Ryan retweeted
Writing this in my personal capacity, but I have been flying these types of aircraft for more than 20 years, with over 8,000 hours, and have reasonable familiarity with how the charter world operates. I feel compelled to post after seeing commentary about the Lear 60 crash, from missile strikes to DEI to critiquing this poor woman’s final radio calls.
That last part is what I find most troubling. She was the second-in-command (SIC), and while she was empowered to point out mistakes as part of good crew resource management, she was doing her job, communicating with ATC right to the end in a terrifying situation. She likely knew before many of those calls that she was going to die. I have heard final calls from friends, from military pilots with thousands of hours in fighter aircraft, and they are just as heartbreaking because they know the end is approaching.
I understand the public interest given the footage and audio. But you do not know the aircraft’s maintenance history, whether there was a structural failure, if any failure was induced by turbulence, overspeed, or overcontrol, or everything happening in that cockpit. I am sure weather will be part of the investigation, but beyond that, it is speculation. The charter industry routinely hires commercial pilots very early in their careers to gain experience alongside an ATP-qualified captain before they move up to the airlines. She would still have the appropriate training, qualifications, and checkouts by an FAA examiner or designee.
Let people investigate, learn, and share the facts. Be respectful to those who perished and the families who carry their memories. God bless them and their loved ones.
Ryan retweeted
BREAKING: For the first time in American history, the Department of Energy has approved a commercial nuclear microreactor's safety analysis for full-power operations.
LA-based Radiant secured the approval, with testing planned at Idaho National Laboratory.
ALT Source: Radiant Rendering
Ryan retweeted
BREAKING: California is building its first new steel mill in over half a century.
Pacific Steel Group is investing $700 million in a steel production facility in Kern County, designed to melt recycled steel and manufacture rebar for critical infrastructure projects.
ALT Source: State of California
Ryan retweeted
I've been storing this one for quite a while!
We now officially supply chemically pure grade methane in California with our partner @westairgases. Photos are with our first externalized six pack during the spring.
An insane amount of hard work went into making this happen. I try not to think too much about the blood sweat and tears of the last five years but this milestone makes it particularly sweet.
westairgases.com/news/terraf…
Terraform is hiring! If you're an ambitious technically minded savant, Terraform is an incredible place to get exposed to every aspect of building a hardware business from sales and hiring to design test and analysis!
Ryan retweeted
I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands.
And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus.
Ryan retweeted
Someone should make a game where you have to restart a 50 year old industry in a civilization that has forgotten how to build big things by mass-manufacturing stainless steel vessels that can magically generate billions in revenue when you put cosmically-born spicy rocks in them, all with the goal of maintaining AI supremacy in the west, while lowering the cost of electricity far enough to bring nations out of energy poverty and supply abundance to the world
Ryan retweeted
watched this great blacksmith taken through the process of developing a new alloy of steel. really interesting
youtu.be/p6qsshPF-oA?is=tkAL…
Ryan retweeted
Here’s an idea for @sama @DarioAmodei et al:
- buy the books
- scan the books
- employ the best book binders and book restorers in the world to re-bind the books
- enlist @mspringut to build a gorgeous, classical stone and glass library whose mere edifice stands as a testament to human knowledge, never mind its contents
- and its contents are all the rare books in the world, preserved for our posterity
- put them in the library
- require (free) membership to visit (now it’s non-public, members only, might get you around the legal stuff)
>> new human library of Alexandria
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
Ryan retweeted
In a building in Sheffield there is a sealed chamber, and inside it a bath of molten salt held at 950 degrees. Drop in a handful of ground-up Moon rock, pass a current through it, and something remarkable happens: the oxygen locked inside the rock is pulled loose, ferried across the liquid, and collected, while what settles at the bottom is a heap of usable metal powder. Moon dust in at one end; breathable air and building material out the other.
The firm is the awesomely named and -branded Metalysis, and the process was built, first of all, for an earthbound job: extracting metals more cleanly than the old industrial methods allow. The European Space Agency looked at it and saw something more. Nearly half the weight of the lunar surface is oxygen, bound chemically into the rock, and a machine that can free it means astronauts on the Moon need not haul every lungful of air a quarter of a million miles from home. They could make it where they stand. ESA has chosen the Metalysis method to produce the first oxygen ever made on the surface of another world; a single one of its machines, by their reckoning, could yield around 400 kilograms of oxygen a year, and 400 of metal beside it.
It is easy, in a country that has spent so long narrating its own decline, to lose sight of what is still going on inside it. While Westminster rehearses the choreography of retreat, a company in one of the less fashionable cities in England has worked out how human beings will breathe on the Moon. The ingenuity that raised the mills, laid the railways, and split the atom did not evaporate. It is still here, in workshops and labs in the places the metropolitan imagination rarely visits, doing astonishing things mostly unremarked.
And then comes the question we so reliably answer wrong. This is what I've been talking about! Metalysis, the kind of firm this country has made a habit of losing: a world-leader in a strategic technology, built here, that the moment it becomes truly valuable will draw a foreign buyer, or an investor who wants it moved nearer his own shore. We have watched it happen to our chip designers, our AI labs, our finest engineering, again and again. We have never been short of talent. We have been short of the will to keep what the talent makes.
Progress exists, in large part, to break that habit: to make Britain the easiest place on earth to start something world-changing and the hardest place from which to carry it away. Metalysis should be making Moon oxygen from Sheffield in twenty years' time, its founders should be among the most celebrated people in the country, and the whole of it should still be ours, and circulating back into more, new, young world-beating props in a seething, thriving, brimming-over startup economy.
If that is the Britain you want, then help us build it. The invention is already here, in Sheffield and a hundred places like it. What it needs now is a country with the nerve to hold on to it.
Ryan retweeted
Sometimes my son gets scared at night. I lay down on his floor using a stuffed animals as a pillow, and he puts his hand out so I can hold it in mine. Every time now I know it might be the last time I get to do this so I hold on just a little bit tighter, not wanting to let go
Ryan retweeted
MIT has invented a 3D zipper that builds itself into a rigid object as you zip it. Could be a useful general purpose technology in the future.
