Juan Botero

@ModernMeadow / BioTech / prev VC @ZXVentures / Philosophy / @Wharton MBA / @Penn MA

[Gossip Goblin @Gossip_Goblin]

An Honest Day’s Work

[Gossip Goblin @Gossip_Goblin]

Cracking The Onion

[Rapid Response 47 @RapidResponse47]

.@SecRubio: "Too often, these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure that no one will lose. We preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average."

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Everyone is sick of generic AI, including us.

Gamma was the first AI presentation platform to reach real scale. But now that AI tools are everywhere, everything looks the same.

Earlier this summer, we came to an uncomfortable conclusion: without a step change in visual variety, Gamma’s output would look and feel too similar to all the other AI tools. The entire point of a presentation is to help someone "get" your idea, to see it as unique and do something with it.

We started over. Today we're shipping Gamma 5, the biggest product overhaul in our company's history.

We rebuilt Gamma to create presentations that actually look like you and your brand. Your teams can design anything they dream up, following your brand's aesthetic or something entirely new, with every frontier and image model under the hood. And the same goes for your docs, social assets, and graphics.

We revamped our agent, design tools, editing, import, export, connectors, and more.

Get your ideas out there.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This is the future we shall bring into being

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

Why can’t communists be communist the way the Amish are Amish, as in, peacefully, voluntarily, among themselves, without taking anyone else’s property or forcing anyone else to participate?

If communism is really about cooperation and community, why does everyone else have to be forced into it?

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

You could use a life expectancy chart to see when communism fell

[Whole Mars Catalog @wholemars]

Spent some time reading about free electron lasers and how they might be used for chip making last night.

It seems like a tall order (you’d have to build a whole particle accelerator) but there are some significant advantages compared to generating EUV light by shooting a microscopic amount of tin with a laser to heat it up to a plasma state, which is the insanely complicated process ASML uses, and that powers all high end chip making around the world.

If Elon and his team can get it to work, it would be a breakthrough in chip fabrication:

— Faster wafer throughput
— No need for exploding tin droplets into plasma
— You can tune the wavelength of the EUV much better than with the current process
— One giant free electron laser could potentially feed multiple ultraviolet lithography machines, as opposed to each machine needing to generate its own EUV source (which makes the machines much more complicated)
— energy recovery could recycle much of the beam’s energy

Long story short… it sounds like Elon is going to build a particle accelerator in Texas. They will probably start by buying machines from ASML, but seems like they are working on ways to make chips without that equipment long term. Would be a major breakthrough if they could pull it off.

Building a particle accelerator on site seems kind of nuts… but also @elonmusk seems like the kind of guy who would think it’s fun. If I remember correctly, he once said that he wanted to work at a particle accelerator like CERN before he got into computers & software.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

An AI just read a stranger's mind through their skull, no surgery, no implants, and got roughly 45% of the meaning right on the first try. On a person it had never seen before.

That's the tech an OpenAI researcher just quit her job for. Two weeks ago she walked out of the hottest company on earth to join Conduit, a startup collecting brain recordings in a San Francisco basement.

Here's what happens in that basement. Paid volunteers put on four pound headsets covered in sensors and chat with an AI for two hours while it listens to their neurons fire. The signal is so faint the team shut off wall power to the entire building and runs on battery packs, because the hum from an ordinary outlet drowns out a human thought.

They've collected 10,000 hours of brains so far. The largest dataset of its kind ever assembled. And here's the part that should make your hands sweat. Whisper needed 680,000 hours of audio to master speech. The moment someone scales brain data the same way, the decoding stops being 45% right.

She says we're in the GPT-2 era of mind reading. GPT-2 was a joke in 2019. Five years later half the internet was written by its grandchildren.

Her timeline says developers wear thought-streaming headbands by 2027. By 2035, AI stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like a limb.

Your inner monologue has been the one place nothing could touch for 300,000 years of human history. That run is ending in a basement in San Francisco, two hours at a time.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The danger of selling to big companies, if you're a startup, is that they don't say no outright. They have months of meetings with you first. Since you hate meetings, that seems to you a sign of commitment. But it's not. They love having meetings! It's almost all they do.

[kevin smith @kevin_smith45]

CNN wouldnt cover Trumps speech last night because of "years of lying from the President"

Perhaps CNN can answer for their lies

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just said the one thing about America they made sure you’d never learn.

The one thing that should’ve made you proud, not ashamed.

Musk: “After World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?”

One nation held a weapon no civilization had ever possessed.

Total monopoly on destruction. No rival. No consequence. No limit.

Every empire in history that held that kind of power did the only thing empires know how to do.

They took until there was nothing left to take.

America had a greater advantage than all of them combined.

And rebuilt the nations it just defeated.

Musk: “The United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.”

Not almost unprecedented.

It had never happened. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded civilization.

The nation with the power to take everything chose to rebuild instead.

Enemies became allies. Rubble became economies. Surrender became partnership.

Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a single generation.

Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.

Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.

Into the capital of the country that just tried to end the free world.

That decision reshaped every economy, every alliance, and every trade route on the planet.

Billions of people lifted out of poverty over the next half century trace back to one moment. One nation choosing restraint over domination.

No other country in history can make that claim. Not one.

Musk: “There’s always like, well America’s done bad things. Well of course America’s done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.”

Every nation on earth has blood in its history.

But the measure of a nation was never its worst chapter.

It’s what it does when nobody can stop it.

When nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.

You’re being told every day that this country is something to be ashamed of.

By people who have no idea what the world looks like without it.

Every free market. Every open border for trade. Every democracy that took root outside Europe stands in the shadow of that single decision.

The values that built this country didn’t just shape America.

They shaped the modern world.

AI is about to hand a small number of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look primitive.

1945 was the first test.

AI is the last.

That power is going to exist. The only question left is who holds it.

The most powerful thing America ever did wasn’t building the bomb.

It was having the power to take everything and choosing not to.

The people trying hardest to tear that story down have never built a single thing worth defending.

[Sea Beggar 🪢🏴‍☠️⚓ @KnotSeaworthy]

"If all else fails, I will retreat up the valley of Virginia, plant my flag on the Blue Ridge, rally around the Scotch-Irish of that region and make my last stand for liberty amongst a people who will never submit to tyranny whilst there is a man left to draw a trigger." -GW

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

Bird autism is definitely one of the best forms of autism. What a legend. 👏👏👏

[Philosophy Sage @philosophysage]

You’re bored because you don’t do side quests, bro.

Life is more than just work and bed rotting.

Here are 50 side quests to complete:

[Genesis AI @gs_ai_]

We are back. After one year of quiet building.

Introducing GENE-26.5, our first robotic brain that takes a major step toward human-level capability.

For years, robotics has struggled to learn from the world’s largest and valuable data source: Humans.

Solving it means rethinking the whole stack from the ground up:

- A robotics-native foundation model.
- A 1:1 human-like robotic hand.
- A noninvasive data collection glove for motion, force, and touch.
- A simulator that turns weeks of experiments into minutes.

GENE-26.5 is trained across language, vision, proprioception, tactile, and action. We designed a set of tasks to test how far we can go with this new paradigm.

Fully autonomous, 1x speed, one model, same weights. (Enjoy with sound on)

We are approaching the endgame for robotics.

And this is just a beginning.

[Claude @claudeai]

New for financial services: ready-to-run Claude agent templates for building pitches, conducting valuation reviews, closing the books at month-end, and more.

Install them as plugins in Cowork and Claude Code, or use our cookbooks to run them in production as Managed Agents.

[Juan Botero @boternation]

@SaP011 Wow. They became San Francisco