Weekly Dose of Optimism #141
Building Civilizations, Nuclear Moon, Physical Intelligence, Argentina, Creatine
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 141st Weekly Dose of Optimism. This week was all about how to build the future: inspirations for future-building, how to power a future on the moon, building robots to do our future housework, and an Argentinian economic roadmap that I imagine many countries will follow in the future. Put some shades on while you read this one because the future is bright.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Building Civilizations Double-Header
You are the heir to something greater than Empire by Noah Smith
Golden Age by Mike Solana
Noah Smith and Mike Solana were singing similar tunes in their own key this week. Noah argues that civilizational greatness is not inherited but built through ambition, risk-taking, and actual effort. Solana gives us a vision for that effort.
Noah is as good as any writer in the world at making clear how good we have it today. He’s really, really good at telling us how shitty life used to be, how comparatively good life is today, and backing it all up with economic data. This specific essay was in response to an X post by former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong in which Wong basically says China will always continue to be great because it’s conscious of its 5000 years of history. Noah disagrees, critiquing the romanticization of ancestral greatness, and especially the idea that modern success is simply a return to ancient civilizational glory. Our ancestors’ legacy , Chinese or otherwise, is not one of riches, and greatness, and wisdom but rather toil, hardship, and relentlessness. We do not honor our ancestors by mythologizing a past that never actually existed, but by building a better future.
Solana just wants more Disney Worlds. Or rather, he wants a regulatory framework and cultural spirit that Walt Disney created and inspired in Florida’s orange groves. He wants Golden City. Solana argues that in order to progress, we need to build an inspiring future rather than protect the crumbling past.
Move forward. Build up. It’s what our ancestors would have wanted.
(2) China, Russia may build nuclear plant on moon to power lunar station
From Eduardo Baptista for Reuters
The inclusion of the nuclear power unit in a Chinese space official’s presentation at a conference for officials from the 17 countries and international organisations that make up the ILRS suggests Beijing supports the idea, although it has never formally announced it.
The power of writing, man. The very same day Noah told the US and China “The proper way to honor that legacy is to emulate it — to build more, to keep struggling upward in the present day,” one of the two listened.
At a presentation in Shanghai on Wednesday on the Chinese and Russian plan to develop the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), the Chief Engineer for its 2028 Chang’e-8 mission, Pei Zhaoyu, said that China is considering building a nuclear plant on the moon to power the base. This echoes a similar claim made by Russia last year.
"An important question for the ILRS is power supply, and in this Russia has a natural advantage, when it comes to nuclear power plants, especially sending them into space, it leads the world, it is ahead of the United States," Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar exploration program, told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference.
That sounds like a challenge to me. America should lead the world when it comes to “nuclear power plants, especially sending them to space.” Moon should be a state. And honestly, a nuclear reactor on the Moon is lunarpunk as hell. We can’t let them get that W.
Mr. President, cut it with the shenanigans. Call Elon into your office. Call up Radiant. Call up Antares. Keep the NRC the hell away from Luna. And for the love of God and country, send our Megawatts to Moon.
(3) π0.5: a VLA with Open-World Generalization
From Physical Intelligence
We have been developing robotic foundation models that can generalize to such messy environments, building on our vision-language-action (VLA) model π0. While both π0 and other recent VLAs are evaluated in environments that closely match training, we've developed a new model that we call π0.5 that exhibits meaningful generalization to entirely new environments. We believe that this represents a significant step forward toward truly generalizable physical intelligence.
If robots are going to take over the world (and by this I mean in a friendly, helpful way…), they’re going to need a generalizable physical intelligence.
The aptly named robotics startup Physical Intelligence made a big leap towards general-purpose home robots with the release of π0.5, a new foundation model that allows robots to generalize to entirely new environments, like cleaning kitchens or bedrooms they’ve never seen before. Simply put, these robots can do housework like a human.
Unlike past robots that only excel under very controlled settings, π0.5 learns from a mix of robot demonstrations, web data, and language instructions, enabling it to understand both how to do tasks and what those tasks mean. This “vision-language-action” model uses a unified system to plan high-level actions and execute low-level motor commands, mimicking human-style reasoning and flexibility. One of us. One of us. One of us.
Housecleaning AI Robots are certainly going to take some jobs in the coming decade. That’s a very, very good thing. If I have to never clean my house again, that is a very good thing. Our human spirit is much better spent elsewhere.
But getting there won’t be easy. Brian Potter wrote in Construction Physics that Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard.
h/t Alec Stapp on X and Astral Codex Ten
Argentina’s economy is not only under control, but thriving under Milei’s stewardship. Many of these numbers are a couple of weeks old at this point, but thanks to a share on ACT and a repost by Alec Stapp on X, the stories are starting to make the rounds again.
In Argentina, under Milei, inflation is down, poverty is down, and economic activity is up. Monthly inflation that peaked around 25% has hit a five year low and has been between 2% and 3% since October. Poverty is now lower than when Milei took office, following an initial spike in poverty rates over the initial course of the administrations “shock therapy” plan for the economy. And economic activity continues to grow: in February Argentina’s economy grew 5.7% YoY and it has been growing year-over-year for nearly 6 months.
Whatever Milei is doing down there, putting aside the memecoin shit he pulled (which was pretty discouraging for a Milei fan), seems to be working. I’ll take Milei’s Hail Mary economic plan over whatever the fuck it is we’re doing in the U.S. any day of the week.
Put more optimistically, Argentina is an existence proof that, executed well, trimming bloat and letting markets do their thing can actually work.
(5) Does creatine cause hair loss? A 12-week randomizedcontrolled trial
Lak et al in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition
This study was the first to directly assess hair follicle health following creatine supplementation, providing strong evidence against the claim that creatine contributes to hair loss.
Good news for any of the fellas that take creatine: it does not cause hair loss. That’s according to a new study that found 5g/day of creatine did not increase DHT nor directly cause hair loss.
The idea that creatine causes hair loss is quite pervasive and has likely deterred millions of people from creatine supplementation over the last 15 years. This idea dates back to a single, small-scale 2009 study of 16 rugby players that found creatine supplementation increased levels of DHT, a hormone linked to hair loss. That study had some design errors, was never replicated, and was woefully misinterpreted, but was effective in instilling fear in millions of potential creatine users.
This new study is not perfect (still relatively small and short compared to what you’d like to see in a study) but is much better designed (double-blind RCT) and more comprehensive (measures DHT, free T, DHT: Ratio and used high-res imaging to evaluate hair characteristics.) The results were pretty conclusive: No creatine-specific changes in DHT, total T, free T, or DHT:T ratios. Importantly, high-resolution trichogram imaging showed zero effect on hair count, density, growth phase ratios, or cumulative thickness.
Now should I definitively say up top that creatine does not cause hair loss? No, that’s not these types of studies work. It’s impossible to completely rule that out. But we can now say that there are two studies on creatine supplementation and hair loss. One study was smaller, shorter, and more poorly designed and showed a loose linkage to hair loss. The other study was larger, longer, and had better design and could not replicate that loose linkage and could not identify any changes in hair characteristics. More research is certainly needed here, but given what we now know from this research and the millions of creatine users that haven’t loss their hair when taking creatine, I feel pretty confident saying that creatine does not cause hair loss. If you’re already genetically pre-disposed to hair loss, perhaps creatine and hard exercise in general expedites the hair loss, but if that’s the case I would recommend taking proactive steps towards treating your hair situation vs. cutting out an otherwise very beneficial supplement or working out less hard.
Yes, I am a biased creatine gummy slinger but a I believe a world with more men taking creatine is a better world indeed.
BONUS: Apply for the Astera Residency
Packy again. If you want to do the kind of work that shows up in the Weekly Dose, I got something for you. My friend, the airship enthusiast Eli Dourado, recently joined Astera as Head of Strategic Investments. Yesterday, he sent me their residency and asked if I knew anyone great who wants to work on things like Mars terraforming, AIs that can interface with brains, and geoengineering… he’s come to the right place.
Punchline: $125-250k to do something so wild no one else will fund it.
I’ll share a paragraph of the description here…
Astera is opening a call for the Fall 2025 cohort of our major science residency program, a one-year, fully funded program centered on the creation of public goods. We plan to welcome 8-10 new residents, who will join the 6 from our Spring 2025 cohort in Emeryville, California, where we are building a hub for open science, data, and technology. We will provide residents a salary of $125,000-$250,000, commensurate with experience, to explore an important problem of their choosing, along with an additional budget for a team and other operational expenses, as necessary; a chance to pitch us and others in our network for longer-term, larger-scale support; medical benefits; and access to substantial compute and programmatic resources (see details below).
… but if you have a really big idea that isn’t a fit for other institutions, you should run to the Astera Residency website and check it out now.
And ping us when you have something for us to share in the Weekly Dose.
Have a great weekend y’all.
Thanks to HoneyBook for sponsoring. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Packy + Dan