Luis Batalha (@luismbat)

I built a personal newspaper on a Zectrix e-paper display and stuck it on my fridge: • Local events I might like (using Grok Bot) • Football matches happening that day • Word of the day Views rotate every 30 mins. The fridge door turns out to be a great interface: short-duration attention without feeling intrusive.

Starship reached orbit for the first time on Monday. One of my favorite potential use cases is launching the next generation of space telescopes faster and with far fewer constraints. Today, engineers designing the largest space telescopes face extreme mass and volume limits that forces them to make telescopes lighter, foldable, and dependent on incredibly intricate deployment mechanisms, adding years of engineering complexity and increasing the risk of failure. Starship changes that tradeoff. Thanks to its massive payload capacity and volume, telescope builders could "convert risk into mass": build heavier, simpler observatories instead of optimizing every component around launch constraints. That could accelerate the next generation of space telescopes, and astrophysics research, by decades!

A few weeks after our newborns arrived, I kept worrying about getting their bath water temperature right, since newborn skin is so much more sensitive. So I used it as an opportunity to test Grok 4.6 and built a tiny Apple Watch app that checks the water temperature and tells me when it’s too hot or cold. Grok Bot was also surprisingly useful for shipping it: it navigated the App Store submission process through the browser, helped fill out the forms, and even helped answer Apple’s questions during review. It’s now on the App Store. If anyone wants to try it, I’d love feedback.

Simple way to find customers using Grok Bot: 1) Use Grok Bot to search for people on X complaining about competitors or looking for alternatives (“Looking for an alternative to...”) 2) Use the @amplemarket connector to learn more about the person + company, then reach out to the poster or people commenting. 3) Turn it into a Grok Bot routine so you get these buying signals every week. The interesting part: you don’t need to guess whether someone has the problem you're solving. They just publicly told you they do. This feels like extremely low-hanging fruit for founders/sales teams.

Yesterday’s eclipse stopped roughly 10²⁰ J of solar energy from reaching Earth. That’s ~1 year of global electricity generation! 1,400 W/m² of sunlight × 10¹³ m² (Moon-sized shadow) × ~3 hours (Time Shadow Crossed Earth) ≈ 10²⁰ J The Sun outputs energy on an absurd scale.

Testing Grok Imagine 2.0 against other image models: Prompt: "A mathematician drinking from an object of genus 1" ChatGPT gets trapped by the donut analogy: it turns a donut (genus 1) into a mug, accidentally creating an object of genus 2. Grok gets it right: a regular coffee mug already has genus 1.