Jim Cantrell

Building Machines, Building Companies, Racing Cars. Arizona Space Commissioner

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

The audiobook version of my book Breaking All The Rules is finally out on Audible. Pick up a copy now and learn how a ragtag bunch of aerospace engineers revolted against the establishment and created a whole new capitalistic movement in space!
https://t.co/f7oW8iPWoF

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

@MagpulMagpie @SpaceX That’s what I’ve been saying for at least 15 years

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

I have always said that @SpaceX was about going to Mars. Even 20 years ago, when people asked me if we were all insane for starting the company. It's only been in the past few years that this surreal vision has begun to seem very real. I believe that Elon and SpaceX will make this happen.

https://t.co/u5NEHOidoR

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

Good question. It was a long time ago. At that time, I didn't think that there would ever be enough private money available to build what became the Falcon 9. I knew that it would require a billion dollars or so. NASA provided that after the shuttle was retired. And I was not really passionate about sending humans to Mars. I was more passionate about space capitalism. So I left out of respect for Elon. He needed a team that was 100% dedicated to his vision. Gwynne replaced me and provided that leadership that he needed. I have never regretted it a minute. I went on to help start a number of other companies including ICEYE who just closed a 1B round at a $10B valuation. Besides, money is not the goal. Making the world better is.

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

@VulcanIgnis Amazing….

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

Things sometimes happen to us in life for which we have no explanation. I have learned to pay attention to these things and not accept the conventional wisdom about them. I knew Kimball from the early days of SpaceX. Now we have one more thing in common.

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

Elon Musk’s younger brother says God spoke to him while he was paralyzed from the neck down, and it was a “beautiful” message.

KIMBAL MUSK: “I land on my head [while inner tubing], and the force pushes my head into my chest. It ruptures my spine at C6 and C7. Paralyzed from the neck down.”

“This doctor says, ‘We think we can fix you.’ And then I realize I’ve got tears streaming down the side of my face, and I have no idea what is going on.”

“I’m not a religious person. If anything, I’m against religion… And I had God speak to me.”

“It was this beautiful, soft, clear message: ‘If they fix you, you’re going to work on kids and food’ ... And it also said I would get a divorce.”

“Three days later, I come out of surgery, and it’s a success. One of the first things I do is ask for a laptop. I resign from my company and tell my wife I want to work with kids and food.”

“A few months later, I said we also need to be divorced.”

The career change. The divorce that came later. All of it happened exactly as the message said.

[James Woods @RealJamesWoods]

I don’t think Billy Woods and I are related, but, dear Lord, I wish we were.

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

@DataRepublican 100% correct. Nothing has changed. "No Kings" = "We Are The Kings"

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

@CoachForGov Media = Propaganda

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

@TheLastRefuge2 99% of what we see here is one form of propaganda or another.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented brains. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called ‘leaves’) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”

— Carl Sagan

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

Truth. You know it when you have experienced it. Never ever care what ‘they’ say. Never ever believe the lying whispers. Never ever give up.

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

My take on aliens talking to @stinchfield1776 and also some commentary on the @FBI

[Real America's Voice (RAV) @RealAmVoice]

THIRD BATCH OF UFO FILES RELEASED

“I think we're looking at phenomena that most of us don't know really what it is…The more and more I see of it…I’m inclined to think that there's something here that's very real, that's well beyond…just a government cover-up.” - @jamesncantrell

@stinchfield1776

[TheLastRefuge @TheLastRefuge2]

.@GavinNewsom , go build something. Go create something. Go make value in something for the world... and guess what? Yeah, you can get rich doing it.

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

@TheLastRefuge2 Well it sure as hell does if you see this as I do: a money laundering scheme. These politicians have their hands in this flow of money and don't care about who this money belonged to in the first place!!!

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

@crasteel Thanks, Charles! I am honored to have such a glowing review of my book on how @SpaceX began! Stay tuned as a movie deal is just around the corner.,

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

@TheLastRefuge2 Chaffetz …. Knew him from my Utah days …. Nope. Better to stick with the pretend world of TV

[Jim Cantrell @jamesncantrell]

Some people invent entire categories of industry and technology then are forgotten by the general public and the tech entrepreneurs who claim the ideas with no attribution or even memory of the inventor. We all stand on the shoulders of giants and let’s not forget, in the age of trillion dollar IPOs, that these world changing technologies and companies are built by teams of people and not by a single individual

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A mathematician coined the term "artificial intelligence" in 1955, built the language that dominated AI research for 30 years, and predicted cloud computing 40 years before AWS existed and almost nobody outside the field knows his name.

His name was John McCarthy.

He was born in Boston in 1927, earned his PhD in mathematics from Princeton in 1951, and spent the next 55 years working on a single question that most of his peers considered either impossible or insane.

Can a machine think?

In the summer of 1955, McCarthy sat down and wrote a two-page proposal for a workshop at Dartmouth College. The proposal opened with one sentence that changed everything: "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."

He needed a name for the field he was proposing. He chose "artificial intelligence." Before that document, no such field existed. After it, every researcher working on thinking machines had a name for what they were doing, a home discipline to publish in, and a founding document to point to. McCarthy did not just contribute to AI. He created the container it lives in.

The Dartmouth Conference ran for eight weeks in the summer of 1956. It was the moment AI became a real scientific discipline.

McCarthy kept building.

In 1958 he invented LISP, the second oldest high-level programming language still in use today, older only than FORTRAN by one year. LISP was designed for a specific purpose: symbolic reasoning. It could manipulate ideas, not just numbers.

It became the language every serious AI researcher wrote in for the next three decades. From 1958 through the late 1980s, if you were working on AI, you were almost certainly working in LISP.

Inside LISP he invented garbage collection in 1959, the technique that automatically frees up memory a program no longer needs. Java uses it. Python uses it. JavaScript uses it. Every modern language that manages memory automatically is using the idea McCarthy worked out while building LISP.

In 1961 he stood at a centennial celebration at MIT and said something that everyone in the room thought was science fiction. He proposed that computing would one day be delivered as a public utility, the same way electricity or water is delivered to a home. You would not own the computer. You would pay for access to it over a network.

AWS launched in 2006. Azure launched in 2010. Google Cloud launched in 2011. What McCarthy described in 1961 is now a trillion-dollar industry. He was 45 years early.

In 1962 he founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, SAIL, which became one of the most important research centers in the history of the field. The researchers who trained there shaped the next 40 years of AI.

He won the Turing Award in 1971. The National Medal of Science in 1990. The Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2003.

He retired from Stanford in 2000. He died on October 24, 2011, at his home in Stanford, California. He was 84.

The researchers at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic building the models you use today are working in a field McCarthy named in 1955, using memory management he invented in 1959, inside an industry structure he predicted in 1961, toward a goal he spent his entire career insisting was not only possible but inevitable.

He was right about all of it.

He just did not live to see the part where the rest of the world finally believed him.