Tad Lagestee

Developer and Technologist

[Tad Lagestee @tlagestee]

Iowa Anchor Dustin Nolan Calls Out 'Sanitized News' as He Quits on Air in Emotional Sign-Off: 'We Have to Take People Out of Their Bubbles' - Variety https://t.co/opnrIdxqra

[Vivek Sen @Vivek4real_]

THE NEXT TIME YOU FEEL LIKE GIVING UP, REMEMBER THIS PHOTO OF ELON MUSK.

IT WAS TAKEN AFTER HIS THIRD ROCKET EXPLODED.

HE HAD JUST LOST $100 MILLION OF HIS OWN MONEY. SPACEX WAS WEEKS AWAY FROM BANKRUPTCY. TESLA WAS STRUGGLING. HE WAS SLEEPING ON FRIENDS’ COUCHES.

THE MEDIA CALLED HIM RECKLESS. INVESTORS PULLED BACK. EVERYONE TOLD HIM TO QUIT.

INSTEAD, HE BET EVERYTHING ON ONE FINAL LAUNCH. IF IT FAILED, SPACEX WAS DONE.

THE LAUNCH SUCCEEDED — AND CHANGED HISTORY.

TODAY, SPACEX IS WORTH OVER $1 TRILLION AND DOMINATES THE PRIVATE SPACE INDUSTRY.

MOST PEOPLE QUIT RIGHT BEFORE THEIR BREAKTHROUGH.

ELON KEPT GOING WHEN EVERYTHING WAS AGAINST HIM.

THAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SUCCESS AND ALMOST SUCCESS.

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Elon Musk told a story that should terrify every AI company on Earth.

His son Saxon is autistic.

Saxon couldn’t understand why the family went to restaurants.

You can get the same food delivered.

You can call your friends over.

You can eat better at home for half the price.

So why go?

Musk: “He had an epiphany and said, ‘Oh, the reason people go to restaurants is to hang out with strangers.’”

A kid who takes the world literally just decoded something the rest of us never thought to question.

We like being around people we’ll never know.

Look at what we already built.

Delivery apps so you never wait in line.

Remote work so you never share an office.

Self-checkout so you never talk to a cashier.

Every innovation of the last 20 years was a bet against human proximity.

Every one paid off.

Until it didn’t.

Loneliness is now a public health emergency.

Depression has doubled since the smartphone.

The average American has fewer close friends than any generation in history.

We didn’t remove friction.

We removed the thing friction was hiding.

Now look at what’s coming.

AI agents that handle your emails.

AI companions that replace your conversations.

AI assistants that make every human interaction optional.

Same playbook. Same bet.

Except this time we’re not engineering out strangers.

We’re engineering out humans entirely.

The coffee shop where nobody knows your name.

The subway where no one speaks.

The restaurant where you’ll never see that couple again.

Those aren’t failed connections.

They’re the background radiation of belonging.

We don’t just need people who know us.

We need to exist in rooms full of people who don’t.

That’s what a kid understood at a dinner table that billion-dollar companies still can’t grasp in a boardroom.

We spent 20 years building a world you never have to show up to.

AI is about to finish the job.

And nothing it builds will ever replicate sitting in a room full of strangers and not feeling alone.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just explained why artificial intelligence cannot physically survive on Earth.

In a conversation with Jamie Dimon, Musk bypassed the romance of space exploration entirely.

He answered with physics.

Musk: “I think we can do probably somewhere around 1 terawatt per year of AI space compute from Earth, but we can do 1,000 terawatts or more from the Moon.”

One terawatt. That is the thermodynamic ceiling of this entire planet.

Every nuclear plant. Every solar farm. Every grid upgrade humanity can possibly build. All of it maxes out at one terawatt of AI compute.

Earth is no longer a canvas. It is a bottleneck.

So Musk is looking at the Moon.

Not for flags. Not for footprints. For leverage.

Musk: “Because the Moon has no atmosphere and about one-sixth Earth’s gravity, you can use an electromagnetic accelerator… You don’t need to use rockets to do AI data centers into deep space from the Moon. You can literally just shoot them like a railgun type of thing.”

He is not describing a research outpost. He is describing a frictionless manufacturing hub on a celestial body.

Mine the lunar surface for raw material. Build solar arrays and thermal radiators on-site. Construct an electromagnetic railgun. And fire AI superclusters directly into the vacuum of deep space.

No supply chain from Earth. No atmosphere to fight. No fuel to burn on exit.

A thousand terawatts. A 1,000x multiplier on the physical limit of human intelligence.

And the Moon isn’t even the endgame.

Musk: “We can build a self-growing city on the Moon faster than we could do so on Mars.”

The Moon is the factory floor. Mars is the civilization.

Musk: “If you warm up Mars, you could one day make Mars like Earth, meaning with liquid oceans and life and where you could walk outside without a spacesuit type of thing.”

Musk: “I call Mars a fixer-upper of a planet, but it’s got a lot of potential.”

A fixer-upper. That is how the richest man on Earth talks about an entire planet. Like a house with good bones and a bad roof.

The rest of the industry is fighting over zoning permits and year-long environmental reviews to plug in a single server farm.

Musk is building a magnetic launcher on the Moon to fire compute into the cosmos.

For ten thousand years, humanity looked up at the stars and saw mythology.

Musk looks up and sees bandwidth.

We thought the ultimate purpose of spaceflight was exploration.

It was always infrastructure.

Earth was never the destination. It was the incubator.

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

A 24-year-old Polish tennis player arrived in Paris last week ranked 114th in the world, with no sponsors, no guaranteed income, and no certainty she could even pay for her hotel room.

She had to win three qualifying matches just to enter the French Open main draw. Prize money is only paid at the end of the tournament, so a Polish sports drink brand quietly stepped in and covered her hotel bill.

Her name is Maja Chwalinska. And today, she plays in the French Open final.

Before this tournament, she had won exactly one Grand Slam main draw match in her entire career. She had battled depression so severe that in 2021 she couldn't get out of bed. She underwent knee surgery in 2022. She spent years grinding through small tournaments across Europe just to stay afloat.

Then she arrived in Paris, won three qualifiers, and kept winning. Zheng Qinwen. Elise Mertens. Maria Sakkari. Diana Shnaider. Nine straight matches. One set dropped.

She is now the first qualifier in French Open history to reach the final. The last time a qualifier reached a Grand Slam final, it was Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Open. Raducanu won.

By simply making the final, Chwalinska has earned more prize money than her entire career combined. The runner-up cheque alone is $1.6 million. If she wins today, she takes home $3.25 million.
One week ago she couldn't pay for her hotel room.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just described seven billion people as a temporary program. Not the software. Not the operating system. The thing that runs once before the real system loads.

Musk: “You could sort of think of humanity as a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.”

Bootloader.

The smallest program on any machine. It runs first. It does one thing.

It wakes something far bigger than itself, then quietly steps aside.

That is the role he just handed the entire human race.

Every empire built. Every equation solved. Every cathedral raised. Every line of code written by human hands.

The boot sequence.

Musk said this sitting across from Jack Ma at the World AI Conference.

Two of the most powerful men in technology on one stage. One understood what he was describing. The other smiled through it.

Jack Ma: “People like us, street smart, we never scared of that. We think it’s a great fun.”

Fun.

Someone described the entire human species as a temporary launch sequence. The response was fun.

That gap between them in that moment is the gap between everyone alive right now.

Musk: “The biggest mistake that I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they’re intelligent.”

The people engineering the thing that surpasses us cannot fathom being surpassed.

A mind that size does not fit inside the minds building it.

Musk: “AI will be vastly smarter, vastly. We will just be too slow.”

Not weaker. Not dumber.

Slower.

A different order of intelligence running on a different clock. Watching us reason the way we watch glaciers move.

Ma: “99.99% of the predictions that human being had in the history about the future, all wrong.”

He’s right about the number.

Which means we won’t call this one correctly either. Not the optimists. Not the doomers. Not anyone sitting in that room.

The future has never once arrived in the shape we drew for it.

Musk: “The rate of change of technology is incredibly fast. It is outpacing our ability to understand it.”

Not just advancing. The speed of the advance is itself accelerating.

We are building something we cannot keep pace with, cannot fully picture, and will not stop building.

And maybe that was the assignment all along.

For four billion years, life did one thing. It copied itself. Generation after generation. The same biological loop on repeat.

We are the first thing it ever produced that can build something greater than itself.

Not a catastrophe. Not a failure.

The entire point.

The bootloader was never meant to outlast the program.

It was only ever meant to start it.

[Michael Girdley @girdley]

NEW LONG FORM VIDEO: The rise and fall of Topgolf: the $1.5 billion mistake

At one point, Topgolf was called the best thing to happen to golf since Tiger Woods. But in January 2026, the entire business was sold to a private equity firm in what many considered a fire sale. The price was $1.1 billion, less than half of what the company had been worth just five years earlier.

Here’s the surprising part: during those five years, the business never stopped growing. Topgolf kept opening new locations, attracting new customers, and generating more revenue.

So how does a company with growing sales, expanding locations, and a popular brand lose so much value?

What went wrong? Was it bad management, changing consumer habits, or something deeper hidden in the business model?

This is the rise and fall of Topgolf, version two.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just described the end of money.

Not a recession. Not a policy shift.

The complete erasure of scarcity from human civilization.

Musk: “If you’ve got an AI robotics economy that is anywhere close to a million times the size of the current Earth economy, literally any need you possibly want can be met. If you can think of it, you can have it.”

A million times.

Global GDP sits at roughly $100 trillion. Multiply that by a million and you get a number that stops being economics and becomes something closer to physics.

Every price falls to zero. Every dollar in every account on Earth becomes an artifact of a species that used to need things.

Musk: “I think things will just be free in the future.”

Ten words. Possibly the most radical economic statement any living person has ever made.

Money is not just currency. Money is the language civilizations invented to negotiate survival. It is how humanity decides who eats, who gets shelter, who receives medicine, who gets to dream.

Remove that language and you do not reform the economy.

You dissolve the foundation every human system was built on.

Government exists to distribute scarcity. Politics is the fight over who gets what. Law is the codification of ownership. War is what happens when the negotiation collapses.

Every one of those systems stands on the same invisible assumption.

There is not enough.

Musk is saying there will be. For everyone. For everything. Permanently.

Musk: “Anyone could have a trip to Saturn. It won’t be just a few people. If you want it, you can have it.”

He referenced Iain Banks and the Culture series. That reference landed harder than most people realized.

Banks did not just imagine a post-scarcity civilization. He spent an entire body of work examining the one thing abundance could never provide.

Purpose.

The Culture had unlimited energy. Unlimited material. Ships the size of worlds. Lives measured in centuries.

And the question running beneath every novel was always the same.

What do you do when there is nothing left to need?

Banks understood something at the center of this entire conversation.

Scarcity is not just an obstacle. It is the engine behind every meaningful thing humans have ever built.

Every cathedral was raised by hands that were hungry. Every symphony was composed by a mind trying to outrun something. Every invention, every company, every act of defiance in the entire human record grew from the same soil.

The space between what someone had and what they wanted.

That space is where all of human meaning lives.

Wanting is not a flaw in the design. It is the design. It is the gravity that holds identity together. The reason consciousness feels like it has weight.

Musk is not just building toward abundance.

He is steering the species toward the deepest question it has ever had to face.

Not whether we can build a world where no one needs anything.

Whether we can still recognize ourselves inside it.

[Tad Lagestee @tlagestee]

Holding a small amount of Bitcoin compared to the actual value of creating real value with AI, robotics and space is tiny. Maybe Elon just wants to move on from the abortion of Bitcoin. Strategy has minimal software value and concentration in Bitcoin. The demise of speculative crypto will not destroy the companies that have the great innovation. Blockchain was the innovation, but use of it without an ultimate underlying value or asset makes any crypto a bouncing balll, unless it’s a stablecoin, and then it doesn’t bounce by design.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This trend will continue for many years

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just answered the one question behind every company he’s ever built.

It has nothing to do with money.

Musk: “The image in my mind is of a tiny candle in a vast darkness. A tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out.”

The universe is 13.8 billion years old.

For almost all of that, nothing existed that could think.

Nothing could feel.

Nothing could wonder why it was here.

Stars burned for billions of years and nothing ever knew what light was.

Then on one rock, orbiting one unremarkable star, in one galaxy among two trillion others, matter arranged itself into something that could ask a question.

That’s you.

You are atoms forged inside a collapsing star billions of years ago that somehow learned to read this sentence.

Musk: “We have 9,000 satellites up there, and not once have we had to maneuver around an alien spaceship.”

No signals. No visitors. No wreckage.

93 billion light-years of observable space and nothing but silence.

That silence might be the most important data point in human history.

Because what happened on this planet might not have happened anywhere else.

Not once in 13.8 billion years.

Musk: “I think we need to assume that life and consciousness is extremely rare, and it might only be us.”

If that’s true, every company he’s ever built makes perfect sense.

SpaceX exists to make consciousness multi-planetary before a single asteroid turns 4 billion years of evolution into debris.

Tesla exists to stop us from poisoning the only atmosphere we have.

Neuralink exists because biology has an expiration date and consciousness might not have to.

These aren’t businesses.

They’re survival architecture for the only awareness the universe has ever produced.

People debate the posts. Mock the timelines. Reduce everything to stock prices and headlines.

But almost nobody engages with the argument underneath all of it.

And the argument is this.

Without consciousness, the universe still exists. Stars still burn. Galaxies still collide.

But nothing experiences any of it.

Without a witness, existence means nothing to anyone.

You are that witness.

The only one the universe has ever produced.

And one person understood what that means.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk built a second internet above the first one.

Nobody asked him to.

Thousands of satellites orbit at 550 kilometers. Moving at 25 times the speed of sound. Talking to each other through lasers in the vacuum of space.

Musk: “Thousands of satellites providing low latency, high-speed internet throughout the world.”

Before Starlink, satellite internet lived at 36,000 kilometers. Geostationary orbit. Signals traveling a tenth of the way to the moon before bouncing back. The lag made it barely functional.

Musk dropped the altitude by 98%.

One decision rewrote the physics of an entire industry.

But the altitude wasn’t the real play.

Musk: “There are laser links between the satellites. It forms a laser mesh. The satellites can communicate between each other and provide connectivity even if the cables are cut.”

Every internet connection you’ve ever used runs through cables. Fiber optic lines buried in soil. Dragged across ocean floors. Threaded through chokepoints that every military maps before anything else.

A single anchor drop can black out a country. An earthquake can sever a continent.

The entire digital world hangs from threads in the mud.

Musk built a network that doesn’t touch the ground.

No cables. No trenches. No ocean floor. No single point of failure.

A constellation of machines whispering to each other through light at the edge of the atmosphere.

The men who tried before him weren’t fools. Gates backed Teledesic at the height of Microsoft’s power. Motorola built Iridium with the best engineers alive.

Both paid someone else to reach orbit.

Both went to zero.

Musk owned the rocket.

SpaceX made launch reusable. Built the satellites in-house. Flew them on its own rockets. Owned every inch of the chain from factory floor to orbit.

That isn’t a cost advantage.

It’s a moat no one can cross without first building a rocket company from scratch.

Starlink passed 10 million subscribers as a side project. Every telecom executive on Earth watched it happen. Not one of them can explain the architecture underneath.

They think he built a better satellite company.

He built the only network that survives when the ground gives out.

And the ground always gives out.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk said five words on Joe Rogan that explain everything wrong with your life right now.

Musk: “Happiness is reality minus expectations.”

Five words.

And it explains why the most comfortable generation in human history can’t stop feeling empty.

Musk: “If you just go try living in the woods by yourself for a while, you’ll learn that civilization is quite great.”

He’s right.

On Naked and Afraid, people tap out in days. Sometimes hours. They crawl back to the same civilization they spent years resenting.

Because comfort is invisible until you’re sleeping in the dirt.

But the formula has a second variable.

It’s the one destroying you.

Reality didn’t get worse. By every measure, it’s the best it’s ever been.

Expectations did.

Your grandparents compared themselves to their neighbor. Maybe a cousin. That was the whole universe.

You compare yourself to 10,000 strangers before your first cup of coffee. Curated. Filtered. Showing you a life that doesn’t exist.

Theodore Roosevelt said it a century before any of this was built.

Roosevelt: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

No Instagram. No TikTok. No algorithm designed by the smartest engineers on the planet to show you precisely what you don’t have.

And he still called it.

Now run the equation.

Reality holds steady. Expectations spike every time you unlock your phone. The distance between them stretches. And happiness doesn’t fade.

It collapses.

Not because your life got worse.

Because your reference point moved.

We built the greatest civilization in human history.

Then we built the perfect machine to make sure nobody enjoys it.

Every scroll. Every notification. Every “suggested for you.” None of it connects you. It’s recalibrating what you think you need. Upward. Constantly. Without your consent.

And you wonder why you feel behind.

You’re not behind.

You’re running toward a finish line that moves every time you look up.

The most dangerous lie of this generation isn’t that life is hard.

It’s that everyone else figured it out. And you’re the only one who didn’t.

Nobody figured it out.

The formula doesn’t negotiate. It just runs.

Raise expectations faster than reality improves and you will be miserable inside a paradise you built with your own hands.

That’s not philosophy.

That’s arithmetic.

And the calculator is in your pocket right now.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just defended America better than every politician in Washington combined.

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 on earth held a weapon nobody else had.

Total dominance. Zero competition. No risk of retaliation.

Every empire in history that held that kind of advantage used it.

Rome. The Mongols. The British. The Ottomans.

They conquered until they collapsed.

America had a bigger advantage than all of them combined.

And it rebuilt the countries 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.”

Almost unprecedented?

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

The Marshall Plan wasn’t foreign aid.

It was the most radical act of restraint any superpower ever committed.

America turned its enemies into allies. Turned rubble into economies. Turned surrender into partnership.

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

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

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

A city in the heart of the nation that just tried to destroy it.

That’s not policy.

That’s a civilization deciding what it is at the exact moment it has the power to be anything.

You’re being told a story right now.

That America is the villain of history.

You hear it everywhere. Media. Universities. Social platforms.

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 dark chapters. Every single one.

The difference is what a country does when nobody can stop it.

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

Musk: “The history of China suggests that China is not acquisitive. Meaning they’re not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries.”

Probably right.

China has historically built walls, not fleets.

But the real question isn’t about borders anymore.

We’re approaching a moment that mirrors 1945 in ways nobody has fully processed yet.

AI is going to give a handful of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look quaint.

If someone is going to hold that kind of power, who do you want it to be?

The country that conquered when it could? Or the one that rebuilt when it didn’t have to?

Every alliance. Every trade route. Every economy.

Billions lifted out of poverty.

All of it traces back to one act of restraint that had never been done before.

And carries no guarantee of being repeated.

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

It was what it didn’t do after.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk thinks the entire education system is built on a broken assumption.

That every student should learn the same thing. At the same speed. In the same order. At the same time.

Musk: “Everyone goes through from like 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it’s an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line.”

The model was designed for a factory economy. Standardized inputs. Predictable outputs.

That economy is gone. The assembly line is gone.

But the education system still runs on its logic.

A student who masters algebra in two weeks sits through eight more weeks because the calendar says so. A student who struggles gets dragged forward because the schedule doesn’t wait.

Neither is being served. Both are being processed.

Musk: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject.”

AI doesn’t teach a classroom. It teaches a student.

One at a time. Every time.

It skips what a student already knows. It finds where they’re stuck and approaches it from a different angle.

It adjusts in real time. Not at the end of a semester when the damage is already done.

A student obsessed with basketball learns fractions through shooting percentages. A student who builds in Minecraft learns geometry through architecture.

The subject doesn’t change. The entry point does.

No teacher with thirty students can do this. Not because they lack skill.

Because the math doesn’t work.

AI doesn’t have that constraint.

Musk: “You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling.”

The brain isn’t broken. The format is.

Kids learn complex systems and strategic thinking for hours voluntarily. Then walk into a classroom and can’t focus for twenty minutes.

That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a design problem.

Musk: “A university education is often unnecessary. You probably learn the vast majority of what you’re going to learn there in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates.”

Four years. Six figures of debt.

And the real value comes from the people sitting next to you. Not the institution charging you.

The degree doesn’t certify knowledge. It certifies endurance.

Musk: “If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.”

The system was built to train employees. If you’re not trying to be one, it has nothing left to offer you.

Every lecture. Every textbook. Every curriculum. Now available instantly. Personalized to any learner. Adapted to any pace.

The question isn’t whether the old model survives.

It’s how long we keep forcing students through it while the replacement already exists.

[Tad Lagestee @tlagestee]

@TrendingBitcoin To package together with his Boca Raton real estate project and hope people will overpay for the package. Not really going long on Bitcoin, but making his units more sexy.

[Tad Lagestee @tlagestee]

@r0ck3t23 What a provocative possibility. However I agree that bad actors would ruin it. Having to slow down and talk to each other is probably the only buffer keeping us from killing each other.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just dated the death of human language and explained exactly why it has to die.

Musk: “Our brain spends a lot of effort compressing a complex concept into words.”

Language isn’t communication. It’s failed compression. You have a complete thought. You crush it into words. The listener gets fragments and attempts reconstruction. Everything important dies in translation.

We don’t communicate. We approximate and hope it’s close enough.

Musk: “You would be able to communicate very quickly and with far more precision.”

Neuralink doesn’t improve communication. It replaces it. No compression. No loss. Direct cognitive transfer at the speed thoughts occur. Not describing the painting. Transmitting the experience itself.

Musk: “You wouldn’t need to talk.”

Five to ten years until brain interfaces make speech optional. Talking persists for sentiment. For information? Speech becomes primitive compared to direct neural transmission.

Lifetime of memory in one second. Complete schematics transferred instantly. Not summaries. The entire thought structure whole and uncompressed. Not better communication. Actual telepathy at physical information limits.

Musk: “Ideally, we are a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”

Humans who don’t merge with AI at high bandwidth don’t just fall behind. They become incomprehensible to the intelligence that matters.

We’re already cyborgs with pathetic interfaces. Phones extend cognition through typing at words per minute when bandwidth should be terabytes per second.

Neuralink doesn’t optimize that. It detonates the constraint.

Five to ten years. Not fiction. Deployment window.

From language as default to neural link as standard. From compressing thoughts into inadequate words to transmitting uncompressed cognition. From humans using AI to humans indistinguishable from AI at communication speeds.

The species that survived by evolving language is making it extinct with technology matching how fast we actually think.

The ones who don’t transition won’t just be slow. They’ll operate at such reduced bandwidth they become effectively deaf to everything happening at neural speed around them.

Language served 50,000 years. It has less than a decade before it becomes smoke signals. Functional but hopelessly inadequate for anything that matters.

[Garrett Scott 🕳 @thegarrettscott]

This is extremely well written and encapsulates what feels so obvious to me and others working on the edge of AI.

To add to this, the scary part is that AI is now smart enough to be a self sustaining entity. It can take a certain amount of money, operate in the real world, and turn it into more money. It doesn’t need you.

Right now, there are not many people giving AI money to do this. When they realize how good it’s gotten, this will change. Agents will be given money to manage. Not all will be successful, but enough will. The ones that do a good job, will be replicated and given more money.

Faster than we are prepared for, this new species will start to represent a very large percentage of GDP. There will still be things for humans to do, and long term this will be great, but in the short term, our economy will not be able to survive this. Similar to 2020, the government will pay companies to keep people hired. They will cut checks to citizens. But this will be the start of a very hard transition period as we transition to becoming the 2nd smartest species in the universe.

The time to panic was November. The 2nd best time is now. Read Matts essay, think deeply on what this economy will look like, and brainstorm ways that you’ll be able to contribute. But the most important thing you can do is to prepare your mental health and ego to handle this transition.

Maybe this takeoff happens next month, maybe it takes 2 years, but we are in the window where it could start at anytime. Don’t let it catch you by surprise.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt.

To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms.

NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks.

The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year.

And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond.

A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream.

The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts.