Computers are empowering and fun! Writing software that runs above the Karman line at @K2SpaceCo. Formerly and forever cofounder of the @recursecenter (YC S10).
Joined October 2007
- Tweets 4,500
- Following 218
- Followers 1,683
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155 Photos and videos
Apr 28
This article rightly puts Mariah Carey on a list of the greatest living songwriters, but fails to mention All I Want for Christmas Is You. That song alone puts her in the songwriter pantheon.
nytimes.com/interactive/2026…
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Apr 28
I would be totally unsurprised if All I want for Christmas is You is still a staple 100 years from now.
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As of last Monday, my code is in space.
And two days ago, it (yes, some of my code!) fired the largest, highest powered Hall-effect thruster ever flown.
So that's pretty cool :)
Apr 8
I'm very proud to share that the team @K2SpaceCo has achieved Tier 2 Mission Success for Gravitas!
Over the past week, we've:
• Powered on our payloads
• Activated our high power propulsion system and fired the thruster
• Completed testing of our software system, including a software update
With all of the satellite bus systems demonstrated and checked out, we will be transitioning to sustaining operations for the rest of the mission.
This includes continuing our payload demonstrations while pushing the satellite bus systems to the limit to learn as much as possible for future missions.
(And yes, this photo is real. Our thruster firing on orbit.)
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David Albert retweeted
Jan 14
If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design
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20 Dec 2025
Cursed documentation:
> To set a variable from the makefile, write a line starting with the variable name followed by one of the assignment operators ‘=’, ‘:=’, ‘::=’, or ‘:::=’.
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2 Oct 2025
For people who fly spaceships (on the ground), the human interface is mostly charts and graphs.
This spring, when we got the first graphs set up for our first satellite, two different colleagues, who've both built spaceships before, got choked up and teary-eyed.
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2 Oct 2025
I still keep our (private) factory livestream in the background though. The satellite is 3,000 miles away, and I want to feel connected.
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26 Sep 2025
Tim discovers the joys of text selection.
(I do actually find this stuff joyful)
26 Sep 2025
Man, text selection is hard. The difference between "working" and "oh that's nice" is massive. I just shipped a reworking of the @AmpCode text selection engine (along with much improved markdown rendering). A couple implementation details in the replies.
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26 Sep 2025
Writing and text is technology, and it's very old. When I'm working on text-related things, I feel connected to ~6,000 years of human history.
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26 Sep 2025
If you're even more curious, I made some videos about layout and rendering last year: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL…
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1 Aug 2025
Years ago @Benjojo12 and I made @recursecenter's routers advertise 2602:fb65:1::/48 from our backup internet connection. If our primary link goes down, we withdraw the /48 and bgp.tools sends me a text.
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1 Aug 2025
I recognize the absurdity of using 1 septillion (1 million billion billion) IP addresses to let me know that the internet is down.
But when you have 309 million billion billion IP addresses, everything looks like an IP address.
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David Albert retweeted
1 Jul 2025
⭐️ We're hiring a Career Facilitator!
This is a full-time, onsite role in Brooklyn with meaningful work, good benefits, great colleagues, clear goals, and a healthy culture.
Please share with kind, extroverted, and curious people with experience in recruiting!
Link below⬇️
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28 Jun 2025
Programming with agents (especially multiple agents at the same time) is a lot like playing Progress Quest (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progre…). Just watching the files fill up with code.
Kinda scary – the more towards vibe coding I get the faster the bars go up. But exciting too.
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11 Jun 2025
Today I asked o3-mini (Copilot Chat) to port a 100 line shell script to Python.
Its first attempt was terrible. No amount of correcting fixed it.
I started a new chat and told it to describe the script, which it did perfectly. Then I asked it to do the port and it nailed it.
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11 Jun 2025
Last week I asked ChatGPT and Claude to try to find bugs, especially memory safety bugs, in a C program @AmpCode and I were working on – I’d been giving Amp minimal supervision.
They found a few, which was awesome. But I’m not confident they found them all.
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11 Jun 2025
Here’s the code for the curious: github.com/davidbalbert/mkto…
There are two assembly files that go with it. They likely have bugs too.
If you see any, please tell me! I want to learn what kinds of things these models miss.
We’ll make it a friendly game of human vs machine.
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