I Want You to Build ad astra per aspera We must Reindustrialize DMs open
Valles Marineris, Mars
Joined May 2023
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Build/Boost retweeted
EVENT TOMORROW
Smoke and Spool at Stone
Witness our FIRST POWER at our garage in Hawthorne.
Yes you will need earplugs.
Dm me for invite.
Build/Boost retweeted
@StonePowerUS is building america's turbine company
we engineered and built their controls and instrumentation panel for their first megawatt.
they're going to be huge. glad we got in early
ALT Stone Power T58 turbine control panel, closed, front view with Stone Power logo
ALT Stone Power control panel with door fully open showing the interior and door-mounted meters
ALT Angled view of the Stone Power control panel door with logo and meters
ALT Close-up of wiring and components inside the Stone Power control panel
Build/Boost retweeted
Robin Hood wasn't re-distributing wealth.
He didn't steal from "the rich". He robbed the king and the king's cronies. These men had previously unjustly confiscated the peasants' property by force. When Robin Hood took those saddlebags of gold, he was returning the people's property.
He wasn't being charitable. He wasn't being socialist. He was rebelling against the state, and the state was well aware of it. That's why they treated him as an insurgency, not just bandits.
Now - consider this. Why are they trying to teach you the story the wrong way?
Build/Boost retweeted
Dm me if you want me to sponsor or invest in your US motor-actuator-winding-electrical-steel-magnet company
Build/Boost retweeted
I don't think people really understand the fight between Paul Graham and Palmer Luckey which played out this week. To the general public, from a casual perspective, it seemed like two rich guys getting in a heated, impulsive debate on Twitter, dragging out for days.
It's not.
Paul is worth ~$2.5 billion. Palmer is worth ~$5 billion. Nothing these guys do is impulsive. They've been sitting on this for years. They were arguing in private for months, maybe years, before Palmer decided this week was the correct window of opportunity to make a public attack.
Paul Graham is one of the intellectual fulcrum points of Silicon Valley. He funds everyone. He sets the tone. He shapes the agenda. Entry-level professionals mimic his style, his worldview, his mannerisms, the way Paul talks. Everyone parrots his beliefs and policies and essays, as chameleon strivers who are trying to get ahead and climb the social ladder.
All of Silicon Valley revolves around a handful of key figures, and Paul Graham was (perceived as) one of the intellectual titans who the entire industry orbited as sycophants.
Palmer challenged all that.
Paul is an elite, Palmer is an elite, and Palmer Luckey chose to publicly challenge the status quo; the elite consensus; the perceived legitimacy of incumbent elits and their institutions.
And he did this for a reason: Palmer is aiming to take the role of Paul Graham, of being the new intellectual godfather of Silicon Valley, based around a new set of ideas: reindustrialization, patriotism, protectionism... rather than America as a deracinated cosmopolitan economic zone to be strip-mined by Third World foreigners.
It's much bigger than a Twitter argument. Palmer was publicly demonstrating that the Emperor had no clothes, and that he was strong enough to MOG Paul Graham and get away with it, while other Silicon Valley tech workers would be terrified of making an enemy who could suffocate future business ventures and block potential funding.
Palmer Luckey is the face of a new military-industrialist consensus which is seeking to hire American workers for American jobs, to build factories and weapons at home, to remilitarize and reindustrialize, to get away from asset inflation and FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) as a sterile, parasitic rent-seeking economic system.
That's the subtext for all of this. It's a public signal of a rising counterelite challenging a stagnant, ossified status quo which can no longer justify or defend their own claim to power.
Build/Boost retweeted
Hard things I learned in scaling a manufacturing business that I wasn’t fully prepared for:
- as the company gets bigger, using slack to communicate across all shifts and factories in different states sucks. You gotta try harder than slack. Things can get taken the wrong way (gotta use lots of emojis) and important messages get lost. Phone calls and travel are so much better but you gotta put in the effort
- with 600 employees you don’t know everyone, but you still feel like they are your kids in a way. When someone loses a family member, or they have a sick kid, or they get into a motorcycle accident, I worry about them like they are my own kid. I can’t imagine how this is going to work at 6,000 employees.
- entropy is real. We are fighting laws of thermodynamics lol. Everything wants to dissolve into disorder and chaos. Gotta fight it 24/7
- it’s easy to make negative assumptions. I see front office teams grow and I’m thinking “really? It’s a full time job just to do xyz??!” But then I sit with them and realize at scale, yes…it’s a full time job to do things that took us 20 minutes a week in the old days
- many vendors and salespeople don’t give you the time of day when you’re small or starting out. Then you get to a certain size and they are begging for your business, offering discounts, and giving you access to crazy deals. If you survive the valley of death it’s nice on the other side
- safety and compliance becomes a big deal. When it’s just 5 of you, safety is implied and everyone kinda gets it because everyone has “done it” before. With a larger population, you have to worry about so much more. Some people are brand new to manufacturing and don’t have the instincts that come with working with machines for years and years
- the larger the company grows, the more you have to lose. hundreds of families count on me for a paycheck, so the stakes are really high. Easy to lose sleep when things go sideways for a little bit.
- when you first start, things seem to cost a couple thousand $. Then after a while it’s $10k. Then $100k. Then you get comfortable with $1M or more and your concept of money is wildly skewed. Every quote you get is some batshit crazy amount of money but apparently that’s how much things cost
- mistakes can cost many millions of dollars at scale. You can still take risks, but the downside starts to get bigger
- you can’t be everywhere all the time, so you gotta have great people that would make the same decisions you would make if you’re not in the room. Or ideally they make an even better decision. Great leaders allow companies to grow. Build them early
Build/Boost retweeted
SI bros will post about superiority and then come up with "statfarads" and "statcoloumbs" and "dynes"
Build/Boost retweeted
one of the really difficult things a lot of these VC funded companies get to skip is that as a small company, it can be extraordinarily difficult to get good vendors. It's constant battle of 'this is the most important thing in the world for us' vs 'this is the smallest job we've done in 5 years', not unlike a start up trying to hire good talent. you have to work really hard to get people to take your money in exchange for doing the thing they are good at and conceivably want to do...
Build/Boost retweeted
No more closed-source black box RF wireless MCUs
Introducing the new MCN-1 from Mericron:
mericron.com/?v=4
Build/Boost retweeted
new engineering grads ask: “where should i work?”
the answer i always give: “walk along the ocean, hear the sound of the waves lapping against the coast. listen to your heart, and when it answers, take the first engineering job you can get”
Build/Boost retweeted
I think a lot of people suffer w their ERP because they see all the bells and whistles and options and try to make themselves use it all instead of really properly sitting down, designing the minimum necessary setup, documenting it well and sticking to it
Build/Boost retweeted
I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon.
And I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That’s not my style.
Tesla open sourced its patents and we made the Supercharger network available to all competitors, even though we could have made it a walled garden.
SpaceX launches competing satellite systems with no increase in price or use of unfair terms.
Even my worst enemies can attack me on this platform.
…
Build/Boost retweeted
Correct, and @neros_tech is the highest volume drone manufacturer in the United States.
Build/Boost retweeted
If you're a relatively new EE and want to level up, dig deep on connectors.
Board to board, wire to board, wire to wire, all of 'em.
High speed data? low speed data? Power? Digital? Analog? High volume product? Low Volume product?
Orders of magnitude cost and labor differentials around every corner.
