Jon Crowell

I don’t think the sports world is ready for how many unexpected positive tests they are going to find if every athlete is tested. Especially anxious to see how this plays out in sports like women’s basketball, where genetic gender testing isn’t done If they are truly going to do genetic testing on every female athlete, guaranteed there will be unexpected positives that will have a major life impact in the athlete who may have had no idea.

Trump: "The amazing thing is we don't need the Hormuz Strait. We don't need it. We don't need it at all. We have so much oil. Our country is not affected by this."

OpenAI shutting down Sora is the most predictable outcome of misunderstanding consumer behavior. Everyone grossly overestimates how creative people want to be. 99% of humans simply want to scroll and zone out instead of spending energy conceptualizing, editing, and creating videos. No matter how much the barrier to creation is lowered by a single prompt. It still takes effort and a fair amount of creative thinking. Even Instagram has 2 billion users. But hardly ~10 million (or 0.5%) would be serious creators. So any AI consumer app betting on "with [new_app], everyone becomes a creator!" is being delusional and will go down the same way. After all the word "consumer" exists for a reason. They consume. They don't produce (or even want to lol)

A $2.5 billion robot has been alone on another planet for 13 years and is still doing science. The scale of that sentence gets worse the longer you think about it. Curiosity landed in August 2012. Obama was president. Instagram had 80 million users. The iPhone 5 hadn’t shipped yet. The rover was designed for a two-year mission and 20 kilometers of driving. It’s now driven 35.5 kilometers, climbed over 327 meters up the side of a mountain, drilled 46 holes into Martian rock, and is currently running its fifth mission extension. The computer running all of this has 256 MB of RAM and a 200 MHz processor. Your AirPods have more computing power. Every command sent from Earth takes 14 minutes to arrive. Every photo sent back takes the same 14 minutes. When Curiosity drills into a rock, the team in Pasadena won’t know if it worked for half an hour. They’ve been operating on that delay, every single day, for 4,846 Martian sols. The power source is 10.6 pounds of plutonium-238 generating about 110 watts. Less than a ceiling fan. It will keep producing electricity for decades because the half-life of Pu-238 is 87.7 years. The rover will run out of moving parts before it runs out of power. And those wheels. Machined from single blocks of aluminum, 0.75 millimeters thick. Half a dime. JPL watched them get shredded by Martian rock starting in 2013, rerouted the entire mission path, taught the rover to drive backwards, and kept going. The wheels look like they lost a fight with a can opener. The rover is still climbing a mountain. Every iPhone you’ve owned since 2012 is in a landfill. Curiosity is on Mars, 140 million miles from the nearest repair shop, running on a ceiling fan’s worth of nuclear power, sending data through a 14-minute time delay, on shredded wheels, doing geology that rewrites what we know about whether life ever existed somewhere other than Earth. We built that. With 0.01% of the federal budget.