Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10. Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years. Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.

Imagine I shoot a movie of a man telling a story. I sit down with him in his home, and he tells me about his life. He talks about the events as a sequence of facts, even though there are some obvious holes and inconsistencies in his story. I sit down with him, I break bread, and I give him the time of day. I accept all of his premises, and follow him through the various rabbit holes he leads me down. I ask a few feeble questions pointing out the impossibility of some of the elements, but never enough that a viewer would walk away feeling the story has been disproven or is evidently false. If anything, by giving him this time on stage, I legitimize his story - the audience knows I’m a smart person, and if I’ve run out of qualms with his story, that must mean that it’s true. Let’s say I turn this series of recordings into a feature film, and importantly, I don’t make much of an effort to give the audience the additional context in between cuts that they’d need to evidently see that his story was complete fiction. Should this film be considered a documentary? Nathan Fielder’s latest film has left me with a very uncomfortable feeling. The film presents itself as a documentary - Nathan explicitly names it as such in the film itself. The film discusses the ethics of media - how a reproduction, like the tv show made about Holmes, isn’t held to journalistic standards because it’s just fictional entertainment. They never promised anyone it was true, and so they have no duty to be honest with the audience. My issue with You Can See Everything is that I feel like Nathan Fielder completely abdicated his responsibility as a journalist in creating this “documentary”. The Academy differentiates a Doc from a regular film due to its primary focus on the truth. They don’t care how you film it or what you say - they care that this body of work brings the audience closer to the actual truth about the world. The poetic beauty of You Can See Everything is that Nathan actually cons the audience with a product that promises to offer certain benefits, and delivers none of them. The film makes almost no attempt to contextualize Holmes’ words - to reveal her inconsistencies - which would have definitively made the movie a documentary. Instead Nathan gives her an incredible amount of space (3 hours!!!) with which she can spin her tale - he helps INCREASE the amount of confusion around her. Whereas the audience might have gone to see the movie with a polarized view of Holmes, they leave somewhere in the grey area - unsure of what they really know. THIS FEELING IS THE POINT OF THE MOVIE, and evidently reflects Nathan’s feeling after working with her. But dude… you’re not in prison!!! Just fucking Google her testimony! Like yeah I get it she maybe manipulated you in the moment… but she’s locked up in prison now and you have internet access! Just fact check her and be done with it! To me this is the ultimate con of the film - the autopoetry of it all, and the reason I don’t think it was accidental. What was marketed to the public as a Documentary was anything but. The same way that technically the Theranos machine tested blood samples, this film technically interviews Holmes to hear her story. But it offers no actual testing of its own. “The chemistry hasn’t been invented yet.”

Tomorrow.

When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows: - Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking. - Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results. So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks. What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files. I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks. What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.

JUST IN: Elon Musk unveils the Tesla Roadster by launching it off a ramp before the car flipped in midair and safely landed on the ground. The car is a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX. One of the most insane things I've ever seen.

My dear friends, I’d like to show you my latest toy project Introducing Handwired: turn your regular JavaScript code into a neural net! - no training - exact outputs vs the JS program - fully differentiable All runnable in a browser, without GPU

Isn’t a neural net probabilistic? Yes if you train it, no if you hand-wrote the weights that correspond exactly to your program, lol 🙂

Isn’t a neural net probabilistic? Yes if you train it, no if you hand-wrote the weights that correspond exactly to your program, lol 🙂