Vibe-coding jokes and a Gillibrand venture-funding row lead Silicon Valley chatter

Gillibrand's son graduated from undergrad on Sunday. Today it's reported that he's received $30 million in venture capital funding to launch a derivatives exchange. His mom sat on the Senate Agriculture committee—which has jurisdiction over derivates—until this past year

I asked Claude Code to make a new GTA: San Andreas mission where CJ has to vibe code a startup and then raise money from investors in SF https://t.co/tuUAsBew1D

cybersecurity startups trying to raise funding right now https://t.co/nxKv5fZmIJ

Woah! Go New Mexico. This is a really important message to Silicon Valley tech companies: you are not above the law

A San Francisco startup says it just turned mercury into real gold, and their own math says gold is one of the cheapest things their machine can make. Aim it at a different metal and it makes a cancer drug ingredient worth tens of billions of dollars a gram. Here's how it works. When you fuse two kinds of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, every single reaction kicks out a neutron moving at 14.1 MeV, which is absurdly fast. Fire one into mercury-198 and it knocks another neutron loose on the way through, so two come out and you're left with mercury-197. Give that a few days and it decays into gold-197, the only stable kind of gold there is. The whole trick needs neutrons above about 6 MeV, and regular nuclear reactors barely make those, while fusion makes one every time it fires. Now swap the mercury for radium-226. Same reaction, one neutron in and two out, and you end up with radium-225, which decays into actinium-225. Novartis is building its next prostate cancer drug around actinium-225, and it's so scarce it sells by the millicurie, roughly $1,200 to $2,500 apiece. Price it by the gram and you're into the tens of billions of dollars, for a material so radioactive nobody could safely hold a gram of it anyway. Marathon's team actually put a dollar value on a single fusion neutron in a paper this year. Use it to make electricity and it's worth about $3 × 10⁻²⁰. Gold comes in at $2.6 × 10⁻²⁰, basically a wash. Molybdenum-99, which goes into about 80% of nuclear medicine scans, is worth $2.6 × 10⁻¹⁷ a neutron. Actinium-225 is worth about $10⁻¹⁰, around 3 billion times what the electricity's worth. That's why fusion people should care. Every fusion company you've heard of is chasing electricity, and selling electricity only pays once the plasma puts out something like 10 to 22 times the energy you pump in to heat it. The best result so far, at JET in England, was about a third. Add gold on the side and Marathon's math says you break even around 3x. For molybdenum-99, the number is 0.001x. So a machine that gives back one-thousandth of the energy you feed it can still make money, as long as the neutrons hit the right metal. By their numbers, a 3 megawatt machine running way below breakeven could cover the whole world's supply of molybdenum-99, which today comes from splitting uranium in a handful of research reactors. Today's experimental fusion machines already beat the gain that job needs. Their second post basically says this out loud. Marathon now describes itself as an isotope company for radiopharma. Their chart shows roughly 390 targeted radiotherapy trials. Pluvicto, the prostate cancer drug Novartis launched at $42,500 a dose, did $1.9 billion in sales last year. Gold still matters to them, just later. It's about a $700 billion a year market, and Marathon's paper figures it could soak up around 2 terawatts of fusion capacity, which is roughly the scale where fusion actually moves the grid. So the plan is to sell cancer isotopes out of small machines now and use gold to pay for the giant ones, years before electricity can pay for itself.

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Whop has raised $200M in Series D funding at a $5.1B valuation, backed by @sequoia and @shopify. It really feels like we are barely touching the tip of the iceberg in a market larger than anyone can imagine. We first launched Whop as a better way for us to sell sneaker bots, one of the most niche types of desktop software out there. Total TAM? Probably $20,000 per day. Who cares, tiny market. But, what people discounted is the idea that there were actually 70,000 other markets exactly like that one. Beyond the investment itself, I am especially excited to welcome legendary silicon valley investor @dougleone to our board of directors. Doug and the sequoia team are nothing but a brilliant, resourceful, and principled group of people. My co-founder Cameron and I started building on Shopify when we were 13 years old. Shopify is one of the most impactful all-in-one cloud ecosystems ever created; @tobi has pioneered modern entrepreneurship the way we know it and we are thrilled to have him in our corner. We have a tenet at Whop to be the dumbest in the room and I am very grateful that this has recently become a lot easier. We are focused on markets, scale economies, and progressive media. If that is up your alley, please message me directly. The $200M raised will support our expansion as we build economic infrastructure for the next century, continuing on our mission of delivering everyone an income.

head of coffee at an AI startup is kind of an incredible role ngl https://t.co/OxOnM50t8L

A fly that died years ago is flying around a harbor that doesn't exist. Here's what's going on. Scientists took one female fruit fly and sliced its brain into about 7,000 pieces, each roughly 2,000 times thinner than a human hair. They photographed those slices 21 million times under an electron microscope. Then hundreds of people spent years tracing every connection by hand until they had the whole thing, all 139,255 neurons and 54.5 million synapses. That map is called FlyWire. Odyssey hasn't said exactly which map it used, but FlyWire is the one most of these projects build on. Earlier this year a startup called Eon ran that map as a simulation with zero training and got a virtual fly that walks and grooms on its own. Now Odyssey has put the brain somewhere new. The harbor in this clip isn't sitting on a server as a 3D model or a game level. Odyssey-3 is a 14-billion-parameter AI that learned how water and light behave by watching a ton of video, and it invents each frame as the fly steers through it. This is kind of a big deal for a nerdy reason. For as long as people have tried to build a mind, there have been two camps. One says copy a real brain. The other says train a giant model on tons of data. Those camps have mostly fought each other, and in this clip one is living inside the other. And here's a fun bit of math. The fly has 54.5 million synapses. The AI dreaming up its world has 14 billion parameters. Line those up and the world is about 250 times bigger than the brain living in it. That's what happens when one approach rides on GPUs and the other rides on grad students with microscopes. The trained side ballooned in a couple of years. The copied side took the better part of a decade to get one fly. What really got me is how little it takes to fool a fly. A fruit fly sees through about 800 tiny lenses per eye, so its whole view of the world is around 1,600 pixels. Each of your eyes sends about a million nerve fibers to your brain. Keeping a fly convinced means the AI only has to look right across 1,600 pixels, which is a pretty low bar, and it's clearing it. The fake world will look good enough for human eyes long before anybody can slice up a human brain and rebuild all 86 billion neurons.

this Austin startup (founded by an ex-SpaceX engineer) just figured out how to build your house for HALF the cost when Elon talks about abundance and money becoming irrelevant in the future, this is what he means the trick is building the house in a factory instead of onsite: > machines make every wall, floor and roof panel, plus your kitchens and bathrooms > the whole house packs into 4 shipping containers and gets trucked to your plot of land > the crew snaps it together on site in days, with about 1/10th (!!) the labor of a normal build right now this is just one small factory in Texas now imagine 10 years from now, when there are 10s of millions of robots around the world constructing stuff 24/7 building is about 64% of what a new home costs in America (the land is only about 14%). so if you take most of that away, a house starts to cost more like a car and housing is the biggest bill most people will ever pay. once that gets cheap, and the same robots start making everything else cheap too, you can just get whatever you want welcome to superabundance my friend

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Goldigging gals are flocking to Silicon Valley to land rich husbands in AI https://t.co/Zt2wQX6grm https://t.co/jMYWSOtXg6

i know approximately 100 people who, at some point, have told me how badly they wanted to build a startup but didnt know how to write code. precisely 0 have built a product even though anyone can now write code. lesson in that.

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