Joined the Charge at ⚡️Base Power ⚡️
Austin, TX
Joined March 2009
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Rob Figueiredo retweeted
The idea that @Alphaschool students don't read books is just anti-AI propoganda.
I lead @alpha_founders, one of the Alpha high schools.
We have a dedicated 30 minute block after lunch each day to read books, and students finish one every ~2 weeks for a group discussion or workshop.
Last one was Meditations, current one is Never Split the Difference. There's plenty of reading.
What some people get confused is that we do use apps which deliberately push a student's reading level through carefully structured passages, since those allow us to be highly tactical in advancing their reading level in a way normal reading cannot do.
But then we ALSO have normal reading. It's not either or.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
Fusion still can't power a single home after 70 years of trying. A fusion rocket turns out to be a far easier machine to build. One just lit up in the UK.
The reason rockets are easier is the best part of this story.
Power plants have to hit breakeven. The reaction must put out more energy than you pump in, then you convert that heat to electricity at maybe 40% efficiency, then you compete with natural gas at around 4 cents a kilowatt hour. Nobody has cleared that bar commercially.
Rockets skip all of it. You don't need net energy. You need exhaust velocity. The best chemical engines ever built push exhaust at about 4.4 km/s, and that number has barely moved since the Saturn V. Fusion exhaust is projected at 25x that or more. Even a reactor losing energy overall can accelerate particles to speeds no chemical reaction will ever touch.
And space solves fusion's two most expensive problems for free. On Earth you spend a fortune building and maintaining a vacuum chamber. In orbit, the vacuum is the neighborhood. The cold helps the superconducting magnets too.
Pulsar's Sunbird design leans into all of this. Deuterium and helium-3 fusion spits out charged particles, which means you can steer the reaction products straight out the back with magnetic fields and get thrust directly. The reactor IS the engine.
One thing worth being clear on. No fusion happened in this test. They lit krypton plasma in the exhaust section to prove the confinement architecture holds, with the fusion core and an orbital demo targeted for 2027.
But the destination math is why anyone should care. Mars in roughly 150 days instead of nine months. Pluto in 4 years when New Horizons needed 9.5. And Sunbirds never launch from Earth at all. They park in orbit like tugboats, dock with passing spacecraft, and hand them off to physics at 329,000 mph.
Pulsar Fusion has achieved first plasma in its Sunbird fusion rocket exhaust system at its Bletchley facility in the UK.
The milestone marks a key step toward developing its planned fusion propulsion technology.
Sunbird aims to enable much faster travel through deep space than conventional rocket propulsion.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Pulsar reported first plasma (krypton, no fusion) in March 2026 ground exhaust test. Video is CGI, not the actual brief lab footage.
globenewswire.com/news-release/2…
rottenwifi.com/pulsar-fusion-…
youtu.be/YTEr_UmiaYI
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.
It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.
People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.
But the time has come to reclaim our dream of antiquity.
In a few months, we will start building a new city. It will be the most magnificent city in all of history.
After all, the great dream of the West has always been to rebuild Rome.
Come walk beside us in this endeavor. The world is waiting.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
Tech bros need to remember that they exist within a nation that has a people, not a blank economic zone
Middle class America needs to remember that national strength comes from economic and technological strength
This is a careful synthesis between these that we must strike
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
Had the pleasure of spending time with @CJHandmer in Burbank last month
I believe Terraform is among the most important companies being built in the world today
Read about The Rockefeller of solar...
rationaloptimistsociety.subs…
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
I don't think people understand how big of a deal this is yet.
The team @RadiantNuclear has built a product that is a nuclear reactor, where historically reactor companies build buildings.
Historic.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
A few very obvious points on Mamdani's grocery stores:
1. The supply of the discounted groceries will run out on day 1, and every day there is a new shipment. This is basic econ 101.
2. This means only the people who are lucky enough or fast enough will get these discounted groceries. Expect to see the city ration these groceries in some other way. By income, or neighborhood or some lottery system.
3. Grocery margins are notoriously low as it is (like 2-3%). These stores will lose a bunch of money selling 30% below market, or they'll sell so little it will be insignificant.
4. There is absolutely zero chance that government bureaucrats can source these products from global supply chains as efficiently as Walmart, or Meier, or Whole Foods, whose survival depends on it. Their costs will be far higher (unless they use government bludgeon to force distributors to sell to them at lower prices).
5. It's actually an incredible triumph of capitalism that you can get a pound of bananas that were shipped to your neighborhood from Equador for like 60 cents, or fresh grapes from Chile in the dead of Midwestern winter for 2 bucks a pound, and Norwegian salmon to cook in Italian olive oil for $15 -20 bucks or so. Truly stop and think about that for a minute. It's a miracle.
The median full time hourly wage is around $31 dollars. For ONE HOUR of work, the median working American can get all of the groceries listed below, which is about 22,000 calories. They can feed themselves for 10 days (or a family of 4 for around 2 and a half days), with an hour of labor.
This is the stupidest industry for socialists to go after.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
Investor *taps watch* where’s my world’s most powerful rocket, 100,000 Tbps of internet, 100GWs of AI Compute, and 1M person Martian Colony? It’s been 6 weeks.
Investors are growing impatient with Elon Musk as the bills come due on his most ambitious promises for SpaceX and Tesla. wsj.com/finance/stocks/reali…
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has reminded the world that some stories never grow old.
We thought it was the perfect time to share one of our favorite retellings.
For a limited time, we are giving away Alfred J. Church’s The Story of the Odyssey as a free EPUB.
We are also partnering with @bethanyshondark of @TheMomWars to give away our complete Chapters I & II box sets.
If you have been looking for a reason to read The Odyssey, or to read it with your children, we hope this is one.
Read more and begin the voyage:
virtueandwonder.com/p/get-th…
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
Things that will still be scarce no matter how smart the computers get:
1. Land
2. Attention
3. Status
4. Love
5. Power
Basically all the same things people in first world countries work for right now.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
1995: oh cool you can buy books online now
2026: the company that owns Whole Foods and Lord of the Rings is experiencing setbacks with its space program
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
It seems overwhelmingly obvious humans talking to computers will be a key driver of productivity. I wonder if we're going back to a world of cubicles instead of open floor plans. It's also an argument for remote work.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
AI 2040 and the Cult of Intelligence geohot.github.io//blog/jekyl…
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
I'm excited to announce the most ambitious recreation of Bloom's 2Sigma study of the last 40 years. It's funded by @reedhastings and staffed by a team of 20 of the best educators in this country.
Our education team's goal is to show the largest academic gains in one year ever recorded, and we'll publish our results even if we fail.
Recently, @jwdanner introduced me to @reedhastings. Most people know Reed co-founded Netflix. Fewer know he has been one of the driving forces behind improving education for the last twenty years.
When Reed pitched me on recreating Bloom's famous 2-sigma problem, I felt an overwhelming sense of hope for education. Over the last few months we have moved at breakneck speed to assemble an exceptional team. Someone recently described it to me as the "Avengers of education."
We are testing one question with the rigor it deserves: can elite one-on-one tutoring reproduce the largest learning gains ever measured in a controlled study? We will work with researchers from Stanford, Brown, Cornell, and other leading institutions, and we intend to be the most transparent research group in the field. That means publishing our methods, our benchmarks, and our results, whatever they show.
We will invest up to $100,000 per year per student to give them the best education on the planet. If it works, the data and methods can help educators and technologists recreate these outcomes for every child.
We are actively hiring tutors, engineers, and operations people to help us climb this mountain.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
School isn't slow because it's hard.
It's slow because it's miscalibrated.
When students are given learning tasks exactly along their edge of mastery, their learning speeds up by orders of magnitude.
They attain their natural, frictionless pace.
So much student potential is lost to needless pedagogical friction.
Like a thermodynamic engine where most of the energy is lost as heat instead of producing useful work.
For anyone wondering how a third-grader can complete six years' worth of math in a single year AND score a 5 on the AP Calculus exam.
This knowledge graph spans 3,000 math topics, from 4th grade to the university level, providing the perfect basis for mastery learning.
Students can go as fast or far as they want! There are no restrictions whatsoever. The only requirement is that they must demonstrate mastery of each topic before moving on to the next.
Kids are capable of incredible things when given that kind of freedom and support.
Rob Figueiredo retweeted
my new goal in life is getting @karpathy to comment (positively) on a @trywindmill product launch.
Congrats!! I was impressed to learn about some of the engineering wizardry (e.g. *very* low voltage domains, cluster scale memory, ...) that goes into tokens/watt maxxing of state of the art LLMs at interactive tokens/sec/user. Esp fun and memorable is the idea that this is engineering at the "opposite" regime to that of power transmission lines: very low voltage high current (at tiny distances) vs. very high voltage & low current (at great distances). Looking forward to more!
