Proteins are what perform useful functions in the body, but the vast majority of DNA does not code for any protein - rather, it regulates which proteins get made

The same is true of our legal code - it's mostly junk. A short 🧵 about viruses, evolution, and regulatory capture Proteins only make up 20% of your body but perform essentially all the functions - digesting, transporting, signaling, and so on.

Much of your body is like infrastructure - the roads, bridges, cellulose scaffolding and cytoplasmic medium that lets proteins do their thing

Fusion is one of the most important technologies mankind will ever develop, and will power civilizations for thousands of years to come.

The Kardashev scale is simply a measure of how much fusion you've captured, because it's the origin of all usable energy 🧵

https://twitter.com/energy_zap/status/1782793917035073792

Deep in the hearts of stellar furnaces light elements are crushed together into heavier elements by gravitational pressure and heat.

The sun burns 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, releasing photons that take a 10,000 year random walk to the surface

Gentle Reminder that in 1964 we flew a supersonic reconnaissance drone with a cruising speed of Mach 3.3 at 90,000 ft with a range of 3,000 nm to take photographs of Russian ICBMs and airfields.

The D-21 was launched from an SR-71 while going Mach 3.2.

A short 🧵 on ramjets

https://twitter.com/kane/status/1782635758530314407

During the 1960s Lockheed Martin developed the A-12 program, a precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird. The autonomous D-21 drone was developed using many of the same techniques - titanium hull, airfoil design, and powered by a ramjet.

But ramjets only work when you're going fast

The meter was very nearly defined as the length of a pendulum such that the period is exactly two seconds.

This would mean the strength of gravity, measured in meters and seconds, is exactly pi squared.

But it's not - a short thread on the importance of units🧵 Christian Huygens invented the first Pendulum Clock in 1657, and it was far more accurate than spring driven clocks of its time.

In fact pendulum clocks were the most accurate means of time keeping until the invention of quartz clocks in the 1930s

SF co-living homes are like deep ocean currents that drive the nutrient and talent rich city newcomers into convection cells with the experienced and well-capitalized.

The sociology of San Francisco does this amazing thing of idea, talent, and capital discovery 🧵 I've never actually lived in a co-living house, but its remarkable how often I learn that interesting and successful characters can trace a common origin to a certain vintage of roommates in now-legendary house.

The Archive, Genesis, The Embassy, Monument, Solaris...

The entirety of modern robotics is hopelessly outclassed by the elegant dexterity and mechanical efficiency of an insect.

Nature has sprinkled the world with walking engineering miracles. Far easier to simply hack their software than reinvent the hardware from scratch 🧵 The beetle is one of the most successful animals on Earth and has adapted to every biome possible.

Industrious, efficient, resilient, we are easily hundreds of years of compounding tech progress from producing something like this with silicon and steel

There's an interesting 2nd order effect on the horizon:

Eventually superconducting reversible logic will be by far the most performative computing hardware platform, for AI training and inference at scale.

This will drive massive economies of scale for cryogenics🧵 Cryogenics is the art of cooling this to be cold. Super cold - just a few degrees above absolute zero.

It turns out, at temperatures just above absolute zero most metals superconduct

Why would you want superconducting reversible logic?

This plot presents a sad truth:

Media has failed it's duty to inform the public

Instead, a business model of selling fear, stoking conflict, pandering, and pushing advertisers propaganda.

McKinsey-ification and it's consequences has been a disaster for the human species 🧵 It wasn't always like this.

In the past newspapers made money by selling newspapers, and they competed on quality of research, clarity of insight, and reliability of sources.

Then newspapers started raking in massive sums in advertising revenue and things went sideways

It would be mistaken to say companies like Pratt and Whitney have not innovated on jet engine design in the last 70+ years of making them.

For example, 13 years ago they added this single gear between the compressor stage and turbofan at a program cost of only $10 billion. 🧵 This lets the fan operate at a different speed than the compressor stage, though the ratio is still fixed. Still, having this small amount of adaptability improved fuel efficiency by 16%.

Today, their best-selling engine is the JT8D.

It first ran in 1960.

The reality is we could've easily mastered energy, food, and material abundance with 1970s era Technology.

Instead, we loaded up on virtue signaling, stakeholder engagement, and regulatory capture.

I call this general phenomenon "The Blight" The Blight is what gives you things like billion-dollar a mile railroad tracks in San Francisco, never completed high speed rail in California, the NRC killing nuclear energy, ArianeSpace, a bunch of go-nowhere climate tech bubbles, Don Lemon, affirmative action, etc

AGI must be decentralized and cheap to be accessible for all

Yet scaling laws in data and energy mean it will take trillions of dollars, leading to centralized control

The solution is a total hardware revolution

Here's the Thermodynamic Computing Explainer 🧵 w/@Extropic_AI I've spent the last few months getting to know @BasedBeffJezos, @trevormccrt1 and his team at @Extropic_AI.

What they're building is the Transistor of the AI era - the most natural physical embodiment of probabilistic learning.

To appreciate how, we need to dive deep:

How to Get to Orbit Cheaper than SpaceX's Starship

Ian Brooke has developed a new kind of jet engine that can act as the first stage of a rocket.

I get brunch with him every Sunday and have grilled him for hours on how it works.

Adaptive Cycle Jet Engines, the primer 🧵 Two facts about rockets:
- They have to carry a lot of fuel
- Structurally they are quite weak

The miracle of the Falcon 9 and Starship is they can be re-used, 10, maybe even 20 times.

But even a Falcon 9 that lasts forever has to consume massive amounts of fuel

A Weekend at the El Segundo Defense Tech Hackathon - The UNIX Timestamp of the Deep Tech Renaissance

This weekend smashed all of my expectations.

Here's my honest impressions and takeaways, and where this fits in to the evolving startup scene.

The Gundo Thread: 🧵 Organizers @apollo_defense did a fantastic job bringing together a room full of talented students, defense industry engineers, and investors.

Teams built through the night and even had calls with members of the Ukrainian defense ministry who were keen to see and use the results

Did you know that all kinds of tubes use physics?

Here's the physics of some of my favorite tubes 🧵

First up: The Vortex Tube, a thermodynamic mystery for over 80 years A Vortex tube takes a stream of compressed air and separates it into two streams of high velocity air, one thats cold, one thats hot.

It has no moving parts and uses no electricity, invented in 1933 it wasn't fully explained until 2012.

The miracle of life is to unpack a living organism from one cell, with a single molecule of instructions driving complex protein machinery.

For first time in history, we can produce fully three-dimensional videos of this process.

Let's take a look at Light Sheet Microscopy 🧵 The first person to observe single-celled organisms was Antony von Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch gentleman-scientist living in the 1600's.

His simple microscope revealed a hidden world of tiny creatures with a magnification of 300x

He named these new wonders "Animalcules"

It's a technology that mediates all our access to the digital world, yet hasn't fundamentally evolved in decades.

But screens of all kinds are about to undergo a massive revolution via a technology just barely escaping the lab.

Let's take a look at Light Field Displays, a 🧵 From the Cathode-Ray Tube of yesteryear to the latest flexible OLED display at CES, displays today show a scene the same way:

A 2D grid of diffuse light emitters, where our eyes focus on the plane of the screen to resolve a flat image

Lowell Wood was an architect of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and worked with Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, to design a system of orbital lasers that could shoot down ICBMs.

Decades later he built a laser system to shoot down mosquitos - the 'Laser Fence' Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation's quest to eliminate Malaria, Lowell worked with a few others and within a year had a working prototype that could shoot down mosquitos.

My Highest Likelihood Explanation on Altman's Departure:

Erosion of senior leadership experience on the OpenAI Board of Directors created a situation where factionalism over the proposed use of a recent breakthrough led to a political takeover.

Over the last few years, board of directors at OpenAI lost a lot of its senior oversight due to conflicts of interest - Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Will Hurd. The only person left with significant leadership experience is Adam D'Angelo.

After Will Hurd left, it was a split vote, 3v3:

The likely factions were Ilya, Sam, Greg vs Adam, Tasha, Helen.

Firing Sam was politics.

It was not over performance, strategic leadership, or vision for the company. Rather, there was contention over the use of a breakthrough that drove a vote between safetyism and deployment speed.

Why this was Factionalism - Sudden Ousting
If this was planned, Sam would not be representing OpenAI at APEC events all week, OpenAI DevDay two weeks ago. If Microsoft knew or was involved, Satya Nadella would not have been on-stage with Sam at Dev Day.

Microsoft claims they didn't have advance knowledge of this - they claim they knew about it one minute in advance. There clearly was not internal alignment on this decision either - @gdb just quit over this.

What was the wedge issue? Just recently at APEC Sam announced he had witnessed the frontier of knowledge being pushed back four times in his experience at OpenAI, and the last time was recently - a couple weeks ago.

Likely Greg and Sam wanted to build and deploy it in earnest, and Ilya didn't. Ilya had become lead of the "Superintelligence Alignment" division earlier this year. I would bet Ilya was the vote that broke the stalemate and led to the departure.

Sam was kicked out over concerns he would move AI forward too fast by deploying a recent breakthrough.

It's unlikely departure was related to anything regarding operations, cash burn, partnership-making ability, and so forth - OpenAI has blank-check status for ability to raise, they have huge cashflow, only a few hundred staff, are beyond doubt.

Most importantly, the suddenness of the departure, lack of communication to Microsoft, and resignation of Greg Brockman all point to this being a sudden move by a board faction.

Likely, the board felt that OpenAI was completely setup - in partnerships, funding, team, and direction, they could afford to push Sam out to regain control of of the direction and pace of roll-out of AI tools without threatening the security of OpenAI.

Whatever the proximate justification behind the lack of being 'candid' - this is likely ultimately a split between safetyism and acceleration.

Explanations that should be discarded
Sam is extremely successful and intelligent, but also has a bulletproof reputation as an upstanding, intentional and pro-social person. He's also a billionaire several times over.

The language used in the OpenAI disclosure, as well as comments by Eric Schmidt, seem to all point that this was a disagreement over intentions behind the use of AI tools, rather than an over-reach of power, monetary conflict of interest, or a personal scandal.
What would Sam build next?

A couple weeks ago, he spoke publicly about it. Superintelligence isn't here until it can make novel physical discoveries in science.

AI has revolutionized text and media. The next frontier is the world of atoms. Scientific Foundation Models will be the true AI revolution, for we as humans live in the world of atoms, not bits.

DM me if you are interested in building in this area.

Inside a Nuclear Fusion Reactor is a beautiful thing.

A faint wispy plasma evolves into a healthy vibrant glow. Millions of degrees Kelvin, 400 kilo-amps of circulating current.

I have no doubt we will solve the greatest challenges facing us. We always have in the past. Around 5 seconds in you can see a bright glow to the right of the center plasma torus - this is likely to be one of COMPASS's two 400kW Neutral Beam Injectors.

Tokamaks 'fuel up' via neutral particle beams that inject DT fuel mixture and also provide heating for the plasma.

You have two options:

Tile the forested mountains with black silicon panels and get 50-100 megawatts for 25-30 years.

Put a BWRX-300 in an IKEA-sized building and get 290 megawatts for 60-80 years.

Which is better for the environment? Calculations:
Mount Teihang has 434 MW of total installed solar capacity, but solar average capacity factor ranges from 10-25%. So, you get 43 - 108 MW with weather-dependent variability.

A BWRX-300 has a nominal output of 300 MW, and nuclear averages 92-95% capacity factor.

Materials Science is about to be revolutionized by Self Driving Robotic Laboratories.

Optimizing atoms is the hardest of hard-tech problems and defines whats possible for every other engineering discipline.

A 🧵 on how SDL will speed-run science to unlock a new Golden Age 2/
When humanity learns the recipe for a new material, the world changes. Bronze gave us the breast-plate, steel gave us the railroads, and semiconductors the world today.

We've optimized solar cells to give unimaginably high efficiencies over 50 years of hard-fought battles