I also caught a dramatic look back from the little rodent…. I call it Last Thoughts

Every builder's first duty is philosophical: to decide what they should build for. AI is beginning to decide what ideas reach your mind—your next action, your next job, your next relationship. It will tempt you to outsource your thinking in ways you’ve never been tempted before. Left unchecked, this becomes autocomplete for life. 200 years ago, when mechanization was starting to transform the world, the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt warned of this very dynamic: To flourish as humans, we have to be self-directed. We are the architects of our own becoming. But if we offload our thinking—if we let AI automate what we once pursued with intention—is it still our life to live? To build AI that advances human flourishing, we need technologists who combine technical ability with moral vision. Silicon Valley once embodied this: Jobs and Wozniak asked what kind of creative life personal computers should enable; ARPANET's pioneers envisioned what kind of connected society networks should foster. But today, we now see three dominant archetypes: 1. The puzzle-absorbed: Solving technical challenges without reflecting on broader ends 2. The reductionists: Collapsing morality into math 3. The dismissers: Waving off philosophy as irrelevant to progress All three abdicate the fundamental question: What should we build for? This is where philosophy is essential. Because the job of a builder isn’t just to ship. It’s to shape a shared world. We need a new kind of technologist—one who builds with human flourishing in mind. Who resists centralized control. Who strengthens autonomy instead of mining attention. We call them Philosopher-Builders. @cosmos_inst exists to train and support them—people who translate deep thinking into systems, institutions, and infrastructure that serve human ends. If you believe the future of AI should expand human freedom and lift human potential, read the full essay.

e-Government Leadership 🏛 With @KristenMichalPM, Prime Minister of Estonia at his office overlooking Tallinn. We discussed their x-road digital government platform built in Estonia and adopted by 25 other countries. · Digital signatures save Estonia 2% of GDP each year (!) · After 20 years of digital voting with no fraud, the majority of Estonians prefer it to paper. · Finance: tax filing averages 3 minutes (!) 99.6% of all banking transactions are online. · 99% of health data is digitized. Digitized: prescriptions, ambulance services, patient portal for labs, clinics and hospitals, DNA sequence for 16% of citizens and growing. Healthcare administration consumes 20% of healthcare spend in the U.S and just 1.5% in Estonia and 5% for rest of EU. X-road even allows health care records to work across countries. · 100% of government services are online, including census, DMV, social services, parking meters, citizen ballot initiatives, fishing and hunting permits, same sex marriage licenses, reporting crime. · A developmental goal: a citizen should never have to enter any piece of data more than once as all data services should be federated and up to date. Estonia has been a leader in digital government services. Why? Coming out of Soviet era, former Prime Minister Ilves said it best: “you can’t bribe a computer.” More:

MareNostrum 5 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) BSC is the lead for DARE (Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe), a chip design effort with 38-partners, launched 4 months ago and aimed at Intel instead of NVIDIA. 306 PFLOPS here, and a GPU blade with glycol cooling.

Church of the Modern Mind ⛪️ Two quantum computers humming and an “AI Factory” under construction… inside a stone church… with Gregorian chants playing softly overhead. Visiting the Barcelona Supercomputing Center today.

Energy drives the wealth of nations. China is adding new energy at a pace 20x the U.S. The last 1 GW U.S. nuclear plant took 11 years and $35B to build. China adds 1 GW every 8 hours.

AGI Highlander 🤖 Tonight Grok 4 breaks away from the pack on the ARC-AGI-2 leaderboard — an independent third-party assessment. • @ElonMusk: on academic tests, @Grok 4 is better than almost all PhDs in all fields • Over 2x better than the best from OpenAI, and improving fast.

All systems go! 🛰️ The first GPS satellite in Low Earth Orbit is now operational. It works with existing GPS infrastructure, but more precise and 150x more powerful, even working indoors.

The Estonian song & dance festivals 🎶 32,000 choral singers in unison, who practiced for a year in advance. It began in 1896 and happens every five years. It preserves a culture and helped spark the dissolution of the Soviet Union:

🟢 A Greenlight to remove chemicals from our crops 🟢 Double-stranded RNA has just been shown to be a rifle-shot treatment for plant viruses — "one of the most stubborn and costly challenges in global food production. Just months after proving we can control one of the world’s most destructive weeds, we’ve now shown that our RNA platform can also target viral pathogens across multiple crops, including tomatoes, corn, and soybeans. Why does this matter? According to the USDA, plant viruses account for over 1 billion metric tons in annual crop losses (with economic losses exceeding $30 billion and a climate impact approaching 1 GTon of CO2e). They are notoriously hard to manage, with few effective, scalable tools available. GreenLight has demonstrated effective control of most classes of pests and diseases that affect crops, including insects, acarids, destructive fungi and weeds, and now, plant viruses." — from And all this without chemical residues or any interaction with humans, bees or ladybugs. Company: