Lived and worked from 38 countries.
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Joined March 2011
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raymondduke retweeted
AI filmmaking is ushering in a golden age of high-fidelity realization of the world's most retarded sci-fi premises
raymondduke retweeted
Absolutely. This is a total lie.
All DOGE did was require contact with the aid recipients to confirm that funds were being used legitimately. Anything less than this is insane!
Multiple people from USAID have been charged by the Justice Department with stealing money.
Moreover, they pled GUILTY!!
justice.gov/opa/pr/usaid-off…
raymondduke retweeted
if @elonmusk paid 100% of his net worth ($1.4 trillion) as a tax it would only cover federal government spending for 77 days. this isn’t a tax problem…
raymondduke retweeted
Depression and pain are all in your head. Filling your head with smoke only hides it. Getting rid of it requires action. Doing literally anything physical over time replaces the depression with feel-good endorphins.
Take a walk. Shovel sand. Wash the dishes. Pick up trash. Literally do anything except sitting around and overthinking your situation.
I have and still do feel deep depression. Fortunately, it's not for a long time due to the advice above. When I feel it coming, I distract myself with something -- staying busy is the key.
raymondduke retweeted
Every year I sit down with my mother to explain how to use her phone and every year Apple sends 750 engineers into their little labs underneath their demonic Cupertino crop circle to come up with new and exciting ways to confuse her
raymondduke retweeted
“While spacewalking I realized something, I used to think I was scared of heights but now I know I was just scared of gravity.”
― Artemis II Astronaut Reid Wiseman
raymondduke retweeted
When a spacecraft leaves Earth, it doesn’t just fire its engines and head straight to its destination.
In many missions, especially those going beyond low Earth orbit, there’s a more subtle and elegant strategy at play, one that uses gravity itself as part of the navigation system.
This is often called a gravity assist, or a slingshot maneuver. But in the case of missions like #Artemis II, what’s being used is a closely related idea known as a free-return trajectory.
At first glance, it might sound simple: the spacecraft goes to the Moon, loops around it, and comes back. But the physics behind it is anything but simple.
Instead of relying on continuous propulsion, the spacecraft follows a carefully calculated path through the gravitational field of the Earth–Moon system. It is launched with just the right speed and direction so that, as it approaches the Moon, the Moon’s gravity bends its trajectory. The spacecraft is effectively flung around the Moon, redirected onto a path that naturally brings it back toward Earth.
No major engine burn is needed for the return. Small trajectory corrections may still be required, but gravity does the heavy lifting.
That’s the key.
This kind of trajectory is not just efficient, it’s also safe. If something goes wrong with the spacecraft’s engines or onboard systems, gravity itself ensures the return.
It’s an inherent backup plan, built into the trajectory from the very beginning.
The same fundamental idea appears in gravity assists used across the Solar System. When a spacecraft flies past a planet, it can gain or lose speed by exchanging momentum with that planet. From the spacecraft’s point of view, it’s as if it has been accelerated without using fuel.
In reality, it has borrowed a tiny amount of orbital energy from the planet itself.
That’s how missions like Voyager reached the outer planets, and how probes continue to explore regions far beyond what their onboard fuel alone would allow.
But there’s an important distinction.
An interplanetary gravity assist is typically used to change speed and direction, often increasing the spacecraft’s energy. A free-return trajectory, like the one used in Artemis II, is designed for something more specific: a path that naturally loops back to Earth without requiring additional propulsion.
It’s less about gaining energy, and more about shaping a trajectory that guarantees a return.
To understand why this works, it helps to stop thinking in straight lines. In space, motion follows curves defined by gravity. The spacecraft is constantly falling, first toward Earth, then toward the Moon, and then back toward Earth again.
What looks like a loop is really a continuous free fall through a changing gravitational landscape.
This way of navigating space reveals something deeper. We tend to think of engines as the drivers of motion, but once a spacecraft is on its way, gravity does most of the work.
The art of spaceflight is not just about thrust.
It’s about knowing when not to use it.
#GoodLuck #Artemis @NASAArtemis
raymondduke retweeted
The weather's looking good for tomorrow's Artemis II launch, and our teams are getting the rocket ready for liftoff!
Read the latest updates on our mission around the Moon: go.nasa.gov/4tiFY4P
raymondduke retweeted
The US figure skating team is basically Russians entering the Olympics through an American VPN.
raymondduke retweeted
why not just raise income tax rates?
because your real intent is not to just “provide healthcare”.
you’re masking that you are proposing the creation of, for the first time in the 250 years of this American republic, an organized government seizure of private property from citizens.
you’re calling it a “wealth tax” or a “billionaires tax” or “millionaires tax” or whatever nom du jour polls well. but at the end of the day, it’s the seizure of private property from citizens by the government. citizens that earned money, paid their fair taxes on those earnings (53% if they live in California) and are now being told they need to hand over after-tax assets because the government has failed to provide promised services with the revenue it’s collected, and are now re-casting their own failure to be a socio-economic inequity that must be justly resolved... a slippery slope that has never gone anywhere good (see economic effects in USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, France and Norway wealth tax etc.)
the American founders fled tyranny in Europe and this amazing nation was populated by immigrants (myself and your parents) from around the world not just looking for a “better life” but for a place where they could have freedom from tyrannical governments that can take what they want from private citizens. a great nation borne of property rights, the rule of law, and endowed freedoms to believe, speak, or act. these principles led to the greatest run of innovations, successes, and widespread increase in prosperity, for all citizens, ever seen.
the citizens, the individuals, not the institutions, delivered this progress. those who invented, who toiled, who bled, who sacrificed, who took risk and persevered, who led, and who changed the world, are not charlatans, kleptocrats, or oligarchs. they’re what made us all better off. prosperity is a measure of america’s success, not its failure.
it is your principle that is so offensive, as evidenced by the broad disdain for your flippant flirtation with the darkest of human fantasy - socialism. you and other neo-socialists have led so many of us to reflect on America’s history and what it is becoming. that now leads so many to consider, so unnecessarily, leaving their homes for a place where everyone stands up to shout down the principle you suggest. because if your ideas are now considered moderate, it’s clear this titanic is sinking.
that a “simple tax” of taking assets that have been earned, through toil and tribulation, rightly taxed, and preserved, should now be unjustly seized, is your solution to a problem of obvious government mismanagement and outright fraud, tells us that your true motivation lies not in giving people healthcare but in cutting down success and deleting the system of prosperity and opportunity for all.
i don’t care, and neither should anyone else, what the sum total market value of a private citizens private assets might be. it is none of my business and should be none of yours. because, again, once you open that pandora’s box, we might as well study Lord of the Flies … there is literally nothing stopping 51% of citizens demanding that their government go out and seize 100% of the private property of the 49%.
want to give healthcare to people in need? do your job and fix healthcare. make it affordable. want to be lazy about it? then do your job lazily and raise income taxes.
want to take private property from private citizens who have paid their fair share of taxes and legally earned their property, then honestly declare that it is envy, not inequity, that you strive to resolve…
raymondduke retweeted
Had this happen to me, but it was for $2,000, at Wells Fargo.
I had to:
- declare my plans for my money
- show id
- state which countries I was visiting
- answer several questions to confirm my identity
- sign my name to confirm my signature
Some of these requests were understandable. After all, I wouldn't want someone pretending to me taking out my money.
However, the red line for me was getting information about what I was going to DO with my money. Why is that any of the bank's business?
They are not loaning me the funds. It was money deposited.
When I deposit money into the bank, do they care where it's from?
raymondduke retweeted
NEW: Gavin Baker discusses how @elonmusk and @xai achieved what was thought impossible with the construction of Colossus, the world's largest AI supercomputer.
They successfully connected over 100,000 GPUs, a task considered impossible by engineers at Microsoft, Google, and Meta.
"Elon, as he so often does, focused deeply on this, thought about it from First Principles, and he came up with a very different way of designing a data center, and he was able to make 100,000 GPUs coherent."
"No one thought it was possible."
"Engineers at Meta and Google and other firms said, we can't do it. There's no way he can do it."
"As a result of that, Grok 3 is now training on this giant Colossus supercomputer, the biggest in the world, with 100,000 GPUs."
"No one had built a cluster bigger than 32,000 H100s... Grok 3 is the first new data point to support whether scaling laws are breaking or holding because no one thought you could make 100,000 hoppers coherent."
"You will have a friend in your pocket with an IQ of maybe 130 who knows everything, has more up-to-date knowledge of the world, and is more grounded in factual accuracy."
"If there's a stock down 25%, I ask every AI, why is the stock down? Generally, Grok is the one who knows. Because of X's dataset, Grok knows exactly what is happening in the world today."
xAI's Grok is reportedly valued at around $50 billion, meaning Elon Musk leveraged X's data to turn his $44 billion investment in Twitter into a profit.
