Interested in many things
Croatia
Joined September 2009
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Goran Zrnc retweeted
Russian Kosmos 2612 and ICEYE-X36 (providing Ukraine military support) are now in perfect sync with each other. The Russian military satellite is intentionally stalking and tracking the Western radar satellite. Keeping a satellite "bumper-to-bumper" in this manner allows Russia to intercept or jam data transmissions, physically inspect Western technology, or quickly pivot to execute a kinetic or non-kinetic anti-satellite (ASAT) attack with very little warning or fuel expenditure.
Kosmos 2612 executed a series of highly precise, fuel-heavy maneuvers to force itself into a "coplanar" orbit—matching ICEYE-X36's exact altitude (~555 km), speed, and inclination (~97.8°). The ICEYE-X36 satellite is giving the Ukraine military support.
Goran Zrnc retweeted
Re: Europe’s plans to fast-track its own @Starlink / @SpaceX.
If it’s a question of ‘not relying’ on American technology, this should have been obvious a long time ago: not a month after a 40-storey-high rocket proves it can deploy fully functional satellites into space. It’s little late, chaps.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, investing $100 million of his own money in a venture widely regarded as a fool’s errand.
When he announced Starlink in 2015, estimating that he could build the constellation with ~$10bn in investment, leading figures in Europe’s aerospace establishment openly derided him, confident that the commercial viability of reusable rockets made no sense.
Today, Starlink has more than 11,000 satellites in orbit, accounting for roughly two-thirds of all active satellites, and more than 12 million subscribers as of June. Last year, its Connectivity business generated $11.4bn in revenue and $4.4bn in operating profit.
It took a decade.
Space is not only the next frontier for humanity, but access to it has become a fundamental axis of geopolitical power, as the war in Ukraine is demonstrating.
And that is precisely the point. If you don’t build capability, you don’t set the rules.
We are in the foothills of a new industrial age: one in which we will venture further into space, and in which AI will radically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
This new age of Intelligence and discovery is underpinned by an industrial base, and predicated on building complex hardware. It is also guided by human imagination and inquiry.
The advantages of having skin in this game compound over time. The longer you delay, the wider the gap becomes, and the harder it is to close.
If you don’t build the industrial and technological capabilities that underpin the next economic paradigm, you become a rule taker, not a rule maker.
Which is particularly ironic given the EU loves making rules.
All that said, I truly hope to see the European space initiative succeed. This would be great for Europe, great for competition, great for the Western alliance, and great as a driver of hope and innovation. 🚀
Goran Zrnc retweeted
Very excited to share the most important discovery of my career yet: your brain switches between a conscious and an unconscious mode ~15 times every second. Consciousness may depend not on where in the brain activity occurs but when.
Find out more below.
bit.ly/3WvA6di
1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness.
New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)
Goran Zrnc retweeted
Fascinating.
"This is not a cryptographic break, new attack, or weakness in the ECDSA curves. In fact, this makes us more confident the curves were chosen without any backdoors or intentional weaknesses. For many years, people have been suspicious of the origins of the NIST curve parameters. They were presented to NIST without any mention of how they were chosen, leaving people wondering if they may have been chosen to have deliberate backdoors in them. These findings make that much less plausible. The seeds were generated in a very simple way: a common pseudorandom number generator initialized from the clock, which anyone can now reproduce"
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
Goran Zrnc retweeted
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Goran Zrnc retweeted
The European mind cannot comprehend this.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
many europeans minds can comprehend this
rac.co.uk/drive/advice/r…
Goran Zrnc retweeted
Top mathematician: "The shock is immense. I am paralyzed."
"Not a single one of the major open problems of my career was left untouched by the announcement."
"I expected to see a few of them in the list. But not all of them. Not all at once. Not with such nonchalance."
"I expected that one day we would be surpassed. But yesterday's announcement hit with a force I had not anticipated."
@AndrewCurran_: "Please resist the urge to mock the mathematicians struggling through this moment. Whatever your field, your expertise, your passion, you too shall one day experience what they are going through. And when you remember your words, you will feel remorse."
"OpenAI's model solved most of the math problems from a single prompt.
It did not even exist before the end of August.
Each result used 3 hours of thinking.
It was given 4000 problems. How many more have been solved in the last 3 days?"
WHY OPENAI EMPLOYEES ARE SO WORRIED:
"I don't think Pacing the Frontier was just about Hugging Face or hacking. The employees have seen how close we are to closing the loop [recursive self-improvement)], and as the hour draws near, their resolve begins to quaver.
All that was needed to start the event was the ability for models to think of novel ways to improve themselves. That was the last piece.”
These same kinds of alien solutions are now being applied to model improvements internally. That's what all this recent consternation is really about. And they see what is about to happen."
"We are in the takeoff."
Goran Zrnc retweeted
Dutch know-how may have just tilted the global balance of power. Register for free to get the full picture economist.com/china/2026/07/…
Goran Zrnc retweeted
There may not have been a leak at Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute. But the world can be forgiven for its panicked interest economist.com/europe/2026/10…
Goran Zrnc retweeted
Apple has sold well over 100 million Macs over the past several years.
Apple is betting that almost none of those owners ever figure out why their $1,500-plus MacBook somehow starts feeling noticeably sluggish within just a year or two of ownership.
I spent an evening talking with a technician who works at an authorized Apple repair shop, someone who's personally handled thousands of "my Mac suddenly got slow" appointments over the years customers absolutely convinced that their expensive, well-cared-for laptop was somehow already failing on them.
What he told me should genuinely make you go check your settings tonight, before you book an unnecessary battery replacement appointment or start browsing the newest MacBook lineup online:
"The overwhelming majority of 'my Mac is slow now' appointments I ever took had nothing whatsoever to do with actual age or failing hardware. It was the exact same small handful of settings, quietly running in the background day after day, on basically every single machine that came through our doors didn't matter if it was 8 months old or 4 years old, the pattern was identical."
Here's everything he walked me through, setting by setting, and exactly how to fix each one yourself 🧵
Goran Zrnc retweeted
Once you start visualizing your SQL schemas like this, there’s no going back.
sqltoerdiagram.com/
Goran Zrnc retweeted
Our understanding of consciousness could be fundamentally wrong.
scientificamerican.com/artic…
Goran Zrnc retweeted
I asked Claude Opus 5.5 to explain how a rocket engine works by building an interactive Raptor 3 you can take apart in your browser.
Cut it open, follow the oxygen and the methane through both turbopumps, then throttle it and watch the shock diamonds move.
airsup.ai/rocket-engine
Goran Zrnc retweeted
Hardly anyone on Earth understands the magnitude of this. It's actually happening right now. Crazy that we get to witness it close up.
🤖 Made with AI
Goran Zrnc retweeted
In its first four seasons, “Fauda” made an effort to be fair. The Palestinian characters, like the Israelis, had griefs and grievances, families and team frictions. The fifth season is different economist.com/culture/2026/0…
Goran Zrnc retweeted
This is Dieter Schwarz - the owner of Lidl, the richest man in Germany, one of the richest people in the world.
Only two known photos exist of him, zero video footage, and he's never given an interview.
He is an extremely dedicated philanthropist, having put billions mostly into educational causes. He lives in Heilbronn, in Germany, and has transformed the area into an educational/tech/research hub, as well as funding educational activities at Oxford, HEC Paris, Stanford and many others.
Technically, he doesn't actually own Lidl any more, as he set up 'The Dieter Schwarz Foundation' - a charity - which owns the Schwarz Group, the parent company of Lidl. In other words, Lidl is owned by a charity that ploughs lots of money into educational causes - and yet Lidl never use any of that in advertising.
One of the most successful, interesting people on earth, and nobody even knows what he looks like any more.
