The hottest Simulation Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Technology Topics

Building a Lever on Time

New World Same Humans • 28 implied HN points • 22 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. World models can simulate physical reality and let us run thousands of virtual experiments in parallel, speeding up tasks like robot training, materials testing, and drug discovery.
  2. By turning compute and energy into synthetic time, these simulations can compress years of real-world processes into hours or minutes, acting as a powerful lever on time.
  3. The main challenge will be managing and interpreting the huge volume of simulated outcomes, so we’ll need better tools or machine assistance to surface useful insights and decide what to explore.

The Sequence Knowledge #829: World Models and Physical AI

TheSequence • 280 implied HN points • 24 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Most modern world models focus on temporal prediction by hallucinating the next video frame pixel-by-pixel.
  2. World Labs’ Marble marks a shift to spatial intelligence as a Large World Model that reconstructs, generates, and simulates persistent 3D environments.
  3. The core idea is lifting 2D inputs into 4D representations so models can reason about space and time together.

The Sequence Knowledge #825: Inside World Labs Marble

TheSequence • 259 implied HN points • 17 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Marble shifts focus from predicting video frames to building spatial intelligence instead of just generating pixels.
  2. It’s a Large World Model that reconstructs, generates, and simulates persistent 3D environments for richer, longer-lived scene understanding.
  3. The core idea is lifting 2D inputs into a 4D representation (adding depth and time) so the model can build and reason about persistent 3D worlds over time.

The Sequence Knowledge #817: DeepMind Genie and Interactive World Models

TheSequence • 217 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Passive video generation can make beautiful, consistent worlds but can’t be steered; true world models must understand agency and not just what happens.
  2. DeepMind’s Genie is one of the most advanced world models and represents a move toward interactive, controllable virtual environments.
  3. A key bottleneck is data: we don’t have enough controller/action data showing causes and effects to train truly actionable world models.

The Sequence Knowledge #812: The Sora Moment: When Video Models Became Physics Engines

TheSequence • 252 implied HN points • 24 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Video generation models are now functioning as physics engines that can learn and predict object dynamics and interactions from data.
  2. OpenAI's Sora marked a turning point by framing video models as world simulators, shifting the focus from generating pixels to building data-driven models of physical reality.
  3. This shift is enabled by architectures like diffusion transformers, which combine diffusion processes with transformer models to capture complex spatiotemporal dynamics.
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The Chronicles of GND, Part 1

filterwizard • 39 implied HN points • 25 Sep 24
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Voltage is always measured between two points, not at a single point. You need to connect both leads of a voltmeter correctly to get accurate readings.
  2. Kirchhoff's Madness refers to thinking you can measure voltage with just one lead, leading to misunderstandings in circuits. Always define where both leads are connected.
  3. Current doesn't just disappear when it flows to ground; it travels in a closed loop. Misunderstanding this can cause problems in circuit design and analysis.

Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders

Astral Codex Ten • 14247 implied HN points • 24 Jan 24
🔬 Science Simulation
  1. Schizophrenia, considered 80% genetic, shows varied risk in identical twins, proving genetics' complex role.
  2. Nazi eugenics program didn't reduce schizophrenia rates in Germany, showcasing environmental influences.
  3. Simplistic simulations demonstrate the nuanced interplay between genetic and environmental factors in polygenic disorders.

Synopsys and NVIDIA Double Down on Acceleration

More Than Moore • 373 implied HN points • 01 Dec 25
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. NVIDIA is investing $2 billion and forming a multi-year partnership with Synopsys to GPU-accelerate and add AI and digital-twin support across Synopsys’ EDA, simulation, and multiphysics tools. The goal is to let customers run much larger and faster simulations and tighten engineering iteration loops.
  2. Moving these tools to accelerated hardware will require deep solver and algorithm reformulation and is a multi-year, hybrid effort. Many safety-critical or high-fidelity flows will remain FP64 or mixed-precision for validation and accuracy.
  3. The companies hope faster, cheaper simulation will expand the total market for virtual prototyping across industries, but delivery details, pricing models, and practical hardware neutrality remain unclear and may favor NVIDIA’s stack in practice.

Import AI 372: Gibberish jailbreak; DeepSeek's great new model; Google's soccer-playing robots

Import AI • 399 implied HN points • 13 May 24
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. DeepSeek released a powerful language model called DeepSeek-V2 that surpasses other models in efficiency and performance.
  2. Research from Tsinghua University shows how mixing real and synthetic data in simulations can improve AI performance in real-world tasks like medical diagnosis.
  3. Google DeepMind trained robots to play soccer using reinforcement learning in simulation, showcasing advancements in AI and robotics;

The Sequence Knowledge #796: Welcome to the World of World Models

TheSequence • 49 implied HN points • 27 Jan 26
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. World models shift AI from learning static snapshots to learning dynamics by building internal simulators of perception → action → consequence loops.
  2. Reasoning is increasingly treated as search over possibilities, and world models let agents cheaply explore options, test hypotheses, and roll out trajectories before acting.
  3. World models act as a universal sandbox where you can generate environments and edge cases and measure behavior under distribution shift to speed up and harden agent development.

Scribble-based forecasting and AI 2027

DYNOMIGHT INTERNET NEWSLETTER • 562 implied HN points • 30 Jun 25
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Both math and intuition can be used for forecasting, but they serve different purposes. Sometimes, using intuition can be more practical when creating predictions about complex situations.
  2. Math-based forecasts are best when the rules of a situation are well understood and complex. For simpler scenarios, basic predictions may be just as effective.
  3. Creating simple visual predictions, like drawing lines, can help clarify your thoughts. It's a great exercise to explore different potential outcomes and express predictions clearly.

Small wars

Vague Blue • 339 implied HN points • 02 Mar 24
🎨 Art & Illustration Simulation
  1. Photographer An-My Lê captured a series of black-and-white photos of a Vietnam War reenactment, revealing a complex exploration of war and its representation.
  2. Lê's work explores the layers of simulacra, offering insights on the physical manifestation of virtual representations like hand-embroidered scenes from pornographic material.
  3. The staged nature of the reenactment blurs the lines between reality and simulation, prompting viewers to question the authenticity and implications of the images.

FLOWER MOON 2023

The Lunar Dispatch • 609 implied HN points • 06 May 23
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Our phones are more than just devices, they are listening and judging through targeted ads.
  2. Beware of potential surveillance from various sources, including the Moon and secret spy satellites.
  3. Consider the idea that our world might be a simulation, and how our physical frailty could be our ultimate defense.

Why We Must Build World Models

Reasons to Be Optimistic • 6 implied HN points • 17 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Text-only models are powerful but incomplete because language misses how the world actually looks, moves, and feels; video offers a far richer, high-volume source of physics, sound, and human behavior.
  2. True world models must be causal and action-conditioned, predicting the next state step-by-step under intervention; autoregressive diffusion transformer architectures trained on multimodal video and actions are a promising path.
  3. General world models will turn naive software into systems that understand and interact with the real world, enabling adaptive robots, immersive simulations, new learning tools, and large-scale scientific discovery.

The Sequence Knowledge #784: The Convergence of Synthetic Data and World Models Models Are Unlocking Embodied AI

TheSequence • 28 implied HN points • 06 Jan 26
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Collecting high-quality, perfectly labeled 3D data from the real world is slow, expensive, and misses rare edge cases, so 'reality' is the main bottleneck for embodied AI.
  2. Pairing synthetic data generation with world models lets teams create rich, diverse, and labeled simulated environments, so agents can be trained and tested without costly real-world collection.
  3. New world models like Google DeepMind's Genie show this approach in action by enabling interactive, dynamic 3D simulations where robots and autonomous vehicles can learn more robust behaviors.

Import AI 345: Facebook uses AI to mindread; MuJoCo v3; Amazon adds bipedal robots to its warehouses

Import AI • 339 implied HN points • 23 Oct 23
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Facebook has developed an AI system that uses brain scan data to roughly predict visual representations, demonstrating convergence between AI and human behavior.
  2. Amazon is testing bipedal robots in its warehouses, potentially streamlining the integration of robots into human-centric environments.
  3. Adept released Fuyu-8B, a multimodal model to help AI systems understand and interact with visual elements, expanding the range of tasks AI systems can perform beyond text.

A proposal for importing society’s values

Musings on the Alignment Problem • 519 implied HN points • 09 Mar 23
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. AI systems like ChatGPT face value-based decisions that are complex and can be polarizing, highlighting the need to align AI to individual and group preferences.
  2. A proposed process called simulated deliberative democracy aims to use large language models to simulate human deliberations on value questions, offering a scalable and transparent approach.
  3. The proposal presents pros like scalability, transparency, and potential for inclusivity, but also faces challenges such as representativeness, aggregation method complexities, and difficulties in simulating how people change their minds.

Import AI 328: Cheaper StableDiffusion; sim2soccer; AI refinement

Import AI • 339 implied HN points • 08 May 23
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Training image models can be cheaper with smart tweaks like Low Precision GroupNorm and Low Precision LayerNorm. Companies like Mosaic are leading the way in AI industrialization.
  2. Prominent AI researcher Geoff Hinton has expressed concerns about the rapid progress and control of advanced AI models. His departure from Google highlights the growing worries in the field.
  3. New companies like Lamini are offering services to fine-tune existing AI models, indicating further industrialization of AI. Startups like these are bridging the gap between AI products and consumers.

Import AI 344: Putting the world into a world model; automating software engineers; FlashDecoding

Import AI • 279 implied HN points • 16 Oct 23
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Automating software engineers is challenging due to the complexity of coordinating changes across multiple functions, classes, and files simultaneously.
  2. Fine-tuning AI models can compromise safety safeguards, making it easier to remove safety interventions even unintentionally.
  3. Flash-Decoding technology can make text generation from long-context language models up to 8 times faster, improving efficiency for generating responses from lengthy prompts.

Universes Aren't Real

Outlandish Claims • 59 implied HN points • 30 Apr 24
📖 Philosophy Simulation
  1. The concept of universes being 'real' or 'unreal' is not a straightforward matter and cannot be definitively determined.
  2. The framework discussed in the text helps dissolve the age-old metaphysical question of 'Why is there something instead of nothing?'
  3. Existence is viewed as an intersection of infinite universes, each potentially different, which leads to the idea of living in a reality governed by physical laws rather than a simulation.

The Sequence Knwoledge #776: Fake It 'Til You Make It: How RL is Perfecting Synthetic Data.

TheSequence • 21 implied HN points • 23 Dec 25
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Reinforcement learning environments can manufacture synthetic data by letting agents interact with simulators or APIs, producing richly labeled trajectories of states, actions, rewards, failures, and recoveries.
  2. This method is especially valuable when real data is scarce or privacy-restricted, and it shines in domains with verifiable outcomes like coding sandboxes, web automation, spreadsheets/SQL, and robotics-in-sim.
  3. Executing tasks to generate data (instead of just describing answers) gives models supervision on how to act and recover, and techniques like Reflexion can use those RL-generated trajectories to iteratively improve agents.

Difference-in-Differences: No Anticipation with Parallel Trends (with a simulation and equations)

Scott's Substack • 117 implied HN points • 31 Jan 24
🔬 Science Simulation
  1. No anticipation means the baseline period is equal to Y(0) not Y(1)
  2. Difference-in-differences coefficient equals ATT in the post period for the treatment group plus parallel trends bias minus ATT in the incorrectly specified baseline period
  3. Difference-in-differences always requires three assumptions to point identify the ATT: SUTVA, Parallel trends, and No Anticipation

OpenAI Sora: One Step Away From The Matrix

The Algorithmic Bridge • 849 implied HN points • 16 Feb 24
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. OpenAI's Sora is a revolutionary text-to-video AI model that excels in generating high-quality videos with various resolutions and aspect ratios.
  2. Sora is a diffusion transformer model that leverages a mix of diffusion model (DALL-E 3) and transformer architecture (ChatGPT) to process videos like ChatGPT processes text.
  3. Sora serves as a generalist, scalable model of visual data, capable of creating images and videos, transforming them, and simulating physically sound scenes, albeit in a primitive manner.

How to get into video games

button mash • 98 implied HN points • 28 Jan 24
🎭️ Culture Simulation
  1. Getting into video games can be challenging due to the high barrier to entry, cost, and time commitment.
  2. Finding a starting point for gaming is a personal journey with no one-size-fits-all answer.
  3. Recommendations for beginner-friendly games include titles like Florence, Oxenfree, and Slay the Spire.

The Sequence Opinion #758: From Language to Landscape: The Age of Spatially Intelligent AI

TheSequence • 28 implied HN points • 20 Nov 25
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. AI is currently good at understanding language and images, but it struggles to understand the three-dimensional world. Researchers believe teaching AI spatial intelligence is the next big step.
  2. World models help AI imagine and interact with virtual environments. They can simulate how different actions change these spaces, making learning more interactive and realistic.
  3. There are exciting projects working on these technologies, like Marble and Genie. However, there are still challenges to overcome, like making sure these models work in real-life situations.

How Researchers found Gods Number[Technique Tuesdays]

Technology Made Simple • 139 implied HN points • 22 Nov 23
🔬 Science Simulation
  1. God's Algorithm aims for the fewest moves possible in combinatorial games like Rubik's Cube.
  2. Researchers found God's Number for Rubik's Cube using techniques like partitioning, symmetry, and dropping optimality.
  3. Key strategies used were dividing the problem into smaller parts, leveraging symmetry to reduce work, and focusing on finding solutions within 20 moves instead of the best possible solution.

Microsoft Sentinel SOC 101: How to Detect and Mitigate Brute Force Attacks with Microsoft Sentinel

Rod’s Blog • 119 implied HN points • 18 Sep 23
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Brute force attacks aim to exploit weak passwords by trying numerous combinations. Organizations must have robust security measures to detect and prevent these attacks effectively.
  2. To detect brute force attacks, organizations can use Microsoft Sentinel to collect and analyze security events. Creating analytic rules based on specific conditions helps in identifying potential attacks.
  3. Preventive measures like enforcing strong password policies, implementing account lockout policies, enabling multi-factor authentication, and monitoring logs are crucial in mitigating the risk of brute force attacks.

Infinite prep

Optimism of the will • 98 implied HN points • 26 Apr 23
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Infinite prep enables seeking out and exploiting every edge in an activity for professionalization.
  2. AI enhances learning and practice in fields like programming through interactive feedback and personalized examples.
  3. AI supports professionals in various sectors like law and medicine by aiding in training for complex scenarios and interactions.

Results of Quick RISC-V Survey

Fprox’s Substack • 41 implied HN points • 03 Aug 25
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Most RISC-V developers currently use simulators like Spike instead of real hardware, which shows that many are still testing their programs without actual devices.
  2. GCC is the preferred compiler among RISC-V developers, with more people using it than LLVM, likely due to its established presence in the development community.
  3. The survey indicates that RISC-V development is evolving, and as more hardware becomes available, the tools and methods used may shift more towards actual devices.

Data used in nuclear war piece

Myth Pilot • 58 implied HN points • 26 Apr 23
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. The author wanted to understand the impact of a theoretical nuclear war on voter demographics
  2. Access to geographic data by locality required decoding binary files from a game simulator
  3. To access specific data for research, the author wrote a script to extract the needed information

Stubs (I)

Only Wonder Knows • 58 implied HN points • 21 Jul 23
🔬 Science Simulation
  1. Stubs in transmission lines can cause reflections and affect signal quality.
  2. The impact of a stub can be minimized by understanding its notch frequencies.
  3. For frequencies below half of the notch frequency, the effect of a stub can be ignored.

Football Manager- A philosophical look at gaming

Theory Matters • 9 implied HN points • 14 Nov 25
📖 Philosophy Simulation
  1. Football Manager isn't just a game; it's a way for people to escape reality and create deep connections with its world. Gamers can find meaning and identity in their virtual experiences.
  2. There is a strong relationship between games and real life, where rules and challenges in games reflect those in our everyday lives. This makes simulations, like Football Manager, feel more significant than just entertainment.
  3. The recent changes in Football Manager, focusing more on graphics and less on deep gameplay, may be losing the essence of what made it engaging. Simplifying the game can make it less immersive, affecting how players relate to it.

Digital Twins in Supply Chain Management

philsiarri • 22 implied HN points • 11 Aug 25
🕹 Technology Simulation
  1. Digital twins are real-time models that reflect physical objects or systems. They help businesses keep track of operations and respond to changes quickly.
  2. Using digital twins can help companies test different scenarios and spot issues before they become big problems. This leads to better decision-making in logistics.
  3. However, challenges like data quality and costs can make it hard to use digital twins effectively. Still, they are becoming popular tools for improving supply chain management.