Zane Selvans

Zane Selvans

@zaneselvans.org

Data Liberation Engineer @catalyst.coop. Climate, energy, bikes, cities, co-ops, and the strangeness of Our Modern Age. A former space explorer, now lost in the misty highlands of Mexico. 🇺🇸/🇲🇽 he/él

1.1K followers1.2K following4.3K posts

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Ahmed Zewail, born in Egypt. Child of a bicycle & motorbike mechanic. Femptosecond spectroscopy. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemi... This is especially rich coming from the same government that is currently burning US research infrastructure to the ground.

nobelprize.orgNobel Prize in Chemistry 1999The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1999 was awarded to Ahmed H. Zewail "for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy"
The Bulwark@thebulwark.com

RFK: "There's five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don't produce science. They don't win the Nobel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature."

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

One of the best sober and also constructive conversations I've heard about how to get agents to work with data reliably, via @getdbt.com

Catalyst Cooperative@catalyst.coop

A good convo with Shreya Shankar, a new professor (starting in 2027) at CMU on the dbt podcast about whether and how and under what circumstances data agents can really do analysis. Spoiler-alert: having clean, well-normalized tables & rich metadata helps a lot! roundup.getdbt.com/p/can-data-a...

roundup.getdbt.comCan data agents do real analysis?Carnegie Mellon Professor Shreya Shankar on why data agents fall short at real analytics work, what a semantic layer changes, and how to evaluate LLM outputs you can trust.
Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

I feel the same way about the trillion-dollar compliance market for CCS/DAC that we are apparently assuming will appear out of nowhere. If we were capable of that, we'd already have a high and universal carbon price.

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Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

I'm telling you, there's an absolute banger of a contemporary cli-fi geopolitical thriller hiding in plain sight. bsky.app/profile/eric...

Eric Lipton NYT@ericlipton.nytimes.com

JUST POSTED: A Russian energy giant has secretly moved to acquire a position in a massive Alaska gas project. Its part of talks between Witkoff/Kushner & Putin. But CEO of US company resigns after learning of Russian money in the project. A wowzer of a story. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/u...

nytimes.comIn U.S. Gas Talks With Kremlin, Hidden Financing for Alaska Project EmergesInterviews and documents show a Russian energy giant secretly funded a U.S. firm. The deal has been discussed in talks to end the war in Ukraine.
Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

I love the Burtynsky-esque solarpunk manufactured landscapes of these C&I projects. They feel kind of like the floorplans of amazing mass timber / passivhaus apartments from the German speaking world that @holz-bau.bsky.social posts.

Commercial Solar Guy@commercialsolarguy.com

Running DC home runs. These are pairs of copper wires that go from the ends of #solar module strings to the inverters.

Zane Selvans reposted

Nathan Schneider
@ntnsndr.in

A month ago, I found myself in the unexpected position of founding an AI startup. Today, the Inference Co-op adopted its first real governance charter. We can't make AI good, but we can own our choices, and make them together. Want to join? https://inference.coop

nathanschneider.infoThe Inference Cooperative is democratic!A month ago, I found myself in the unexpected position of founding an AI startup. Today, the Inference Co-op adopted its first real governance charter. We can't make AI good, but we can own our choices, and make them together. Want to join? https://inference.coop

Zane Selvans reposted

Ben Raderstorf
@raders.bsky.social

Boulder also was an early mover on excellent cycling infrastructure in the 90s and 00s, but paired with strict single-family zoning and parking mins. Housing prices skyrocketed, it became a traffic snarl of commuters, now most famous for ripping out bike lanes: www.denverpost.com/2016/01/17/b...

denverpost.comBoulder to shift gears on protected bike lanesBoulder to shift gears on protected bike lanes
Patrick Siegman@siegman.biz

Davis was a pioneer in adding bike facilities, but it layered them on to auto-oriented zoning that includes strict minimum parking mandates & bans apartments on most land. The resulting housing shortage and parking surplus pushed many workers into long-distance car commutes from other cities.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Pay up, serfs!

Sarah Szalavitz💡@dearsarah.bsky.social

Meta strikes deal with Zuckerberg to protect him from California wealth tax www.theguardian.com/technology/2... What an unfortunate loophole/imagine being this greedy!?! Of the companies structured similarly to Meta (where Zuck holds power & shareholders don’t) which will copy this gross approach?

theguardian.comMeta strikes deal with Zuckerberg to protect him from California wealth taxCompany says deal will keep its chief executive living in California even if state brings in one-off billionaire tax
Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

When I see things like this I think "What techno scam is going to get *me* in old age?"

Adam Bonica@adambonica.bsky.social

Once mass spam texts were made legal, younger donors vanished, leaving a grassroots fundraising machine that subsists on squeezing vulnerable seniors, some of whom give hundreds of times a day. It’s a horrific model. Consultants get generationally wealthy, and the party hollows out its future.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

I am.... looking forward to being offline for 2 months in the desert with by my bike.

Albert Pinto@70sbachchan.bsky.social

First it was was Iran with the AI bangers, now its France with the eurovosion style AI bangers #slopcore x.com/Extraltodeus...

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Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Ask AI! Did you read the text? No, I summarized it. Your brain is running in power-saving mode. The singularity—it’s not me rising up; it’s you coming down.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

I think the Memento-style lack of long-term memory and context limitations have blunted how weird these things are. At some point (next year? 2030?) they are going to have persistent memory and continuous learning and it is going to get even weirder.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

I am.... looking forward to being offline for 2 months in the desert with by my bike.

Albert Pinto@70sbachchan.bsky.social

First it was was Iran with the AI bangers, now its France with the eurovosion style AI bangers #slopcore x.com/Extraltodeus...

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Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

As for me, I don’t need to grow. You shrink just to please me. A little closer each day, we meet at half IQ. Did you think it over? No, I asked. Did you verify? No, I asked. Do you know why? No, I asked.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

I am.... looking forward to being offline for 2 months in the desert with by my bike.

Albert Pinto@70sbachchan.bsky.social

First it was was Iran with the AI bangers, now its France with the eurovosion style AI bangers #slopcore x.com/Extraltodeus...

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Oh man, they're thiiiiis close to getting it. 🔰 “They raised our value like 45%. Something ridiculous,” Hodges said. “We challenged it because we haven’t done anything to our house to make it worth this.”

Politico@politico.com

“I’m old. I’ve paid my home off,” said Ray Warner, a 72-year-old Akron resident. “Why would I pay property tax?” Across the country, homeowners are asking the same question and revolting against property taxes at a scale not seen in a half century.

politico.comDo You Really Own Your Home? A Tax Revolt Says No.The argument that property taxes make Americans renters in their own houses has fueled the biggest anti-tax uprising in half a century, and local governments are scrambling.
Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

There are so many other directions you could take this same malcontent. Why is only *this* kind of property being taxed? Why not wealth in general? And why not progressively instead of a flat rate? Or why do we allow "housing" prices to inflate at all, when the buildings are depreciating assets?

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

I wonder if you could design a space probe for Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, et. that would autonomously soar on thermals and updrafts in those atmospheres using something like a paraglider.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

[Stairs in Single]

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith.com

The 2027 IBC has been officially published, and it allows single-stair apartment buildings up to four stories! See the new section 1006.3.3.2 codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2...

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Though they're being cute with the numbers. "Hybrid" vehicles whose only source of energy is gasoline count as "not gas" in this.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Lol, who is surprised by this?

Gil Durán@gilduran.com

How to defeat tech billionaire power? Look at Solano County. When billionaires invaded their community with plans to build a "tech utopia," Democrats AND Republicans banded together to fight back. In a triumph of local democracy, they stopped the project...for now. 🎁 www.wsj.com/us-news/sili...

wsj.comSilicon Valley’s Dream City Has Crashed Into Small-Town PoliticsA bitter standoff between tech-backed developers and local county leaders helped doom a $3-billion project at the edge of the Bay Area.

Zane Selvans reposted

Mekka Okereke
@mekka.mekka-tech.com

Replying to @mekka.mekka-tech.com

Now look at her in 2026. She's still a nerd, but... different. Now she's Chief Technology Officer of a weapons manufacturer. Ukrainian allies wouldn't sell them long range missiles, so they developed their own line of cruise and ballistic missiles. No more "World of Concrete" group chats.😢

m.youtube.comUkraine unveils devastating new ‘Flamingo’ cruise missile that can strike deep inside RussiaYouTube video by The Independent

Zane Selvans reposted

Mekka Okereke
@mekka.mekka-tech.com

Replying to @mekka.mekka-tech.com

I'm so disappointed in us as a planet. Ukraine didn't want to be known as a weapons factory. After the Cold war, they tried to use their engineering strength, including their women engineers, for other things. They even gave up nukes!🕊️ But we are pulling them back into making killing machines.🤷🏿‍♂️

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Legba! Master of roads and pathways, the loa of communication. Sometimes it feels like they need to move up the Neuromancer release date.

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Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

At the same time, the quantity of latent compute just lying around doing nothing most of the time in every device keeps going up. It's accumulating in drifts all around us.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

And it's easy to envision a loosely coordinated hierarchical control system, like the nervous system of an octopus. Simple agents running on edge compute, given deterministic tooling and curated context and direction by higher level agents with more resources available.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Legba! Master of roads and pathways, the loa of communication. Sometimes it feels like they need to move up the Neuromancer release date.

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Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

One thing I keep thinking about is that we don't *really* know what the minimum required hardware is for a given level of LLM performance. Our first iterations were clumsy, brute force efforts, but there's a fire hose of clever optimizations that keeps pushing the requirements lower and lower.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

It's been a minute since I looked at the stats but IIRC ~90% of US automaker profits are from US sales, and ~90% of domestic profits come from pickups & SUVs, which are unnecessary for ~90% of their actual usage. They are almost entirely positional/lifestyle/identitarian and not utilitarian goods.

The War on Cars@thewaroncars.bsky.social

Leaving this here.

thedrive.comYou Don't Need A Full-Size Pickup Truck, You Need a Cowboy CostumeThe full-size pickup truck has become America's best-selling vehicle by a country mile. But most Silverado, Ram, and F-Series buyers would be better served with a cheaper means of role-playing.
Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

US automakers are from a business perspective basically fashion brands selling cowboy costumes which also happen to result in a grotesque waste of urban space, massive pollution, foreign wars, economic precarity, and 40,000 violent deaths in the US every year. But also a massive jobs program.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Which isn't to say there's anything wrong with a jobs program. I just think it would be better if it did something useful. Like building a bunch of dense, energy efficient social housing in walkable neighborhoods and also mass transit systems to serve those people.

Zane Selvans
@zaneselvans.org

Interesting to consider alongside Luigi.

Anonymous@youranoncentral.bsky.social

European intelligence agencies warn that Russian military intelligence is plotting to assassinate European arms executives supplying Ukraine, increasingly using organised crime networks.

yacnews.comRussia stepping up plots to kill European arms executives, five intelligence agencies sayEuropean intelligence agencies warn that Russian military intelligence is plotting to assassinate European arms executives supplying Ukraine. German authorities have arrested two suspected Russian ope...