Mike Polich

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

@SawyerMerritt @Tesla J.M. @Tesla gives me 100% confidence in this rating. Ford, GM math is sketch

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

@akafaceUS It happens all the time at the Venetian. If you order an Uber black it goes to valet pick up. If you order a regular Uber, it comes to the Uber pick up lot. They appear as the same dot in the Uber app. It’s an Uber software issue that should be addressed.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I took delivery of a beautiful new shiny HW4 Tesla Model X today, so I immediately took it out for an FSD test drive, a bit like I used to do almost daily for 5 years. Basically... I'm amazed - it drives really, really well, smooth, confident, noticeably better than what I'm used to on HW3 (my previous car) and eons ahead of the version I remember driving up highway 280 on my first day at Tesla ~9 years ago, where I had to intervene every time the road mildly curved or sloped. (note this is v13, my car hasn't been offered the latest v14 yet)

On the highway, I felt like a passenger in some super high tech Maglev train pod - the car is locked in the center of the lane while I'm looking out from Model X's higher vantage point and its panoramic front window, listening to the (incredible) sound system, or chatting with Grok. On city streets, the car casually handled a number of tricky scenarios that I remember losing sleep over just a few years ago. It negotiated incoming cars in tight lanes, it gracefully went around construction and temporarily in-lane stationary cars, it correctly timed tricky left turns with incoming traffic from both sides, it gracefully gave way to the car that went out of order in the 4-way stop sign, it found a way to squeeze into a bumper to bumper traffic to make its turn, it overtook the bus that was loading passengers but still stopped for the stop sign that was blocked by the bus, and at the end of the route it circled around a parking lot, found a spot and... parked. Basically a flawless drive.

For context, I'm used to going out for a brief test drive around the neighborhood to return with 20 clips of things that could be improved. It's new for me to do just that and exactly like I used to, but come back with nothing. Perfect drive, no notes. I expect there's still more work for the team in the long march of 9s, but it's just so cool to see that we're beyond finding issues on any individual ~1 hour drive around the neighborhood, you actually have to go to the fleet and mine them. Back then, I processed the incredible promise of vehicle autonomy at scale (in the fully scaleable, vision only, end-to-end Tesla way) only intellectually, but now it is possible to feel it intuitively too if you just go out for a drive. Wait, of course surround video stream at 60Hz processed by a fully dedicated "driving brain" neural net will work, and it will be so much better and safer than a human driver. Did anyone else think otherwise?

I also watched @aelluswamy 's new ICCV25 talk last week (https://t.co/RdaM23kvez) that hints at some of the recent under the hood technical components driving this progress. Sensor streams (videos, maps, kinematics, audio, ...) over long contexts (e.g. ~30 seconds) go into a big neural net, steering/acceleration comes out, optionally with visualization auxiliary data. This is the dream of the complete Software 1.0 -> Software 2.0 re-write that scales fully with data streaming from millions of cars in the fleet and the compute capacity of your chip, not some engineer's clever new DoubleParkedCarHandler C++ abstraction with undefined test-time characteristics of memory and runtime. There's a lot more hints in the video on where things are going with the emerging "robotics+AI at scale stack". World reconstructors, world simulators "dreaming" dynamics, RL, all of these components general, foundational, neural net based, how the car is really just one kind of robot... are people getting this yet?

Huge congrats to the team - you're building magic objects of the future, you rock! And I love my car <3.

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

@QuantinuumQC 🤯

[Quantinuum @QuantinuumQC]

Today, we launched Helios, a technological marvel redefining the possible. Helios is the most accurate quantum computer in the world, with 98 of the highest fidelity physical qubits ever released, and 48 error-corrected logical qubits.

Learn more: https://t.co/pkvTsS9poF

[The Kilowatts 🚗⚡️ @klwtts]

BREAKING: Tesla Candy has arrived with Dog Mode Chill, Mango Bolt, &amp; Cyberberry Supercharged Gummies!!

[Tesla Semi @tesla_semi]

Semi Factory progress update

[Quantinuum @QuantinuumQC]

As the only quantum computing company with a quantum computer powerful enough that it can't be simulated, Quantinuum has published a unique and highly influential paper on an end-to-end quantum algorithm that only a quantum computer can solve efficiently. https://t.co/Q46qLam6K4

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

This is not even remotely crazy. I almost cried, it’s only two weeks late. I will cry when the clip of coordinated hive behavior is posted.

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

Whatever water there was didn’t appear to be enough. Oceanfront homes burned down. The majority of gold miners in Alaska could have successfully protected an oceanfront home and turned an even higher profit than the average success rate of mining. Elon might have some creative ideas and perhaps tactical knowledge on high volume water pumping systems.

Tell Elon it’s physically impossible to create a low cost water supply network to successfully protect fires of this sort and watch what happens next. It won’t even require an X-prize to hear the solution. It’s not a hard problem

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

.@ElonMusk exposed by firefighters for his own lies.

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

@elonmusk What’s the coaster used for? Does it single out the active non-empty Diet Coke?

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

In honor of Facebook ending its fact-checking partnerships, here are the funniest fact-checks of Babylon Bee jokes:

A running 🧵:

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

@bradsferguson Glad you are OK. Also helpful would be changes to US law to enable the third brake light to flash rapidly and situation where cars decelerate rapidly. This is already present in other countries. It might not prevent the situation, but it improves the odds with humans

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

Note to self: After the 2024 US Election, remember to un-register as a voter. 2028 elections might offer voting in VIP luxury boxes at concerts or professional sporting events available only to newly registered voters.

It would be a shame to miss out on the opportunity. Voter un-registration appears to be available in every state.

[Quantinuum @QuantinuumQC]

At this @RoyalInstitution public lecture, @Coecke will share how one groundbreaking approach is making quantum physics more accessible by using intuitive diagrams instead of complex mathematics.

Register here: https://t.co/uap9jmD9TA

[Quantinuum @QuantinuumQC]

The principles of quantum mechanics is often inaccessible without years of mathematical training. In education, this field is typically reserved for undergrads, but recent efforts show how quantum principles can be understood through innovative &amp; visually engaging methods.

[Marshall Mathers @Eminem]

#Temporary Music Video - Out Now https://t.co/43AF8c3xPh

[Felix Gatfield @FelixGatfield]

Who is Gwynne Shotwell, the woman behind the success of SpaceX? - By Felix Gatfield (@Space_Time3)

As of September 2024, there are over thirteen thousand employees at SpaceX, from engineers to board members, but there’s one woman who sticks out from the rest. The eleventh employee of SpaceX, @Gwynne_Shotwell joined them in 2002 after holding two previous roles at Chrysler, which she left as she didn’t find the work interesting, after which she ventured into the aerospace industry, working at The Aerospace Corporation conducting work on their military space research and development contracts, during which she had the chance to work on Space Shuttle Flight STS-139, in 1998 she left them to become the director of space systems at Microcosm, a relatively small rocket company.

But Shotwell hadn’t always wanted to hold a career in the space or engineering industry. She remembers watching the Apollo 11 mission on TV when she was younger and recalls finding it “boring” and having no interest in it at all. Her first spark of interest in engineering was when her mother took her to a panel at the Illinois Institute of Technology held by the Society of Women Engineers. At that specific event, there was a mechanical engineer who owned her own company, which inspired Shotwell to pursue studying engineering. The name of the exact engineer is unknown, but Shotwell remembers, “I loved her suit”. She went to Northwestern University and received a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering, and later, after she left Chrysler, a Master of Science degree in applied mathematics. Shotwell recalls that she was one of three women out of thirty-six mechanical engineering undergrads.

In 2002, she was introduced to SpaceX CEO @elonmusk by a colleague she had previously worked with at Microcosm, @HansKoenigsmann, who went on to become VP of Flight Reliability for SpaceX. During her first meeting with Elon Musk, she impressively convinced him that he needed to hire someone to work full-time on their business development, but did not plan to join SpaceX until two weeks later when she took a job offer for that specific role in September of 2002.

She was at the company for six years when she was promoted in late 2008 and became SpaceX President. This was due to the role she played in the negotiations of the first $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract, which SpaceX won after the fourth and first successful launch of the Falcon 1, SpaceX’s first rocket. Without this contract from NASA, SpaceX would have gone bankrupt.

During her time as SpaceX President, she has overseen the exponential growth of the Falcon rocket family, taking the cadence from zero launches a year to ninety-six launches in 2024, with more to come. Apart from her work with increasing cadence for the Falcon rocket family, she has played a huge role in the overall success of the company, including acquiring a twenty-year lease of historic Launch Complex 39a at the Kennedy Space Centre, previously used by the Saturn V and Space Shuttle.
In 2018, she was listed in “America’s Top 50 Women in Tech”, then again in 2021 in “50 Over 50 – Vision” and again in 2023 in “Power Women” at number 28, and again in 2024 at number 36 in “American’s Self-Made Women”.

Shotwell is a huge inspiration, and SpaceX would not be where it is today without her.

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

Great event today in LALB

[Nanette D. Barragán @RepBarragan]

The future of clean shipping is here at the @PortofLA!

In #SanPedro today to celebrate the first cargo ship powered by green methanol to arrive at a US port. The Alette Maersk will be part of the maritime industry effort to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pollution in our port communities. Maersk is leading the way and I look forward to others following their example.

Thank you @Maersk for showing that a clean shipping future is possible and shout out to Long Beach’s own Olympic Gold Medalist Snowboarder @ChloeKim for her leadership on climate justice!

[Mike Polich @mpolich]

Jim clearly understands the challenge

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Ford CEO Jim Farley: “If we cannot make money on EVs, we have competitors who have the largest market in the world, who already dominate globally; If we don’t make profitable EVs in the next 5 years, what is the future? We will just shrink into North America.”

Source: https://t.co/KLCuPQKOuK