
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 25/09/2026
Btw this is why they run on GPUs. 3d graphics rendering is *also* a bunch of linear algebra. A GPU is a processor that is entirely specialized for multiplying matrices quickly. Turns out you don't *have* to use it just for drawing pictures!
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 25/09/2026
Good job being someone doing the fascists' work! (Did you actually read the thread?) It is documented fact that Americans have staged some of the largest protests in our history in opposition to the Trump regime.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 25/09/2026
Under the hood all of these are enormous matrix multiplication linear algebra equations. But what the rows and columns mean in each matrix and in what order you do all the math has a bunch of configurability to it while still being "deep learning", with some shapes better for image gen, text, etc.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 25/09/2026
Another view: you may have heard of "deep learning" or "neural nets" in like 2018, and specific variants of those for image gen: GANs, or RNNs, etc. You can wire up the neurons with different "architecture". "Transformer" is one such shape and it is the most effective by far for LLMs.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 24/09/2026
Pretty sure this video is exactly what social media was designed for. Perfect interjection in the doomscroll.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 24/09/2026
Something I will give YC credit for: We got there with the SAFE for seed round funding term sheets and a similar ubiquitous boilerplate for advisory contracts. CA has form-of wills and power of attorney. Some sort of universal hourly rate-based and fixed bid-for-SoW paper would help lots of folks.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 22/09/2026
But like, does this pack aligned screws into a magazine used by an electric drill? Or does it just hold them in a neat row for you to pick up with your fingers more easily, or..?
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 22/09/2026
This looks satisfying to my ocd but I'm curious what you'd use it for in a home lab setup
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 21/09/2026
And, uh, for anyone who wasn't following our local school board news in the NY Times a couple of years ago when we recalled 1/3 of the school board for being useless... Nobody would claim that SF has figured out something that improves public education.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 21/09/2026
Also, yes, the parents hate it, mostly cuz the schools suck, but also because if your two kids are assigned to schools on opposite sides of the city, your commute is just hell for the next four years.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 21/09/2026
So the thing is, SF basically tried this. (Private tuition is so expensive here it's effectively a 300% tax on "normal" tuition.) All the affluent and middle class families just move away. SF has one of the lowest child pop %s in the US.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 21/09/2026
He asked with some trepidation [read in a strong an Irish accent] "So... You believe in God, then, right?" (I nod; he is visibly relieved.) "But no Jesus?" (I nod again. No Jesus.) I think my ability to give a theology lecture is mid even when sober but I attempted to explain from there.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 21/09/2026
One of my more memorable travel experiences was in Dublin, Ireland, a fellow at the pub bought me a beer, saw my Jewish star necklace, and asked "are ye' a Hebrew?" He had never met a Jew before. We had a delightful conversation, although I dunno how many facts he retained after all that Guinness.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 20/09/2026
Yes and you're giving up the significant multiplexing efficiency from shared resource pooling. (It's called "batch size".) Also given "personal use" prompting is not continuous, you're then paying for lots of idle GPU*minutes to keep the model loaded. Thus why AWS et al offer MTok-based metering.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 20/09/2026
Serving full-resolution frontier models with meaningful context buffer length and acceptable tok/sec, eg what Anthropic does with Sonnet, takes a GPU cluster. There is some efficiency gains by multiplexing of users sharing the resource at the same time, but the upfront capex is still what it is.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 20/09/2026
Required VRAM is a function of model weight size & context length. Full precision models are like 1TB. Downsampled, lower-res versions of open weight models can be downloaded to a laptop drive, but running with even 10k token context requires 32GB VRAM+. Also the tokens/sec on a PC is very slow.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 20/09/2026
So, yea, unless / until there's an engine you can completely lubricate with canola oil, we still need the petro distillates to operate any spinning or reciprocating engine motor.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 20/09/2026
I know there is now "synthetic" motor oil you can buy... What's that stuff made of? If it's not vegetable-based, any time I hear "synthetic" my mind thinks "plastic" but that's straight back to petrochemical feedstock, so that can't be right.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 19/09/2026
And that's on top of the fact that, as a demographic, Jews voted for dems like 80% of the time even before Trump.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 16/09/2026
My copy of /The Secret Life of Circuits/ arrived today. Actually... Two copies arrived? Anyone want a book about electronics?
Two hardback copies of "The Secret Life of Circuits"
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 15/09/2026
Yea I was surprised about all the comparison, + cite about "character" likeness in comics. (unclear if that's intended to be a rubric for infringement of a visual element or whether a character like "batman" is copyrightable?) But my first thought was "well what text are you claiming wotc copied?"
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 14/09/2026
(zooming in, I actually see it says.. 15L. That's almost 4 gallons of mayo in freedom units. Jesus christ that is an irresponsible amount of mayo.)
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 14/09/2026
Well, how big is the bucket? How much mayo we talking about, here?
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 12/09/2026
Oh excellent, thanks I'll give that a watch.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 12/09/2026
So those repair roles need to be outsourced (handyman on call, or auto repair shop model) and widely available for inexpensive fees (trade school grad, not M. Eng). And reliability (MTTF) needs to be 10-50x better than today. That's all coming in X yrs, but those are the markers I'd be watching.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 12/09/2026
Even for great wages ($100k+ for fairly junior experience levels) hiring automation engineers today is hard; supply is thin. Robots today break down in ways large and small all the time. They need car-like reliability to break out of automated labs / factories and penetrate random schools, etc.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 12/09/2026
Having worked in a different space (automated wet lab) I think the real tipping pt will be availability of cheap maintenance. $100k robot + $120k/yr automation engineer doesn't replace the janitor. Being able to call a $50/hr robot handyman the 2x/yr the robot breaks down does.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 12/09/2026
And is that multiplexed/interleaved across users? Or does the ability to serve 100 queries in parallel mean they need 30 or 50 (or whatever) A100 servers times 100 parallel inference tasks?
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 12/09/2026
What does an actual "instance" of a model look like? O(~2.8TB) of source code / weights at rest across NAS, and a cluster of N servers with ~100GB of VRAM each, working in concert? When I send a prompt to a cloud model, how much compute am I actually using for the next 15s?
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 12/09/2026
Especially after other projects like Control were clearly inspired (at least partially) by SCP, I'm surprised they didn't take steps to protect the SCP "brand" with registering wordmarks. Because, uh, it leaves you vulnerable if you don't.
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 12/09/2026
If A24 don't use any of the *content*, just the SCP concept/"universe", idk if cc-by-sa applies. Looking at their licensing and FAQ pages, the wiki doesn't assert trademark rights over "scp" or "secure, contain, protect", etc. Qntm's book dealt with actual scp *text*, so different story...
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 12/09/2026
Are these operating fully automomously? (AI fighting AI?) Or is a human pilot / gunner operating the vehicle remotely for the battle?
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 11/09/2026
Automattic is now a fully @matt-levine.bsky.social -ass "who controls a company" style story. "Who's got superuser privileges on the company slack" is the new "who has custody of the chop."
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 11/09/2026
WALDORF: And if they are dead, invite them back anyway! STADTLER: Based on the last dozen guests, we'd never know the difference!
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/08/2026
We have deep fried at home
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/08/2026
Who says America isn't great? An immigrant can come here with their own heritage sausage and follow the American dream and mantra, "you can deep fry anything you want to and serve it at the state fair."
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/08/2026
This is like a blindingly obvious workspace improvement as shown like this but had never occurred to me before. Great idea!
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 28/08/2026
I didn't catch this part in the openai talk. Ability to do one tool call and spoof another in the msg transcript seems... Bad? (also wdym all the spoofs "we saw" were easy to notice... If they succeeded at a more subtle one, uh, are you sure you would you notice? 😅)
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Aaron Kimball @gremblor.com · 26/08/2026
The hiring process is highly selective therefore it selects the best.
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