Brian Freed

A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday." He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way." The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.

Every developer needs an AI shed: An always-on machine running on their tailscale network where the majority of their herdr agents are running.

This silly Omarchy Radio station has no right sounding so good! Maybe I'll get tired of the puns one day, but the tunes are so catchy I almost doubt it. radio.omarchy.org/#omarchy-o…

Highlights from move-in.

Did the Dems just steal an election with a thumb drive? In all fairness, in my election I wasn't 20 points ahead in the polls; maybe that's why the thumb drive in my district didn't get the same attention. Either way...those thumb drives sure are partisan!

I used to be a liberal independent. But my years in education, which has shown me exactly how distorted the left’s image of man is, have turned me into a conservative independent. Both political parties are detestable—the republicans because they fail to live up to their principles and the democrats because they succeed.

As I have repeatedly explained, the worst and most imbecilic ideas stem from academia. Many academics exist in an intellectual landscape wherein ideas are decoupled from the auto-corrective slap of reality. Hence, they spew nonsense and are rewarded with promotions for poisoning the minds of young people.

Jesse, I stop engaging with people when I realise they are operating in bad faith, not reading what I am actually saying and are primarily interested in dunking on the people they are pretending to engage with. For some reason there is a cadre of people here who hate Elon Musk so much they're incapable of processing any debate about any issue without seeing it as a pro or anti Elon point. I was and remain extremely enthusiastic about any effort to cut public expenditure and bring the budgets of Western countries into some semblance of normality. And I think the way the debate is had whereby any reduction in spending is framed as killing people is unhelpful, which I explained. That doesn't mean that I can opine with certainty about the exact impact of DOGE. I just don't think the framing is helpful which is the only thing I've said in this entire discussion. Beyond that, I have very little to say to someone who keeps trying to start a bitch fight with me by constantly tagging me into their tweets while promoting a guy who is a confirmed liar spreading claims about Israeli dog rapes. Calling me a "guru" or a "midwit" won't help you because anyone who is familiar with my work knows that I have never presented myself as an authority on anything outside of my very limited area of expertise while also knowing that my IQ is significantly above average. You're just being rude because you don't agree with me which is rarely a sign of someone who is winning the argument. I've always regarded you as a serious journalist so this is all a bit surprising. If you want to have a grown up conversation, I'm always up for that. Otherwise, carry on screaming into your echo chamber of Elon-haters but don't expect me to engage.

Their long march through our institutions will not be undone in a few years.  Saving the USA, and bringing back a free and virtuous West with competent institutions is the fight of our lives. Glad to have smart, optimistic voices like @ZubyMusic who understand what's at stake.

Let’s get off the keyboards and talk in person then John. I’ll fly you first class down to my studio. 2 hour flight from DC. I’ll pay for your security too if you require it. Let’s discuss these rules & precedents. I’ll also make a $10k donation to a mutually agreed worthy cause.

Fractal wrongness is the state of being completely incorrect at every conceivable scale of resolution. From a distance, one sees only a conclusion that misses the mark. But a detailed examination of any single premise or supporting argument reveals that it is just as wrong as the whole conclusion. Examining the roots of those wrong premises, in turn, reveals that they, too, are based on premises just as wrong as the whole business, and so on, to infinite depth.

🚨NEW -- HAKEEM JEFFRIES SIGNALS DEMS WILL OPPOSE FISA Here's JEFFRIES to me just now: “FISA was already on life support in terms of Democratic support, and the decision to put a deeply unserious, dangerous and unqualified person like Bill Pulte into a position as the acting director of national intelligence is about to cause the plug to be pulled.” FISA expires next week. Rs almost certainly do not have the votes without House Dems.

If that addict on your street were your own son, what would you do? That is the defining question that guides my 5 step plan to fix the homelessness problem in LA. We *must* end this evil racket of corrupt politicians and NGOs who profit off the misery of these poor souls. They launder money and feed them more drugs, so they can keep their customers locked in this hell on our streets. We have a moral obligation from God to help them and make our city safe and clean for everyone. Karen Bass and Nithya Raman have forsaken this city. Time for real leadership. Time for real compassion.