Sammy Fries 🔸🌱

I've often said 'Any AI smart enough to take your job will be smart enough to take your assets'. Now it seems like AI agent swarms (whether guided by human hackers or working autonomously) will be taking people's assets long before they take people's jobs.

The guy who invented Amazon Prime disappeared for six years. He came back this week with $250 million and a factory that turns lines of code into tiny working machines. Type different code, a different machine comes out the other end. That sounds fake. Here's why it took six years. A chip fab is the most precise factory humans have ever built, and it makes exactly one kind of thing. Flat silicon that processes information. The moment you want moving parts, multiple materials, or real 3D structure, you leave the fab for a world where getting one new device into production takes years and tens of millions of dollars. Engineers call it one product, one process. It's the reason micro-machines never got their Moore's Law. Holden's Matter Compiler kills the per-product process entirely. Features down to a few microns, no new tooling, and the system measures and corrects every step while it builds, then feeds what it learned into the next design. His first product is the tell on how sharp the strategy is. PrimeSwitch is a 150-amp relay for 800-volt power in AI data centers. It opens in roughly 50 microseconds, about 1,000x faster than a normal contactor. So the first thing to come out of a universal factory is aimed at the one market where demand is basically infinite and a faster switch means less fried hardware. Neal Stephenson wrote the Matter Compiler as fiction in 1995. Holden just shipped the first real product out of one, and it's a light switch for AI data centers.

worrying about recursive self-improvement on australian TV (lateline) in 1996.

This may become a full-time beat!

i'm obsessed with what's happening in AI reforestation right now this Franco-Brazilian startup called MORFO took a patch of land in Brazil that was rock-hard and compacted from years of cattle farming. they replanted it using a single drone. months later the ground was covered in grass, bushes, and small trees. the land came back to life. here's how the whole thing works. 1. drones scan the terrain with high-resolution cameras and sensors 2. AI analyzes the imagery alongside soil samples, moisture levels, slope, and surrounding vegetation 3. the system picks from a catalog of 300+ native species, deciding exactly which plants will thrive in which specific spot 4. the drone fires biodegradable seed pods packed with seeds, nutrients, and moisture at 180 capsules per minute 5. satellite and drone imagery monitors regrowth over time, with AI tracking vegetation cover and biodiversity 6. two people and one drone cover 50 hectares a day. a person planting by hand manages about one hectare. and MORFO isn't alone. AirSeed in Australia drops 250,000 seed pods per day into bushfire-scarred koala habitat, replanting swamp mahogany that koalas depend on to survive. Flash Forest in Canada fires 50,000 pods daily into wildfire-destroyed boreal forest, planning the replanting alongside Cree Indigenous communities. re-green won Prince William's Earthshot Prize after planting 6 million seedlings across 30,000 hectares of Amazon and Atlantic Forest. five companies across four continents built this same approach independently. nobody coordinated. the physics of the problem demanded it. knowing which seeds belong in which soil used to require years of ecological fieldwork, manual planting crews, and budgets that made large-scale restoration nearly impossible. now two people with a drone and an AI model trained on local soil data can replant 50 hectares before lunch. this is the AI work that'll still matter in 50 years.

Watching some of the newly freed medical research beagles struggle to understand that they’re safe now is heartbreaking 💔 Even with all they’ve been through, each one is incredibly gentle and so badly wants to trust. We have no doubt that with all the TLC they’re receiving, they’ll become a little braver each day ❤️

The sloth falls into the water and although he is able to swim, he appreciates the capybara's prompt rescue.