Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️

Founder - @localwnn - Former SpaceX, Varda, etc -I enjoy painting, electronics, and reusable space hardware. he/him
Equality is important. Make good decisions.

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

When you understand that the entire universe is “space”, you’ll understand why so many of us want to explore it.

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

Fun fact: I thought about forming a startup, poaching a bunch of people from SpaceX, and doing something like this with flatpack satellite swarms. I think electron beam welding (they don’t seem to be doing that here) is a good fit for in-space fabrication.

[Outer Space Today @outerspacetoday]

BREAKING: A robot developed by Caltech and funded by DARPA has successfully built part of a structure in orbit without astronauts, marking what researchers describe as the first autonomous construction of a structure in space.

The experiment, called ASTRA, uses a robotic arm to retrieve individual structural tubes and connecting joints, then assemble them into sections of a larger framework directly in orbit.

Launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 in March, the system has spent approximately six months in space testing the technology.

The robot successfully constructed a new section of a truss structure, demonstrating that spacecraft could eventually assemble large structures from smaller components rather than launching them fully assembled.

The experiment is part of DARPA's NOM4D program, which aims to enable construction of enormous structures in orbit, potentially hundreds of meters or even kilometers across.

Potential applications include:
> Giant space telescopes
> Large satellite communications antennas
> Orbital solar power stations
>Future space infrastructure too large to fit inside conventional rockets

The demonstration did not complete the full planned antenna, but establishes an important proof of concept for autonomous orbital construction.

The technology could eventually allow the size of structures built in space to exceed the physical limits of the rockets used to launch their components.

Link to official report submitted by Caltech: https://t.co/63Mpylbisb

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

If you’re confused about what’s happening with Nvidia right now…

Basically Jensen Huang, the guy who runs Nvidia, which is the company that makes the chips basically every AI company on earth needs, just sent an email to his entire company admitting he cheated on his wife, and that came right after the New York Times reported that US intelligence believes a woman who got close to him was secretly passing information to the Chinese government, and to understand how we got here you have to go back to June 2024, when this Chinese businesswoman named Alice Huang, who also goes by Huang Le and isn't related to Jensen at all, they just have the same last name, gets photographed at a party in Taipei sitting right next to him, and then about a year later her company, a small Singapore company called Megaspeed that almost nobody had ever heard of, reportedly sets up a deal to buy around $2 billion worth of Nvidia's chips, which is a crazy amount of money for a company that small, and the Times even pointed out it was an unusual amount of business for a firm like that, and people already had questions about where all those chips were really going, but Nvidia looked into it and said everything checked out, so for a while that's kind of where things sat, until October 29, when the Times reported that US intelligence had concluded Alice was passing information to Beijing, and that it wasn't some new discovery either, because Trump had reportedly been briefed on it about a year earlier, and the officials involved apparently believed Jensen didn't know what she was up to, but here's the strange part, nobody ever told him, because there's this thing called a defensive briefing, where counterintelligence people basically pull someone aside and say hey, a foreign government might be targeting you, be careful, and Jensen never got one, even though the whole time the government was still watching her, so you have the head of the most important AI chip company in the world apparently being targeted, and the people who knew about it just let it keep going, and then everyone starts denying it, Nvidia says the Megaspeed allegations were already investigated and debunked last year, China's foreign ministry says the whole report is baseless, and Jensen says the business with Megaspeed was totally normal, just a customer buying chips like any other customer, but Congress doesn't let it go, and three House Republicans who run national security committees ask Jensen to come in and explain himself in a closed-door briefing, which means a private meeting away from the public and the cameras, and then on a Sunday, out of nowhere, Jensen sends that email to every single employee saying he had been unfaithful to his wife, that it hurt her and their children, and that nothing excused what he did, and he doesn't say who it was with, but you can imagine where everyone's mind went, and right after that, Nvidia's board, which is the group of people who are supposed to oversee the CEO, announces it's setting up an independent committee with outside lawyers to investigate, but at the same time says it has no reason to believe any national security secrets or company secrets were compromised and that it still has confidence in him, and then a company spokesperson comes out and says none of this is going to slow Nvidia down and Jensen is going to keep running the company without any interruption, so basically you have a suspected Chinese intelligence asset who got close to the CEO, a $2 billion chip deal, a president who reportedly knew about, a CEO who was never warned, a confession about an affair, an investigation, and a company insisting everything is fine, so that's pretty much where Nvidia is tonight.

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@PutinIsAVirus Definitely more accessible than it was, agreed

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

TEMPEST was an old concept when I read about it in the 1990s. This isn’t new. AI just makes it easier to extract information.

[Psalter @Psalteric]

your HDMI cable can leak what’s on your screen

watch the laptop on the left. it reconstructs the video playing on the monitor beside it from radio signals leaking out of the HDMI connection

this is TempestSDR. an antenna picks up the leakage, a HackRF radio captures it, and software turns it back into an image

researchers took this further with Deep-TEMPEST, using AI to make recovered images and text easier to read. this clip shows the original technique

quality depends on shielding, distance and interference. the picture is imperfect, but recognizable content still gets through

a wired connection can still leave a wireless trace

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@Smallzero Tempest has been a thing for a very long time. This isn’t new.

[AJHalliwell @AJHalliwell]

Dan Curry guidance on how stars should move in windows across the Enterprise. #StarTrekTNG

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@AriSchulman Most of the people voting democrats in don't even like the democrats, it's just that shit was so broken under republican government that literally any adult in the room is better than lord of the flies.

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

I am going to get pneumonia from sitting in ORD. They have the air conditioning blowing cold air and it's probably not even 65F. I feel like you could cure meats in here.

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@TheBrancaShow Me: "oh, this guy is talking like he knows what he's saying, lemme look at his profile. Cool, cool, a lawyer who's grifting. Yeah, that checks out"

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

If Chuck Schumer isn't re-elected as leader, do you think he'll write a strongly-worded letter?

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@astuyve On my alpine tests, ! was the placeholder in shadow, not *. What does yours look like?

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@kbsingh The biggest problem(?) I have found is that the output is just so verbose, tracing all of the work back is hard, so I have to ship that back to agents too.

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

From a tax perspective, is this like an LLP or what?

[New York Post @nypost]

California city makes history allowing throuples, foursomes to legally register as partners https://t.co/Eg2YxF6oEQ

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@kbsingh Here's the block from CLAUDE.md

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@kbsingh Here's the beginning of the conversation I have with the main coding agent

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

I actually do wonder how much Ukraine bombing Russian datacenters prevented their interference in this election.

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@lysandrou_ @MattBinder hahah you're all good

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

@lysandrou_ @MattBinder Read the tweet first and I was like, “lol who would…. Oh Paddy”

[Matt Simmons 🚀🛰️ @standaloneSA]

Crazy how I saw someone at my polling place today who was voting, and their shirt said, "eliminate food insecurity" and I immediately knew which party they voted for.

How screwed up is that?