Art Wrightson

Investor, Tech, Fitness, Endlessly Curious, Always Learning

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile are jointly lobbying the FCC to preserve existing rules as @SpaceX moves closer to launching its own independent cellular network that would compete directly with the three major U.S. carriers.

On Oct 20th, reps from all three major U.S. wireless carriers met with FCC officials to push back against proposed changes that would give satellite companies more freedom to offer cellular service.

The carriers urged the FCC to:
• Block satellite companies from using certain 5G frequencies currently used by wireless carriers.
• Keep rules requiring satellite companies to get permission from wireless carriers before using their licensed spectrum.
• Allow wireless carriers to maintain control over these agreements, including the ability to end them.
• Reconsider proposed interference limits to protect existing cellular networks.

Based on all the public communications from these carriers, and the lobbying, they are clearly worried that SpaceX's @Starlink Mobile network is going to be a major competitor to them. Starlink Mobile will become the first network operator to deploy both satellite and terrestrial spectrum.

The FCC recently announced that they are considering new rules that could make it easier for satellite companies like SpaceX to offer cellular service without relying as heavily on existing wireless carriers, so this is partly what the three big carriers are fighting against.

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration?

DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in making cholesterol. GPT-Rosalind suggested a possible explanation: cholesterol may not be reaching where neurons need it.

That gives scientists a specific mechanism to test and, if confirmed, a direction for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative disorders.

With @perturbai_tx and @scrippsresearch, a team of thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents worked in parallel, connecting gene-expression results from millions of mouse brain cells with scientific literature in just 32 minutes. We’re now expanding this collaboration to identify new drug targets.

https://t.co/oHdF3ELsMj

[Art Wrightson @wrightsona]

@protectingblue 🙏🏼😢

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

The complete AI fund flows

[Art Wrightson @wrightsona]

@BuzzPatterson 🙏🏼🙏🏼

[Art Wrightson @wrightsona]

@RobertMSterling 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

[Tesla @Tesla]

Real life, baby

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A drone captured the incredible moment a whale pushed a paddleboard with its fin.

Maximiliano Jonas filmed the amazing footage off the coast of Puerto Madryn, Argentina

[📹 maxijonas]

[Art Wrightson @wrightsona]

@gregisenberg @Jason need him on @theallinpod

[Art Wrightson @wrightsona]

@JaapVergote @unusual_whales @grok What did they pay today for the contracts?

[Race 🕊️ @multiplanet1]

A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.

At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."

He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.

Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.

He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.

He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."

The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

Nine years of working night shifts in hospice care taught me something I’ll never forget:

People nearing the end of their lives rarely ask for the things you’d expect.

Sometimes, they don’t ask for God. They don’t ask for miracles. Sometimes, they ask for something so small it breaks your heart.

Room 4 belonged to an 86-year-old man named Walter. He had lung cancer. His wife, Dorothy, had died in 2019, and he hadn’t had a single visitor in eleven days.

One night, around 2 a.m., he waved me over.

“Are you married?” he asked.

“No,” I told him.

He nodded slowly. “Then you probably don’t wear perfume.”

I smiled and told him I had some in my locker.

“What kind?”

“Nothing fancy. Just something cheap from the drugstore.”

He shook his head.

“Dorothy wore White Shoulders. Every night before bed. Not for church. For bed.”

He chuckled, but the laughter quickly turned into a coughing fit. When he finally caught his breath, he looked at the ceiling and said something I still think about.

“I used to tell her she was wasting it on me. She’d say, ‘The good stuff isn't for God. It’s for whoever has to look at you in the morning.’”

Then he smiled.

Not the polite smile people give strangers. The kind that belongs to someone remembering the best years of his life.

I finished my shift at seven that morning, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dorothy.

So I drove to three different pharmacies until I finally found a bottle of White Shoulders. It was tucked on the bottom shelf, behind the nail polish remover.

$18.99.

That evening, on my night off, I went back to the hospice.

Walter was asleep.

I didn’t wake him. I sprayed a little perfume on the inside of his pillowcase, then sprayed a washcloth and gently folded it across his chest.

I sat beside him for a while.

He never opened his eyes.

But slowly, almost painfully slowly, his hand rose from the blanket. He reached for the washcloth and rested his palm flat against it.

Then he held it there.

His breathing softened. His face relaxed. For the first time in days, the tension seemed to leave his body.

I've watched many people die over the years. Nurses learn to recognize the moments when someone stops struggling against what is coming.

That night, I watched Walter settle into a memory that was bigger than the room he was lying in.

Maybe he was remembering Dorothy getting ready for bed. Maybe he was remembering the way she smelled when she climbed beside him. Maybe, for a few precious minutes, he wasn't an 86-year-old man dying alone.

Maybe he was simply a husband lying next to his wife again.

Walter passed away on Thursday morning.

Nobody came to collect his belongings.

His room was cleaned, his bed was remade, and eventually another patient moved in. The world kept going, as it always does.

But I never forgot him.

People think hospice care is about managing pain, administering medication, and making someone comfortable during their final days.

And yes, it is.

But sometimes, comfort isn't a medication.

Sometimes, it's a familiar song.
A voice you haven't heard in years.
A hand holding yours when the room goes quiet.
Or the smell of the person you loved most in the world.

We spend our entire lives building what we call home. We fill it with furniture, photographs, clothes, and all the ordinary things we barely notice until they're gone.

But when everything else is stripped away, home can become something incredibly small.

A familiar scent.
A remembered touch.
A voice saying your name.

Sometimes, home is the person you keep expecting to find beside you when you wake up.

And sometimes, when you can't bring that person back, the kindest thing another human being can do is help you remember them one last time.

I've worked nine years of night shifts in hospice care.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's this:

At the end of life, people don't always need someone to save them. Sometimes, they just need someone to remind them that they were loved.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your dog spends about 20% of the night awake and its sleep quality doesn't drop at all. In the bed-sharing arrangement, you were always the fragile one.

Dogs are polyphasic sleepers. Their sleep comes in short bouts stacked across the whole day, and their brains are built to surface, check the room, and sink back under in seconds. Humans run on 90 minute cycles where a single bad 3am wake-up can cost an hour. Same mattress, two completely different operating systems.

A Mayo Clinic study put activity trackers on 40 owner-dog pairs for a week. The dogs hit 85% sleep efficiency whether they slept on the bed or the floor. The humans managed 81%, and their number moved depending on where the dog was. Dog sleep was bulletproof. Human sleep bent around the dog.

Then wearables blew up the sample sizes. A 2026 analysis of 11,733 WHOOP users across 1.6 million nights found that on dog-in-the-room nights, people slept about 10 minutes longer, resting heart rate dropped about 1 beat per minute, and heart rate variability rose. There were a few extra micro-wakeups, around 0.4 per night. The nervous system downshifted anyway. It read the dog as safety.

A 2025 study ran sleep EEG on family dogs and found the inversion. Dogs sleep measurably worse when their owners aren't in the room. You are your dog's sleep aid, and apparently its main sleep disruption too.

The evolutionary read is that this deal is tens of thousands of years old. Humans who slept near dogs could afford deeper, more vulnerable sleep because something with better hearing was handling the night watch. Co-sleeping researchers think dogs literally expanded how much uninterrupted sleep early humans could get.

The dog takes the broken sleep so you don't have to. The trade predates agriculture, and your heart rate still drops a beat the moment one curls up at your feet.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

T-Mobile spent five years trying to get rid of the exact spectrum Elon just called "the last critical piece" of complete phone coverage in America.

This 800 MHz block is Sprint's old Nextel spectrum, the stuff that powered push-to-talk walkie-talkie phones in 2004. The DOJ forced T-Mobile to divest it as a condition of the $26 billion Sprint merger. Dish had first rights at $3.59 billion and walked away because it couldn't raise the money. T-Mobile finally offloaded it to an investment firm called Grain Management last year for $2.9 billion plus a spectrum swap.

Grain's original plan was selling it to utilities for private networks.

Fourteen months later, SpaceX buys the whole portfolio, and shares of the carriers who passed on it fall as much as 8% in a single afternoon.

Here's why it matters so much. Starlink's satellite signal at 2 GHz can reach your phone outdoors, but it dies at the first wall. 800 MHz penetrates buildings. Most phones already have the band built in. So satellites handle the open sky, this low-band layer handles indoors, and suddenly Starlink Mobile covers everywhere a normal carrier does without the tower network.

Stack the moves. $17 billion for EchoStar's 50 MHz of 2 GHz spectrum. FCC approval for 15,000 Gen2 satellites this week. Now the low-band coverage layer.

Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile paid $81 billion in a single auction for C-band spectrum in 2021, then spent years and tens of billions more deploying it on towers. SpaceX assembled a nationwide carrier out of a distressed-asset sale, a forced divestiture castoff, and rockets it already owns.

The walkie-talkie spectrum from 2004 ended up being the piece that lets satellites replace cell towers. Nobody who touched it for twenty years saw that coming.

[Art Wrightson @wrightsona]

@SBI1937 🙏🏼❤️

[Art Wrightson @wrightsona]

@adcock_brett @BillAckman On the list

[Jason Oppenheim @OppenheimJason]

A public service announcement.

[ℝ𝕠𝕔𝕜𝕖𝕥 @rdbrewer4]

Ever see a grizzly get flat out knocked on his ass? Me neither.

[Jake Tapper 🦅 @jaketapper]

On this day in 2009, at the crack of dawn, more than 400 insurgents attacked the 53 US servicemembers at the remote Combat Outpost Keating in Afghanistan. The COP was at the bottom of three steep mountains just a few miles from the border with Pakistan. 1/

[Love Classical Music and Movies 🎺🎻💖🎥🎬 @AlexTran677026]

One of the most beautiful versions of Hotel California I have ever heard. It's magical.😱
The Eagles - Hotel California - | Moyun