The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System(schmidtsciences.org) |
The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System(schmidtsciences.org) |
Best of luck to them anyway.
Edit: it looks like the Argus array at least is a project out of Chapel Hill. Better info here: https://argus.unc.edu/specifications
Schmidt probably helping fund it.
Have you not been following modern satellite and telescope bus architectures? Both planet and spacex have been using this model to great effect over the last decade.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-13439603/eric-...
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-20/former-goo...
And one yacht should be enough, especially if it is like this:
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/eric-schmidt-and-his-wi...
Maybe not so surprising:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46512881 "65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform" (2026-01-06, 456 comments)
Through the systemic abuse and exploitation of countless individuals' privacy and autonomy. The context is everything.
A guy has woken up to the fact that he'll be remembered as a villian and is trying to whitewash his reputation.
The Bezos Earth Fund: https://www.bezosearthfund.org/
It’s not unlike if you had a blog post about a gardening project in your backyard. Perhaps interesting to gardeners, but approximately no one cares.
Low effort cynicism.
He’s sort of a lesser known figure to me.
Speak for yourself. I'm a non-pacifist, and I think "autonomous A.I. weapons" are a nightmare.
But you also have to keep in mind that China, Russia and Hamas will gladly develop them anyway. Until we've figured out the worldwide peace thing, we need to keep running the race, awful as it is.
AI weapons are specially horrific in the way they have potential put massive and specific lethal power under the total control of a small number of people, in a way (like all AI) that basically cuts most of humanity out of the future (or at the very least puts them under a boot where no escape is imaginable).
In some ways, they're even worse than nuclear weapons. A nuclear attack is an event, and if you survive there's some chance of escape. Station 100,000 fully automated drones around a city with orders to kill anything that moves, and the entire population will be dead in a couple months (anyone who tries to escape = dead, everyone else sees that and stays inside out of fear until they starve).
Manpower and attention limitations have been and important (and sometimes only) limit on the worst of humanity, and AI is poised to remove those limitations.
But even if it's true, I don't see why letting China and Russia etc be the only ones having these weapons is good?
Honestly, I think the tech is probably getting pretty close to what I described. You don't need AGI or anything like it. Just autonomous surveillance drones watching for movement, and attack drones that can autonomously navigate to the area and hit the target (the latter is just stringing together a lot of drone tech I've seen implemented, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drone...).
> But even if it's true, I don't see why letting China and Russia etc be the only ones having these weapons is good?
That doesn't mean the tech isn't scary (a bad thing) or that I want SV people like Schmidt developing it. There's something weirdly misanthropic and unhinged about many in SV.