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Out on a frozen lake in Canada, an upside-down cell tower is collecting data on the local fish population. The device is called Echo, and it’s just the beginning of what Dominion Dynamics hopes to build for the country’s growing defense industry.
(Video episode here on YouTube - youtube.com/watch?v=e9eORCxS…)
Our northern brothers have been agitated to the point of action, thanks to President Trump declaring that they’re nasty people we should perhaps conquer. Threatening Canada is not unlike kicking a puppy, but it turned out to be the final straw. The country counted its beans and concluded the situation was loony — 70 cents of every dollar Canada spends on military hardware goes to American companies. Realizations like these pushed Dominion founder Eliot Pence to move back home after 20 years in the States and get to work on renewing Canada’s awesomeness.
“I want to compete with Lockheed, with Anduril, with Northrop,” Pence told me. “I want to put Canada and Canadian defense back on the global map. That’s the ambition, and we can do it.”
Before Dominion, Pence spent four years at Anduril as one of its earliest business hires. The lessons he gleaned from that experience are what he hopes to return to Canada, which has a maddening history of building world-class defense technology and immediately tossing it in the trash. “We’re trying to change history here and build back what Canada was,” Pence said.
Since its founding in June 2025, Dominion has raised $169M CAD, reportedly at a $570M CAD valuation. They’ve been hard at work on all sorts of cool gadgets like Echo, which is meant to find adversary submarines under the ice, plus a communications network called AuraNe, and an unmanned drone that flies alongside fighter jets called Scout.
In the latest episode of our Canada series, we spent some time with Pence to figure out why Canada would even need a robust defense industry. We got a tour of Dominion’s new factory, which will likely never make a camera appearance again because, ya know, top secret defense stuff. We took a skidoo across the lake to see the tech in action and bribe a local fisherman with beer. I almost kiss a pike and jig like my life depends on it. If you aren’t Canada-pilled by the end of this video, perhaps there is no hope left for you.
Will say that @edzitron is the only PR person ever to stand me up in like 25 years of my being a reporter. Which takes guts to do as a PR person. So he has guts.
Is any of this that complicated? The tech industry does the same thing every time something very, very, very big appears on the horizon.
People get excited. They overspend building infrastructure as they try to seize the high ground for the next big thing. They get overzealous both by the ideas and the money. They overestimate how quickly the technology will filter into the world.
There's a big pullback at some point. The boom busts. But then it all comes back even bigger than before.
Semiconductors. PCs. The internet. We have been here.
Ed will be right on some things given enough time. Unless . . . . AI keeps improving and hits some huge leap forward - a la transformers - before the data center build out stalls.
Him continuing with the idea that AI is basically fake just seems obviously wrong to me. Even if AI didn't improve at all from where it is, the world is just very different. Like internet different.
“Do they believe their own bullshit?” Jon presses Ed Zitron (@edzitron) for insight in how tech’s business leaders are rationalizing their massive debts that are servicing the advancement of AI.
Ashlee Vance retweeted
Soooo, @LIFE is back. And @corememory couldn't be happier to team up for the ride. @ashleevance has written an 11,000-word piece for the first issue, and we've produced two documentary films to go along with the launch. Stay tuned.
new.life.com/
Oh. Hello. And welcome back!
LIFE returns to print 11.23.26.
Read our Editors’ Letter and learn more about the new LIFE here: new.life.com
Can't believe @kyliebytes is going as an actuator for Halloween. So impressed
Feels like I've spent my career covering the things Neal Stephenson predicted. So was a true pleasure to have a nice, long chat with him.
We did swords for @CJHandmer and others. I prodded him on Blue Origin, Bezos and our AI overlords. Lots more.
youtube.com/watch?v=Ii-aeW5p…
Does this mean we're just in the midst of @demishassabis's original vision of how to get to AGI after a kinda brief brute force period?
Rumors I’ve been hearing. I’ll start with OpenAI, then Anthropic.
OpenAI: The internal model’s reasoning jump comes from more aggressive RL, including training in games and simulated environments. Strategies learned there transfer to research mathematics and other fields. Navier–Stokes and ETH show the scale of the improvement. The clue is in the Synthetic RL hiring: self-play, simulators, and synthetic feedback.
Anthropic: Same direction with its internal Claude model. It’s trained on long, difficult tasks in demanding environments, and the reasoning skills transfer to other fields. Its ETH result shows how far the improvement has gone. The earlier Universes listing and the RL hiring around mathematical reasoning align with that.
Musk’s Digital Optimus hiring explicitly calls for measuring transfer from games into general computer use. That’s why his game-playing AI push matters: games develop abilities that work far beyond the games themselves.
The interesting part is where those abilities show up. Each lab’s internal model applies reasoning developed through interactive training to mathematical problems that had resisted decades of work.
This is the sort of important beer engineering I expect from Waterloo students
Full episode here - youtube.com/watch?v=vw2fveBi…
We had the great Neal Stephenson on the pod. He's been caught off guard by AI. I am amused.
Full episode - brought to you by the AI wizards @brexHQ - right here corememory.com/p/the-man-who…
Ashlee Vance retweeted
Made a new site for @DurinMining in El Segundo, they’re building robotic exploration drill rigs to find more minerals, faster.
Sere vibes, threejs rigs, animated coring bits, typeset in Publico and New Rail Alphabet, zero rounded corners
I am longer asking: It’s Time to Mine
Ashlee Vance retweeted
Dan Bilzerian is willing to do whatever it takes to reclaim his vape company from his father — even if it means sending him to prison.
Wonder if anyone outside of the movie + documentary + journalsim professions cares about this debate or understands what's been going on over the past few years.
It used to be that documentary subjects were never paid. Now, for celeb and athlete stuff, the subjects are often the producers and are paid.
Google paid for The Thinking Game, but I don't think anyone really realizes that.
The idea is to avoid conflicts of interest and for things to be more pure and somewhere closer to objective and truthful if you don't pay.
Agreeing to pay @per_asp3ra and then pressuring him to unwind the deal is a hell of an act on all sides. I'm quite sure the audience has no idea of how things have morphed around all these customs in just the past few years.
reason.com/2026/10/26/nathan…
Oh, is that @nealstephenson coming on the Core Memory podcast tomorrow? Why, yes, it is.
There's quite the irony in him saying, "the whole AI revolution blindsided me."
America being able to make its own computers is probably a good thing since everything hinges on computers
If you hang around Silicon Valley long enough, you start to notice that many of the most capable engineers come from the University of Waterloo, and they have a special reputation for being particularly cracked. We went to Waterloo to observe them in their natural habitat and learn how this all came to be.
Full episode here and on the YouTube channel as well - youtube.com/watch?v=vw2fveBi…
Ashlee Vance retweeted
The latest piece for @AlterMagIndia is a technological history of how india saved its tigers. It takes you beyond the clickbaits, to understand the history and scientific complexity of the achievement.
To launch the latest issue @adadithya and the team have put together an escape-room style mystery.
Sherlock Holmes meets Jungle Book.
A tiger has gone missing. The records don’t add up. Somewhere between pugmarks, camera-trap photographs and suspicious leads lies the truth. What happened to the tiger? You, the readers & audience, have to figure it out.
Taking place this weekend in Bangalore!
Register here: luma.com/ghyfu6jt
Well, well, well. A new rocket player has entered the arena.
Lots about the rocket and engine looks fairly standard. But then it's rockets. The physics gives what it gives.
What is quite novel is a second stage that turns into . . . a data center with all sorts of dual use parts. I like this idea.
Looks like lots of Blue Origin and Ursa folks.
Launching in 2028 is, in the parlance of our times, 🙈
Here for the aesthetic
