Peniel

Captive of the muses

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

Happiest moment.

[David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf]

@Chancellorpen You do.

[Gappy (Giuseppe Paleologo) @__paleologo]

In the wake of SPCX’ IPO, it seems the people that are favorable to it celebrate Musk’s ingenuity and drive. They don’t care for his politics.

The people who lament it hate Musk’s politics. They don’t care for his ingenuity and drive.

There is a deep lesson in this. Although I am not sure which.

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

Exactly

[arnav @arnav_kumar]

Elon Musk may be remembered for electric cars, reusable rockets, AI, brain-computer interfaces, and perhaps one day, Mars.

But his greatest contribution may be a complete reset of human ambition.

He reminded an entire generation that it is still possible to attempt absurdly difficult things, risk public failure, and pursue goals measured in decades rather than quarters.

Whether his bets succeed or fail, he has expanded humanity's sense of what is worth trying.

Every generation inherits a ceiling on what it believes is possible.

Musk's greatest contribution to mankind will be that he has raised this ceiling a million miles higher.

Almost like the SpaceX Starship rocket lifting the collective ambition of mankind

[Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge]

Finally happened.

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

This

[Casey Handmer @CJHandmer]

The lesson I take from the SpaceX IPO is that the only thing stopping us from solving arbitrarily difficult problems is extreme creativity in business models.

No amount of tax and spend programs got us reusable rockets and great electric cars. Customer delight is a necessary precondition for success.

There seems to be some discussion around whether successful entrepreneurs should give up control of their companies so they can subsidize some philanthropic venture that otherwise has no value prop sufficient to run it as a business where customers voluntarily exchange money for goods and services at a competitive and reasonable price.

This misses the point. Transformational products deliver tangible value at 1000x the rate of charities whose value cannot be tested in the market place. Think about the undeniable value of the smart phone, satellite Internet, electric consumer devices, etc etc.

I think the transformational moment for SpaceX was when Elon stepped away from the philanthropic Mars greenhouse concept and fixed his resolve on unlocking radically better rockets for humanity. The greenhouse would have been, at best, a neat trick. Falcon and Starship give humanity a durable economic engine to maintain and improve access to space, forever.

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

@eutaktospol My point is, being good is hard, the problem btn having good values and actions is doing it even when it's hard. This persistence. That's what I meant

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

Persistence is the highest of virtues

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

What possible virtue can't be used for evil? Courage? Intelligence? Even morality can be used for downright evil and has many, many times. Any virtue can in the hands of the great and good man and the great and vile man. Genghis Khan was courageous, mobsters have moral codes and brilliant men have been evil. The virtue of goodness is what is left. And it's no single virtue to be good you must be courageous, persistent and wise

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

Persistence means not yeilding in the greater quest. It doesn't mean never changing your mind. Success is a search process, persistence will help you get there. Persistence for it to work requires trying things, feedback from the world, and trying other things. But never yielding in the greater quest. Can it be used for evil? Yes.

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

@__paleologo How would you rate it's writing so far?

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

> you’ll never start a rocket company
> you’ll never build your own engines
> you’ll never be able to use off-the-shelf parts
> you’ll never survive three launch failures
> you’ll never reach orbit
> you’ll never win NASA’s trust
> you’ll never launch cargo to the ISS
> you’ll never compete with Boeing
> you’ll never compete with Lockheed
> you’ll never make rockets reusable
> you’ll never land a rocket vertically
> you’ll never land one on a drone ship
> you’ll never reuse a booster
> you’ll never fly the same booster 10 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 20 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 30 times
> you’ll never recover and reuse the fairing
> you’ll never lower launch costs
> you’ll never launch every month
> you’ll never launch every week
> you’ll never launch multiple times a week
> you’ll never carry astronauts
> you’ll never replace Roscosmos
> you’ll never fly civilians to orbit
> you’ll never manufacture satellites at scale
> you’ll never build the biggest constellation ever
> you’ll never make satellite internet work
> you’ll never make satellite internet fast
> you’ll never make satellite internet affordable
> you’ll never serve rural customers
> you’ll never serve aircraft and ships
> you’ll never build a methane rocket engine
> you’ll never make full-flow staged combustion work
> you’ll never build the most powerful rocket ever
> you’ll never build a rocket bigger than Saturn V
> you’ll never build it out of stainless steel
> you’ll never launch Starship
> you’ll never separate Super Heavy and Starship
> you’ll never relight Raptor in space
> you’ll never bring Super Heavy back
> you’ll never catch a booster with Mechazilla tower arms
> you’ll never launch 85% of mass to orbit worldwide
> you’ll never change the economics of space
> you’ll never force the entire industry to copy you
> you’ll never win
> you’ll never IPO

Congratulations to @elonmusk and the SpaceX team. You did what countless people said was impossible, and you did it time and time again.

Today is your day. You deserve this. May it be a glorious one.

[Hank Green @hankgreen]

The hustle bros won't tell you this, but swimming upstream against your nature is always bad strategy.

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

@DavidDeutschOxf Love that

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

This is actually crazy

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is a super exciting release - Claude Fable 5 is the same underlying model as Mythos but with added safeguards. The benchmarks are great and it's SOTA on everything by a margin but I'll add that *qualitatively* also, this is a major-version-bump-deserving step change forward (imo of the same order as Claude 4.5 was in November), peaking especially for long problem-solving sessions on very difficult problems. You can give it a lot more ambitious tasks than what you're used to, the model "gets it" and it will just go, and it's never felt this tempting to stop looking at the code at all (but don't do this in prod!). The model still has quirks that people will run into and the safeguards are configured to be a little too trigger happy for launch, which can hopefully be tuned over time.

I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full wandb that is hyper-specific just for your project), you can 10X your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results, anything! "Free your mind" (Matrix ref). Really looking forward to all the things people build!

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

This

[Jeff Dean @JeffDean]

Denying entry to a Somali soccer official selected as one of the World Cup referees is quite shameful. The whole point of the World Cup is as a spirited athletic competition that brings us together, and allowing him to officiate is obviously the right thing to do.

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

@carl_feynman Flex

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

@bcubeddd The only reason we have science is because some weird people in the past found it interesting

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

Damn that's high praise

[John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack]

I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer than I am.

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

@poladian57260 @JoshPhillipsPhD Read As you like it, it'll make you less miserable

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

@morallawwithin Not for you maybe

[Peniel @Chancellorpen]

@natashamalpani Hmm, my issue with the verifier is, you can verify correctness but not importance