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Lighter Than Air, Heavier Than It Looks
It’s been just over a week since we launched one of the world’s most advanced aerostats at Thinking Balloon (yet also one of the cheapest!). The team is already deep into the next iteration: much better weather stability (next version will have >99% weather uptime), better autonomy, and A LOT...
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Deterrence in the 21st Century
There’s a poignant section in Feynman’s memoirs, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, where he describes sitting at a cafe in Manhattan after helping build the nuclear bomb, watching families enjoy their afternoon, while he lives with the dread of knowing he helped create something capable of turning the whole city...
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Catching Lightning in a Bottle
There are only a few moments when you know, while it’s happening, that you’re in the room for something that might be a real breakthrough. It doesn’t happen every day. This week felt like a small milestone for us, quiet but important. I want to capture a few thoughts while...
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A New Sensory Organ for Civilization
The air is broken. Every day in India, thousands of people die from breathing. Not from lack of it, but from what’s in it. You don’t see it. You can’t point at it. But it’s there, quietly killing people faster than any war or virus. And somehow, this doesn’t seem...
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SpaceX for the Stratosphere
This is a letter to my future self, a time capsule to open in 2030 to see how much of this wild vision I’ve pulled off. I’m inspired by Sam Altman’s 2014 blog post on AI, written two years before he co-founded OpenAI with deep conviction that artificial general intelligence...