Deep Future

Two nerds bullshitting about electric toys you can ride. Recorded on August 16, 2024The post Electric Motortoys – ØF appeared first on .

Two nerds bullshitting about the massive leak of social security numbers this week. Recorded on August 16, 2024The post Mega SSN Leak – ØF appeared first on .

The AESCAPE robot that gave me my first robomassage.  One of the really important things to solve for is how do we get robots working much more closely with humans. And this is really difficult for a whole bunch of reasons, and you guys know some of them. But the truth is they need to be able to really get close. We need them to touch our bodies. And right now what we do with robots is we put them in giant cages and keep them away from the humans in case they need it. move at the wrong time. And that’s, that’s a good stopgap for now, but where we really want to be able to go is a world where we can trust the robots to treat us as the way that our, friends and family or massage therapist would. And so today we get to hang out with Eric Litman, who’s on the forefront of trying to solve this problem by making robots that can give you a massage. And I, for one, have been wanting to do this for years. If you listened to the episode that Ash and I did, about the MassageBot 5000, you got a kind of a preview. This week I got to go visit Aescape which is Eric’s new company,. They’ve been working on this robot since 2017. I got a massage from it. My first massage from a robot. It’s in beta here in New York City. You can do that too. And hopefully soon these robots will be all over the world. And so Eric and I talk about his, journey, what caused him to get into doing this, taking this on in the first place, the hard problems that they ran up against, why this is difficult. And look, these guys are pioneers. They’ve been at it for seven years. They’ve spent a lot of time and effort figuring out how do you make a. robot that’s literally right up on you, specifically trying to manipulate your body. That is safe, trustworthy, comfortable, not scary. And they have solved all that. I can tell you for sure. If anything, I wanted it to be more aggressive with me than they’re willing to let it be at the moment. But it is a really competent. Massage therapist already. And so it’s very exciting, why I want to share this stuff with you and why I’ve been seeking out these kinds of roboticists, and there are a couple of others that you’ll meet soon, is that there’s really important inflection point coming. And Eric and I talk about it a little bit here in this conversation, but the thing that has to happen is we have to make it a lot easier to go do new things with robots. And in the past, up until now, and even with Aescape they’ve had to just build everything from the ground up, and it’s too much for a startup to take on. It’s too much to do, in one, company. We really need to get to a point where building robots and building, automation and building all these automated tools is as easy as building things in software. And this is happening. The toolkits are coming, the frameworks are coming, the SDKs are coming, the software to be able to integrate these things is coming, and we’re at an important inflection point where those things will start to exist in the next couple of years, and so the, as you listen to this conversation, think about how the next company that’s trying to do something like Aescape not going to take seven years. We will be able to do them faster. We will be able to do more and more of them and it’s going to make a huge difference. So look, Eric is an experienced, guy who spent his whole career in the tech industry, had a couple of exits, was able to take on doing something new. We don’t really need to pick all that apart. If you want to go read his bio, we’re going to link to it in the notes, but as you’ll get immediately by listening to this conversation, he’s a great entrepreneur. He’s got a lot of energy. He knows what to do and they’ve been, they’ve been at it and it’s really exciting. Please enjoy this conversation and then, quit your job and go work for Aescape. Important Links Book a massage at Aescape Eric Litman on Wikipedia Eric Litman on LinkedIn Recorded on July 27, 2024The post Robot Massage is Alive! – Eric Litman appeared first on .

Two nerds bullshitting about the imminent scale of computation on Earth. Recorded on July 5, 2024The post NVIDIA Math – ØF appeared first on .

Demonstration of Emergency Response technology, Bill Bob Brown visit to Wireless Test Bed  When I was at the Idaho National Labs, I got to meet Wayne Austad. We had a conversation about cybersecurity as it relates to physical infrastructure. People always wonder what if hackers shut down the power grid? They have shut down the power grid, in different parts of the world and we talked about that a little bit. Wayne’s at the forefront of figuring out how do we secure this physical stuff? How do we secure the grid? How do we secure power stations? Nuclear reactors? How do we secure all the stuff that people rely on in daily life and just take for granted? This is the physical stuff, it can kill you. If something goes wrong, it can explode and be a terrible disaster. We really want to make sure that we have the best security we can for these things. Historically, it’s been challenging because a lot of the physical machinery and the control systems for it predate networks, predate the internet. And so for a long time that stuff’s been vulnerable. And it’s so exciting to see the large-scale operation they have at the Idaho National Labs. They have a huge team working on this amazing stuff. I got to see simulators for historical attacks on infrastructure. You could actually go and play with these things. You can see a virus taking over a power plant and shutting it down. You can test interventions, you can really experience what it would have been like to be on the response team during these actual events. It’s really cool. Wayne is the CTO of National and Homeland Security at the Idaho National Laboratory. He’s also the Chief R&D Officer for an operation called Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute. Wayne has a lot of very forward-thinking ideas about applying state-of-the-art technology to this infrastructure that we rely on every day of our lives. Wayne Austad Bio Wayne Austad CTO, National & Homeland Security, Idaho National Laboratory Chief R&D Officer, Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CyManII) Mr. Wayne Austad has worked at INL for 30 years with 21 years of experience building impactful national security programs. As CTO for National & Homeland Security he: 1) Provides leadership and strategy for the collaborative R&D, infrastructure, and partnerships; 2) Acts as Chief R&D Officer for CyManII, a DOE institute led by UTSA focused on pervasive cybersecurity in manufacturing automation and supply chain, and sponsor of new MFG-ISAC; 3) Leads the Secure & Resilient Cyber Physical Systems Initiative for INL. Previously, Mr. Austad created INL’s Cybercore Integration Center and led outreach to agencies, national labs, and academic institutions to build a collaborative, interdisciplinary teaming environment linked to INL’s Research & Education Campus expansions. As a Director of the Mission Support Center, now part of Cybercore, Mr. Austad led a senior technical group that developed new methods for analysis of targeted cyber threats, provided technical context for mitigation priorities, and created new paradigms for information sharing between industry infrastructure owners, threat analysis teams, and government leaders. He also served as the Director of the Special Programs, which developed special technology and analysis for defense and intelligence agencies in advanced materials, trace detection, nuclear nonproliferation, electronic warfare modeling, information operations, and wireless communications systems. Important Links Idaho National Labs Recorded on June 24, 2024The post Securing Physical Infrastructure at Idaho National Labs – Wayne Austad appeared first on .

Two nerds bullshitting about turning your dead relatives into diamonds.. Recorded on July 7, 2024The post Cremation Diamonds – ØF appeared first on .

One of the awesome guys that got to meet at the Idaho National Labs is Nicholas Woolstenhulme. He’s a mechanical engineer working on the fuel for nuclear reactors, and his whole career has been working on the fuel for nuclear reactors. He gets to learn about all the fuels that are possible to make, test them out, figure out how to make them better, make them safer, make them more efficient. In this conversation, we dig into that. He brought me an amazing example of a 3d printed model of how fuel can be structured in modern reactors. I’m going to put a picture of that on the blog so you can see it and I hope that you guys will learn something from this. I know these are deep nerd conversations, but we really have to have them in order to get to the bottom of what’s possible from the people who are really in the trenches. And we’re so lucky to have thousands of people in the trenches. Engineers working on every aspect of making modern, safe nuclear reactors. We have all the talent that we need. We have all the people that we need, what we need to do is go build them and I’m so excited to see that this country is finally getting our act together. Finally turning around on sentiment around nuclear reactors. Important Links: Nicholas Woolstenhulme Research Bio Idaho National Labs Recorded on June 24, 2024The post Nuclear Reactor Fuel at the Idaho National Labs – Nicholas Woolstenhulme appeared first on .

Two nerds and an Australian architect bullshitting about turning CAD software into a giant world simulating video game. Recorded on July 5, 2024The post CAD World Game – ØF appeared first on .

Recently, I got to go hang out at the Idaho National Labs in Idaho Falls. There are thousands of people at those labs, working on the future of energy for the United States. They’re working on renewable energy of course. They’re working on all kinds of things that I had no idea were happening. Around recycling and waste processing, but primarily they are working on nuclear reactors. It was such a treat for me to go see all the work they’re doing. We have engineers who spent their entire careers working on the technologies for nuclear reactors. We need to make this happen at a large scale. I don’t know why we haven’t been putting these people to use and making a lot of nuclear reactors. They know everything! They’re testing fuels, they’re testing metals, they’re testing different reactor designs. They have live reactors there, since the 1950s, that they use for this kind of testing. It’s incredible what I got to see. And one of the folks I got to meet there was Ahmad Al Rashdan. He’s a PhD that’s working as a senior research and development scientist at the Nuclear Science and Technology Directorate at Idaho National Labs. This is a short but important conversation for me. You get to see me asking the questions that I need to ratify my view and understanding of what’s happening with nuclear reactors and what’s possible with them. I’m getting to ask an expert who spends his entire career every day, working on these technologies and it’s very important. I don’t want to have the wrong ideas because you hear me evangelizing nuclear reactors a lot! I want to know as much as possible, and I’m grateful to have a chance to pick some brains now and then of people who are in different parts of the entire chain of making this possible. Important Links: Ahmad Al Rashdan Research Bio Idaho National Labs Recorded on June 24, 2024The post Nuclear Reactors at Idaho National Labs – Ahmad Al Rashdan appeared first on .

Two nerds discuss alternative college experiences including innovative hybrid college concepts, repurposing spaces for learning, creative educational challenges, and gaining real-world experience through unconventional methods.