Caleb Sponheim

is this…. an ad? Come on, y’all 🤦

U.S. war on Iran plunges gas markets into chaos - Gas Outlook About a fifth of the global LNG trade is at a standstill with the Strait of Hormuz blocked due to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

The important point from @sebkennedy.bsky.social

“The idea that you can cost-effectively decarbonise your economies by relying on a commodity that, in the space of 5 years, is subject to two illegal wars that send prices stratospheric, it just doesn’t make any sense”

Solar makes sense.

I'd guess this is either a one-off demonstration or focused on commercial vehicles like trucking. China has battery swapping tech for trucks but most still charge, iirc.

thank you, I appreciate you sharing. A lot of folks I teach are pushed to the two extremes:
1. they can't access any modern models or tooling so can't develop anything
2. they invested in typical tool development processes and can't be flexible/iterative enough.

How often do you find the "custom AI tools" to be:
- Skills in common platforms like Claude Cowork or something
- More complete software packages that you then need to maintain?

I'd love to get a sense for what shape these types of custom solutions take :)

1. lol no
2. Is he implying that the combined SpaceX + xAI entity is going to merge with Tesla?
3. No matter what, count on Elon to be the first CEO to claim he has an AGI

This episode was VERY good. I agree.

Kitbashing industrial equipment together to create spaceships is not a terrible approach.
#space #art by Stanislav Verbitsky.
www.artstation.com/artwork/yk8qaR

OpenAI when someone proposes a "please tell us how you are doing AI safety testing" law: this will KILL american freedom and innovation we're subpoenaing everybody who supports it

OpenAI when the government demands unfettered murderbot access: hey that's just democracy man, our hands are tied

Only 3 out of 10 participants said an AI interview felt natural. Long silences, interruptions, and "Wow, brilliant!" for mundane answers made it awkward.

https://bit.ly/4l3ERTM

#UXResearch

Cool job alert

The Voyageurs Wolf Project of Northern Minnesota tags & documents grey wolf ecology & behavior: www.voyageurswolfproject.org

The video you see here is confirmatory proof:
Wolves. Love. Blueberries.

As much as 83% of a wolf's calories in summer months comes from eating berries.

He just wants to project strength, so he says what he thinks a tough guy would say. “Is that all you got? I could go all day”

Whenever folks ask me about portfolios, I show them this video.

In 52 seconds I can see what André is good at. I understand what he is good at. If I need to hire someone who understands game feel, and who can build that on their own, I will interview him.

I know this in 52 seconds.

The administration killing the IRS’s free filing option after turbo tax and co. lobbied still pisses me off

Green ammonia boom wanes as carbon incentives fade Fertiliser executives warn ‘there will be no green transition with red numbers’

It is why solar dominates. And storage. And electric trucks and busses. And EVs. It's cheaper.

This FT article has a good quote.

“There will be no green transition with red numbers,” he said. “In order to scale, it has to be profitable.”

Low cost wins. Which means clean energy and EVs.

It’s so difficult to maintain what I really do think is the epistemologically correct stance of “it’s a big deal but there’s a lot of bullshit”, because like, there is a *lot* of bullshit

Born #onthisday in 1868, the US sociologist + civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Celebrate with a look at the stunning hand-drawn "infographics" he made with his students, depicting conditions of African-American life in 1900: publicdomainreview.org/collection/w... #otd #BlackHistoryMonth

What mechanisms or levers can activists access to resist this? any particular orgs you’re impressed by on this front?

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Maria Loconsole1*, Silvia Benavides-Varela2,3, Lucia Regolin1 Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of this association, and whether it is unique to humans, we tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby domestic chickens (Gallus gallus). as a precocial species, chicks can be tested shortly after hatching, allowing us to control their pretest experiences. Similar to humans, both 3-day-old [experiment 1 (exp. 1)] and 1-day-old (exp. 2) chicks spontaneously choose a spiky shape when hearing the “kiki” sound and a round shape when hearing the “bouba” sound. results from naïve young animals suggest a predisposed mechanism for matching the dimensions of shape and sound, which may be widespread across species.

main fig from the paper showing the association between bouba/round and kiki/spiky in newborn chicks

the new paper on bouba/kiki in chicks is utterly compelling

canonical, elegant method from comparative cogsci & its partner in developmental science, ultra-simple design, ultra-clear effects, no need for fancy analyses, machine learning, or AI

it appeared in an appropriately badass venue (Science)

Impending YouTube video by GLUMLOT

I’d put glumlot in this category too. youtube.com/shorts/D8UDk...

This style of light doesn't really appear in animation anymore. You know it when you see it -- it's bright, hot and almost dangerous.

Our new issue explores the tricks behind it, and how one artist has revived the look for the digital age: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/dangerous-...

one reset I'd personally appreciate: behind the insistence that we must offer the electorate a little bigotry is the idea that commoners are more bigoted than the richer and more educated, who can be appealed to with high minded policy. but then you Ctrl+F "phrenology" in the Epstein files

Green tech is going to be bigger and make more money than LLM/GenAI will over the next decade by an order of magnitude

A graph showing the levalized cost of energy over time, broken up by source of energy. It shows the radical decrease in solar energy cost per megawatt over time.

Another opportunity to post my favorite graph

www.lazard.com/media/eijnqj...

CBS spokesperson Phil Gonzales provided The Verge with the same statement claiming Colbert was not blocked from broadcasting the interview that was given to Variety and other outlets, but refused to attribute it by name per The Verge's background policy. Asked for a name, Gonzales wrote, "Respectfully, you don't need to use the statement. We will keep that in mind next time verge as us to reply [sic]."

Phil Gonzalez from CBS, welcome to the Verge’s background policy www.theverge.com/policy/88000...

ppl should stop using ai-generated diagrams. you know i’m not anti-ai but they’re just not good at this yet!

the problem is that diagrams have a very specific purpose: they’re meant to compress understanding into few key bits. ai vomits out poor approximations that aren’t conceptually compressed

I do like that the big bet on AI replacing the entire software industry requires everyone to take for granted that random people across every industry can imagine useful applications and then describe them in sufficient detail to make them real. I love this optimism for us

Photos: The Scale of China’s Solar-Power Projects As the Trump administration's “big, beautiful bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent ...

This photo series of China’s solar build out looks like background scenes from a near future series on Apple TV you’ve heard is good but aren’t going to watch

www.theatlantic.com/photography/...

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment — The New Yorker In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system.

If you haven't yet read Bill McKibbon on the revolution in solar and wind power, it is easily the most hopeful thing I've read in a long long time

https://apple.news/Az7nU1cqeSpibruPw5qmiQg