Kurt Kumar

#bitcoin, #accelerate, still learning, want abs but chicken biryani is life, death will be cured

[Kurt Kumar @KurtKumar]

@naval Decentralization is 🔑 to it all

[Steve Jurvetson @FutureJurvetson]

On the eve of the Starship test flight, a reminder of why full reusability is a game changer for access to space... While the industry is following the red line, SpaceX is on a different curve.

Note: a straight line is an exponential on this semi-log graph.

[Naval @naval]

The latest IQ test involves data centers and water.

[Kurt Kumar @KurtKumar]

@JohnKobyltRadio Do you have the voter guide for June 2nd 2026 CA statewide elections?

[Palmer Luckey @PalmerLuckey]

I started Oculus while I was living in a trailer working a minimum wage job. I spent years developing the technology and sold it less than 18 months after hiring my first employees. Most of the $2.3B purchase went to them on account of our shared ownership structure.

Wish all you want, but you just aren't correct on this. Individual people create billions of dollars in value all the time.

[Kurt Kumar @KurtKumar]

Priest was preaching !

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

🚨 Here is the full 40 minutes of my crew and I exposing California fraud, Minnesota was big but California is even bigger... We uncovered over $170,000,000 in fraud as these fraudsters live in luxury with no consequences. Like it and share it, the fraud must STOP.

We ALL work way too hard and pay too much in taxes for this to be happening. These fraudsters have been able to defraud American taxpayers for years without any pushback from the public and politicians.

It is time to EXPOSE IT ALL and end America's fraud crisis.

[Rhys @RhysSullivan]

i gave Claude access to my financial data and asked for suggestions and it told me to leave California 💀

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

A guy with a YouTube channel just accidentally redesigned the most complex machine in human history.

Not an aerospace engineer. Not a SpaceX executive.

A guy with a camera who asked one obvious question.

Tim Dodd was walking around Starbase when Musk proudly explained how the Super Heavy booster eliminated its entire cold gas thruster system. Instead of a separate, heavy, complex mechanism, it just vents hot gas directly from the propellant tanks.

Elegant. Zero added mass. Zero extra failure points.

Dodd asked one question.

“But this is only for the booster, right?”

Musk stopped.

Not to defend. Not to explain. Not to reframe the question so it didn’t threaten what he had just said.

He stopped because something clicked.

Musk: “Yes. Although arguably, now you mention it… we might be wise to do this for the ship, too. Now that… we’re going to fix that.”

Mid-sentence. In real time. On camera.

No pause to protect his pride. No deflection. No “good point, let me circle back on that.” Just the immediate, unfiltered acknowledgment that a better path existed and they were going to take it.

Seven months later, Musk confirmed it was one of the biggest improvements ever made to the vehicle.

Think about what just happened.

To change a fundamental flight system at a legacy aerospace company requires years of environmental reviews, safety committees, and budget approvals.

Musk deprecated an entire subsystem in 15 seconds because a podcaster asked the obvious question that nobody inside had dared to ask.

In a traditional corporation, that cold gas system gets built anyway.

Because admitting the architecture is flawed is politically expensive.

The VP doesn’t want to lose the headcount.

The engineers don’t want to scrap the work.

The manager doesn’t want to explain the pivot to their director.

And so the mistake gets a budget. Gets a timeline. Gets a team assigned to it.

The machine gets heavier. The flaw becomes load-bearing. And eventually the flaw becomes so embedded in the structure that fixing it would require tearing down everything built around it.

So nobody fixes it.

Now think about the last time someone pointed out a flaw in something you built. Something you were proud of. Something you had already explained to twelve people without anyone questioning it.

Did you stop the way Musk stopped?

Or did you feel that heat in your chest. That reflexive need to explain why they were missing the point. Why the context was more complicated than they understood. Why the question, though interesting, didn’t really apply here.

That heat is the most expensive thing most organizations will ever pay for.

A failed launch at least tells you the truth.

A defended mistake just compounds.

This is the organizational architecture required to win the AI arms race.

The ultimate moat isn’t compute. It isn’t capital.

It is the velocity of error correction.

The geopolitical AI race will not be won by whoever starts with the best blueprint.

It will be won by whoever can feel that heat in their chest and choose the truth anyway.

A journalist asked a question. The best answer won.

The rocket got lighter.

Most egos don’t.

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

🚨 I just learned about a concept, I can't stop thinking about.

The Four Burner Theory.

It destroyed Elon Musk's first marriage.
It explains why Bezos is jacked but divorced.

And why Zuckerberg has no real friends.

Once you understand it, your life will never be same:🧵

[Kurt Kumar @KurtKumar]

@brucefenton @DrJesseMorse It’s in Dubai, you could try it out as u r already there

[Shane Legg @ShaneLegg]

AGI is now on the horizon and it will deeply transform many things, including the economy.

I'm currently looking to hire a Senior Economist, reporting directly to me, to lead a small team investigating post-AGI economics.

Job spec and application here: https://t.co/VAfwrMc8Tp

[Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays]

Coffee with Scott Adams moves to The Scott Adams School 01/13/24 https://t.co/RsXWMvV6yA

[Kurt Kumar @KurtKumar]

@ScottAdamsSays You will be missed, Scott

[Kurt Kumar @KurtKumar]

@ScottAdamsSays How are you feeling today, hope pain is manageable

[German Shepherd Dad 🇺🇸 & 🔥 @FlagAndFire]

You can argue with me all you want, but I agree with @jimmycarr.

You're all, to an extent, communists.

[Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays]

I have a favor to ask.

If my work helped you, or someone you know, please follow my biographer and good friend @joelpollak and leave a comment here in case he wants to follow up with you on DMs.

It gives me great joy to learn about any contribution I made.

I tried to be useful.

[American Debunk @AmericanDebunk]

Arguably Scott Adams’ greatest livestream video ever- The User Interface for Reality.

If you know, you know.

[Jarrod Watts @jarrodwatts]

> be demis hassabis
> spawn in london
> age 4, become child chess prodigy
> win chess tournaments
> reach ~2300 elo
> face danish chess champion
> game lasts hours
> position is a forced draw
> too exhausted to see it
> resign
> danish guy laughs and shows the draw
> feel sick to my stomach
> realise something is wrong
> chess is too narrow a problem
> brilliant minds wasting decades on it
> decide not to become a chess pro
> buy a computer with chess winnings
> teach self to program from books
> start hacking on games with friends
> decide to finish school early
> apply to cambridge age 16
> cambridge says you're too young
> forced to take a gap year
> enter a video game coding competition
> win
> get invited to join bullfrog game studio
> too young to be legally employed
> work there anyway
> build ai system inside theme park game
> game becomes a global hit
> turn 17
> offered £1,000,000 to stay and build games
> turn it down
> go to cambridge anyway
> decide games aren't enough
> study computer science
> interested in agi since 2007
> most people laugh at this idea
> realise brain is only form of agi we have
> want to learn more about human brain
> go back to school
> study neuroscience
> realise academia moves too slow
> decide to build a company instead
> start deepmind
> pitch “solve intelligence”
> investors don’t know what that means
> get to meet peter thiel for one minute
> wonder how to convince him
> spend one minute playing chess with him
> pitch "solve intelligence" again
> he invests
> go into total stealth mode for two years
> no website
> secret office
> candidates think it’s a scam
> start to train ai in simulated environments
> train ai with reinforcement learning
> train ai on pong first
> it sucks
> can't win a single point
> keep trying
> wait it won a a point
> wait it's winning every single point
> it actually works
> expand to train on any two-player game
> chess first, then move on to go
> beats world champion at go
> beats pros at starcraft
> games is not enough
> want to push into science
> realise compute is the bottleneck
> know this will take decades
> google offers ~$400m
> not the highest price
> but they offer unlimited compute
> accept
> refuse to become a product team
> stay in research mode
> determined to use ai for good
> need to figure out what's next
> land on protein folding
> 50-year-old unsolved science problem
> many great minds have tried and failed
> "good luck"
> start up alphafold
> try to solve protein folding
> humans take years to find 1 protein structure
> alphafold can find ~5 per day
> submit results, win competition
> not good enough
> hire more scientists
> rebuild it
> go from solving one per day to millions per day
> create invaluable system
> pharma would pay anything
> have to decide what to do with this
> could sell access for usage
> maybe make it a paid service
> remember childhood chess tournament
> remember why we built this
> decide to give it away all away for free
> publish all known protein structures publicly
> win nobel peace prize
> just the beginning towards agi

[Shaan Puri @ShaanVP]

misogi is a japanese ritual - one hard, year defining challenge

i heard about it from @JesseItzler last year on the pod 

for 2025 my misogi was… learning piano from scratch

[Kurt Kumar @KurtKumar]

@ShaanVP @JesseItzler Seeing the end result makes it even more inspirational