“I’m trying to be an All-Star this year.” 🗣️
Yaxel Lendeborg sits down with
@taylorrooks and says that he has his sights set beyond Rookie of the Year 🌟
Grok Bot summary: IAC 2026 presentation by SpaceXAI President Michael Nicolls.
🎯 The main message
- SpaceX was founded in 2002 to make life multi-planetary and "extend the light of consciousness to the stars."
- He said the biggest risk as constellations grow is not debris. It's satellite operators not sharing data with each other.
🌍 How Starlink grew
- Starlink began in 2019 with 60 V0.9 satellites. User service started in late 2020 as the "Better Than Nothing Beta."
- V1.5 added space lasers, which let the satellites link into a mesh. That's when Starlink really took off, reaching oceans, Antarctica and airplanes.
- V2 (2023) has 4x the capacity of V1. Falcon launches V2 satellites 2–3 times a week, and each launch adds about 3 terabits of capacity.
- V3 launched on Starship about a week before the talk. Each V3 satellite has another 10x capacity, and each Starship launch carries 20–30x what a Falcon launch does.
- Starlink now has over 11,000 satellites, about 60% of all active satellites in low Earth orbit.
- It serves more than 13M customers in about 170 markets, plus ships and planes.
- The laser mesh means Starlink doesn't depend on local ground infrastructure. During last year's fires and power outages in Spain, it kept tens of thousands of customers and emergency responders online.
🚀 The life of a Starlink satellite
- **Before launch:** SpaceX checks that deploying the satellites won't bring them close to anything else, and shares where they'll be.
- **Deploy:** satellites are released below 300 km, where almost no other operators fly.
- **Orbit raising:** each climb path is checked against other satellites and crewed space stations, and SpaceX publishes the satellites' positions every hour on the way up.
- **Lower orbits for safety:** the original plan was about 1,000 km. Now every satellite flies below 500 km, and V3 will fly at about 350–360 km. At these heights a dead satellite falls back to Earth within months instead of staying up for centuries.
🛡️ How they avoid collisions
- Each satellite makes small station-keeping moves about once a day and a collision-avoidance move about every 10 days.
- Across the fleet, that's about 1,000 avoidance moves a day.
- Starlink's threshold for moving is nearly 100x more cautious than the industry standard, so the whole fleet's collision risk is about the same as a much smaller constellation's.
- "Ducking" moves turn the satellite so it presents a smaller target during a close pass, cutting the collision risk about 10x more.
- Automated software makes these decisions, which is why Starlink tries to stay in contact with every satellite at all times.
📡 Always connected
- Starship's live launch video was streamed over Starlink.
- The new V3 satellites connected to the network within 2 minutes of release, because Starlink terminals are built into the satellites. Their lasers link into the mesh within tens of minutes.
- The goal is to make contact right away and never lose it.
🌬️ Space weather
- During a 2024 solar storm, air density in orbit jumped 5x in a few hours, which throws off predictions of where satellites will be.
- Starlink is "probably one of the best sensors" for this. It measures density in real time and automatically corrects its position forecasts.
🔭 Working with astronomers
- **Optical:** SpaceX tried Vantablack paint and sun visors. What finally worked was a mirror-like film that reflects sunlight away from the ground, combined with careful steering. A V2 satellite now looks about as bright as a sheet of paper. This was done with groups like the Vera Rubin Observatory.
- **Radio:** working with observatories like the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Starlink steers its beams and frequencies around where the telescopes are pointing. As a result, the telescopes can now observe more often.
♻️ End of life
- SpaceX uses statistics to predict when parts will fail and deorbits satellites early. Many of those satellites would have kept working.
- Retired satellites are steered down within weeks, not left to drift for the 5 or 25 years regulations allow.
- They're built to burn up completely, and reentry is aimed over the ocean.
- Of about 10,000 satellites launched by early 2026, only a few dead ones remain in orbit. The goal is zero.
- "Reliability and rate go together."
⚠️ The biggest danger: other operators
- Tracked debris is like obstacles on a road: if you can measure it, you can avoid it.
- What you can't avoid is a satellite that maneuvers without telling anyone. Starlink has had passes as close as tens of meters this way.
- Starlink has maneuvered around satellites from about 650 operators in recent months, but shares position data with only about half of them. "That number is too low."
- SpaceX shares data with China's space station and some Chinese operators. Many operators don't share at all, including some in the US, Europe and Japan.
⭐ Stargaze: Starlink's own space tracking
- Over 30,000 star trackers on Starlink satellites spot passing objects as streaks against the stars.
- Stargaze now tracks over 17,000 objects, including about 90% of the maneuvering satellites that cross Starlink's orbits.
- In one example, an untracked satellite's predicted 9 km miss shrank to about 60 m after it maneuvered toward Starlink. Stargaze caught the move and the Starlink satellite dodged in time.
- He said it's still no substitute for operators sharing their plans in advance.
🤝 The ask: share your data
- SpaceX runs its own space safety data platform, and over 100 operators have signed up.
- Operators can upload their satellite positions and check them against Starlink and against Stargaze tracking.
- His message to every operator was to join the platform and share their positions.
🧠 StarMind: AI compute in space
- StarMind is SpaceX's planned AI satellite constellation, starting launches and scaling next year.
- The goal is to move AI compute off Earth. He expects StarMind to drive demand for Starship launches the way Starlink did for Falcon.
- On the ground, SpaceX is building over 2 GW of compute in Memphis. He said AI demand will be nearly limitless, and Earth's resources make that hard to keep scaling there.
- In space, the satellites run on solar power and shed heat through large radiators.
- Each satellite is simpler than a Starlink: basically a computer with big solar panels and radiators.
- Each one has about 250 kW, roughly one NVL72 rack of compute.
- They'd fly in tight clusters of about 10 satellites linked by about 10 terabits of bandwidth, then connect to Starlink.
- SpaceX has filed for up to **1 million satellites**, in low-inclination and sun-synchronous orbits. Building them could mean thousands of satellites a week.
- New challenges include much higher reliability and redundancy, flying in close formation, and micrometeoroids. Dead satellites might be sent away from Earth instead of burning up in the atmosphere.
🌙 Beyond Earth
- Starlink is developing very high-bandwidth lasers to connect the Moon, then Mars, building an "interplanetary mesh."
- All of that depends on getting safety right in low Earth orbit first.
💡 Key takeaways
- Starlink is the world's biggest constellation, and it's moving lower to be safer.
- It makes about 1,000 collision-avoidance moves a day, with nearly 100x more caution than the industry standard.
- The biggest risk is operators who don't share where their satellites are going.
- StarMind could scale to 1 million AI satellites, with launches starting next year.
- "Coordination is a key element for realizing all of our ambitions."
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Abstract is winding down.
Starting today, all of
@IglooInc's focus will go towards taking Pudgy Penguins, Pudgy NFTs, and $PENGU to the next level.
When we acquired Frame in the summer of 2024, the vision was to build the blockchain for consumer crypto. Pudgy Penguins had shown us what it meant to reach the masses, and we believed we could bring that same approach to building a chain.
Abstract achieved a lot in a short period of time; we built the Portal and AGW, onboarded major global brands, amassed over 300 million transactions, and grew a vibrant onchain ecosystem.
The journey became stifled by the lack of a DeFi ecosystem, insufficient liquidity, minimal institutional cross-over, and prohibitively high costs that impeded growth in winning areas.
Unknown to most, Igloo, Inc. had been funding Abstract over the last 18 months.
After losing tens of millions of dollars over two years, building consumer products, assembling an all-star team, onboarding some of the biggest brands in the world, and building a community of millions, we still had not found product-market fit.
In combination with the market's reduced appetite for what we had built and not being able to find a scalable path forward, we could no longer justify taking from the Pudgy Penguins business.
Igloo, Inc. has always been a community-first company. Even after losing 8 figures, we could have launched a token or pursued an ICO.
Ultimately we decided against this. A token only works if there is something driving demand to it, and launching a token that we don’t have conviction in would have been a disservice to our community.
The entire team at Abstract has worked tirelessly with a tremendous amount of passion to make the consumer crypto vision come true. I cannot fault a single one of them for this outcome.
To the Abstract community, I want to thank all of you for sticking by our side on this long journey and for continuing to champion us. You supported us through all of the ups and downs, and I wish the result could have been different.
There will be many that will find satisfaction in seeing this shut down, and that is fine. I take a great amount of pride in having the ambition to venture into the chain business, notoriously one of the most difficult to make work, and the only regret I have is not being able to celebrate a win alongside the Abstract community.
As we wind down Abstract, our full focus shifts to making Pudgy Penguins into the global & cultural phenomenon I know it can become.
Return to Pudgy Penguins.
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I love Gacha 😂🔥
Trying the Sport All-Star this time 👀
$100 in. Let’s see what I get 💸
Dreaming of finally pulling an Epic 🙏🔥
Just use Jupiter 🪐💚
@JupiterExchange @JUPCommunity
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A note on recursive STARK mempools (EIP-8288)
This is an EIP that I am hoping we can get included in I-star (the fork after Hegota) that you can think of as the next step after Frames, that would unlock extreme amounts of power. Particularly:
* Ultra-cheap quantum-safe signatures (SPHINCS-). Much of the cost savings comes from the fact that the signature data (~3 kB) does not have to go onchain
* Ultra-cheap quantum-safe privacy protocols. Status quo minimum cost for private txs is ~300k if you engineer very well (no one does), status quo quantum-safe is ~10M gas, this could reduce it to low tens of thousands.
* Universal support for your favorite new signature or proof scheme without needing EVM changes. Whatever you use (Falcon, ML-DSA, some other lattice-based thing, something code-based or isogeny-based or even more esoteric), you can just wrap it client-side in a STARK, onchain gas cost low tens of thousands just like privacy protocols. Hopefully, Ethereum will never need "please support my favorite cryptographic algo" politics again.
* Private account abstraction: keep your account logic private, and in a private location onchain. Then you can make one transaction to change the ownership of all your onchain state - accounts, defi positions, privacy protocol notes, everything - without revealing which objects' ownership you're changing.
Here's how it works.
Your transaction can include a type of frame that we call a "dependency frame". The frame is a list of statements, asserting claims like "message hash M was signed by SPHINCS- public key P" and "data hash D was proven to satisfy a statement defined by verification key V".
When you send your transaction, you send it in an envelope, which includes a signature or a STARK for each statement in a dependency frame.
Once the transaction reaches the mempool, nodes aggregate them. Each node runs a loop: wait one tick (eg. 500ms), aggregate all new envelopes (either single-tx or multi-tx) that you've seen, remove any transactions that are expired, generate a STARK recursively proving all dependencies, and send a new multi-tx envelope containing that STARK.
Hence, the bandwidth load is bounded: each node's outbound is one STARK (~100-300 kB) per tick, plus each transaction getting broadcasted through the network once (as happens already).
The block builder acts as "yet another mempool node", receiving envelopes from the mempool (plus any side channels), generates its own STARK covering the subset of transactions it intends to include in the block, and adds that STARK to the block.
Total onchain overhead: one STARK (100-300 kB), plus 96 bytes for each statement being proven.
This is what I've called before ( ) "The Proof Singularity". Today, we have all the ingredients to actually implement it.
As a developer, this requires a somewhat different workflow than you are used to, but it is conceptually simple. Any signatures or STARKs, you put into a separate frame. Then the main logic that today is verifying a signature or STARK, you replace with checking for the existence of a frame that includes the correct statement as a dependency.
Examples of useful statements:
* [tx sighash] verifies against [the pubkey at sload(0)]
* there exists a secret and a merkle branch such that hashing secret+0 and applying the merkle branch outputs (public) root R, and hashing secret+1 outputs (public) nullifier N
* there exists a secret address A, salt S and signature Z such that sload(0) = hash(A, S) and a merkle proof of address A inside a recent ethereum state contains some pubkey D where [tx sighash] was signed by D [this is private account abstraction; all variables except [tx sighash] and sload(0) are private; you can also make D a STARK verification key]
* there exists an ML-DSA signature signing [tx sighash], that verifies against an ML-DSA pubkey whose hash is sload(0)
At the core, this is moving any compute and data other than bookkeeping "business logic" outside the core path of Ethereum execution, sharding and parallelizing it via the mempool.
Notice also that this requires agreeing on a _language_ (aka. an ISA) for the recursive STARKs to define statements in. The current leading candidate is RISC-V. So this would also de-facto be Ethereum adding RISC-V (or something else we decide on) as a canonical ISA - a big decision that should be done carefully, but that I think will be necessary to drive Ethereum forward.
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SpaceX is turning Star Trek into reality.
Sholto, thank you for setting the record straight. Larger issue is that multiple very serious people in Silicon Valley have heard some variation of this and believe it to be true. And the reason it is believable to so many is that it is consistent with Dario’s public messaging and what he outlined in the essay you shared: this technology *might* be dangerous for humans in multiple ways, could lead to extreme concentration of economic power (as outlined in the essay) and therefore needs to be regulated thoughtfully. I agree with the potential risks and I believe Dario makes all of these arguments in good faith.
As discussed on the pod, if one agrees that AI *might* be dangerous, there are two ways to address this potential risk. Either concentrate it in the hands of a chosen few companies and politicians via regulation or distribute it widely. Essentially boils down to whether one believes AI is too dangerous to concentrate or too dangerous to distribute. There are reasonable arguments on both sides, but I profoundly agree with Zuckerberg’s statement that: “The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led to safe or positive outcomes.” And as Dario says in the aforementioned essay, “some may object that we can simply keep AIs in check with a balance of power between many AI systems, as we do with humans.” I believe this is the best path forward: I want as many AIs as possible to maximize the odds that one shares my own particular values. And as Dario notes, no human has ever been able to take over the world.
At this point, I think safe to say that Dario has lost the argument. His messaging has failed to result in his preferred regulatory path. The fact that the only solution to the recent incident where an unreleased advanced OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face was an open-source model likely ended any chance of strict near-term regulation. Essentially every major company other than Anthropic has signed Jensen’s letter.
However, Dario’s messaging has been massively helpful to efforts to ban datacenters here in America. I suspect we will see anti-datacenter advocacy groups runnings ads using clips of Dario warning about how dangerous AI could be for humans. His good faith efforts in favor of regulation are now increasing the odds that AI will not be beneficial for Americans and humans everywhere. I believe that there is a reasonable chance AI might help us cure most forms of disease such that we have extended lifespans and can enjoy these long lives in an abundant Star Trek like future. That is the future that I want and I think Dario is decreasing the odds of that future at this point.
He is about to be the CEO of one of the most important public companies in the world and given that the pro-regulatory effort has failed (at least for now), I respectfully think he should make an effort to be a more positive advocate for his own industry. And if I am wrong and we do need to regulate this technology, he will be a more effective advocate for this in the future having been open-minded to the alternative.
And for the sake of clarity and as I outlined on the pod, I think Anthropic has deep competitive advantages and is an amazing company. Ironically, the main risk I saw to Anthropic a few months ago was nationalization as a result of Dario’s own rhetoric and behavior.
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Amar'e Stoudemire BURST onto the scene in 2002-03!
☀️ 13.5 PPG, 8.8 RPG, 1.1 BPG
☀️ 140 dunks (#
4# in NBA)
☀️
@Kia NBA Rookie of the Year
S.T.A.T. would go on to make 6 NBA All-Star teams and 5 All-NBA teams... he enters the
@Hoophall this Saturday!
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COURT ASMR 🔊👂
From the Emirates NBA Cup to the NBA Berlin Game to NBA All-Star to the NBA Finals… the soothing sounds of last season 🏀
Many have asked how this photo was made. This is my explanation.
The ISS rotates about its pitch axis as it orbits Earth at 17,000mph to keep its nadir view constant. Because of this long exposure photography turns stars into arced lines.
Sidereal clock drives on Earth match the planet's rotation to see stars clearly. I knew one designed for space could do this too.
So a camera mount was custom built at
@RITtigers to rotate once every 90 minutes using a 60 to 90 toothed gear system, cancelling out the orbital motion of ISS and allowing the capture of distant stars as fixed points!
In essence, it is a a rotational coil spring powered analog star tracker. It was machined out of aluminum and is entirely mechanical to bypass NASA's strict electrical requirements for cargo. We had to get creative!
After Expedition 72 it was safely returned to Earth and is to be displayed at RIT. Which I am pleased to say because a similar barn door tracker I made from spare parts on Expedition 6 for nighttime city photography was destroyed in an atmospheric trash disposal!
Photography is an important part of sharing the journey to new frontiers for all people of Earth!
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