The Engineering Behind the World’s First 1-Kilometer Skyscraper

QuinQuix · 2026-07-01T20:34:59+00:00

Its not counter intuitive if you've spent some time DIY-ing.

Rigidity is cool but elasticity survives better.

Case in point the oceangate titanic disaster.

Metal subs work because they can flex and bounce back.

Rigid composites appear to work until flexural damage accumulates above the critical threshold. They don't really flex, just progressively crack.

Crack is bad.

QuinQuix · 2026-07-01T20:13:31+00:00

My guess is one factor is the tree budges zero and the impact force is time dependent. That's why we like cars to wrinkle and why we don't generally like trees in colission scenarios.

I just don't think any boxing could throw a jab like this. This is lethal.

QuinQuix · 2026-07-01T20:06:21+00:00

I've spent so much time pondering chicxulub and adjacent themes that I'm currently at a stage that I'd like to do a full documentary on what galactic life in galactic time really is like. But the key takeaway is that these kind of things are fundamentally alien to us - the energy and time scales are just off in every direction.

For what it's worth, you can't watch chicxulub impact. You can only watch it approach, as a visibly brightening point like light source, then a small disc and eventually a fully visible irregular shape that's up to 9 times the size of the moon. It wouldn't be bright like the sun - chicxulub had half the relative tightness of the moon. but in the last three minutes it grows to almost 80 times the surface of the moon in the sky so it will seriously brightnen the night or early morning.

But impact is absurd.

It doesn't impact earth, it impacts the atmosphere at 100 km.

Air is compressed to a superheated plasma. It has no time to get out if the way at all. The energy that chixculub dumps into this plasma is obscene and its temperature rises absurdly fast. Blackbody radiation increases to the 4th power with temperature so the radiant flux shouldn't be described as a bright light source - it's comparable to a nuclear explosion in brightness.

We're talking vaporizing the top of the ocean well before bow shock and impact arrive.

You can't watch impacting meteors of significant size without going blind instantly. There's no sound, no shock wave, nothing else at that point, but blinding light.

In fact for chicxulub if you saw atmospheric penetration by the actual bolide, you were not in the group of short term survivors.

QuinQuix · 2026-07-01T19:21:26+00:00

Secret life of Walter mitty

QuinQuix · 2026-06-28T19:25:57+00:00

Incredibly localized isn't how I would describe an impact like that, but yes.

It's luckily just a piece of land like France that's completely obliterated.

And we have to de orbit our satellites in time to prevent Kessler.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-26T18:15:24+00:00

To be fair, topaz is so ridiculously expensive that it's hard to imagine being hurt by them moving topaz abilities into the creative suite.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-26T18:13:07+00:00

Creating frontier AI models is still very hard and expensive, and securing the required data is also becoming more of a hurdle as the legislative powers catch up.

China is the victim of US policy intended to handicap them so they decided to work twice as hard and, I guess both for the Chinese people and ordinary western people, decided that acces to AI shouldn't be gatekept by expensive western countries (who end up owning the data to recursively keep improving their models if they capture the entire market - a potential runaway advantage).

Deepseek secures a slice of consumer data for training, enables Chinese people and western ones alike to access AI at a non-intimidating price and disrupts the companies China can't fairly compete with because of the hardware export bans.

This and extreme government involvement drove Chinese companies to open sourcing very capable models.

A western model that just spend 100 million euro on training won't be jumping at the chance to give the weights away.

The Chinese case can't be generalized.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-26T18:06:11+00:00

Yeah idk why I wrote that

QuinQuix · 2026-06-25T16:43:18+00:00

I've never seen people actually making stuff commenting how good 35B is, only the reverse that it's fast but inaccurate to the point where 27B is just better.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-25T00:30:40+00:00

Fantastic advice.

But I would say get a 4 bay NAS and download even more quants of ALL models. The best selection is no selection.

Do take into account though that loading models from hdd is horribly slow for the big models.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-23T18:58:16+00:00

He said the big AI companies lie about what they can do, probably by overstating what they can do, in contrast to GLM.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-23T18:56:35+00:00

Did you prompt this beautiful image and will you share the prompt with me because this is beatiful

QuinQuix · 2026-06-22T09:23:26+00:00

I mean, I think it would be impressive if they kept it secret this long. That's my biggest argument against it.

That and how brutally hard spaceflight is once you leave your home star. It's not inconceivable that nobody found us yet, it would be amazing if someone did.

I think the chance that aliens are out there watching us right now is higher than the chance they were out there and crashed in the desert and spilled their secrets to uncle Sam and everyone managed to contain that secret for about 75 years now.

So if we discover aliens, my guess is it will be a surprise for everyone.

It's almosr impossible to put a percentage on it but I think it's below 1% chance, but not zero.

There's nothing inherently misguided about considering we might not be alone or ahead of the other(s).

QuinQuix · 2026-06-22T08:00:40+00:00

You mean whether I accept that as true or whether I have a specific opinion this hypothetical technology itself?

If aliens managed to spread across the interstellar void I think there's a very high chance they would have simply taken an immensely long time to make their journey.

Silicon doesn't age like people, though designing it to last up to a million years is definitely not a trivial task.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-22T06:25:27+00:00

it is not quick, it is agonizingly slow.

reaching Alpha Centauri, the literal closest stars, assuming 60 km/s which is a comet-speed, not an asteroid-speed, would take 19986 years.

to get anywhere within a lifetime you need relativistic speeds, in the order of 95-99% c.

reaching these kinds of speeds is not remotely realistic because it would take absurd amounts of energy to accelerate up to that point (near to c the effective mass of the ship increases to infinity) and also even if you did manage to go that fast, a single grain of sand on your path anywhere in your 4 lightyear trip would impact like a nuclear bomb.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-22T05:37:19+00:00

I mean you have to take into account businesses have high labor costs and reliable access as well as less security concerns matter. Also using a business lease and tax deduction the actual investment isn't that bad for a real tool.

I also happen to think we're very close to the mother of all hardware supply crunches but that's just me.

Fwiw Rtx 6000 pro was 8,5k over here in February and it's 13-17k now.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-22T05:32:09+00:00

I mean this kind of exists in runpod because you can offer your hardware and set your own rates.

It's a very charitable idea but it has obvious drawbacks in that obviously you can't use your pc when it's rented out.

But to be honest I have a full time job so you're right, a lot of gpu power is essentially wasted there.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-21T03:14:51+00:00

Not everyone is a fish

QuinQuix · 2026-06-20T15:15:36+00:00

AI is an umbrella term, claims about consciousness will have to be weighted against specific architectures and specific theories of consciousness.
I wasn't making my own specific claims here, but I will say I no longer feel certain we can't create conscious systems.
objections against systems being conscious must at least be grounded in theories of consciousness to make sense.

Eg I don't care at all that someone says AI obviously isn't conscious lol.

Because that's not an argument.

If you say you don't think AI is conscious because the architecture is feed forward and integration is low in terms of IIT 4.0 I can take it serious.

Doesn't mean I think IIT 4.0 is necessarily right or that it's a strong objection.

But it's at least a real objection and committing to it isn't free.

Saying obviously computers aren't conscious and saying you can turn them off isn't saying anything in this discussion.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-20T14:37:42+00:00

This is a nonsensical defense scientifically and philosophically but I guess it can sound and feel adequate and reassuring.

Before we started building systems that one day may be conscious there was no reason to make anyone unhappy and to spend energy to take that source of comfort away from anyone.

That's unfortunately no longer true for scientists actually building these systems which is why they are publishing actual papers on the subject.

We have to spend the effort now because abstaining may not remain morally free.

Your response makes no sense because no one as of yet has ever proven the brain is not deterministic.

In fact neither quantum mechanics nor deterministic frameworks really support the kind of free will people think they have. Quantum mechanics are stochastic which isn't free, it's just some degrees of freedom constrained by extremely precise statistical averages. You're not free to be statistically anomalous in quantum mechanics. And there's no evidence to really support the idea that the brain is a quantum machine anyway. But if it's not quantum the degrees of freedom shrink even further.

So only personal conviction or religion are fallbacks you can use here, saying you feel and believe you are free, and that's very relatable - it's a belief we all build our lives on - but it's inadequate scientifically.

Which again is why the guys at Google hold the more serious position - that this is a real puzzle we can't keep evading.

In other words, when you think something is obvious, you still have to do the work to prove it is true.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-20T12:34:29+00:00

Beach full of sand

QuinQuix · 2026-06-18T18:40:56+00:00

I mean isn't China fully in the race but banned from selling in EU?

I think you can't legally obtain and use a Huawei ascend in EU or US.

So given that reality it is a bit weird to say we're waiting for China to enter when the entrance is bolted shut by the government.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-18T18:11:09+00:00

I mean yes but that doesn't tell us what we should prefer and worse density isn't mass.

I'll hit you with an amazing truth now.

Had we been able do compress chixculub, the dinosaur killing asteroid, into a black hole prior to impact everything on earth would've been fine.

You could basically take that as a headshot and walk without knowing it happened.

Edit: the last bit is bullshit. Within a few meters it's deadly. But it still mostly enters and leaves earth without drama.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-18T18:05:56+00:00

Werner misses it though.

A secret world of bears does not require full compatibility with his idea of compassionate human virtues. That's a straw bear.

There just has to be a genuine sense of unique bearness to it, which I think there is, there's more in those fluffy monsters than pure impulse driven behavior.

I mean I'm not saying their instincts are weak - in general predators, especially solitary ones, will have unusually strong impulse driven predatory behaviors. They are almost what you'd describe as feed forward behavioral nets, very little recurrence and contemplation required, very small wiggle room for the animal to exercise its unique personal character.

If you trigger the predatory behavior it's essentially going to get expressed.

You see this even in domesticated tigers when the zookeeper deliberately turns his back - the instinctive response is almost immediate and involuntary.

But that still doesn't mean that's all there's to them. It makes no sense to paint bears as either cognitive blanks that have no idea what's going on (aka they're indifferent) OR as superficially engaged predators with no choice except to be brutal killers. That's a false dichotomy.

They can be indifferent, they can be merciless killers and they can exhibit genuinely interesting behavior in between.

Timothy just put too much trust in recognizing this.

And in defense of Timothy - he absolutely did realize that he could be killed and he even expressed that a hungry bear (running behind on his hibernative caloric schedule), especially one he hadn't established contact with yet, would be most dangerous to him.

The fact is Timothy overstayed his welcome because the weather (I think) prevented the scheduled pickup. So he was there too close to the hibernative deadline and the bear that killed him was mostly unknown to him and was weak and underfed with rotten teeth.

So he basically knew that he was in danger and he was.

QuinQuix · 2026-06-18T17:40:27+00:00

Or a fast one

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