@snowmaker
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12 years ago I founded Boom, as a software engineer doing hardware for the first time. I’m probably the least handy founder in hard tech. My 12 y/o son does my soldering and 3D printing for home projects, and I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome the whole way through. What business does a software guy have building supersonic jets and turbines?View quoted post on X
More than a decade in, the most insane realization is that software is the key to reaccelerating hardware engineering. But in a way that I don’t think is widely understood or implemented, even in the burgeoning hard tech community.
Most hardware engineering is actually software engineering in disguise. It’s spreadsheet “code,” engineering calculations done as one-offs. Eg wing structural loads in, spar sizing design out. Thermal loads in, air conditioning system sizing out.
Everything is a calculation, and calculation is software. But these calculations are done essentially by hand, as if we are doing arithmetic but have not yet discovered algebra.
Hardware engineers have baby software, built in spreadsheets, the kind of crappy software I wrote as a kid before I understood architecture, unit tests, APIs, version control, and everything else that makes modern software good.
Our airplanes and engines are built with the software sophistication of a script kiddie.
So what we tell our engineers: don’t design the hardware, design the *algorithm* for designing the hardware. And take the algorithm seriously—as an algorithm and as a first-class engineered software system.
Never design a piece of hardware, such that you couldn’t redesign it tomorrow with a different set of assumptions.
This all sounds obvious, yet our experience at Boom is that it changes everything.
Ten years ago we couldn’t afford to build much software. We had a small team—and there were few software engineers with the curiosity, brilliance, and vision required to learn hardware engineering.
But now AI changes the equation. Now everyone can code. The software engineers define the architecture. The hardware people bring the physics and engineering know-how.
We have a turbomachinery design tool that lets one engineer do in realtime what previously took 100 engineers six months. Another tool auto-generates 65% of entire aircraft structure. I’m sure we’ll figure out the other 35% too. Eventually these should not be multiple tools, but one integrated physics model of a complete vehicle, airframe and powertrain.
The results speak for themselves. A boomless supersonic airplane built by 50. A full scale supersonic turbine made by 150. And with this approach, I don’t think we’ll need that many more people to build and certify a supersonic airliner.
You don’t need a big team to build big things—not when everyone on the team is a software engineer.
We’re a 2-person lab researching more efficient architectures for generative image and video.
linum.ai/field-notes/pj…
Last month, we published Pyramid-JiT, a pixel-space architecture that converged 11x faster than its latent-diffusion counterpart.
Today, we're releasing a 2B Pyramid-JiT text-to-image model as a milestone towards more affordable video models.
Trained from scratch for only ~$20K.
See blog for details & weights (Apache 2.0).View quoted post on X
In four days of the Iran war, the US and its allies fired more Tomahawks than the US builds in four years. One bottleneck is energetics production.
So we built a 100% CONUS energetics supply chain with our own capital. Our modular solution makes HMX and other advanced energetics, the explosives in nearly every US missile and munition.
The US builds about 85 Tomahawks a year. The Army's only plant making the explosives inside them is 84 years old, and its $1B upgrade has slipped from 2025 to 2029 or later. That plant is Holston, in Tennessee. It makes about 3% of what it made in 1944, and buyers wait one to two years for its explosives.
Holston makes its chemicals and its explosives on one site, so every expansion means building both plants there. A plant like that takes billions of dollars and about a decade to build. Permitting this in the US is a nightmare, because you’re taking on the risk of a chemical plant and an explosives plant at once. What could possibly go wrong.
We separated the two. Terraforge 1, Solugen’s Houston plant, is tied into Houston's petrochemical infrastructure and makes inert precursors: white powders about as flammable as sugar. They can ship via FedEx or UPS, and sit in an ordinary warehouse. Discreet.
Odin Energetics, our joint venture with Kraken Kinetics, turns them into explosives in shipping container reactors called Nitroforges. It took us six months to build the first one, and they can be set up where the weapons are needed. On-demand energetics. That means no stockpiles or concentrated first-strike targets. Kraken builds the warheads, so every step from chemical to warhead happens in the US. Together we stood up the entire chain from raw chemical to finished warhead.
Odin can already make close to a tenth of what Holston makes in a year. To make more, we’re building several factories at the same time.
wsj.com/politics/natio…View quoted post on X
Introducing Kino: make videos end-to-end with Claude Code and Codex.
Drop your footage, get highlights, edit together, send links for feedback, and let your agents cook.
AI is becoming a great creative partner. Kino is a new home for your team and agents to collaborate.View quoted post on X
