Physicist, Immigrant, Pilot, Dad. Former Caltech, Hyperloop, NASA JPL. Once considered pretty smart for an organic. Founder @terraformindies. Hiring!
NASAdena
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Try this in the browser at mars.caseyhandmer.com/mars3d!
You can now enjoy a colored relief map render of this dataset streamed through Google Earth. Download the .kml file (drive.google.com/file/d/1bS1…) and open it in your Google Earth Pro client. Enjoy!
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Google's primary problem is that they have never had to fight for survival. They invented a gold mine worth $400b a year and have done okay for an entity coping with the resource curse, but actual capitalism is still a foreign concept.
Google is an incredible company that I’ve always rooted for that trips over its own bureaucracy in frenetic times.
They ironically do a middling job at their first priority, but crush it at their second or third. We’ve seen this with Search, Google+, Assistant, Cloud and now even AI. Why?
The internet would be unrecognizable without Google. This is a company that has Search, Chrome, Android, Workspace (Docs/Sheets), Drive, Play Store, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Photos, Translate, Gemini, Calendar, Meet, Chromebooks, Waymo: some of the most widespread and most undermonetized products in the history of the world. It is inconceivable for most of us to live life without software Google has made available for $0.
And truly, having worked there, this is a company that continuously prioritizes their users over profits. Even as a casual reader, it might be trivial for you to imagine 100s of ways to monetize all of Google’s products. But they usually don’t. They don’t just launch experiments because it’s high engagement, but only when it’s actually good.
So how does a company like this falter?
My observation has been that these frenetic eras either attract or condone the worst behavior out of execs that trickle down to the rest of the company. The most “ambitious” L3-L7 people who feel stuck finally see a company-wide priority and their eyes light up with the gleaming prospect of a promotion. A lot of people in big orgs’ entire sense of self esteem is wrapped around their level. They will do a lot for an N+1. “Did you know Sergey is personally working on this?” “Sundar referred to my project in the all hands” In turn, everything in these orgs become a knife fight for getting the most “high impact” projects, fighting for credit, flagrantly hiding concerns around juiced metrics. More work goes into a promo packet than the actual project. Goodhart’s Law kicks in and the metrics measured for a promotion are abused beyond measure.
On the other hand, second and third priority things work brilliantly. It attracts people with genuine interest, sincerity who are willing to play longer term games. Many products have grown and thrived when left alone.
When there is immense pressure for a number to go up, it eventually does but often at the cost of product quality (the small product polish things don’t get me a promo), core innovation (why take on a high risk bet if I can get promoted for copying oai/ant) and cultural cohesion (a lot of bad blood amongst people in the org, tons of reorgs). There is a certain type of individual that thrives in this environment, and they are typically not very likable nor “Googley”. This is why an incredible number of people leave or allow jesus to take the reigns as they cash in the bag.
I lament that every time this happens, we, the billion users, lose out on yet another beautiful Google product.
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First Starlink flight. Obligatory FaceTime call to @Steph_stoj during the climb (with headphones, and silent on my end!!). Such cool technology.
Now to the real fun of Starlink, coding agents all flight 😂
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Etsy DM: "Your shop's named 'Quercus Maps,' did you make these great pencil and watercolor maps?"
No, apparently Australian wallpaper maker Quercus & Co. did, but ceased selling them in 2017. Bummer
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Would y'all be cool if I lowered the editing/narrative quality on the BPS videos in an effort to cover more detail? Looking for honest feedback!
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Then feed all that into a video model. Need to improve the camera work here a bit but not bad.
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You can probably serve this from cloudflare like domes.caseyhandmer.com.
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I just saw a crazy homeless guy walk into the middle of the road next to Times Square and piss on the road in front of traffic
Here’s a photo of the puddle
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Huh? No; “torturing” sleeping people is obviously very bad, even if they don’t and won’t feel that (because we want to respect people’s wishes around what happens to their bodies and safety during sleep, not because they feel anything); torturing awake people is much worse. What makes you think I implied otherwise?
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It is bad to torture humans in a way that it’s not bad to torture rocks. It is an important question whether an LLM is more like a human or more like a rock.
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I've been doing this. It's called working on cool stuff.
Tech companies launching their own programs to train grads because they 'can't rely' on Ivy Leagues trib.al/Fi2miAG
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Casey Handmer on how Elon's Mass Driver is going to work:
"With a rocket, you can launch every couple of days if you're really good.
With a mass driver, you'd have a shuttle that sits in an electromagnetic track and once it starts to slow down, roughly halfway down the track, whatever the payload is will separate from momentum and fly the rest of the way.
Then the shuttle will accelerate in the other direction, get reloaded with another wire bale of moon rock, and shoot itself back into space.
At the speeds involved, it might be like one a second.
If you want to do 100 tons a day, you don't need to do one Starship. Instead you do it in 86,400 bite sized pieces of a few kilograms at a time.
You could actually build this mass driver on Earth, test it on Earth, launch it to the Moon, do a minimum of assembly or deployment on the Moon, and then operate it."
My second interview with @CJHandmer, Founder of @TerraformIndies.
0:09 How the Mass Driver is going to work
2:54 Mass Driver vs scaling Starship
4:26 Economics of space compute vs building data centers on Earth
8:53 Why large scale projects are becoming illegal
14:26 Terafab
20:02 Starmind
26:19 Maximum scale as fast as possible
27:43 Luisiana launch tower buildout
30:13 Elon’s decade long company baking period
32:56 Firing teams
37:35 Starting companies
41:57 Being unfiltered publicly
42:52 DOGE
46:39 Deregulating without a major war
55:17 Founder-led companies are mini dictatorships
58:53 Taxes
1:03:26 Civilization hard resets
1:05:30 Starship scaling constraints
1:07:16 How Elon sets objectives
1:09:31 Universal high income
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I wonder if you can just do a belt loop for the sled so it does what a rollercoaster does when it loops over a bend, and instead of slowing down, it uses the residual velocity for the free return and the electromagnets just assist in slowing down back to launch.
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What specifically was the trigger? I’d guess the national care service - taking on a huge unfunded liability is unlikely to have pleased the bond market.
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Casey Handmer retweeted
Only a tiny fraction of the world’s mosquito species prey on humans. All of these are invasive across essentially their entire range, having tagged along with humans as we moved around the world. Multiple careful studies say that eliminating these species would have little or no impact on the environment. However, it would save at least a million human lives a year, and get rid of a constant source of discomfort that prevents people from safely spending as much time outside as they would prefer. Malaria is only one of dozens of diseases, many potentially fatal, spread by mosquitoes. Gene drives can safely and relatively inexpensively eliminate these parasitic insects; we can create male mosquitoes that can only have male offspring and which then crash the population. It’s well past time that we did it.
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