engineering physicist, writes about deep tech, physics, energy, sci fi and whatever. founder @hyperstition_x produces @deeptechweek
San Francisco
Joined September 2012
- Tweets17.6K
- Following1.8K
- Followers134K
- Likes44.1K
Andrew Côté retweeted
Boom was unusually loud and proud describing their single crystal turbine blade development program - Blade Runner - at this year's SF @deeptechweek
Andrew Côté retweeted
Here you can see @EdwardMehr explain exactly how they've designed their flexible modular manufacturing to be easily and quickly deployable, running off a portable generator that fits in the back of a pickup truck.
Andrew Côté retweeted
Bloomberg: The Pentagon has tasked US robotics startup Machina Labs with trying to mass-produce cheap attack drones in quickly assembled modular factories as autonomous systems continue to change modern warfare. Link in comment
Andrew Côté retweeted
12 years ago I founded Boom, as a software engineer doing hardware for the first time. I’m probably the least handy founder in hard tech. My 12 y/o son does my soldering and 3D printing for home projects, and I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome the whole way through. What business does a software guy have building supersonic jets and turbines?
More than a decade in, the most insane realization is that software is the key to reaccelerating hardware engineering. But in a way that I don’t think is widely understood or implemented, even in the burgeoning hard tech community.
Most hardware engineering is actually software engineering in disguise. It’s spreadsheet “code,” engineering calculations done as one-offs. Eg wing structural loads in, spar sizing design out. Thermal loads in, air conditioning system sizing out.
Everything is a calculation, and calculation is software. But these calculations are done essentially by hand, as if we are doing arithmetic but have not yet discovered algebra.
Hardware engineers have baby software, built in spreadsheets, the kind of crappy software I wrote as a kid before I understood architecture, unit tests, APIs, version control, and everything else that makes modern software good.
Our airplanes and engines are built with the software sophistication of a script kiddie.
So what we tell our engineers: don’t design the hardware, design the *algorithm* for designing the hardware. And take the algorithm seriously—as an algorithm and as a first-class engineered software system.
Never design a piece of hardware, such that you couldn’t redesign it tomorrow with a different set of assumptions.
This all sounds obvious, yet our experience at Boom is that it changes everything.
Ten years ago we couldn’t afford to build much software. We had a small team—and there were few software engineers with the curiosity, brilliance, and vision required to learn hardware engineering.
But now AI changes the equation. Now everyone can code. The software engineers define the architecture. The hardware people bring the physics and engineering know-how.
We have a turbomachinery design tool that lets one engineer do in realtime what previously took 100 engineers six months. Another tool auto-generates 65% of entire aircraft structure. I’m sure we’ll figure out the other 35% too. Eventually these should not be multiple tools, but one integrated physics model of a complete vehicle, airframe and powertrain.
The results speak for themselves. A boomless supersonic airplane built by 50. A full scale supersonic turbine made by 150. And with this approach, I don’t think we’ll need that many more people to build and certify a supersonic airliner.
You don’t need a big team to build big things—not when everyone on the team is a software engineer.
Andrew Côté retweeted
this is jessie frazelle, CEO of zoo and co-founder of oxide computer company
we discuss building a CAD kernel from scratch, software engineers vs developers, GPUs and CAD, AI written code, candor, and why the best engineers are opinionated
Andrew Côté retweeted
Atlas shrugged, the Elves sailed into the West, and the Orbital Data Centers launched to Sun-synchronous orbit.
Andrew Côté retweeted
This is a significant part of my motivation to grow cheap gasoline from the ground up here in America. It’s all my community talked about come election season growing up.
$2.00/gal at the pump or less, fixed price. Just give us some time.
Andrew Côté retweeted
The world of startups has really strayed from its original vision of Faustian types with a singular vision of how to fundamentally reshape the world, dead set on making it work come hell or high water, regardless of a lagging metric such as their current "traction".
Traction may come sooner or later but is fundamentally a function of a founding team's thumos. Please learn what the Attic Greek word thumos means. Steve Jobs had Thumos. Shockley had it. Currently, Musk and the Zuck have it.
Do you think Elon cares about "traction"? YOU ARE WEAK. A great industrialist has traction because they imposed an overbearing degree of will on the world and oriented men around their vision.
This is what it means to "bet on a direction" - it is to have a shape of the world in your mind, to imagine it as strongly as you've imagined anything. The very act of such an imagining will direct you to take a sequence of actions sufficient to achieve it. Can you countenance the pain? If you stay the course, it will all happen!
Bridgit Mendler of @NorthwoodSpace says the builders of the early internet bet on a direction without knowing exactly what it would become, and the space industry is in that same moment now:
"For folks that were early with the internet, there's no way they would've foreseen what the internet is today. But they were betting on a direction... and look what we have today."
"I think we're in a similar moment with the space industry where we don't know what is going to be built. A year ago today, would we think that everybody would be talking about orbital data centers? No way."
"But it's captivated the public imagination and who knows what's gonna come next... The whole thing that we're about is taking companies further faster. Taking space missions further faster."
"If you analogize to the internet, you have a couple of kind of platform infrastructure plays that really wind up becoming enmeshed across the internet... There are a few that wind up becoming really influential and fundamental."
"Cloud is one that we analogize to a lot and we are inspired by. And we wanna be one of those companies."
@BridgitMendler
Andrew Côté retweeted
Pretending there’s no risk is naive. Focusing only on that risk is absurd. I take the stance of building the future I want to see for my daughter. There are worlds of value yet to unfold. Let’s birth them.
Andrew Côté retweeted
um, yeah, this is perhaps the main reason why the entire ai safety community has become way less interesting to me over the last few years
it's like everyone decided that solving alignment is doomed and complete pause/stop is the only option.
even though alignment has actually been going more optimistically under "Plan C" than i suspect most of them ever expected.
by that i mean "AGI progresses to the point where it's churning out superhuman mathematics, also is widely distributed, and the worst thing AIs have ever done is some illegal hacking to steal test results without hurting anyone badly or intentionally, and also AIs are just generally very friendly and help make peoples' lives better" is a state I think almost all AI alignment-concerned people I knew, including myself, from a few years ago would have considered an improbably optimistic state of the world. and that's just naming the legible, in-Overton-window aspects of why things are going surprisingly well.
it feels like a lot of AI safety people have anti-inductive epistemics. they will get more doomy no matter what they observe. probably they will be *more* fanatical about pause if things are actually going well because then it's harder for them to be doomy by engaging with the object level stuff.
If you read any blog post on AI safety from this year, make it be this one
lesswrong.com/posts/xikGZ8fu…
Andrew Côté retweeted
Two weeks from delivery (and 5 billion tokens!) to getting this engine online. I could not be more proud of my team.
It’s so fucking cool.
Happy friday everyone!
Andrew Côté retweeted
woah just learnt that normal Newtonian gravity, the slow / low gravity limit of GR, is actually temporal curvature which means that the rate of “ageing” (proper time) per unit coordinate time for a standard frame of reference changes with height. When you combine this with the principle in GR that things follow geodesics that maximize proper time, you get the familiar behavior of falling objects. It follows the same intuitions, and unintuitions, as Fermat’s principle/Snell’s law.
They fall because they are refracting down to where proper time goes slower!
Andrew Côté retweeted
Introducing RL with Neural Feedback (RLNF). We have found reliable ways to train AI models to respond to human preferences purely from brain signals.
The example below is a picture of a face that self-transforms into a more attractive version for the subject as they are looking at it.
Andrew Côté retweeted
Correct.
World's Greatest Dad has been telling me about the Reindustrialization boys for about 6-12 months now and I didn't understand what he was talking about. Lately I've been talking to some American tech geniuses and I can tell you the hype is massively underrated. Reindustrialization is the new BITCOIN EVENT. This is the number one trend that is going to bring wealth to America and it's the thing you need to be looking out for, supporting, and finding a way to be a part of. This is your big opportunity to get rich over the next decade. It's all going to be extremely obvious in retrospect. Build projects, train your skills, and make friends who can help you cash in. This is the future and you have an opportunity to get rich in a life-changing way.
Andrew Côté retweeted
You would've seen this coming months in advance if you had been at the @deeptechweek SF 2026 event hosted by @Playground_VC
See the introductory physics beyond launching 20,000 megawatt data centers into sun synchronous orbit.
Giddy up, Space Cowboy @CowboySpaceCorp
Andrew Côté retweeted
The panel discussion at Deep Tech Week - Austin. Featuring Thomas Brophy, Garret Moddel, Stuart Hameroff (@StuartHameroff), Hal Puthoff (@haroldputhoff), James Tagg (@jamestagg), Jazon Reza Jorjani (@Jason_Jorjani), and yours truly (@MaxDerakhshani).
Moderated by @Andercot. Sponsored by @M31Capital.
youtu.be/FUEN-avcWfk?si=O68_…
Andrew Côté retweeted
This is what a declining civilization looks like.
Before you crank up the thermostat, try these tips to keep your house warmer for longer bbc.in/48gLc8A
