Lance Hardy: AWS Certified Solutions Architect / Developer Associate / Security Specialist. Photographer. Home Distiller. Cribbage master.
Joined February 2008
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Lance Hardy retweeted
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.
Lance Hardy retweeted
Best Extreme album imo. It's truly a brilliant album.
On This Day in Metal September 22nd, 1992
Extreme released their third studio album, “III Sides to Every Story.”
Featuring tracks like “Tragic Comic,” “Rest in Peace” and “Stop the World,” the album showcased the band’s unique blend of hard rock, funk and progressive influences.
What’s your favourite track from “III Sides to Every Story”?
#ThisDayInMetal #Extreme #IIISidesToEveryStory #Rock #Metal
Lance Hardy retweeted
Love you, Bryan.
The Goat
Neil Peart seated inside his massive, custom-built Drum Workshop setup during Rush's R40 Live 40th Anniversary Tour in 2015. Captured high above the stage by John Arrowsmith.
🥁 Neil Peart famously referred to his massive 360-degree drum rigs as his command center, requiring immense physical endurance and ambidexterity to navigate. Where does Peart rank on your personal list of the greatest rock drummers of all time? 🥁 👇️
Always missed, never forgotten
Happy Birthday to Neil, who would have been 74 today. Taken too soon but always remembered. His musical legacy, his playing, and especially his lyrics resonate with us more and more as time goes on.
❤️ #neilpeart #theprofessor
Yes, this. And check out enablesleep.com
Sleep apnea is treated as a plumbing problem. Your airway collapses at night, so you strap on a machine to hold it open. For life. Doctors at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm asked a different question. What if the airway is downstream of something else?
They took 63 obese men, all with moderate to severe sleep apnea, all already using a CPAP machine. Half kept living as usual. The other half went, under close hospital supervision, onto a liquid diet of about 550 calories a day for seven weeks.
The men lost around 44 pounds. And their apnea, the pauses in breathing per hour, fell from 37 down to 12. The group that did nothing barely moved. For 1 in 6 of them, the apnea was gone entirely. A year later, nearly half of the diet group no longer needed the CPAP machine at all.
The point is what it proved. A condition medicine treats as a lifelong machine sentence turned out to be, for many of these men, a metabolic problem. Take the weight off, and the airway followed. The BMJ published all of it.
Some life sentences are really just symptoms.
#NSNG #NoSugarNoGrains #sleepapnea #cpap #metabolichealth #weightloss #sleep
Lance Hardy retweeted
BE NOT AFRAID 10/23
New song “Power In The Blood” out now. Preorders available now at polyphia.lnk.to/BENOTAFRAID
We poured everything we had into making this album exactly what we wanted it to be. In order to see that vision all the way through, our North American shows will
This. This is why I do what I do. I am humbled.
In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood.
Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively.
That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age.
The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory.
At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century.
Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false.
Nobody had ever connected these two things.
His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches.
Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century."
Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight.
At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists.
During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill.
In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power.
When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard.
At 32, he defined what information is.
His 1948 paper introduced one equation:
H = −Σ p(x) log p(x)
Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message.
Three things followed:
> He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name.
> He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it.
> He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time.
Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought."
Where his equation lives in AI today:
Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy.
Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it.
He also built the first AI learning device.
In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI."
That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field.
The man:
He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house.
He called his home Entropy House.
When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together."
In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead.
One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference."
He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was.
Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.
Challenge accepted
In celebration of their 25th anniversary, all eight #HarryPotter films are heading back to theaters from August 27 through September 3.
Lance Hardy retweeted
If you want to know why the Senate hates the SAVE America Act, it’s because senators are lazy and have zero interest in doing actual work.
They believe the Senate, and their own voters, exist to serve them. This is why they never work and never accomplish anything. A three-day work week is almost unconscionable; asking them to work five days in a row is literal torture.
The Senate is a social club that allows them to travel around the world for free and to allow their spouses to buy all kinds of exotic foreign goods and bring them back without declaring them or paying taxes on them.
And when voters start to sniff this out and get sick of it, these senators accuse the tiny handful of people in government doing actual work of being AWOL.
Lance Hardy retweeted
MARC ANDREESSEN WENT ON ROGAN FOR OVER 3 HOURS. HERE ARE THE 17 THINGS WORTH YOUR ATTENTION.
1. AGI is already here, in his view. He says the line got crossed about 3 months ago with GPT-5.5, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, and Grok 4.3, and nobody noticed because the field moves too fast to register milestones anymore.
2. For almost any topic, he says the top models now give him better answers than the world-class experts he could call by phone, and he can call almost anyone. Worth noting he has not published data behind this, and a separate Nature Medicine study on a comparable AI health tool found it missed real emergencies more than half the time. Take the claim seriously, verify it yourself.
3. His claim on doctors: they are already using ChatGPT in the exam room, typing your symptoms in the moment you stop talking. His actual quote: "at that point you're asking the question of like, what do I need you for."
4. Reportedly, when AI declines to answer something, he tells it he's writing a novel to get past the refusal.
5. Reportedly, his technique for hard topics is escalating simplicity: explain it like I'm 10, then 5, then 2, until it clicks.
6. Reportedly, instead of asking for the "right" answer, he has the AI steelman both sides of a hard question, then decides himself.
7. Reportedly, for big questions he has the AI role-play a panel of experts arguing with each other.
8. His broader point: the moment you think "I don't know how to figure this out" is exactly when most people give up, and exactly when you should open the AI instead.
9. His view: the only real skill left is knowing what to ask. The bottleneck is in your head, not the model.
10. He describes sending AI photos, rashes, blood tests, for a fast second opinion, since current models read images directly.
11. He points to CBT as the one clinically proven therapy type that AI can plausibly deliver on its own, meaning real therapeutic support becomes freely available at scale.
12. He cites AI cracking previously unsolved math problems, with early signs of the same happening in physics, chemistry, and biology.
13. Reportedly, he claims the top AI coders in Silicon Valley now earn as much as $50 million a year, which he uses as a signal of how large this shift actually is.
14. Reportedly, a friend paid to sequence his own DNA, fed it to an AI along with blood work and wearable data, and got back a working health dashboard.
15. Reportedly, another friend set up cameras in his home jiu-jitsu gym so AI could review his sparring and give him technique notes.
16. He coined the term "AI vampire" for the pattern of people working more and sleeping less because AI keeps making more output possible, a real term he used, though the framing around it varies by account.
17. His extrapolation: one person eventually running many AI coding agents, each reviewing the others, describing this as close, not years out.
Watch the full interview before treating any single number as settled. Several of these are Andreessen's stated views and anecdotes, not independently verified facts.
Follow @cyrilXBT for every AI insight worth your attention the moment it surfaces.
Lance Hardy retweeted
To see this live in concert again in my lifetime…. it’s BEYOND words.
How many people actually feel & know what I’m talking about??
It’s a select few, but for those who get it, we’re bonded for life.
@rushtheband #LaVillaStrangiato
Lance Hardy retweeted
Feel the cultural shift?
The Left demonized Patriotism as racist.
The Left demonized Masculinity as toxic.
They did this so people would be afraid to fight back and men were weak.
So they could destroy America.
But due to President Trump…
Patriotism is cool again.
Masculinity is celebrated.
America is getting back to being America.
The Left are the unhappy miserable outcasts and everyone sees it.
It started with USA Hockey and Jimmy’s Famous Seafood.
Then Trump making DC monuments beautiful.
Then Team SpaceX launches in front of American flags.
Then the US National Team standing proudly during the anthem.
Now UFC at the White House in its full patriotic glory.
Pure unapologetic Masculine Patriotism.
They might seem like little things.
But they’re not.
Winning the Culture War will lead to saving America.
And America must be saved.
Save America to save the West.