Umar Akram

i build technologies and design businesses. Writing short stories at

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

👇🏼

[ThomPete @Hello_World]

If I was young today, I would work in the space industry.

For decades, Western pop culture has framed orbit as either apocalypse backdrop or billionaire playground.

That steady drip of doom is a mind-virus. It turns curiosity into paralysis.
Kids don’t just worry about climate change; they fear it.
They don’t just dislike fossil fuels; they dream of smashing the grid instead of re-engineering it.

Activists scoop them up when engineering schools should. If you don't believe in the future you won't invest in it.

Space is harsh, airless, and filled with opportunity.

Launch costs are collapsing; a reusable highway to orbit is taking shape, and with it whole industries.

Commercial stations are queued to succeed the ISS, Varda is already flying factory cargo home from orbit, and we will still be putting permanent settling on the Moon.

Generation Alpha won’t just stream the countdown of yet another SpaceX chopstick event.

They’ll clock in above the Kármán line. So if you’re choosing a major, or mentoring someone who is, remember: the help-wanted signs are already blinking in orbit.

Look up!

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

“Babies learn about the world by experiencing it directly, while AI mostly learns from reading text. So even though AI talks smartly, babies may still understand the real world more naturally in some ways.” https://t.co/hjXkH4p2UM

[Naval Podcast @navalpodcast]

Naval: “We have to nurture optimism. We have to reward optimism. We have to be irrationally optimistic, because that’s the only way out of this anyway.”

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Winston Churchill's collected works. Somehow he managed to write all of these as well as being a politician. He mostly dictated them, but that's just as much work for the brain, if not for the hand.

[Aaliyah Barker @aalicbarker]

I am hiring for the coolest, funnest job ever (speaking from experience, here).

If you’re an operator and want to break into VC, reach out!

Perks: free housing in Silicon Valley & traveling the world w me to meet global founders.

(We support relocation ✨)

(Link in replies)

[ThomPete @Hello_World]

The EUs ability to make the absolute worst decisions for the consumers, businesses and entrepreneurs is unparalleled.

"Starting February 18, 2027, new smartphones and tablets must be designed so that end users can remove and replace the battery themselves using standard tools. Adhesive bonds that require heat to be removed will then be largely prohibited."

[Tim Draper @TimDraper]

We are proud to double down on our seed investment in Scout by leading their $100M series A. Colby and Collin are world-class entrepreneurs and technologists.

Between seed and Series A, Scout’s vision language and action (VLA) model was deployed in the field by their government and commercial customers.

Freedom is not free. Edge intelligence is the future, and its applications range from industrial security, deterrent for global conflicts, and cyber security.

With Scout, the world is a safer and better place for everyone.

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

No country has a fully mature, large scale commercial thorium reactor fleet yet.

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

Nuclear energy as a Service and the waste must be reutilised. Norway sits on 15% of world’s #thorium. A small minor fraction is enough for the whole world to consume for years. #energy #nuclear #future

[ThomPete @Hello_World]

@samhogan 1. A language model can learn everything we have the knowledge to teach it.
2. It cannot create new knowledge.
3. We will always need to create new knowledge for the LLM to learn and utilize

Our knowledge creation is the bottle neck of the LLMs, which is good for both of us :)

[ThomPete @Hello_World]

LLMs will need to become a lot more biased to be useful for decision-making.

The current “even Steven” neutrality makes them great for high school essays and code, but almost useless when an actual decision has to be made. Decisions require bias and choosing one view of the world over others and acting on it.

“Attention is all you need” as the now famous genesis paper on LLMs implies exclusion. To focus is to ignore. That’s how creativity works, how businesses operate, and how scientists decide what to pursue: by committing to a particular belief about how the world works or might unfold.

Much of that bias will be wrong. That’s unavoidable. But some of it will be right. There’s no way to know which without trial and error.

In other words, even AI have to obey the laws of physics and what Wolfram calls computational irreducibility.

[Naval @naval]

AIs replace UIs and APIs.

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

@Hello_World @peterrhague 💯

[Adam Draper ⏻ @AdamDraper]

Me: “please say space laser, please say space laser, please say space laser.”

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

@nivi 🙌🏼

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

@paulbz 👌🏼

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

@suffiyanmalikk @mattocko 🙌🏼

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

“You have to have people that other people want to be around, even if they're demanding, even if they're high performance.”

[Suffiyan Malik @suffiyanmalikk]

“If you hire people who are brilliant but who are self-aggrandizing a-holes, eventually you're gonna be left with them and the cringing minions they hire.”

Matt Ocko (@mattocko) shares the hiring philosophy at DCVC (@DCVC), emphasizing that the best firms are built by people who are not only "smarter and harder working" than the founders but are fundamentally decent humans.

“You have to have people that other people want to be around, even if they're demanding, even if they're high performance.”

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Jessica and I have been talking about how earnest Swedish founders seem. Obviously it's news to no one that Swedes would be earnest. But I don't think they themselves realize how valuable this quality is for founders specifically.

https://t.co/251q8RSQ0Z

[Umar Akram @helloumar]

Apple's curated app store, the human interface guidelines, the design polish, the ecosystem lock-in - all of it becomes irrelevant when the interface itself is generated in real time by an AI that runs on any phone. - Naval