2026-09-16 flight from MAD/LEMD Madrid–Barajas to MLN/GEML Melilla. Iberia IB 2290 operated by Air Nostrum. ATR 72-600 registered 9H-NCD. This is my 1211th flight of all time.

2025-08-31 flight from AEI/LEAG Algeciras to JCU/GECE Ceuta. HÉLITY Copter Airlines HTY 132. Leonardo AW139 registered EC-NEP. This is my 1049th flight of all time, or the 15th flight on a helicopter.

Quick thoughts on AI: When in human history has there ever been a technology that was net negative? What about fire? Fire makes noxious smoke, risks burns, can destroy homes and can kill. But fire liberated us from the cold and let us cook our food. Then we made stoves with pipes — and they were safer and warmed our homes, but still carried some fire risk and had pollution. So we invented the power plant, which solved some problems with at-home fire—and we found ways to make better gas stoves and furnaces. Over time, we've made power plants better and better, reducing the negatives while enhancing the positives. Nat gas beats coal, and nuclear should beat both. So what about nuclear? I admit it's debatable whether nuclear weapons are a net positive or a net negative. I'd argue a net positive—because they ended WWII and made a mass-casualty great-power war unthinkable. But even if you disagree about nuclear weapons, you have to acknowledge nuclear is a technology category broader than weapons: nuclear power, nuclear medicine, and X-rays are part of the same fundamental technology. And there's no question nuclear writ large is a massive net positive for humanity. What about smartphones? They've certainly had downsides we need to take seriously — but it's obvious we are better off now than we were in the flip phone or landline era. This is the typical story of technology. And it's the arc of progress that lifted humanity out of the wilderness, that freed 90% of the population from back-breaking farm work while virtually eliminating famine, that enables any human with a tap of a finger to access the sum total of human knowledge, that allows us to enjoy comfortable climate-controlled environs any time of the year in any outdoor climate. My conclusion is: every technology has pros and cons. The cons are real—and the pros always outweigh the cons. As technology evolves, the improvements enhance the pros while reducing the cons. So what about AI? The question is not: are there cons with AI? Obviously there are; technology always has cons. The question is: are the pros going to outweigh the cons? Right now, with AI in its current state, it's not even close. The pros dramatically outweigh the cons. AI enables anyone to have a personal tutor. To offload repetitive and boring work. Anyone with an idea can become a creator and a software engineer. Individuals and small teams can do what used to take gigantic teams and big budgets. Our cars are becoming safer. Etc. Sure — we don't want AI teaching kids how to make nuclear bombs or bioweapons. We don't want hallucinating AI weapons. There are cons to be managed, solved, reduced, and eventually eliminated. History shows us that as technology develops, the pros are enhanced while the cons are reduced. So if we want better, more useful AI with fewer downsides — we need to accelerate AI development, not slow it down.

BREAKING: Terence Tao and 24 other Fields Medalists just signed a letter telling AI companies they're destroying mathematics >headlines: AI solves famous math problems >25 greatest mathematicians respond today >"we are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work" >ai labs are treating math problems like a benchmark you can brute force >“solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup and citing relevant previous work of others" >they're talking about openai >"this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions" >they're definitely talking about openai >openai offered to put math professor name on navier-stokes proof >condition: abandon his coauthor bc he works at anthropic >"the most precious resources of our profession are students and ideas" >for the labs the most precious resource is GPUs A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics

A battle is taking place on chain. The fighters are @mevrefund and a hacker who compromised a set ethereum validators. It all started when an ethereum validator set had their withdrawal address keys compromised. Withdrawals were initiated on the compromised validators. Soon, those funds will hit the withdrawal address. Who will get there first?

I made a mistake in my previous calculation: It actually takes only ~100 years to cool Venus down to an Earth-like temperature if we block all solar radiation from reaching its surface and use the intercepted solar energy to power an economically feasible AI data center in Venus orbit. That means planetary-scale climate engineering may not be as far beyond our technological horizon as it sounds. The biggest constraints may not be the laws of physics, but the scale of humanity’s economy, along with the amount of energy, infrastructure, and industrial capacity we are able to deploy. At the current pace of growth in energy demand, we may be able to achieve planet-scale electricity generation within a few thousand years, if not sooner. If we first blocked most or all of the sunlight reaching Venus, the planet could gradually cool. As the temperature falls, the CO₂ atmosphere would eventually cross into a very different phase regime. Venus currently has an atmosphere dominated by CO₂ at a surface pressure of roughly 90 bar, so once the planet becomes sufficiently cold, a large fraction of its CO₂ could potentially condense into liquid or solid reservoirs rather than remaining in the atmosphere. At that point, the problem changes fundamentally. We would no longer be dealing with an atmosphere containing an enormous amount of gaseous CO₂. We would have a planet covered with concentrated carbon-dioxide reservoirs that could, in principle, be processed, transported, or stored much more efficiently. In other words, the first stage could be thought of as planetary cooling, while the second stage becomes planetary carbon management. Yesterday, Europe officially opened its largest industrial carbon capture and storage facility at Yara’s Sluiskil plant in the Netherlands. The project captures and liquefies up to 800,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year from ammonia production, after which the CO₂ is shipped to Norway and permanently stored 2.6 km beneath the seabed. Some may argue that this facility produces little value. It may be true on Earth. But it could serve as a real-world testbed for technologies that, in a not-too-distant future, might be adapted for terraforming Venus. The basic industrial logic is similar: capture carbon, concentrate it, transport it, and permanently remove it from the atmosphere.

Six years ago, a Zcash team member wrote me and kept confusing EST and EDT. Communication went nowhere, I banned their entire company. Six years later, this is still one of the best decisions I have made. Still remember the BlockFi incident where they were supposed to send users 701.4 USD but actually sent 701.4 BTC? Anyone who cannot tell EDT from EST will probably also mix up BTC and USD.

If you can’t get an idea how daylight saving works, how can you claim that you understand something like zkSNARK? Hire too many people who don’t know basic principles how time zone works. Your project would end up of failure. @ZcashFoundation @zooko @BradleyDMiller @arcalinea

A factory that produces absolutely nothing. No profit and no revenue. It cost a billion dollars to build and will cost $100 million dollars per year to operate. It will capture less than 0.003% of the world's CO2 output. They're calling it the most European project of all time.

JUST IN - Europe's largest "carbon capture facility," officially opens in the Netherlands, aiming to cut emissions by capturing and liquefying CO2, then transporting it to Norway, to store it 1.6 miles beneath the ​seabed.

Introducing Starbase, Louisiana – a high-cadence launch site that will enable Starship to open a pathway to the stars for humanity. Thank you to @LAGovJeffLandry and the great people of Louisiana for all of their support as we work together on this audacious project →