Rolf V

Steam generator size has never been the limiting factor There’s a certain amount of energy that high-pressure and high temperature steam can carry, the more energy you want, the more space you need for the vapor The generation four nuclear plant designs have been around for 20 years. It’s not Tech that’s the problem

YC is backing some absolute wizards!

@JohnCleese Germany appears weak

The Muslim countries have never been very good at accepting other Muslims

@AndrewYNg You’re wrong. It’s gonna help my children get good jobs, good housing, families, so I can have grandchildren sooner They don’t need to be competing against invaders

The new White House policy requiring green card applicants to apply from outside the US is a capricious attack on legal immigration. It will hurt families, leave us with fewer doctors, teachers and scientists, and hurt American competitiveness in AI.

@HungCao_VA Congratulations to both of you from a proud member of USNA class of 89!

Thirty years after I graduated, and exactly one month after I assumed the duties and responsibilities as the acting Secretary of the Navy, I got to sign my own son’s commission and speak at his graduation. Only God could have orchestrated this.

Americold Logistics is asking engineers in Atlanta to paper mail their resumes to apply May not be a sexy company, but this is a $4B public company. Why are they getting away with the same tactics that Facebook paid a $14M settlement to DOJ for using? Does this deter American applicants?

@sovernTranch Totally understand doing a pause to focus on bringing in revenue

Speaking of milling lumber and timber framing I’m going to share a failure of mine with yall Around 5 years ago I started milling and building a 52x70 timber frame, all from logs that came from my farm I fell, milled and set every post and beam I haven’t touched it in a year

Getting out ahead of the upcoming local AI controlled biologic robot meat production boom

@sentientist If I could stop working and take a vacation for two weeks not have to be concerned about anything, I’d be a lot more relaxed too

In adults, limiting smartphone functionality to texting and calls and blocking all social media and mobile internet for 2 weeks significantly improved attention, self-reported well-being and mental health. 90% of participants experienced a benefit.

@johnkonrad To regular people, smart people just look crazy

Alex is talking about how 0.01% top-tier talent works… but he’s wrong about not being able to understand them. When I was in grade school, we had no money and lived in the Bronx but my Dad wanted us to get a top education. So he bought an abandoned house in the best school district in America. We happened to move across the street from a kid my age who now is one of the 1% top physicists in the world. We grew up together. My dad graduated from Cornell Medical School and had an IQ far to the right of the distribution curve, but this kid was somewhere on the tail. Just listening to the conversations they would have was mind-opening. Much of my academic success was just trying to keep up with this guy. He’s probably a big reason why I became a ship captain too because we were on the sailing team together & he always kicked my ass. No matter how much I tried to outperform him on the physical side, he would calculate some changing wind angle or currents & blow past me. The best of the best truly do think differently. Spending so much time with him gave me three major advantages in life: I can’t outthink them, but I was able to learn how they think and operate. Put me in a room with these people & I can follow along. People like this are not telepathic, they are limited by the same words the rest of us are. They have to slow their brains down to communicate with each other. Get in a room with a few true geniuses, and you’ll feel like listening to the teacher in Charlie Brown… but learn your vocabulary words and understand how they think & you can follow along. Second, after a few years, you will be able to understand many of the ways they think through problems. It’s radically different than the rest of us, but over time, you’ll pick up new ways of looking at the world. Geniuses have a massive toolbox of ways to think through problems. If you spend enough time with them, then you start to pick up individual tools. Now you can never compete fully because they can operate the tools faster and, more importantly, know what tools to use in various situations while you’re stuck trying each one… but there is real value in having them. Finally, and most importantly, you can recognize genius when you see it. It’s incredibly rare, but every few months you’ll spot someone truly gifted. Help them out and become friends with them & you have true talent on speed dial. I love understanding geopolitical complexity in situations like the Strait of Hormuz today. I think grok can tell you my predictions have been more accurate than most. How did I do that? Well, I worked through several problem sets, then when I reached my intellectual capacity, I called a genius. So how can this help you? Well, there is a trick. The most valuable resource in the world isn’t brain power or money… it’s time. Another valuable resource is friendship. Geniuses need friends & people who can help them compress time. For example, I have one friend I volunteered for years to drive him to the airport. I saved him having to spend time figuring out parking or worrying about a taxi. I got an hour each way getting access to his brain. But to do that, you have to recognize & understand genius first. There are two ways: Get a low-level job somewhere that hires geniuses. It doesn’t matter if you fetch coffee or manage the printer. You’re there to learn. Second is to get access to their classrooms and workshops. I was CTO of a startup at MIT. It sounds more impressive than it was, but the best part of the job was access to MIT lectures. I’d walk into subjects and just listen. Often I’d arrive late because what I wanted was not the lecture information but rather the chance to listen into the discussion after. My son does this now with the rocket club @ERAU_Daytona. Has he contributed a new rocket motor fuel design? No, but he helps lift the rockets & such, which lets him be a fly on the wall when the literal rock scientists work through problems.

During the Biden administration, H-1B visa holders were buying houses with 97-100% financing. 97% would come from the FHA, with the rest coming from state first-time home buyer programs. Zero money down. Thanks to programs that were supposed to be helping low-income American families buy their own homes. FHA loans to non-permanent residents quickly grew to represent 6% of mortgage issuances. The percentage was undoubtedly higher in places like the DFW area, where H-1B visa holders are disproportionately concentrated. I don’t have anything against people in America on H-1B visas. I’ve said it before—and I’ll say it again—that I’ve found many of them to be great people on an individual level, and I wish them all nothing but the best. Individual immigrants—especially those here legally—are not at fault for flawed US immigration policy. But this might be the most radicalizing thing I’ve ever seen. Not only are American workers forced to compete for jobs, they’re also forced to compete in the housing market against people bringing 0-3% of a house’s cost to the closing table, versus the 10-20% most people have to pay. First, companies import mass numbers of H-1B visa holders, largely in "back office" white-collar fields like IT and accounting. This essentially imposes a lower ceiling on domestic wages in these job categories. Next, these workers—who are generally concentrated in certain geographic areas—create more demand for housing (especially in good school districts), driving up home prices and the cost of living. Then, to top it off, they don’t even have to save up money for a down payment. They can close on a $500k house with $0-15k plus a 97% FHA loan. Meanwhile, ordinary American families are forced to come to with $50-100k for the same down payment. I don’t care how you feel about Trump or what your preferred immigration policies are; there’s no defending this. It screws over hard-working American citizens several different ways over, and it’s yet another reason why I will always be glad Trump won and Kamala Harris lost in 2024.

@JDVance Now go after the companies that are hiring foreigners of a single ethnicity into different departments If my business only hired white guys for software development or IT, there would be a problem with that

Another great win for our fraud task force. We will not tolerate foreign nationals abusing our visa system at the expense of the American people.

@ValerieFoushee Get the foreigners out, and get young American men trained and working

The short deadline our government gives STEM international students to find a sponsor for their work visa is increasingly unrealistic in Trump's economy. I’m introducing the Stop the Brain Drain Act to extend the period that graduates on F-1 student visas can remain in the United States. This bill is an important step to provide international students, who've graduated from our universities, opportunities for success without having to leave the country.

I’m on my land here, 50 acres that would be perfect for pasturing sheep. Just had a conversation with local USDA representative about how the federal government might be able to help me grow my farm, and he said all they can do is based on the 2018 farm plan where they can address resource concerns Can’t do anything to help me get fencing, Bermuda grass, water source, or anything else to help me get started livestock farming. Apparently they can only address resource concerns, not anything that would cause a resource constraint 🤦

@BuzzPatterson Lived in Halden just down the road age 4-9 Thought cross-country skiing was the only kind of skiing, and ate a lot of codfish

So, when I was a child, 3rd through 6th grade, I lived in Oslo, Norway. My dad was a US Air Force pilot and stationed at NATO’s Kolsas Mountain, right outside of Oslo. He was the military aide for the ranking US general in Norway. We lived in a Norwegian subdivision a few miles away from his work. The NATO community was amazing. Movie nights, family dinners, trips to museums, ski trips… All of our neighbors were Norwegian, so I quickly learned the language and taught them how to play baseball. They thought I was saying “Buzz Ball” and I didn’t correct them. 😎 They taught me soccer and skiing. I went to school at the US Embassy school a few miles away. It was grades 1-12. Not a lot of us there but the education was outstanding. I also played my first little league baseball there. And I’d play for a long time after. Another really cool thing about that school was that, in the winter, I would actually ski to school with my younger brother. We had both cross country skis and downhill skis. The school also had its own runs and ski jump, so I learned to jump there as well. Sometimes I’d ski to school on my cross country’s with my downhills strapped to my back. The experience was idyllic. Short summers, cold winters, little sunshine, no American frills, no TV, no internet, no phones. Just an American service family serving the nation abroad. I wouldn’t change a minute.

@girdley Getting things done should be part of the culture

It's incredibly easy to let go of the poor performer who is low ethics or a jerk. It's incredibly tough to fire someone with a great culture fit who doesn't get things done.

@SamaHoole Our ancestors must’ve been so much more advanced than us to be able to create this self healing and self replicating biological technology

"Beef can't feed the world. It's just not scalable." A fair point. We need a serious technological solution. What we actually need is to mobilise our greatest scientific minds and pour billions of dollars into developing a revolutionary new agricultural technology. The specifications are demanding. It would need to operate on the roughly two-thirds of global agricultural land that is too rocky, too steep, too thin-soiled, or too high-altitude to grow crops. It would need to require no irrigation, drawing only on rainfall. It would need to function without electricity, without supply chains, without sterile inputs, and without a centralised manufacturing facility. It would need to convert cellulose, the most abundant organic compound on the planet, into complete bioavailable human protein. We currently have no industrial process that does this. The cellulose just sits there. It would need to make use of the agricultural byproducts that currently go to waste. Crop residues. Brewers' grain. Oilseed meal. The husks, stalks, and chaff that pile up after every harvest. Convert it all into food, ideally with a complete amino acid profile and bioavailable iron, zinc, B12, and creatine as a bonus. It would need to fertilise the soil while operating, rather than depleting it. It would need to reproduce itself at no cost. It would need to come with leather, tallow, gelatin, bone meal, and approximately ninety other secondary products as standard. And it would need to do all of this while running, ideally, on solar energy converted via photosynthesis into a low-grade plant matter that the technology could then process internally through some form of multi-chamber fermentation system. This is the holy grail of food technology. We should fund it. We should put our best people on it. Anyway. There's a cow in a field in Worcestershire that has been doing all of the above for ten thousand years. She has not asked for any funding. But please, let's keep looking.

@CanesCoachL @megynkelly Especially in track and field 28 year old pros competing against 18 year olds Why??

What is the NCAA doing about D1 schools signing so many pro players from Europe? Our Universities are signing Pros from Europe and not our American high school athletes. Something is wrong with this picture.

@esrtweet Going through Python code with Ruff and Desloppify, and the JavaScript with Biome and Fallow, lots of good improvements

For the last six weeks - specifically since the 13th of February - I have been shipping a software release a day. This is because I have been marching through my 62 personal open-source software projects with fire, sword, and robot friend. Fixing bugs, implementing wishlist features, hardening code, and cleaning up over 40 years of technical debt. I also did first ship on two small projects during the march. AI, amplifying my skills, made this possible. We live in a time of wonders. Today I reached the end of the string. Now I can take on new projects without the constant feeling that I might be neglecting the older ones - and knowing that my code has been judged solid by state-of-the-art AIs. (Plural because I started with ChatGPT 5.1 and am now on 5.5. Grok was helpful for research and questions.) There's still plenty for me to work on. Watch this space.

@bryanhasling Buy some land and plant an Orchard

At ripe age of 36 y/o, I find myself needing to reinvent myself. I've been the startup guy, building his own startup practice. 0-to-1. But the practice hit some milestones lately - and it feels like that entire first-leg of the race is done. So on one hand, I'm stoked! This is the friggin dream. But also.. *what the hell* are you supposed to do next? Coasting isn't an option. I'm too young, with too much info in my brain the world needs more of. It's time to level up. And I guess it's the first time I've gotten a promotion but didn't have a boss telling me what my new goals are.

@gregpr07 lost me with the use of an undefined TLA