This week on Construction Physics: How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine construction-physics.com/p/h…

The permitting reform bill is out, with more meaningful reform in it than ever before! The most important reason to pass this, from @SenatorHeinrich: "We need to be able to build big things in this country again... to figure out how to get to yes, or how to get to no, a whole lot faster. If we don't, experts have estimated that we will see 20-30% increases in the cost of electricity in the near term."

Trump signed an executive order yesterday directing federal agencies to develop and implement, by November 27, a campaign across Washington, D.C. to reduce, by 2028, invasive mosquito populations by 90% & tick populations by 50%: whitehouse.gov/presidential-… @chenderson

LLM classification of where 37k inventions listed on Wikipedia were invented. From nber.org/system/files/workin…

An Ode to Tesla's Cybercab austinvernon.site/blog/cyber… Speeding up AVs can prevent millions of deaths. The Cybercab is a major advancement in automotive manufacturing technology, being an order of magnitude more scalable than any previous car design. A true feat of engineering.

We’re sharing a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of the deepest problems at the frontier of mathematics. The proof was produced by a group of agents, using an OpenAI next-generation model significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra. The problem concerns whether the description of smooth three-dimensional fluid motion modeled by the Navier-Stokes equations can break down. It has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.

This week on Construction Physics: my third and final post looking at the housing supply impacts of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. construction-physics.com/p/h…

WSJ: See the New Building Techniques Turbocharging the Data-Center Boom - Hyperscalers’ need for speed is spawning timesaving products and building techniques wsj.com/tech/ai/see-the-new-…

And with a 5 person crew Not even 9 months ago we were at a week per floor

This week on Construction Physics: how the strategic petroleum reserve works. construction-physics.com/p/h…

“Wherever we look, we see the same thing: American transit agencies struggle to rein in costs when building transportation infrastructure,” writes @_brianpotter. “In the United States, we pay far more for our transit systems than virtually anywhere else in the world.”

The main throughline of the Reacher books is that "Reacher can win any fight," and over the course of the series they throw more and more ridiculous challenges at him. In one book he has to fight a tiny guy in a room with a really low ceiling. In another book he fights a truck.

Italian company, American factory Olivetti-Underwood, Harrisburg, Penn., 1970

huh

A new US actuator startup has entered the chat!

This week on Construction Physics, the first in a multi-part series where I try to suss out what the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act will actually do for housing supply. construction-physics.com/p/w…

AI pause now.

Cool potential use of a home robot: regular skin cancer screening.

A command called 'pytorch_no_powerplant_blowup=1' runs inside some frontier data centers, keeping their GPUs running with dummy workloads after their real work has completed. Why? Because researchers realized that thousands of GPUs stopping at once flatlined MWs of power in a fraction of a second — risking major damage to the grid. Unfortunately, the risk goes beyond *accidental* power swings. An adversary or saboteur could hijack a data center's load-management system, causing widespread blackouts and infrastructure damage. That kind of hacking ability used to be mostly the domain of sophisticated state actors; with the advent of Anthropic’s Mythos model, it can now it can be done by AI. Anthropic’s Mythos model found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities across every major OS and browser in weeks. While it is not available publicly today, Mythos-level cyber offense capabilities will soon diffuse. What can federal regulators do to protect the grid? My new piece argues that FERC should use its existing large load interconnection docket to both reform the broken large load interconnection system, and to create a speed-for-security bargain: - give data centers that agree to be curtailable an accelerated interconnection path — so long as they abide by sufficient cyber and physical security standards - direct NERC to write enforceable security standards instead of the voluntary guidance we have now. FERC’s principles for large load interconnection reform in its November ANOPR establish standardized, generator-style interconnection procedures for large loads: jurisdictional scope and study rules, cost responsibility, an expedited pathway for curtailable load, and a co-location framework. These are great steps to help alleviate the ever-growing large load interconnection queues that drive data centers behind the meter and outside of the US. But it is little help if these data centers are hacked, disabled, or used as weapons against the grid. Advancing the ANOPR’s principles, and adding a speed-for-security bargain will help protect both America’s AI R&D leadership, and our vulnerable grid. That is what FERC should do in its upcoming June large load interconnection action.