SVRGN Weekly Digest #33 💫
Citizenship, Geothermal, Spatial intelligence
Good news everyone!
🤼 People
Vladimir Stroganov - Founder at Geothermal Radar
Vladimir is a former quant/banker/developer whose interest in energy has been focused on geothermal in the last 1.5y. The success of geothermal depends heavily on the quality of the well, and reducing uncertainty in drilling that well. So he decided to start geothermalradar.com to provide data products and a platform for simulations to those who want to dig into profitability of geothermal energy.
Till Moldenhauer - Chief of Staff at SPRIND
SPRIN-D is the DARPA of Germany, sort of. They incubate, invest and organize challenges - called “Funke” (Sparks in German). This week they hosted an autonomous flight challenge at a military airfield outside of Munich, where drones had to fly autonomously in a GNSS-denied environment through a course. They may have set the bar a bit too high, given that only one team made it all the way through, but it was impressive nevertheless.
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
🚀 Companies
Sorcerer - Making weather forecasts more accurate
Status: YC
Source: CAVI
Founders: Maxmillion (such a chad name btw, next kid will be called Maxbillion), Alessandro, Austin
Why it’s cool:
We’re living in 2024. Why aren’t weather forecasts better? Ok, they have gotten significantly better in the last few years, mainly through better models, more compute, and better measurements. These (partially) ex-Urban Sky founders want to collect even more weather data. Now made possible because of better balloons, compute and connectivity presumably. Next step: order weather by filling the balloons with SO2.
[REQUEST FOR STARTUP] - A user-friendly, non-custodial crypto-onboarding solution
Status: non-existent AFAIK
Source: Vitalik
Founders: You?
Why it’s cool:
Security is relative and has trade-offs. But assume we don’t want to rely on the good will of politicians to allow the existence of banks that serve our crypto institutions. Or we don’t want to trust ourselves with managing one password that, if lost, equals losing everything. The best option today is probably a smart account (e.g., SAFE), with different sources for keys. But there is no really easy to use-way of setting up those keys using ZKEmail, social recovery, and some for of zk-credentials from government ID, for example. Please build this, someone.
Pyannote - conversational speech diarization
Status: Stealth
Source: CAVI
Founders: Herve Bredin, Vincent Molina
Why it’s cool:
Interestingly, whisper - one of the foremost STT/TTS models doesn’t do diarization. Hence, why pyannote is necessary. And pyannote works really well. Just
pip install pyannote.audio or use the non-OSS version for better and faster options.
💡 Ideas & Science
This week is podcast edition, but if you don’t like it, use whisper + pyannote to transcribe them!
Daniel Yergin - Oil Explains the Entire 20th Century by Dwarkesh Podcast
Daniel Yergin is a Pulitzer-prize winning author who wrote up a massive history of the 20th century, from the perspective of oil. Without effective usage of oil and abundance thereof, we’d probably never have achieved any of the progress we have today. He’s also written a newer book called “The New Map” which involves the more recent history of energy in general, and the geopolitical consequences of controlling them.
The Frontier of Spatial Intelligence with Fei-Fei Li by a16z podcast
World Labs made a splash when coming out of stealth this week, and this is a great introduction to what they’ll be working on, building on research from the last 10+ years. The “generative everything” future is coming true with generated world models, incl. semantic context being one of the goals for World Labs.
Vitalik Buterin on political philosophy by Into the Bytecode with Sina Habibian
As always, Vitalik has some reflective, intelligent things to say. The political aspect of crypto and technology is something we’ve heard from him about every now and again, but more so recently with the US election, Ukraine, Operation Chokepoint 2.0 etc. One interesting shift he mentions in this episode from governmental-driven ideologies to tech-driven ideologies (crypto, e/acc, Network states, Cypherpunk, etc.). He notices how the more recent (21st century) ideologies are less focused on what the government should be doing and more on how corporations, entrepreneurs, individuals, engineers, etc. should be acting.
If you define success by the absence of a thing, you’re probably disappointed. If you define success by the presence of a thing, then you’re probably happy.
Bonus note: Jonatan has received Praxis citizenship. So far, it means getting a cool “Visa”, a discord-server, and having to explain to the family why moving to an unknown techno-optimist mediterranean country is absolutely necessary. In time for the Network State conference in SG, a recent hilarious quasi hit-piece by BBC seemed to hint at Praxis being secretly white supremacist because they had an ad for milk in a magazine. This seems very far-fetched and contradictory to the fact that the Network State terminology was created by Balaji Srinavasan. It’s certainly not for normies, but not as much a political statement as a form of socio-technological experimentation.