Jack Madden

Building Places. Interests include real estate development, tech, space, engineering, philosophy, music, nature.

[Max Zhdanov @maxxxzdn]

🌍Today we release Mosaic, a probabilistic weather model that shifts the Pareto frontier of ML weather forecasting.

It matches the skill of state-of-the-art models while generating a 24-member, 10-day global forecast in under 12 s on a single H100.

Thread!

[Seth Bannon @sethbannon]

NASA just quietly published something incredible.

A map of how we build a permanent human presence off Earth.

It’s called the Moon Base User’s Guide.

Here's what's in it! 🧵

[Jack Madden @Jack____Madden]

@AvalancheFusion So no more steam meme?

[Blue Origin @blueorigin]

Melt. Extract. Breathe. Repeat. 🧑‍🚀

From Moon dust to fresh air, our Air Pioneer technology turns lunar regolith into breathable oxygen, ready for astronauts returning to the Moon. At our Space Resources Center of Excellence in LA, we developed a reactor (left) that melts regolith simulant and passes a current through it to release oxygen and other gases. The gases flow into the purification system (right) and emerge as medical- and propellant-grade oxygen. A flight-qualified Air Pioneer at this same scale could provide the first breath of life for a sustainable Moon base. 🌕

[Lip-Bu Tan @LipBuTan1]

Elon has a proven track record of reimagining entire industries. This is exactly what is needed in semiconductor manufacturing today. Terafab represents a step change in how silicon logic, memory and packaging will get built in the future. Intel is proud to be a partner and work closely with Elon on this highly strategic project 🚀🚀

[Jack Madden @Jack____Madden]

@BigDemoPrez I am a dummy

[Jack Madden @Jack____Madden]

What a time to be alive!

[NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman @NASAAdmin]

NASA is building SR-1 Freedom, a nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft, launching to Mars in 2028. 

We are proud to announce this during the 250th year of the United States, the mission’s name reflects the spirit of American innovation and exploration. 
This mission will bring America’s nuclear power capabilities to space and deliver the Skyfall payload of Ingenuity class helicopters to explore the Red Planet.  

Nuclear power and propulsion will be the key to undertaking crewed missions to Mars and exploring the outer solar system.  

Space Reactor-1 (SR-1) Freedom will make the next giant leap and accomplish a key component of President Trump’s National Space Policy, bringing nuclear to space alongside @Energy.

[Jack Madden @Jack____Madden]

This needs to deploy nationally

[Claude @claudeai]

🥇CrossBeam by Mike Brown

California builders lose months navigating permit corrections.

CrossBeam speeds up California's permitting process by giving builders and municipalities faster tools for code compliance and plan review.

[Colin Gorrie @colingorrie]

Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).

The Spelling of our Tongue was in the main ſettled ere the eighteenth Century, & the Grammar has ſuffer'd but little Alteration ſince. Yet before this happy Settlement, things were exceeding ſtrange.

In Shakeſpeares dayes, ſpelling was much more variable, & you ſhall finde notable differences in the grammar: "thou" could bee intimate or inſulting, depending vpon whom you ſayd it to; to chooſe amiſse had conſequences.

Wende we now tuo hundred ȝeer bifore, to Chauceres tyme. It seemeth ȝit as Englisshe, but it nis nat esy to reden withouten greet connynge.

Yet tuo hundred wintre er, sone after þat the Normans comen to þis londe, is Englisch on muchel wandlunge. Þe tunges work is tobroken, Frensce wordes comeþ in, and þe writunge is al totwemed.

Þy furðor þu underbæc færst, þy gelicor biþ Englisc gesewen þære Deniscan spræce. Englisce bec þæs m. geare ne mæg nan mann rædan buton he sundorlice geleornad sy.

[Beth Azor, “Canvassing Queen” @Bethazor1]

Leasing a mall that was 17% occupied, in a city a 3-hour flight away.

No excuses. Just strategy.

I embedded myself in the local market:
→ Subscribed to local news
→ Found an entrepreneur competition
→ Became the headline sponsor
→ Moved the judging + awards into the mall
→ Taught a leasing class inside the space
→ Brought 50 entrepreneurs through the doors
→ Offered free rent as prizes
→ Captured 100+ tenant leads
→ Earned major TV coverage

Result? “The mall is back.”

That’s how we jump-started leasing at Tower City, Cleveland, 2021

[Jack Madden @Jack____Madden]

@adamstatonsmith How do you get around cloudflare / needing a human in the loop ?

[Jack Madden @Jack____Madden]

The modern day B-24 pivot

[REINDUSTRIALIZE SUMMIT @reindsummit]

Something tells me we're going to start seeing a lot of this.

[Michael Boegl @michaelboegl]

the art of framing

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

Still think about this

[lusso @luusssso]

The landscape architecture of Brazilian artist Roberto Burle Marx doesn’t get talked about enough

[Captain Eli @TheCaptainEli]

Elon Musk is simply one of a kind.

In his conversation with @Erdayastronaut , you can clearly see it’s the end of what was probably a very long workday—and he’s likely already gone through everything work-related with the SpaceX team.

Yet even after the formal interview wraps up, Elon shows zero signs of wanting to end the chat. He’s genuinely excited, lighting up as he dives into physics, the technical challenges ahead, and the solutions he’s thinking about.

That’s where it all comes from: pure vision + real, child-like joy in actually building and making things happen.

[Ole Lehmann @itsolelehmann]

The scale here is actually hilarious when you think about it

SF covers *forty-seven* square miles

That's space for roughly 12 Tesla Gigafactories, or *every* major auto plant in Michigan combined

BYD's new complex will be so vertically integrated that lithium ore walks in one door and finished EVs drive out the other

They're building the battery cells, the motors, the semiconductors, and assembling the cars all under one roof

Tesla's original Gigafactory seemed absurd when Musk announced it

BYD just casually announced one that's 12 times bigger lol

Scale is relative, and China is redefining what large-scale manufacturing looks like

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt.

To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms.

NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks.

The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year.

And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond.

A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream.

The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts.

[Karan Kunjur @KaranKunjur]

As the founder of a space company, I like to think I’m pretty optimistic - but even I underestimated the rate of acceleration we’ve seen over the last few months.

Almost four years ago, Neel and I started a company because we were excited about Starship. We saw the opportunity to build much bigger, much higher power satellites that could start humanity down the path towards being a Type 2 Kardashev civilization. We decided to call the company K2, we made our logo a Dyson sphere.

Four years later, the Kardashev scale is a mainstream concept - with the ambition to make humanity a K2 civilization being broadcast by one of the greatest engineers in the world. Concepts that I thought were 5 to 10 years out, like orbital data centers - are now foundational capabilities for what could be one of the most significant IPOs ever.

We’ve gone from people asking us “why would anyone need a 100kW satellite?” to people taking that number, asking their AI to put it into their orbital data center excel and having the lightbulbs go off.

It’s honestly the best time ever to be building in space, we are truly fortunate to be building K2 today.

For a big satellite company, we’re a small fish in a big big pond. We may end up being NPCs in a much bigger game - time will tell. All I know is I’m going to have the time of my life building alongside people I admire and respect.

So up next, launching the 20kW satellite in two months, learning a ton, continuing designs on the 100kW satellite, scaling up the factory and doing our small part to help progress humanity up the curve.

“K2 or you’re not even trying.”

[𝖓𝖎𝖓𝖊 🕯 @atlanticesque]

This kind of building is called a "5-over-1"

Most wrongly assume that 5-over-1 means "5 floors of residential over 1 floor of commercial"

It actually means the upper floors are IBC Type V construction (wood-frame, flammable) and the bottom floor is Type I (concrete, fireproof)