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mattparlmer 🪐 🌷 Profile picture
mattparlmer 🪐 🌷
@mattparlmer
making machines that make other machines @genfabco - rationalist, humanist, liberal, and friend of the future
Oct 10 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Figure is a systemic risk to the American hardware startup ecosystem, it is very obviously a scam and when it inevitably crashes out the funding ecosystem for actually useful robotics projects will become considerably worse because it will be held up as a false comp Bipedal humanoids with heads are a ridiculous LARP and LPs should be mad at funds that back humanoid companies

There are plenty of reasons for a robot to have 2+ arms with dexterous manipulators, but almost no reason to add a bunch of mass on top of leg actuators
Aug 14 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
The US Navy has a couple very significant architectural problems that if fixed would allow us to secure global maritime commerce for another 50yrs, and if left unfixed leaves an opening for PRC to impose a much less favorable set of circumstances with their rapidly growing navy Our foremost problem is that we have far too few keels in the water

If we want to go toe to toe with China in the Western Pacific while also maintaining our other security commitments we’re gonna have to massively enlarge the fleet
May 16 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I think all the Harvard researchers will do just fine working at less parasitic institutions in Ann Arbor or San Diego The amount of research funding hoarded by Harvard alum grant cartels is eyewatering, there is absolutely no reason a massive private hedge fund with a some labs attached to it should be in front of the line for federal dollars, send those to Iowa State
May 15 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
He just barely stops himself from saying the thing you’re not supposed to say about the combat relevance of radar defeat capabilities That it doesn’t matter when anybody with a 1990s era military thermal optic can spot your engines against background from over a hundred miles away

But that info is classified to shit as a vulnerability for our warplanes so Lockheed can keep selling snake oil
Apr 14 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is how you lose elite human capital fwiw Multiple people I know are thinking of leaving the country bc of this sort of comment
Mar 21 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The existence of narrative enforcement thinkpiece stormtroopers like Ezra Klein is exactly why Dems didn’t get their shit together on the “abundance” issues until it was far too late Fully automated luxury r/neoliberalism was sitting on the table as a set of coherent policy options the whole time, but serious deviation from recursively degenerating idpol nonsense was not allowed
Feb 6 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
We will lose our lead in biotech in the next two years, around the same time that Huawei makes better chips than Nvidia

Mainstream Western reaction will be complete shock and cope, followed by dismay

We desperately need leadership that gives a shit about turning this around This is what losing looks like
Jan 29 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Based on ~20 vendor conversations today I am convinced that the American and European precision motion industries are culturally incapable of cost control of any kind The level of overengineering on things like ballscrew-driven linear actuators boggles the mind, people are out here selling $1200+ assemblies (without encoder) that do not do significantly better on repeatability than the fractional micron that I can hack together for $60
Jan 24 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Almost all factory automation is >10x overpriced

If we solve that in America we can leapfrog PRC, if we don't then we stagnate and lose The most direct route to 10x cheaper automated factories is a vertically integrated automated factory for factories

I think of this as the minimum viable version of a Von Neumann constructor, which has been the objective of @genfabco from the very beginning
Jan 10 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
PLAN is making the contemporary equivalent of the WW2 D-Day Mulberry Harbors

This is not the kind of invasion prep that you can hide easily, and it makes me think that the decision to invade Taiwan has been made and now we’re just running down the clock Image Historically speaking the Chinese way of war isn’t particularly concerned with big expenditures of blood and treasure if territorial integrity is at stake
Jan 7 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
USG already mass produces and deploys small modular nuclear reactors in the 200MW+ category, but only for warships for some very stupid reason

Let's scale existing production, slap them in Alaska-class tanker hulls, and then moor them off big coastal cities to serve grid demand This is a straightforward approach to significantly increasing American energy output that requires no new reactor certification, no new contractors, and no new infrastructure on land

It would also be a great excuse to get even better at making large numbers of naval reactors
Jan 7 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
America needs to start beating PRC on basic industrial stuff if we want to remain economically relevant in the 21st century

A good place to start would be electricity, because I think we can catch up pretty quickly there

Let's look at industrial grid pricing for Southern China Image In Shenzhen and its environs you can expect to pay ~$0.09/kWh for electrons to your facility, this is a high demand region with no locally available hydrocarbons

If you factor in stuff like local govt giving favored entities perks it probably nets out somewhat lower than that
Dec 31, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
US is firmly, unambiguously losing to China in every area of robotics, every area of transportation other than airliners, every area of energy generation and storage, and every area of infrastructure and construction

In 2025 we will lose our lead on AI, semiconductors, and more This is already baked in, it will happen, there’s nothing that we can do to regain the lead in any of these areas in the next year

Without whole-of-society mobilization to reindustrialize, their margin of overperformance will grow beyond our ability to surpass them in 2030
Dec 31, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Restricting immigration or throwing fits about H1Bs will not fix any of the problems that have led to declining American quality of life

There is no silver bullet, we must radically restructure the government, the banks, the universities, and the myriad petty bureaucracies We live in a globalized imperial political economy that is rigged at almost every level to benefit parasitic rentiers

The root of this system is the clerical oligarchy that cycles between sinecures in the civil service, banks, NGOs, and universities, and it must be destroyed
Dec 27, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It’s time to start thinking seriously about your personal bird flu precautions, it looks like a human outbreak may only be a matter of time and the political system is not in the right condition to organize an effective response Tbc I'm not making any claims like the ones in Jan 2020

This isn't a human-adapted SARS-derived bioweapon leaking from a lab in China, it's a branch of the Influenza A virus bruteforcing human adaptation from American cattle herds to farm laborers

Dec 24, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I beg you all to consider that viruses tend to be exponential when breaking out into novel populations

Bird flu has decimated America’s poultry farms and is now ripping thru America’s cattle herds

A bird to mammal jump is much harder than a mammal to mammal jump Shut down all movement of cattle between farms to start, mandate respiratory PPE and biweekly testing for all workers who come into contact with livestock, close any operation that doesn’t immediately comply

Also set up fever clinics in tents outside hospitals to limit ER risk
Dec 24, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
H5 influenza, covid, and RSV, and regular influenza A numbers from the main wastewater treatment plant in SF

Previous H5 reading was 6.5, jumped to 228.8

There are no major dairy processing facilities in SF and people don't flush pet waste, so this is likely coming from people Image
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Image Link to the wastewater monitoring dataset, as you can probably see there's a clear trend despite some inconsistent sampling data.wastewaterscan.org/tracker/?chart…
Dec 7, 2024 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Low hanging fruit for US domestic electronics production:

- server motherboards/other major components
- networking hardware
- commercial radio transceivers
- industrial controllers
- gaming consoles
- high end sensor packages

What else? More difficult to reshore:

- cameras/other commodity CMOS
- TVs/screens
- phones/laptops/desktops

Extremely difficult:

- batteries
- commodity components (esp passives)
- thermal management systems
Nov 6, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
For the Dems to have won this they would have to be an entirely different party

For example:
- Admit when their leader has declined into senility circa 2022
- Select a new leader via an open primary process, not a closed door conclave
- Make any attempt at all at persuasion They were incapable of doing these things because they are the party of the permanent administrative state, which is the only coalition that matters to them

All their messaging was targeted at the people they already represented
Oct 18, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The QTs on this post are very interesting and worth perusing if you want an idea of how dysfunctional American politics is and will likely remain for the next few decades There are two types of QT above

Type 1: standard lib and leftie pile-on of the Helldump variety, per usual they're missing the point/proving his point

Type 2: righties dunking on him but also incorrectly inferring that he's making a racial point in addition battle-of-the-sexes
Jan 3, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Possible
Meissner
Effect
Near
Room
Temperature
In
Copper
Substituted
Lead
Apatite

arxiv.org/abs/2401.00999
arxiv.org/abs/2401.00999 Well well well Image