guys, i know we’re all worried about the impact from Dibiasky but it’s filled with yttrium, terbium, osmium, and dysprosium, market value about $140 trillion. obviously we need to be as safe as possible but we can’t just leave the Dibiasky money on the table.

Robotics deep dive: THE MAGNET CHOKEPOINT Every high-torque joint in a humanoid turns on a neodymium-iron-boron magnet, and a motor buried in a hip or a knee runs hot. Heat is what demagnetises NdFeB. The fix is dysprosium and terbium, the heavy rare earths, alloyed in at a few percent to hold coercivity at operating temperature. They are the reason the magnet survives a shift. The number everyone quotes is mining: the IEA puts China at 60% of global mined production of magnet rare earths in 2024. Sixty percent is a share you can compete with: the ore is not rare and it is not only in China. The number that decides anything is the next one in the same report. China was 91% of global refined output, and 94% of sintered permanent magnet production. That gap, 60 to 91, is the whole subject. Mining is digging. Separation is chemistry, and the rare earths are chemically near-identical by design of the periodic table, so you take them apart by running the liquor through hundreds of solvent-extraction stages in series, each stage nudging the mixture a fraction of a percent toward pure. It is slow and capital-heavy, and it concentrates thorium in the tailings. Thorium is radioactive. The tailings pond is what a Western separation project actually gets fought over, and that fight does not run on a budget cycle. How long it takes: Lynas commissioned a heavy separation circuit in Malaysia and produced dysprosium oxide in May 2025, terbium in June. First time either had been separated commercially anywhere outside China, ever. Rated capacity, up to 1,500 tonnes a year. Magnets are one node in a robot's supply chain and not the only concentrated one. It is the node with the longest replacement time. The clock, checked 21 July 2026. China's April 2025 licensing regime on seven rare earths, dysprosium and terbium among them, is still in force; the IEA's account of what it did is that export volumes fell sharply through April and May and carmakers outside China cut utilisation or stopped lines. The October 2025 expansion, which added a 0.1% de minimis rule and a foreign direct product rule reaching magnet technology, was suspended on 7 November 2025 and the suspension runs to 10 November 2026. It has not been extended. In June Beijing put MP Materials and USA Rare Earth on its own control list. The IEA's 2026 outlook has European dysprosium and terbium trading at around five times Chinese domestic prices. That is the price of the truce while it holds.

Earlier organizations will write their handbooks describing their principles to employees via a handbook of sorts. Amazon had reversible and irreversible distinctions, long-termism and document-reading culture; Facebook had "move fast and break things"; Google had "don't be evil". Now all of us are required to do the same for our fleet of agents via the AGENTS markdown file; the only difference is is that majority of folks have never run a company at scale and don't understand that getting these principles right is highly non-trivial as each one of them has tradeoffs to choose from.

CHINESE RARE EARTH SUPPLIERS HALT SOME U.S. SHIPMENTS Some Chinese suppliers are refusing to ship rare earths to U.S. customers even after receiving export licenses, fearing repercussions from Beijing, Reuters reports. The issue has now moved onto the U.S. agenda ahead of Xi Jinping’s Sept. 24 Washington visit, with Washington pressing China to uphold commitments on smoother export approvals. Supply remains tight in materials critical to defense, aerospace, semiconductors and energy. U.S. yttrium imports from China are still only about half 2024 levels, while some companies have waited more than six months for licenses. Japan is facing even tighter restrictions, with China shipping no terbium to Japan through August, while yttrium exports fell 98% YoY.

China reportedly halts some rare earth shipments to US. Not a new blanket ban, or any mention of specific rare earths. But… if I had to guess, Japan is usually a decent indicator of what’s actively important since Japan: - “sources virtually all of its dysprosium and terbium from China.” - gallium, dysprosium, terbium and yttrium from China to Japan all stood at “zero” in June. - Shin-Etsu Chemical has reportedly suspended acceptance of new orders for magnets containing dysprosium. - Global magnet producer Proterial had received no export licenses for Chinese dysprosium as of last month The Reuters piece mentioned yttrium, gallium, terbium, indium phosphide, and tungsten as historical examples (doesn’t say what’s being targeted now). On a side note, $LYC.AX is becoming one of the most important alternatives, as Japan has locked up 75% of Lynas’s medium/heavy rare-earth output. (8 tons of dysprosium + terbium in Q1) Something fun I also read is that Japan’s deep sea resource is enormous (est. at 16 million tons of rare earth rich mud, but commercialization is post-2028) But in the meantime, China seem to be choking off feedstock that would materially affect Japan. Since you’ve already seen the WF6 Japanese industry stressed from tungsten related halts. And indium/others earlier this year that is used to make InP substrates from Sumitomo/JX. But still gradually allowing exports directly eg. $AXTI -> $LITE to allow US/China trade to continue, kinda disrupting that from time to time, then using that as leverage. It’s interesting since Japan has so many different monopolies like ABF, so we’ll see if they do anything back. But if I had to give a prediction, it does look like the US has a countdown timer until China becomes self-sufficient on semiconductors. TLDR: - rare earth disruption to US - China actively targeting Japan for upstream feedstock (which goes to Us supply chains), probably want to focus on that - many many second/third order effects from disruptions - we’ll see what US/Japan wants to do back, but supply chain wars are being fought upstream.

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Robotics essentials: HUMANOID ROBOT COST Ask what makes a humanoid expensive and the instinct's answer is the AI. It isn't. On a Unitree G1 teardown, the entire compute stack, the chip the robot thinks with, is about 3% of the bill of materials. The joints are 66%. Actuators run half to two-thirds of what a humanoid costs to build: motor, gearbox, encoder, thirty-odd times over. Hands are the next lump, roughly a fifth on their own, which is why so many robots ship with a claw. Sensors and battery are rounding errors beside the motors. The cost curve is falling faster than the people modelling it expected. Goldman penciled in 15 to 20% a year. It fell 40% in a single year, and they pulled their consumer forecast forward by two to four years. This is no longer a projection: Unitree's IPO filing shows its average humanoid selling price dropping from about $85,000 in 2023 to about $25,000 last year, at a 63% gross margin. A G1 lists at $13,500 today. The R1 is $5,900. The reason is a supply chain, and it is in one country. Morgan Stanley priced the same Optimus two ways: about $46,000 built with Chinese components, about $131,000 without. Roughly triple. China holds around 63% of the world's supply of the mechanical parts, the motors, the reducers, the screws. Every high-torque joint needs a magnet, and every good magnet needs dysprosium and terbium. China's export controls on exactly those elements have been in force since April 2025, and the truce covering the rest expires in November.