Brett Bond

@GavinSBaker Yeah you’re very wrong. Datacenters in space just make no sense. You vastly overstate advantages and you don’t understand the physics of cooling, power, radiation. Not to mention poor economics of maintenance, failure rate and obsolescence. Earth FTW

Deeply amused by all the confident commentary that datacenters in space do not work from a physics and engineering perspective. Elon operates two of the largest coherent GPU clusters in the world, SpaceX is responsible for over 90% of mass to orbit and SpaceX operates the largest satellite constellation in the solar system. More than 10 years later, no other company or country can consistently land and reuse orbital rockets. He publicly stated that the “lowest cost way to do AI compute will be with solar powered satellites.” Maybe, just maybe, his “pencil and paper analysis of the physics or the economics at play” is superior to yours. There might have even been more than just a “pencil and paper analysis” of the subject done by some of the best engineers in the world. Perhaps they have thought of a cooling solution that has not occurred to the galaxy brain accounts here even after they took several minutes to carefully think about the problem. The CEO of Google also agrees that data centers in space will be “normal” within a decade. If you are not currently operating a large AI datacenter, a large satellite cluster and have not landed a rocket, maybe be a little less quick to confidently assume that Elon and Google are *both* wrong on this topic. Especially when there is a working, albeit very small, datacenter in space *today* - Starcloud’s orbital setup just successfully trained an LLM. Great name btw. Yes, I am biased on these topics and as ever, time will tell.

@chamath You lost me at the pay range

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@compliantvc I just moved to Italy as a 6-time startup founder. Nevermind investment, not looking, but honestly is it even possible to do a startup here?

I raised a €100 million to invest in European startups However, the European Financial Innovation Committee suggested I reduce my fund from €100m to €3m after going through their 18 month approval process After paying a 60% VAT, I have €1.2m left to invest into startups All investments will be subject to government approval and additional taxes Which talented EU founders should I meet?

@EconTalker Right, it’s a war. The difference between war and genocide is that when one side surrenders the killing stops.

Call me old-fashioned but I prefer to keep the term “genocide” for systematic attempts at slaughtering and exterminating a people. The word has now been so degraded that it is useless with adding the word “real” in front of it. My suspicion is that this began long before October 7 through the colonialist-settler theme. Feel free to share examples of the latter. And of course some colonialists throughout history did commit genocide. But we here in Israel are not colonizers. And if you disagree, please explain the two million Arabs who live here in Israel as full citizens with voting rights, subsidized education and health care.

What I notice is that portions are way smaller. They’re also way less salty. There’s a tendency (and a need) to walk a lot especially common after meals. The rhythm of morning coffee, a midday meal including a pasta, walking, a dinner with more carbs, then more walking means: weight loss not gain, a bit more of an up and down to the day, but it’s kept in sync with working patterns like having a few hours off at midday. Sleep is definitely improved with a balanced evening meal say 50-60% carbohydrate and a glass of wine.

It’s quite fine in Italy for me to eat a higher carbohydrate diet. Whatever keto I tried in the past didn’t work for me back in the US. It ruined my sleep and I was eating tons of meat, feeling alive but weird. Italians do eat pasta, bread, pizza etc very often, and so I am too.

I’ve also learned a lot from my elderly neighbors. They pretty much all are. From little things about our apartment building and dealing with community issues to linguistic tidbits and they even bring us food and give us plants. I lived in Summit, NJ the past 4 years, barely talk to my neighbors, and the place is a ghost town even on weekends because everyone’s got their kids in sports

Think of the Italian nonna. And there’s also the more recent phenomenon of mammone here sort of like Failure to Launch ppl seem to keep living with their parents, maybe tooo long. I think it’s not just that the kids don’t have enough money, I also think the parents want them to contribute to their expenses.

Italians seem to value older people more than compared in the US where we too often shut them away, ignore their sage advice, forget to learn from our past that they can easily tell us about, and try to hide and avoid our own aging like it’s death itself.

Sto imparando italiano e ho trovato lezioni per adulti gratuiti right here in Santa. I’ll write in English or Italian as a way to see how I improve over time. My wife’s Italian but we found it shockingly difficult to speak the language from the US. It’s like the mind gets compartmentalized. I remember one time in Italy when I couldn’t remember the name Burger King. It’s like I knew that I knew it but just couldn’t recall that stupid place. MUCH easier to learn the language when you’re here. I’ve never take lessons I just talk to people. Italians seem to be remarkably understanding about messing up, and they also like to try out their English on me so we often have conversations where I’ll speak only italian and they’ll speak only English and we both just keep plowing through.

We’re in Santa Margherita, exactly 100km from Milan right next to Portofino. If you’re around, drop me a line and say hi.

I moved to Italy recently and I’ll jot down some of my notes about the culture and language compared to the US. Twitter seems a good place for this sort of thing: who has time for a blog? Of course if you never take time, then how can you ever have time ;) this seems a happy compromise

Your examples of torque sensing, microphones are sensors other than the ones he mentions: lidar/radar. I think you’re misinterpreting Elon’s point: he isn’t broadly discrediting sensor fusion, just the fusion of those specific sensors which are both effectively visual modalities. If you look at Tesla’s deep learning “hydra” it does fusion of many lower level networks such as occupancy, and there’s not much difference between synthesizing those lower results including conflict resolution and fusing sensor data, but the main point is they’re different sensing modalities.

@chamath Living in Italy for the year (Santa Margherita)…started my first AI company in 2015… do another one or just enjoy the focaccia?

Can someone please start CAA for AI people.

@Fredrikstal @DungeonGrill @jack @ana_couper I’m not convinced. I hold a bunch of patents, mostly defensive. If they have value, I could raise some $ to fight the bigger guy bc the prize of winning would be worth the risk.

@DungeonGrill @jack @ana_couper That's how patent law is supposed to work, and does by part of the law. You are free to use a patent, develop it further and repatent. The broken part is the use of it as a weapon. You can never afford to win in court to a financially much stronger opponent.

delete all IP law

How I arrange the pillows when my wife’s away.

@porlando I find it more difficult to handle non-response ie nobody’s listening, nobody cares about the product than the negative ones. Luckily I’ve been training hardcore my entire entrepreneurial career!

I’ve been making founders do 30 days of rejection, where they purposely try to get rejected once a day. The purpose is to toughen up so you’re not broken by hearing customers / investors / collaborators say “no.” Recently I’ve added AI analysis. These are the exact steps.

@chamath You’re assuming AI models are LLMs, but many soon won’t be. Machine learning takes any form of data and finds useful patterns in it. For example industrial models trained on sensor data is a whole orthogonal space with wide open fields.

Let me say the quiet part out loud: AI model building is a money trap. What you are seeing here is a feature of modern AI models: there is no bounding law like Moore’s law where advances can be predictably expected. Nor has any model builder adequately publicly explained what to expect sans jargon and BS. What this means is that it’s very difficult to plan spending programs to create advances and will likely render entire months and possibly years of energy, hardware, R&D, OpEx and CapEx wasted and useless as new innovations are discovered. Open Source is the clear winner. Closed source will be forced to keep their best models secret and sell to enterprises OR try and create some incredible consumer app with it. Having done this before, my lived experience is that this is easier said than done. Net/net consumers will win, many venture funded efforts will not.

@chamath @nytimes @washingtonpost @X @cremieuxrecueil @AutismCapital @shellenberger @KanekoaTheGreat @TheChiefNerd The papers have gone way downhill but without paid reporters what sources do these alternative “news” outlets use? Surely they’re aggregating and analyzing more than generating actual reporting. Where do I subscribe to pay for accurate primary sources?

I cancelled my @nytimes and @washingtonpost subscriptions and just reallocated the money to subscribe and follow the following folks on @X whom I believe help me get accurate news. @cremieuxrecueil @AutismCapital @shellenberger @KanekoaTheGreat @TheChiefNerd I will periodically publish accounts I subscribe to on @X that you may want to consider supporting as well. Worst case, consider following them.