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Apache 2.0 | v0.1 — come build with us 🛠️
https://t.co/U6xouvSRwX
In a workshop on the outskirts of Bletchley (it had to be there, didn't it), on the 26th of March this year, a small British company called Pulsar Fusion did something that has not been done by any other company or government on Earth.
It ignited a controlled plasma inside the test chamber of a working nuclear fusion rocket engine.
The plasma held, along with the chamber. The fusion reaction was the kind of reaction that, contained inside a sufficiently engineered magnetic bottle, will one day take a crewed British vehicle to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months, and that will, within the working lifetime of the engineers presently building it, make the outer planets of the solar system accessible to anyone with a British passport.
The geography of the achievement deserves a longer moment of pause. Bletchley, in 1942, was where Alan Turing and his colleagues broke the Enigma cipher and almost certainly shortened the war in Europe by two years. Pulsar Fusion's headquarters sits roughly 600 yards from the Hut where they did it.
The country that did the maths inside that hut has just, less than a mile down the road, ignited the plasma that could power the next century of human space travel. There is a continuity of British scientific lineage here that is, on the face of it, almost embarrassingly providential, and it is almost completely unreported in the British press.
It's not quite Kitty-Hawk-to-the-moon in 61 years, but it's close.
Like so many great companies of profound importance, Pulsar Fusion is pretty small. It was founded in 2013, and employs around 50 staff. Its chief executive, Richard Dinan, is a working British physicist who has spent the last decade quietly assembling the team and the capital to do what the world's national space agencies have been promising for 60 years and consistently failing to deliver.
The competing American programmes, principally at NASA's Glenn Research Center and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, are years behind on the propulsion side. The competing Chinese programmes are obscure but, on what is known publicly, also behind. The European Space Agency is, as ever, organising a workshop. Pulsar fired its plasma in March and has been preparing the next-stage tests in the months since.
What this kind of capability means, when commercialised, is genuinely vast.
The economic argument for getting a payload to Mars in 30 days rather than 8 months is not principally about the human passengers, though there is one. It is about cargo. Given a 30-day transit, Mars becomes a logistically tractable destination for the kind of infrastructure-build that turns it from a flag-planting science mission into a working industrial site.
The argument for the outer planets is even larger. The asteroid belt alone, on conservative mineralogical estimates, contains more economically viable platinum-group metals than the entire crust of the Earth has been mined for in industrial history. The first country with reliable fusion propulsion is the first country with reliable access to that supply. The country that holds that capacity, fifty years from now, will be holding the most consequential industrial advantage of the 21st century, and there is no obvious second prize.
The standard British response to this kind of thing is to either ignore it entirely, sell the company to an American buyer at series B (the DeepMind path) for fire-sale prices, or fund it at the level of a Whitehall departmental tea and coffee budget (the Skycutter and Orbex paths).
The standard British response will not be sufficient. Pulsar Fusion needs the kind of patient capital that turns a working demonstration into an operational engine, and that, in turn, into a manufacturing capability. The British state, on present form, is structurally incapable of providing it, British pension funds are structurally incapable of investing in it, and the British political class will, on present form, only notice if it somehow manages to swing a leadership election.
I wantt= Pulsar Fusion treated as a national-strategic asset, and beyond that as a potential subject of national destiny.
The Sovereign AI Fund that backed Ineffable Intelligence has a clear template. The Prosperity Zone programme we designed at Progress that anchors heavy industry at SaxaVord and Teesside has the geographic flexibility to include a fusion-propulsion cluster in Buckinghamshire, six miles from the most evocative site in modern British scientific history.
The procurement architecture of every major British defence and space agency should, from this autumn, be writing offtake contracts contingent on Pulsar's milestones. There's nothing extreme about these ideas. We could have been doing it decades ago.
I always conceived of Britain as being as much among the stars as it is on Earth. To buy into the idea of Britain as a culture and polity is necessarily to buy into the concept of the human being as an illimitable force. Our history is littered with happy instances of people of great fortitude hitting upon obstacles and, with a cry of "This will not stop us", clearing the way for our brothers and sisters to follow through.
A small British company in Bletchley has, while nobody was looking, extended that arm of our tradition, by accomplishing one of the most important pieces of scientific engineering of the decade.
The country that produced them is, in a measurable sense, the same country that produced the Bombe, the Colossus, the jet engine, the structure of DNA, and the World Wide Web. The capacity is intact. The political class capable of recognising it must catch up, and will.
As the marginal cost of building software decreases, the effort to prevent employees starting a more niche competitor will increase.
This is why I'm not convinced AI companies will gobble up all industries.
My favorite corporate emails were those where someone @ mentions the whole enterprise with a guns blazing last stand and everyone just has to pretend to themselves that it's probably nothing
unpopular dockerfile takes (that actually work)
1 - stop using alpine — yes, it's tiny. but musl libc ≠ glibc. your python/node app will rebuild native deps from scratch or just... silently be slower. use -slim (debian-slim) instead. same size win, zero grief.
2 - layer order is your cache strategy. COPY your lockfile first, run install, then copy source. invalidating the install layer on every code change is a skill issue ngl
3 - multi-stage builds aren't just "best practice" — they're the actual reason your prod image doesn't ship gcc and 400mb of build tools. builder stage = bloat zone. final stage = lean mean container.
4 - COPY . . is fine actually — if your .dockerignore is correct. most pain here is from forgetting to ignore node_modules/, .git, *.log. fix the ignore file, not the COPY.
5 - one process per container is a vibe, not a law. if your app needs nginx + app server and you're not at k8s scale — just use supervisord. the "one process" dogma costs more complexity than it saves sometimes.
6 - pin your base image by digest, not tag. node:20 today ≠ node:20 in 6 months. prod broke because of a tag? that's a you problem tbh.
7 - BuildKit cache mounts (--mount=type=cache) will change your life. pip/apt/cargo cache between builds without it ending up in the final layer. nobody talks about this enough fr
there's no "best practice" in a vacuum. alpine is great for Go binaries. slim is great for Python. scratch is great for static bins. know your workload, then choose.
btw if you want something to catch all this stuff automatically -
check out dockerfile-roast — a linter written in Rust that literally roasts your Dockerfile. 63 rules, brutally honest output (but it can also provide just dry facts, no roast), runs on any OS or as a docker container
https://t.co/NVYpe8iD65
#docker #devops #kubernetes #backend #linux #rust #sre #containers
Every B2B software company is (or should be) building a "headless" version of their product. One that can be used by agents.
But "headless" doesn't mean "brainless".
You don't just wrap your existing APIs into an MCP server and call it a day.
The companies that succeed in the agentic era are those that take a thoughtful approach to *designing* an agentic user experience (AUX).
Yes, that will likely involve APIs, MCPs and CLIs.
But the difference will be in the *ergonomics* of the interface. We need to figure out *how* agents actually want to use our products/platforms. Because if all they wanted to do was use them like humans do, we have "computer use" for that.
I'm personally very excited about this new agentic world when it comes to B2B software.
HubSpot is all-in on building the #1 agentic customer platform.
Just posted this in a private Slack thread with the HubSpot exec team:
Being agentic is not just about agents running *on* our platform, it's about agents *running* our platform (being able to operate it). That's how you take AI from being a simple tool to a savvy teammate.
Starting to see an uptick in "finish the last 10%" projects on UpWork. Interesting seeing non-technical vibe coders starting to learn software development lore.
you do these hops until you finally land in aws
it's not as pretty, but it doesn't keep you up at night
you learn the lesson: the next project starts on aws
The highest leverage thing you can do with your life, is get good at “GTM”
Organic social, paid media, outbound sales
Pick one and get good - being able to spin up Money from thin air is magic.
Most people can’t
They think they can, but they work at firms where the brand equity is doing the heavy lifting for them
They don’t realize that being able to have no brand and drive revenue is 1 in a million skill
You will never regret it
Are you working at a company working on an Everything App right now?
So is everyone else. It's a trap created by the possibilities of LLMs and weak product vision. I'm sure yours will be different, though.
A lot of folks talk about "escaping the permanent underclass". If AGI pans out, the future class divide won't be based on wealth, but on cognitive agency. There will be a "focus class" (those who control their attention and actually do things) and a "slop class" (those whose reward loops are fully RL-managed by AI)
To manage growing demand for Claude we're adjusting our 5 hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.
During weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT, you'll move through your 5-hour session limits faster than before.