pritchie retweeted
Please can we not let a great race distract us from the absolute disgrace these power units proved to be at the beginning
pritchie 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.
Starship transiting the Sun this morning during Flight 14 — prior to this morning's mission, this has never been captured before with the world's largest and most powerful rocket.
I’ve ached over this shot for years, mainly for two reasons: what does methane exhaust look like silhouetted against the Sun, and how violent are the acoustic energy waves from 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster?
Well...now we have an answer.
📸 - @NASASpaceflight
pritchie retweeted
Quebec is 53rd out of 54.
Among Canada's four biggest provinces and all 50 US states, only Mississippi has a lower GDP per person.
That should bother every one of us.
I moved back to Montreal three years ago. On purpose.
It's one of the most unique places in the world to live. And I've never been anywhere with more entrepreneurs per square foot. Everyone I meet is building something.
It's personal for me too. My family came to Quebec to escape the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. They got their start running small businesses. Quebec (and Canada) gave them a chance.
Lindsay and I want our daughters, and their kids, to stay here and see what I see.
But these numbers are hard to ignore (and insanely scary):
- The average Quebecer's share of the economy is more than $5,500 a year smaller than the average Ontarian's. Last of Canada's four biggest provinces.
- Every hour of work here produces about $22 less than the average of 19 advanced economies. In 1981, that gap was under $3.
- Our businesses invest $11,455 less per worker in equipment, technology and software. Less investment means lower wages.
- We start new businesses at a lower rate than Ontario and the rest of Canada. For more than 20 years straight.
This isn't abstract. It's wages. Housing. Hospitals. Schools.
We can't be in the bottom 10% economically and expect top 10% social services.
Andrew Lutfy of Groupe Dynamite and Alain Bouchard, founder of Couche-Tard, just made this case in open letters in La Presse. They're right. Creating wealth is our job as entrepreneurs. And as Andrew put it, if the Habs finished near the bottom every year, nobody here would shrug. So why do we accept it with our economy?
On October 5, whoever you vote for, ask them one question: what's your plan to make Quebec richer?
It doesn't have to be this way.
We can just choose ambition. We can just choose building. We can just choose to win.
pritchie retweeted
We are at a civilizational fork in the road.
We either listen to the Doomers and engineer our own collapse from pure demoralization
OR we follow the e/acc Golden Path and achieve amazing abundance via an expansion of scope and scale of civilization to the stars
Choice is ours.
pritchie retweeted
I gave Opus 5.5 one of my french theory analysis that got 80 million views and simply asked it to turn it into a video.
This is what it came up with. 🤯🤯🤯
A lot of new stuff to illustrate, this is amazing.
Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme).
Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident.
Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité.
Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison.
Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme.
Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable.
Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion.
C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part.
Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes.
Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre.
Alors pardon. Et au travail.
The constant decel messaging in Europe is insufferable as an adult, but its effect on kids is worse. As a parent, it's your obligation to counterprogram this nonsense. Show them robots, rockets, and wonders of AI. Show them cathedrals and moon landings. Instill hope in progress.
pritchie retweeted
The biggest design mistake I made when we moved OC to sqlite: using sync db access. When it was just an agent that reports to you on Slack or iMessage this was fine; now that one agent might do 50 sessions in parallel and the whole team works on it, it is limiting.
I have a /goal with Astra that so far landed 575 PRs to move everything to to async workers. We ship these improvements as we make progress. Pretty insane how even huge refactors are no longer scary.
pritchie retweeted
👀🐦⬛
A SR-71 Blackbird Has Vanished
The head of NASA just cryptically teased a new X-plane with an image that looked a lot like the iconic Blackbird. Now a very particular SR-71 is missing.
twz.com/air/a-sr-71-blackbir…
This is one of China's most formidable advantages: 93% of the Chinese believe AI will help their country. Only 36% of Americans do. These are dire numbers for the US. We have to turn this around.
'An average of 72 percent of respondents said they felt curious, happy or excited about A.I., compared with 41 percent who felt worried, sad or angry.' @nytimes's Damien Cave uses @Gallup data to remind us the rest of the world digs AI. (Annoyingly, NYT doesn't link to Gallup directly, link below.) nytimes.com/2026/09/23/world…
news.gallup.com/poll/714593/…
pritchie retweeted
Today we announced the Claude-led discovery of a molecular machine that we suspect could represent a new gene editing mechanism. Its precise function, biotechnological utility (if any), or level of significance is not yet clear, but at minimum it is work I would have been proud to do as a PhD student. The work was done mostly, though not entirely, by Claude: our life sciences team suggested a broad area of research, Claude read through the literature and a bunch of genome data and discovered something interesting, then Claude proposed experiments to verify the discovery and our team carried them out.
It’s easy to dismiss this as a one-off or curiosity, but we’ve repeatedly seen a pattern where AI performance in new intellectual domains goes from weak to superhuman in a matter of a few years. In 2023 models struggled to do math at the level of an average high-school student. In 2024 they started to do well on math competitions for the best high-schoolers in the country, in 2025 they started to solve minor open problems, in early 2026 more significant open problems, and in late 2026 they are beginning to solve the top few open problems in all of mathematics. We believe AI for biology is on a similar exponential trend.
The main difference between biology and mathematics, of course, is that math can be done purely theoretically, while biology requires experimentation. Some have used this to draw the conclusion that AI’s utility in biology will be limited. We think this is wrong. As we’ve demonstrated today, humans can collaborate with AI to perform the experiments, validate key results in a few weeks and, if necessary, work with the AI to iterate on what they find. Eventually it may even be possible for Claude itself to safely perform the experiments by autonomously controlling lab equipment, with appropriate safeguards in place, but we aren’t doing that today (our lab is also a BSL1/BSL2 facility that doesn't handle materials dangerous to humans).
More broadly, biomedical advancement has many stages — from fundamental biology discoveries, to translational research, to drug discovery, clinical trials, and finally the actual delivery of medicines and health care to patients. We are also interested in these later stages, but even simply accelerating the first stage of fundamental biological discoveries has the potential to speed up and broaden the entire pipeline. Improving our understanding of biology and sharpening biologists’ tools can drive forward all of the later stages, for example by identifying new drug targets, finding new therapeutic modalities, allowing for more precise measurement, and speeding up the experimental loop which itself further accelerates our understanding of biology. This will not in itself speed up clinical trial times, but if it succeeds it could greatly increase the number of promising candidates that go into the pipeline — an increase in throughput even though latency remains.
In Machines of Loving Grace, I wrote about AI’s potential to “cure most diseases in 5-10 years” — a goal that sounds impossible, but one I believe is just barely possible if AI is applied to every stage of the pipeline. The first step is showing that AI can first help with, and then drive, biological discoveries.
Claude’s discovery is the latest in a line of related prior work that goes back decades, beginning with systems like CRISPR, and continuing with discoveries like the bridge recombinase and VIPR in the past few years. Recently, there has been heightened interest in systems based on reverse transcriptase (RT) enzymes, the enzyme underlying the system Claude identified. And most recently, a Stanford team working independently described a novel RT system with an associated non-coding array that is in some ways similar to the one Claude found, though they are distinct systems that evolved independently from each other. I believe that we’re at the very beginning of finding such systems and developing them into powerful tools for biotechnology.
I’m proud of the resources Anthropic has invested in accelerating the public benefits of AI through the life sciences, and we’re aiming both to grow our life sciences team and to work with other scientists to extend this approach to a broad range of problems. If you have a proposal for a research collaboration or are interested in joining our life sciences team, please reach out.
Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.
We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.
Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
pritchie retweeted
Bringing autonomy to the next fight: wildfires.
Anduril has earned first place in the Autonomous Wildfire Response Track within the @xprize competition.
Our solution manages the entire wildfire lifecycle with minimal human intervention. Lattice coordinates assets across air, land, and space to detect and respond faster.
The award reflects Anduril's deep experience building firefighting tech including more than two years of dedicated work with XPRIZE. During the rigorous finals test in the Alaskan wilderness, our platform autonomously detected, fought, and suppressed live fires.
Destructive wildfires are a global crisis. Anduril and XPRIZE are pioneering faster, more scalable and more automated ways to fight them.
pritchie retweeted
Congrats to @PalmerLuckey and Anduril for winning the Wildfire XPRIZE - for detecting and suppressing a wildfire within 10 minutes of ignition!
pritchie retweeted
The family of an 83-year-old grandmother battling cancer says she was given MAID against her will.
This is disgusting. We have a sworn duty to protect the most vulnerable.
This story demands action. The Liberal government must strengthen and enforce safeguards to protect vulnerable Canadians from pressure and abuse.
Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother was euthanised against her will under Canada's assisted dying system - she died covered in blood with her hands clasped in prayer trib.al/aXPoCk2
pritchie retweeted
So, apparently Muse and Instinct are just OpenClaw under the hood, which is slightly disappointing to me, but also is a huge compliment to @steipete ‘s work.
Man built the kernel for proactive agents.