I am a technology enthusiast, writer, and modder. Founder of ModRetro,
@Oculus
VR, and
@Anduriltech
. Keeping American superheroes safe with autonomous systems.
Today marks the 10th Anniversary of
@Oculus
. Here are a few words on the past, a promise for the future, and a look back on the original mission statement for the company hellbent on ripping AR and VR out of the pages of scifi and into the mainstream.
YouTube has deleted every comment I ever made about the Wumao (五毛), an internet propaganda division of the Chinese Communist Party. Who at Google decided to censor American comments on American videos hosted in America by an American platform that is already banned in China?
Introducing:
Roadrunner, a compact VTOL drone powered by twin thrust-vectored turbojet engines with extraordinary speed, range, and payload capacity.
&
Roadrunner-M, a radical new low-cost weapon that allows for unprecedented tactics against powerful threats.
Thread
The Taylor Lorenz/Washington Post correction scandal isn't the isolated incident apologists claim. When I was fired, her story said I had announced I was leaving Oculus. This was false - it wasn't my choice nor my announcement. Her only source: Facebook PR. WaPo later
Impossible to overstate the importance of this win. Please spread the word. Anduril is proving that with the right team and business model, a seven-year-old company can go toe-to-toe with players that have been around for 70+.
The real winner? The United States of America.
The
@usairforce
has selected Anduril to design, manufacture, and test production-representative Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA).
In this era of great power competition, there is no time to waste on business as usual. We look forward to delivering CCAs on schedule, within…
So glad we can finally talk about this! Fury is a high-performance, multi-mission group 5 autonomous air vehicle. It is capable of pulling 9Gs at Mach 0.95 for a tiny fraction of the cost of similarly performant fighter craft.
People who think their criticism of AI art is insightful or useful should read what painters originally said about photography. No skill required, the tech does all the work, no creativity, blah blah blah etc.
"Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has announced that he is leaving the company just three years after selling it to Facebook for $2 billion."
"BY TAYLOR LORENZ - 03/30/17 5:27 PM ET"
But sure, you don't cover Oculus and never have.
This appears to be a new global policy on YouTube, not directed at me specifically. Try saying anything negative about the 五毛, or even mentioning them at all. Your comment will last about 30 seconds and get deleted without warning or notice, CCP-censor style. To what end?
From
@anduriltech
’s
@PalmerLuckey
:
What is the
#1
job most kids want today?
“It’s social media influencer, next is professional gamer, next is YouTuber… the problem is, you can’t tell kids to follow their dreams when their dreams suck.”
What was the
#1
dream for kids in 1971?…
"This might be a game, but it is not something you play."
To commemorate the Sword Art Online Incident of November 6th 2022, I made the OQPNVG, the first virtual reality device capable of killing the user - if you die in the game, you die in real life.
I normally ignore things like this, but Bosworth is the head of VR at Meta. He took over everything I made prior to being fired.
For him to now claim that he was a public defender of mine is beyond crazy. The tree remembers what the axe forgets.
@boztank
@Anticleric
@ID_AA_Carmack
@hmltn
Great story to tell now that I have dragged myself back to relevance, but you aren't credible.
You retweeted posts claiming I donated to white supremacists, and a post saying that anyone who supports Trump because they don't like Hillary Clinton is a shitty human being.
You…
@boztank
@Anticleric
@ID_AA_Carmack
@hmltn
Great story to tell now that I have dragged myself back to relevance, but you aren't credible.
You retweeted posts claiming I donated to white supremacists, and a post saying that anyone who supports Trump because they don't like Hillary Clinton is a shitty human being.
You…
Anduril is launching two new products on Friday evening. One of them is a radical new category of weapon that is totally unlike anything that has come before it, the other has dozens of applications outside defense.
Please, everyone, send me your energy!
If the truth actually backs up what you say about me and why I was fired, let's make everything public and let people judge for themselves. You are the CTO of Meta, a trillion dollar corporation. This is fully within your power, not some peon decision.
Just say the word.
@PalmerLuckey
@Anticleric
@ID_AA_Carmack
@hmltn
You better than I know the limits on what can be said here, as I understand it. I think there is some jeopardy there. To that end you are right in your critique that I am working with secondhand information.
I can now confirm Anduril as one of five vendors for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), the Air Force's flagship autonomous aircraft program.
As the only non-traditional company selected, we commend Secretary Kendall and the USAF for their commitment to new technology.
No hyperbole can express what a massive story this should be. Not just that the New York Times currently employs reporters who praise Hitler (bad) and the Holocaust specifically (even worse), but their subsequent defense of his reporting as "important and impartial work".
The
@nytimes
has just rehired a NAZI
Let that sink in.
Soliman Hijjy praises Hitler, and the NYT rehired him.
We all saw how the NYT immediately parroted Hamas’ lies regarding the al-Ahli hospital (which Hijjy contributed to) and still refuses to retract these fabrications.…
Undersea nations, floating cities, orbital colonies, Mars and Moon bases. Concepts ridiculed as impractical or pointless by people who claim to celebrate all cultures yet fail to understand why man settled remote volcanic islands, frozen tundras, and the wild west.
"The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI."
This is crazy. Imagine being fired from your own company by people who have ZERO skin in the game!
I recently spent two weeks in federal court successfully defending myself from someone who tried to turn my willingness to help out a fellow (pre-Oculus) VR forum member into a billion-dollar payday. You don't know this because nobody is reporting on the unanimous jury verdict.
At some point, someone must've realized that they shouldn't have just made things up without any evidence. These hoity-toity papers love to crow about truth and justice when they correct tiny things like misspellings, but major wrongdoing is regularly papered over without fuss.
America needs to turn this around as quickly as possible. I am trying to do my small part at Anduril, but graphs like this are by far the most important backdrop for conversations about slowing down automation.
China doesn't care, they want to win.
The leaders of Hamas are literally billionaires. They aren't ragtag community organizers, they are a well-funded and highly organized terrorist organization intent on extermination.
I wish we lived in a world with more billionaires fighting terrorism than supporting it.
Important context
*Oppression is THE industry in Gaza*
There’s a ruling elite that lives like royalty
The head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, is worth ~$4B
Their children live like princes and princesses
This would fall apart without the narrative mirage
The success of Anduril can be attributed to one thing and one thing only: The early-2017 creation of a dedicated room exclusively for playing Super Smash Bros on a CRT television.
VICE is shutting down games media division, Waypoint, and laying off the entire staff.
I wish I could be magnanimous, but no, good riddance. Those assholes spread nasty lies about me for years in official and non-official capacities. "Fuck Capitalism and Go Home" has been…
The Nikola fraud trial has been interesting, but it was this particular claim from a few years ago had me and all my buddies rolling:
"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer. That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it…
People accusing me of hating journalists or not understanding how their job works: I studied journalism in college for three years before I dropped out to start Oculus. I was the Online Editor of the Daily49er, our school paper. I don't hate journalism, I hate bad journalism.
Taylor responded, asking what story I am talking about and claiming to have never covered Oculus. I would have thought giving a specific date, topic, and excerpt was enough, apparently not.
"Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey has announced that he is leaving the company just three years after selling it to Facebook for $2 billion."
"BY TAYLOR LORENZ - 03/30/17 5:27 PM ET"
But sure, you don't cover Oculus and never have.
Stanford's rise from regional university to prestige powerhouse was driven by WWII-era Department of Defense contracts. Today, defense technology is one of the few business areas seeing explosive growth.
Despite this,
@StanfordGSB
just rejected the formation of a Defense…
Obesity is deadlier than smoking. Why not stigmatize and regulate it to the same degree?
(As an obeast myself, I am personally pro-stigmatization and anti-regulation)
Anduril founder
@PalmerLuckey
on why the US should ban TikTok and how to do so:
“You should not make this a culture war issue… Strictly on a trade basis, we should not allow [China] to sell this thing to us if we can’t sell the same thing to them.”
This is “the law of…
Imagine if most of our DoD communication and coordination during the Cold War was via adversary-built Russian computers designed and manufactured under Soviet law with Kremlin supervision. Too unbelievable for even the most cynical satire, right?
Now consider Lenovo.
The Apple Vision Pro uses cutting edge technology to show a passthrough view of your eyes, a feature they call EyeSight. You can accomplish 50% of the realism for 0.1% of the cost using this vinyl sticker:
I regret not doing more to support and defend
@PalmerLuckey
at Facebook. We were in different states and divisions, and I was largely out of the political loop, but when I became aware of the situation I should have made a clear and open statement of opposition to the witch hunt.…
published a story claiming I hid political contributions using shell companies and refused to comment. This was also false - it was a single donation from a regular company, and they didn't reach out to me until 5:54 AM, seven minutes before print. When
How far might we be if supposedly learned elites didn't use the power of words to attack the power of technologist-driven technology? It isn't without cause - there is always some ideological pet project they would rather the actually-competent tackle.
The below example is…
The New York Times, 1903: "Man won't fly for a million years – to build a flying machine would require the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanics for 1-10 million years."
The New York Times, 1903: "Man won't fly for a million years – to build a flying machine would require the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanics for 1-10 million years."
Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today.
Let us first say thank you to all the incredible people who we have worked with at OpenAI, our customers, our investors, and all of those who have been reaching out.
We too are still trying to figure out exactly…
We just announced Altius 700M, the largest and most advanced loitering munition. It slings Hellfire-category warheads from air, land, or sea ten times farther than the competition, and can survey the battlefield for well over an hour before devastating your toughest targets.
ALTIUS-700M expands Anduril's loitering munition offerings with a larger, penetrating warhead to kill armored targets and infrastructure. ALTIUS-700M is the most lethal tactical loitering munition available today.
Learn more about our first live fire test:…
I publicly called them out for this, they said the note regarding comment was technically true, and that they would only edit the story if I provided WaPo with detailed financials proving my helicopter business isn't a shell corp. Then they deleted everything with no disclosure.
Remember the one good scene from the Battleship movie? The one where they raid a retirement home for WWII veterans who know how to operate the all-analog museum battleship against the EMP-equipped aliens?
lol. So you expect high school grads to know what they want to be the day the graduate ? To pick a trade or certificate when they are 18 and live with it ?
Or maybe find a school they can afford, Community College or local university and learn new things that might inspire…
Anduril has prohibited TikTok/ByteDance from all devices used to access Anduril systems, including personal devices.
Two reasons:
1) The No TikTok on Government Devices Act requires this of defense contractors. It should have gone further.
2) TikTok is nation-state warfare.
How can the Writers Strike possibly go their way, even in theory? No sane studio could possibly agree to permanently keep AI out of their writing and editing process, or any other part of production. It would be signing their own death warrant.
I am so honored to be added to the "Big Tech" alert system. I would like to thank my wife and the many people at Oculus and Anduril who have helped me get to this point. I will treasure this moment always.
I wonder what the world would look like if every man was expected (perhaps even required) to set a world record. To prove themselves or something of their creation the best at something as a baseline for respect and recognition as a man.
I wish someone would steal my private prison reform business plan. It was my
#2
choice post-Oculus, but defense/Anduril was so obviously important and time-sensitive.
In short, build a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison.
Board-run OpenAI is NGMI.
“As he gazed at it suddenly Sam understood, almost with a shock, that this stronghold had been built not to keep enemies out of Mordor, but to keep them in.”
@heikki_bear
@passthebeano
I started Oculus VR when I was 19 years old, working a minimum wage job and living in a camper trailer. The tech to make synthetic long-chain hydrocarbons is very well understood and proven.
Dunking on founders for being young and not traditionally-educated is lame.
Retconning a franchise that revolved around stopping the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in order to appease the Communist Party of China is bad. Doing so by stripping out any reference to our allies in Japan and Taiwan is so much worse.
There’s a new Top Gun movie coming out. And Maverick is wearing the same leather jacket - only this time it’s Communist Party of China-approved, so the Japanese and Taiwanese flag patches are gone (screenshot on right is from the new trailer)...
For the people who think this is in poor taste, sorry, no sympathy. The lies these people told are part of why I had my entire company and identity ripped away from me. They went for my scalp, kicked me while I was down, celebrated my fall and derided my return. Screw 'em.
Peter Bright (
@DrPizza
) is one of several ArsTechnica/Condé Nast journalists who have spread outrageous lies about me for years. Technology Editor since 2014.
He was arrested in an FBI child sex predator sting two weeks ago. No bail, "risk of danger".
@elonmusk
The main thing holding us back is constraints imposed by the pre-existing commercial engine used in this particular aircraft. Keeps costs low and maintainability high, the right choice for this bird.
Supersonic is on the roadmap for one of our unannounced vehicles, though!
Sure, we could put early space explorers and moon colonists through years of training that adapts them to living in small spaces away from greater society.
Or we could just send basement-dwellers.
Anduril is launching two new products on Friday evening. One of them is a radical new category of weapon that is totally unlike anything that has come before it, the other has dozens of applications outside defense.
Please, everyone, send me your energy!
They said it couldn't happen, that it was impossible. They pretended their word meant something, as if Chinese law doesn't require them to lie about backdoors.
Not following through with a TikTok ban was a huge mistake on the part of USG.
Plagarism detection is/has been hard. Decades-old examples coming to light just as the perpetrators come under scrutiny reflects that.
AI trained on the right data could instantly expose every example of blatant plagarism in academia. Fire them all.
Laughing my ass off at this Hacker News comment from an Anduril competitor who says our footage of Ghost flying in rain and heavy water spray is "impressively disguised Hollywood grade CG".
No wonder they didn't win the contract. Anduril has a no-renders policy, BTW.
A single operator can launch multiple Roadrunners at once to autonomously navigate to threats, ensuring high probability of defeat and allowing operators to address multiple threats at once.
"These are leaders of multi hundred billion multitrillion dollar companies so bound by their business interests that they can't say basic things like “genocide is bad; Concentration camps shouldn't exist” because it would so severely impact their business. What a testament to the…
"Israel has my [and our] unqualified support,” said Anduril’s Founder,
@PalmerLuckey
speaking on stage yesterday at the
@WSJLive
's Tech Live Conference.
"What's happening in Israel is just another instance of the same type of evil that's been going on for a very long time. And…