mostly tweeting stuff about #space, #DARPA, #politicaleconomy and #law. also stupid jokes
Polar Orbit
Joined August 2007
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First Panda in Space retweeted
Unrelated, but NASA Goddard's director took her oath on Carl Sagan's Cosmos.
ALT Dr. Makenzie Lystrip, the first woman to serve as director of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, taking her oath
First Panda in Space retweeted
Chasing a rocket upwards with a drone is one of the coolest things I've ever seen holy shit
First Panda in Space retweeted
If your husband is going to cheat on you, ideally it's with a spy. If your husband cheats with some random girl at a party, ouch. If your husband is ensnared by the resources of the entire Chinese state apparatus + professional seducers... you got dealt a bad hand.
First Panda in Space retweeted
Padme’s medical droid: She just lost the will to live.
Me (there for some reason): Wait, what? That’s not a thing.
Droid: Good catch—You’re right, my first diagnosis of “lost her will to live” was incorrect. She actually had a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
First Panda in Space retweeted
TLDR: Jensen Huang was sleeping with a Chinese spy.
Her mission was to use Huang to lobby Trump to sell AI chips to China.
He did, completely selling out his country to enrich himself.
The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far:
- The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT)
- Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg)
- The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT)
- The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT)
- Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia.
- Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia.
- Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia.
- Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world.
What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point.
The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.
First Panda in Space retweeted
When researchers analyzed how Pegasus spyware infected iPhones without the user tapping anything, they found something wild. The attackers sent an iMessage with a fake GIF that targeted Apple's image decompression engine. The decompression math was so flexible that the exploit chained arithmetic operations together to construct a literal, functioning software CPU using over 70,000 segment commands that defined logical bit operations (AND, OR, XOR, XNOR, etc.) entirely inside the image parser. This created a small computer architecture with registers, a full 64-bit adder, and a comparator, running raw code before the phone even buzzed with a notification
First Panda in Space retweeted
the phrase "meteoric rise" doesn't make any sense. meteors exclusively *fall*. that's their defining characteristic
First Panda in Space retweeted
Somewhere a health insurance COBOL mainframe just exploded
California city makes history allowing throuples, foursomes to legally register as partners trib.al/injZnvo
First Panda in Space retweeted
The only thing that would sway my vote this election is six text messages from an unidentified number during my work day.
First Panda in Space retweeted
Writing this in my personal capacity, but I have been flying these types of aircraft for more than 20 years, with over 8,000 hours, and have reasonable familiarity with how the charter world operates. I feel compelled to post after seeing commentary about the Lear 60 crash, from missile strikes to DEI to critiquing this poor woman’s final radio calls.
That last part is what I find most troubling. She was the second-in-command (SIC), and while she was empowered to point out mistakes as part of good crew resource management, she was doing her job, communicating with ATC right to the end in a terrifying situation. She likely knew before many of those calls that she was going to die. I have heard final calls from friends, from military pilots with thousands of hours in fighter aircraft, and they are just as heartbreaking because they know the end is approaching.
I understand the public interest given the footage and audio. But you do not know the aircraft’s maintenance history, whether there was a structural failure, if any failure was induced by turbulence, overspeed, or overcontrol, or everything happening in that cockpit. I am sure weather will be part of the investigation, but beyond that, it is speculation. The charter industry routinely hires commercial pilots very early in their careers to gain experience alongside an ATP-qualified captain before they move up to the airlines. She would still have the appropriate training, qualifications, and checkouts by an FAA examiner or designee.
Let people investigate, learn, and share the facts. Be respectful to those who perished and the families who carry their memories. God bless them and their loved ones.
First Panda in Space retweeted
I have stage 4 lung cancer and never smoked. It's driven by one gene fusion called ALK that scientists only discovered in 2007. By 2011 there was a pill that targets it. I'm on the third generation of that pill now and it's the reason I'm still here.
The wellness crowd has pushed ivermectin and fenbendazole on me more times than I can count. Not one of them could tell me what either drug does to the EML4-ALK fusion.
First Panda in Space retweeted
Sweet. It's a 1 megawatt nuclear microreactor that fits in a shipping container.
Gas-cooled, first by helium, then air.
Runs for five years, then you ship it back to the factory, where they take care of the spent fuel and refuel it.
