SVRGN Weekly Digest #48 💫
Resilience, Decentralized compute, neutrino beams
OT: I lost a ski pole down the north face of a saddle in the Tyrolian mountains this weekend. I was chasing the Sun as it was setting on my way up, completely alone. Just after I had stabbed my poles into the crusted, windblown snow at the top where I wanted to ski down, to remove the skins from my skis and flip my boots and bindings into “Ski” mode, one pole fell over and slowly slid over the edge. I tried reaching for it, lying flat on my stomach, but gravity got it and it tumbled down what looked like a couple of hundred meters of almost-vertical snow with sharp rocks jutting out of them I decided my 10 years old Leki with electrical tape on the handle would be this years sacrifice to the mountain gods. May it bring us all luck
🤼 People
Mengyao Han - Founder at t2
Mengyao is one of the most resilient people I know. She is not unreasonably optimistic, aware of limitations and difficulties, yet almost nothing can stop her from doing her best. This is a trait we look for in our founders, but is very hard to gauge from even an extensive due diligence process. There are signs, and life stories which, if shared give us reason to believe this person has been through hardship and stood up again. We talked about learnings, about treating ourselves with kindness and what progress looks like.
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
🚀 Companies
Dystr - Automating engineering workloads
Status: Seed
Source: Network
Founders: Nabeel and Julie
Why it’s cool:
Making non-coding engineers 10x more efficient at their jobs because they can just use a simple low-code tool for every day tasks. Like Matlab if you didn’t have to write matlab!
Yotta Labs - Decentralized compute for AI workloads
Status: Pre-seed
Source: CAVI
Founders: X
Why it’s cool:
Not all AI has to happen centrally, or on your own device in real-time. A remote network of compute could run an agent “unstoppably” to live its life online. How this makes economic sense is a question with an answer you probably don’t want to hear: 🤫 tokens
Roc Camera - Capture verifiably real moments
Status: Pre-order
Source: CAVI
Founders: Kosuke
Why it’s cool:
A physical application of nice cryptography just makes you happy. Dan Boneh has floated the idea of a proof of a collected physical artifact (e.g., photons incident on a CMOS), but we haven’t seen anyone implement it at scale yet.
💡 Ideas & Science
“There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour.”
Destruction of Nuclear Bombs Using Ultra-High Energy Neutrino Beam
One can theoretcially use a beam of neutrinos, subatomic particles that almost don’t interact with anything, to all “focus” on a distant point. For example, it can traverse the earth and if enough neutrinos interact with parts of a nuclear bomb, it would destroy it. Sadly, this will require 50GW to operate, order of magnitude stronger magnets than we have today and a 1000km accelerator. If anyone has a muon collider lying around of more than 100 TeV let me know.
The rise and fall of “fact-checking”
Fact-checkers and fake news have peaked as a separate concept from just good journalism and gullability, as Zuck announced they’re removing fact-checking from Meta’s platforms. Misinformation certainly exists as a too to control and manipulate groups online, but it’s very unclear if a group of human fact-checkers help or abet those spreading misinformation, or are helping one group more than another.