John McCrea

True story: Harvard Business School rejected me in '91. When I got the news, I checked to see if they'd cashed my $100 application fee check. They hadn't, so I did a "stop payment". When they called, trying to collect, I suggested they could learn a business lesson from this. 😂

@garrytan Fuck, yeah!

Polymaths in this era will be undefeated

@elonmusk Experienced it today as a passenger. Complete game-changer.

Try Tesla FSD (self-driving)!

Can confirm.

@paultoo Would you please help me connect with Deliver for California? I want to help. john@indigopac.org. Many thanks.

Ukraine crushed NATO partners during naval exercises near the coast of Portugal. Ukrainian Magura V7 naval drones simulated the sinking of a frigate during the drills. After several simulated hits, NATO sailors even wrote in the chat: “So are you going to attack us or not?” — not realizing they had already been attacked. Ukrainian operators commanded the “red team” and won all five combat scenarios. The exercises highlighted something important: unmanned naval systems, combined with Ukraine’s real combat experience and operational planning, can pose a serious challenge to traditional naval forces. They also demonstrated that many militaries — including NATO — are still not prepared for this new type of warfare. I have said this before: today it is not Ukraine that needs NATO, but NATO that needs Ukraine. Source: FAZ

This robotic hand can weave itself together in minutes. Allonic developed a process that "braids" robot bodies around a 3D-printed skeleton in a single automated step. The tech draws from the textile industry, using braided fibers instead of traditional mechanical joints and bearings. Their braiding system grows tendon-driven structures directly onto skeletal cores, creating flexible yet durable parts without screws or assembly. One finger only needs 4 skeletal elements. Then thousands of braided fibers wrap around them to handle force and articulation. The software converts designs directly into machine code that runs the braiding process. But what matters is that robotic hands like this can cost up to $30,000, ~20-30% of a humanoid robot's total price. Allonic's braiding process could crush those costs while enabling custom designs at scale.

@garrytan Gary, can you hook me up with an intro to California Back to Basics? We can help. Time is of the essence.

Matt Mahan on Saving California with Common Sense, literally on Sam Harris' Common Sense Podcast "We've actually given Trump his most powerful ammunition here in California by failing to fix our problems."

@FutureJurvetson Wow. I had no idea. I thought rockets were developed by the Germans in WWII. Thanks for sharing!

🚀 Today is the 100-year anniversary of the first liquid-fueled rocket launch. Like the Wright Brothers, Robert Goddard’s flight changed rocketry forever, pioneering today's mainstay, liquid-fueled SpaceX rockets. Here are my artifacts from his 1926 flight (last photo). But first, I am pointing to a museum replica of Nell — Goddard’s 10’ tall rocket powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen. It went just 41’ up in 2.5 seconds, hitting 60 MPH, but it marked the dawn of the space age. The New York Times publicly mocked his work in 1920, but Goddard persisted. Fearing further criticism, Goddard kept his 1926 launch secret for nearly a decade. Go Goddard, go, go go! “There can be no thought of finishing, for aiming at the stars, both literally and figuratively, is the work of generations, but no matter how much progress one makes there is always the thrill of just beginning.” — Robert Goddard From the Future Ventures’ space museum, last photo: 1) Inner nozzle from the first flight Starting on the far right, the alundum cement rocket nozzle liner from the liquid-fueled rocket launched by Robert H. Goddard, likely the world's first on March 16, 1926. The piece measures approximately 1.25 x 2.25 x .5 inches and has scorch marks on the interior from use. This artifact was given to Frederick C. Durant III by Goddard’s widow, Esther Goddard, and has been kept in an envelope labeled in Durant’s hand, “Ceramic rocket nozzle liner used by R. H. Goddard in 1920s, possibly from the 1926 (March 16) flight.”   Frederick C. Durant III, the former head of astronautics at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, was one of the world’s foremost authorities of spaceflight and rocketry. This is one of several artifacts he received from Esther Goddard, one of the four people on the crew for the launch of March 16, 1926, and from her testimony, he determined the 1926 flight as the likely origin. The small size of the piece lends credence to this conclusion, as Goddard’s rocket experiments grew larger and larger over time. 2) Fuel valve remains from a failed experiment Bottom left. Fuel-feed-rate needle valve from one of Goddard’s early rockets, circa late 1920s/early 1930s. The piece measures approximately 7 x 5 x 2” and consists of a valve passing through a longer pipe segment attached to a fragment of a larger base; a short bracket extends from the base, which was damaged in a blast during rocket experiments. The needle valves were located near the top of Goddard’s rockets and were a critical element in controlling his fuel feed line and tank systems. This artifact was given to Frederick C. Durant III by Goddard’s widow, Esther Goddard. 3) Fuel Tank Baffle Upper left. Bi-level metal rocket fuel tank baffle from one of Goddard’s early rockets, circa mid-to-late 1920s. The piece measures approximately 3.5″ in diameter and 2.25″ tall and consists of two discs connected by four rods. This artifact was also given to Frederick C. Durant III by Goddard’s widow, Esther Goddard. The baffle was an important element of Goddard’s fuel tank design, used to combat the ‘slosh’ of liquid propellant during flight. A couple more Goddard quotes that remind me of @ElonMusk: “Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace.” "It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow."

we are cooked

I am leaving the Washington Post to join a new journalistic venture backed by Politico founder Robert Allbritton that will be both the hometown publication the D.C. region sorely needs and a scrappy and fearless national news organization. I hope you'll join us.

@aakashgupta How did you get this?

Stop scrolling and watch this 55 min talk from Steve Jobs in 1983 where he tells you exactly how the next 4 decades will unfold

What a gift that this was recorded, digitized, and shared. The man, the myth, the legend.

💯

Thomas Massie just went nuclear on Trump’s DOJ for bringing zero “charges, arrests, or investigations” over the Epstein files. “Who should be investigated?” “I’ll name them right here.” “Leon Black.” “Jes Staley, accused of terrible things.” “Leslie Wexner.” “Why did the FBI list him as a co-conspirator in their own documents in a child sex trafficking case, and then tell him that they had no questions for him?” “Over 3 million documents describing horrible things, unspeakable things, much of it redacted.” “Over two dozen people have resigned, CEOs, members of government worldwide.” “But I haven’t seen any arrests or investigations here in the United States.” “Prince Andrew, Duke of York, who has since been stripped of his royal titles due to his affiliation with Jeffrey Epstein, has been arrested.” “Peter Mandelson, who previously served as UK’s ambassador to the United States, resigned in disgrace from UK’s House of Lords and the Labour Party, and he’s been arrested.” “Former Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjørn Jagland, has been charged.” “But we don’t see any charges, arrests, or investigations in the United States.” “What do we see?” “We see our FBI director celebrating in the locker room at the Olympics overseas.” “We need justice.”

We’ve trained a multimodal AI model to turn routine pathology slides into spatial proteomics, with the potential to reduce time and cost while expanding access to cancer care.

There is no substitute for the person who Knows What To Do.

Great discussion. I can correct a few of the early memories for history. The chip behind SGI was the "Geometry Engine". It was not Jim Clarke's thesis project. He was a prof. at Stanford, and the Geometry Engine was a project of him and his extraordinary grad students. No computer company wanted to add a real-time 3D chip, so Jim founded his own company, Silicon Graphics. If you want to read more of the history of 1994/1995, SGI and Netscape, enjoy: therealmccrea.com/2014/01/09/jan…

My conversation with Marc Andreessen (@pmarca), co-founder of @a16z and Netscape. 0:00 Caffeine Heart Scare 0:56 Zero Introspection Mindset 3:24 Psychedelics and Founders 4:54 Motivation Beyond Happiness 7:18 Tech as Progress Engine 10:27 Founders Versus Managers 20:01 HP Intel Founder Legacy 21:32 Why Start the Firm 24:14 Venture Barbell Theory 28:57 JP Morgan Boutique Banking 30:02 Religion Split Wall Street 30:41 Barbell of Banking 31:42 Allen & Company Model 33:16 Planning the VC Firm 33:45 CAA Playbook Lessons 36:49 First Principles vs. Status Quo 39:03 Scaling Venture Capital 40:37 Private Equity and Mad Men 42:52 Valley Shifts to Full Stack 45:59 Meeting Jim Clark 48:53 Founder vs. Manager at SGI 54:20 Recruiting Dinner Story 56:58 Starting the Next Company 57:57 Nintendo Online Gamble 58:33 Building Mosaic Browser 59:45 NSFnet Commercial Ban 1:01:28 Eternal September Shift 1:03:11 Spam and Web Controversy 1:04:49 Mosaic Tech Support Flood 1:07:49 Netscape Business Model 1:09:05 Early Internet Skepticism 1:11:15 Moral Panic Pattern 1:13:08 Bicycle Face Story 1:14:48 Music Panic Examples 1:18:12 Lessons from Jim Clark 1:19:36 Clark Versus Barksdale 1:21:22 Tesla Versus Edison 1:23:00 Edison Digression Setup 1:23:13 AI Forecasting Myths 1:23:43 Edison Phonograph Lesson 1:25:11 Netscape Two Jims 1:29:11 Bottling Innovation 1:31:44 Elon Management Code 1:32:24 IBM Big Gray Cloud 1:37:12 Engineer First Truth 1:38:28 Bottlenecks and Speed 1:42:46 Milli Elon Metric 1:47:20 Starlink Side Project 1:49:10 Closing Includes paid partnerships.

@pmarca 🤞

That is indeed what we are getting, and it’s amazing.

Idiocracy

💯