Simon Schmid

Asking my AI teacher how to spell seventeen

the visuals of this day would have just been epic. These high tech beautiful ships, the flags flying, the drums beating to quarters, two columns of sail slowly closing in on that huge crescent of French and Spanish ships. Then smoke and thunder for hours.

Why I'm leaving Britain after 27 years 🇬🇧 - 5th darkest country 🌧️ - Cost of life (£5 coffee) - Two friends stabbed - About 40% tax rates - Wife gets catcalled - Immigration / politics I want: reasonable tax, nice weather, clean air, good food, safe, quiet.

My new favourite fonts to unslop designs. Save this for later 👀

He’s very much underrated. People barely talk about him. Dude lost his dad Steve Jobs to cancer when he was 20 and ended up building a $1B+ fund focused on fighting cancer, backing biotech, AI drug discovery and cancer research. Barely does interviews, stays out of the spotlight. Could’ve spent his life doing literally anything with that last name but chose this instead. Pretty fucking cool tbh.

Which startups are most likely to get an investment from top tier VCs? I looked at ~60 attributes across 5000 startups and these were the 15 strongest. #1 is being from a top tier fund. MBA is a negative signal Full list of signals below:

We're doubling down on hardware and are looking for someone to manage our hardware shop ycombinator.com/companies/y-…

100,000 Brick House, in New Delhi. A home designed for a writer, where the brick provides texture, or masquerades as fabric… Architecture by Shonan Purie Trehan

Apparently Apple is getting a big new office building in Zürich with plenty of space for 500-700 desks! (FlurWork owned by a UBS fund)

Here is my 10 Minute Mac Security Checklist It covers the min requirements to harden your Mac's security using system settings and free, open source tools mac.0xosprey.com/

If anyone catches whiff of any investor at all thinking about giving these guys money, please direct them to me and I will explain why this cannot happen Giotto is trained on kimi and launched as "the smartest european sovereign ai" 8 days after the CEO wrote that open source is a trojan horse for europe and then enacting the same trojan horse as an excuse to raise money from people who don't know better. For those who don't know I can't describe how laughable it is to use these old "benchmarks". Half the benchmark table is saturated, really old maths, zero agentic evals, and the launch EULA banned you from publishing your own numbers. Building on open weights is fine, it's literally my job. Lying about it, but most importantly doing it so incompetently and poorly, is not. Incompetence can itself be a form of evil

Our robots built this in the city of Almere: curved walls, different types of bricks and bonds, indented text. Real world deployment, insane complexity, 100% of every brick done by our robots, with another 15 houses to come in the coming weeks.

Uwe Horstmann and I started out as venture investors in Europe around the same time. He has a military background, and he was investing in defence years before it was obvious – honestly, before most of us would have taken the meeting. Then he stopped investing in it and went to build it. We were the first to back him at inception and have tripled down every round since. STARK is what he and @jschaback built. A multi-domain neo-prime for European defence: inexpensive, AI-driven systems – from drones to unmanned boats and beyond across air, land and sea – designed from the first prototype to be mass-produced. Within 18 months of founding they had landed contracts worth billions, which @gradypb notes is unheard of in this industry. They went from zero to 700 people in two years, most of them engineers. Uwe’s view is that the real lesson of Ukraine isn’t drones. It’s the innovation ecosystem – soldiers giving feedback, talent willing to work in defence, capital, a robust supply chain, procurement that moves in months instead of years. Combat ready technology, from the real world. The other thing is how close they stay to the user. The buyer is a general. The customer is a staff sergeant. STARK has a large team in Ukraine and shows up at the training grounds with a new version every couple of days. This feedback is critical. They take it, go back, and come back with something a little better. That is how you win trust with soldiers. Johannes is an engineer’s engineer. He tells the story of a public test that didn’t go to plan, a frozen shooting range in November, three shifts around the clock, and the moment two weeks later when “from there on, we’ve always hit.” A few things we cover: – The four things STARK did right: innovate next to the battlefield, fund the R&D themselves, design for certification and mass deployment from day one, and make the factory part of the weapon. “Production is deterrence” – Soldier-centricity: why soldiers wanted a wood box they could burn vs plastic, and what that taught the team about the lab vs. the field – Europe’s mandate to step up on defence, and why its changes in procurement are structural, not a moment. Europe doesn’t change because of a charismatic leader; it changes when reality kicks in – “As complex as a washing machine”: the edge a two-year-old company has over a 70-year-old prime – Startups inside a startup: autonomous programs for maritime, aerial and strike systems, plus capability teams for GNSS-denied navigation, target re-identification and comms – Sub-meter precision on a target moving at 60 km/h, and why it’s neither a hardware problem nor a software problem but both, tuned together down to the compute budget – Born out of fire: the Virtus test that failed in public, and the four weeks that followed – A single strike from launch to target: the operator sets the intent, the system plans around no-fly zones, the swarm shares what it sees, and the human stays in the loop where the customer wants them – Where AI shows up: perception on the device, Minerva for mission planning, and NATO’s responsible-use principles as hard-coded safeguards – The next hard problem isn’t a product. It’s contract design – building surge capacity into the contract the way you’d buy cloud, because that is where real deterrence comes from 0:00 – Introduction 1:03 – Billions in contracts in 18 months: Stark's four-part playbook 2:28 – The staff sergeant matters as much as the general, and wood beats plastic 7:42 – Why Europe is ready for a neo prime, and why procurement reform will last 11:45 – Startup DNA, venture-style programs, and "as complex as a washing machine" 16:27 – Born out of fire: the failed trial and the round-the-clock comeback 21:13 – Where Stark finds talent, and why defense is no longer off-limits 23:48 – Anatomy of a strike, from the wooden crate to the kill zone 27:22 – Vertical integration, multiple domains, and shifting left on manufacturing 32:53 – After the Hugging Face hack: guardrails on autonomous weapons 35:56 – Matching the primes on R&D and scaling to 700 people in two years 39:24 – Deterrence by contract, and Europe's next chapter with the US

New in Claude for Legal: a gallery of ready-made artifacts for contract review, regulatory horizon scans, cite checks, and more. Start from the built-in example, add your own documents and connectors, and share it with anyone across the business.

1/ Excited to announce our new company Particle This is our first step in a series of models focused on developers. With particle-1, we focused on token efficiency and managed to keep parity in performance while using ~45% fewer tokens. Live now: particle.ai