daskro @daskro

Everyone is talking about missile shortages but few are talking about the energetics bottleneck. RDX is made at a single World War II era plant in Tennessee. It's used in nearly every bomb, missile, and artillery shell. The production target that's slipped to 2030 is 15 millions pounds per year. For reference, the U.S. produced that much RDX every month during Vietnam.

Today, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $115 million in funding, including a $100M Series A led by @kleinerperkins. America has lost the ability to build, and we’re here to restore it. My co-founder, @NoahMcGuinn, and I left our jobs at @SpaceX , where we worked on programs including Starship, Starshield, and @Starlink, to build a company that will solve construction’s greatest challenges. Infrastructure is the foundation of civilization, and construction is the precursor to innovation. If America wants to build a brighter future for the next generation, we have to make it faster, cheaper, and safer to build. That’s where @TerraFirma_Inc comes in. We’re a new type of company, a robotic construction company that builds the full technology stack needed to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement in one of the world’s oldest, largest, most important, but least efficient industries. We are building technology that expands what’s possible in construction on Earth, and then we'll use that same technology to build megastructures and colonies on the Moon and Mars. We’ve made tremendous progress over the past year, growing the company more than 10x in the last 12 months. We are performing projects across the world. By the end of October 2026, we are on track to operate 3 of the top 3 largest robotic construction fleets in the world, each on a different continent, bringing unprecedented speed, scale, and efficiency to some of the world’s most complex critical infrastructure projects. This funding will allow us to step on the gas and scale our manufacturing, software, operations, and construction deployments, including work on massive commercial and government contracts. We’re building the future of construction right here in Austin, Texas, and scaling it globally. If you want to be part of the team changing the world, now and on Mars, join us. Our Series A was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, BANNER VC, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Definition, PEAK6, Magnetar Capital, and Ravelin Capital. Huge thanks to all of our angel investors, friends, and family who have helped and supported us throughout this journey. Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/TerraFirma-Inc…

You have got to be kidding me. Someone does not like Marines.

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@xenocyke @codyaims You'd need to replace the hardware encoders / decoders / transcoders across the stack and that takes a decade.

We have refused to do any kinetics integrations up until this point for this reason, I do not want to see a warfighter get killed. Some fielded "ESAD"s that have been used with live explosives are controlled by Arduinos and relay boards. Some have gone off just from idling or dropping. You will pass out if you see some of these "esads" ☠️

Jim LaPorta @JimLaPorta

3 months ago

Exclusive at @CBSNews - Amid the Pentagon race to adapt low-cost, expendable drones, an Army explosive safety specialist warned that the military’s rush to innovate may be outpacing basic explosive safeguards—raising the risk of accidents, docs show. cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-…

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The Pentagon's Lethality Prize Challenge competition in April sought manufacturer able to cheaply mass-produce tiny modular warheads safely attachable to diverse FPV kamikaze drones. Read on to learn about the winners (mostly startups!) & their warheads. 1/5

Just got access to Claude Mythos… & ughhhhhhhhh this is AGI. It was the first time a model one shotted a 10/25G Ethernet MAC/PCS, it even knew to select the right line rate and data width for lower latency. This alone is something that would take a really skilled digital designer 3-6 months if they had experience in the past to pull off… But it didn’t just do that I then said to make the MAC fully cut through and only forward certain IP addresses within a range downstream it one shotted it instantly also which blew me away… Then finally I thought ok let me trip it up so I said now do 50G MAC and it knew without me telling it to add another GT transceiver and it even added alignment markers and FEC to it correctly. 💀💀💀 It’s passing all the tests I have so I’m going to flash the board and see if it actually works on hardware now…

WSJ says the US is running out of munitions for the Iran campaign. The bottleneck isn't missiles. It's chemistry. BAE-Holston, a chemical plant in Kingsport, Tennessee, is the only US producer of RDX and HMX, the explosive compounds inside nearly all U.S. warheads and propellants. At peak production in 1944, Holston shipped over a million pounds of explosives per day across 10 production lines. Today it runs 2. The Army gave BAE an $8.8 billion contract in December 2023. Output went from 8 million pounds a year to 15 million a year in 2024. That's still less than 5% of what it was in WW2. Meanwhile, China has been mass-producing next-generation explosives since 2011. America simply can't make them. In 2023, the Army found over 100 single points of failure in the munitions supply chain alone. If that's what it looks like for explosives, imagine the rest of our chemicals supply chain.

EgoX: Egocentric Video Generation from a Single Exocentric Video github.com/DAVIAN-Robotic…

Orient Anything: a unified, symmetry-aware orientation estimator; based on VGGT + DINOv2 encoder; tops GPT-4o & Gemini-2.5 in symmetry recognition (65.2%). orient-anythingv2.github.io

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Meta just released MapAnything on Hugging Face A universal transformer model for metric 3D reconstruction It supports 12+ tasks like multi-view stereo and SfM in a single feed-forward pass

@DefenseAnalyses Gaddis will have too write another chapter in Surprise, security, and the American experience

autocad it’s a cranky grandmother solidworks will build tension with and then tell you that she has to leave and then proceeds to crash your car freecad is a pick me girl Fusion is a girl who teaches you bad habits ansys loves you but won’t tell you when something’s wrong nx won’t shut up about her sister catia

Vishakh Ranotra @VishakhRanotra

9 months ago

Mechanical engineers have a different kind of party. They’re way cooler obviously.

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A Blender AI motion capture plugin trained on NVIDIA CUDA that converts video or webcam footage into real-time XYZ skeletal point data and rotation values.

That‘s crazy. 1.5km 3D Gaussian Driving at 280-500fps. City scale Gaussians with exciting real world applications.

Longyi Kim @longyikim

10 months ago

It's possible to render a 1.5 km gaussian platting driving scene at 280fps-500fps on RTX 5090.

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NGL first time seeing a taylor swift music video. TTT3R pretty impressive.

outside five sigma @jwt0625

10 months ago

every other day i yearn for more research fields to adopt the culture from the ML and ML adjacent fields of building a demo website for each paper and put code on github

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@thrice_greatest This tweet turned into one of the hardest rap songs Ive ever heard suno.com/s/ABbmqd1JWAtc…

@DFZ_Engineering Chute looks great, do you intend to put them on the sea?

one must imagine sisyphus happy please work hard on things that matter, we cannot escape suffering and so we should suffer in pursuit of the right things. you either choose a boulder or you will be assigned one.

@Nopel_0 Already sold out?