Christian Toivola retweeted
A San Francisco startup says it just turned mercury into real gold, and their own math says gold is one of the cheapest things their machine can make. Aim it at a different metal and it makes a cancer drug ingredient worth tens of billions of dollars a gram.
Here's how it works. When you fuse two kinds of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, every single reaction kicks out a neutron moving at 14.1 MeV, which is absurdly fast. Fire one into mercury-198 and it knocks another neutron loose on the way through, so two come out and you're left with mercury-197. Give that a few days and it decays into gold-197, the only stable kind of gold there is. The whole trick needs neutrons above about 6 MeV, and regular nuclear reactors barely make those, while fusion makes one every time it fires.
Now swap the mercury for radium-226. Same reaction, one neutron in and two out, and you end up with radium-225, which decays into actinium-225. Novartis is building its next prostate cancer drug around actinium-225, and it's so scarce it sells by the millicurie, roughly $1,200 to $2,500 apiece. Price it by the gram and you're into the tens of billions of dollars, for a material so radioactive nobody could safely hold a gram of it anyway.
Marathon's team actually put a dollar value on a single fusion neutron in a paper this year. Use it to make electricity and it's worth about $3 × 10⁻²⁰. Gold comes in at $2.6 × 10⁻²⁰, basically a wash. Molybdenum-99, which goes into about 80% of nuclear medicine scans, is worth $2.6 × 10⁻¹⁷ a neutron. Actinium-225 is worth about $10⁻¹⁰, around 3 billion times what the electricity's worth.
That's why fusion people should care. Every fusion company you've heard of is chasing electricity, and selling electricity only pays once the plasma puts out something like 10 to 22 times the energy you pump in to heat it. The best result so far, at JET in England, was about a third. Add gold on the side and Marathon's math says you break even around 3x. For molybdenum-99, the number is 0.001x.
So a machine that gives back one-thousandth of the energy you feed it can still make money, as long as the neutrons hit the right metal.
By their numbers, a 3 megawatt machine running way below breakeven could cover the whole world's supply of molybdenum-99, which today comes from splitting uranium in a handful of research reactors. Today's experimental fusion machines already beat the gain that job needs.
Their second post basically says this out loud. Marathon now describes itself as an isotope company for radiopharma. Their chart shows roughly 390 targeted radiotherapy trials. Pluvicto, the prostate cancer drug Novartis launched at $42,500 a dose, did $1.9 billion in sales last year.
Gold still matters to them, just later. It's about a $700 billion a year market, and Marathon's paper figures it could soak up around 2 terawatts of fusion capacity, which is roughly the scale where fusion actually moves the grid. So the plan is to sell cancer isotopes out of small machines now and use gold to pay for the giant ones, years before electricity can pay for itself.
Here's how it works. When you fuse two kinds of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, every single reaction kicks out a neutron moving at 14.1 MeV, which is absurdly fast. Fire one into mercury-198 and it knocks another neutron loose on the way through, so two come out and you're left with mercury-197. Give that a few days and it decays into gold-197, the only stable kind of gold there is. The whole trick needs neutrons above about 6 MeV, and regular nuclear reactors barely make those, while fusion makes one every time it fires.
Now swap the mercury for radium-226. Same reaction, one neutron in and two out, and you end up with radium-225, which decays into actinium-225. Novartis is building its next prostate cancer drug around actinium-225, and it's so scarce it sells by the millicurie, roughly $1,200 to $2,500 apiece. Price it by the gram and you're into the tens of billions of dollars, for a material so radioactive nobody could safely hold a gram of it anyway.
Marathon's team actually put a dollar value on a single fusion neutron in a paper this year. Use it to make electricity and it's worth about $3 × 10⁻²⁰. Gold comes in at $2.6 × 10⁻²⁰, basically a wash. Molybdenum-99, which goes into about 80% of nuclear medicine scans, is worth $2.6 × 10⁻¹⁷ a neutron. Actinium-225 is worth about $10⁻¹⁰, around 3 billion times what the electricity's worth.
That's why fusion people should care. Every fusion company you've heard of is chasing electricity, and selling electricity only pays once the plasma puts out something like 10 to 22 times the energy you pump in to heat it. The best result so far, at JET in England, was about a third. Add gold on the side and Marathon's math says you break even around 3x. For molybdenum-99, the number is 0.001x.
So a machine that gives back one-thousandth of the energy you feed it can still make money, as long as the neutrons hit the right metal.
By their numbers, a 3 megawatt machine running way below breakeven could cover the whole world's supply of molybdenum-99, which today comes from splitting uranium in a handful of research reactors. Today's experimental fusion machines already beat the gain that job needs.
Their second post basically says this out loud. Marathon now describes itself as an isotope company for radiopharma. Their chart shows roughly 390 targeted radiotherapy trials. Pluvicto, the prostate cancer drug Novartis launched at $42,500 a dose, did $1.9 billion in sales last year.
Gold still matters to them, just later. It's about a $700 billion a year market, and Marathon's paper figures it could soak up around 2 terawatts of fusion capacity, which is roughly the scale where fusion actually moves the grid. So the plan is to sell cancer isotopes out of small machines now and use gold to pay for the giant ones, years before electricity can pay for itself.
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building Francisco to achieve record power density.
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Christian Toivola retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
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Christian Toivola retweeted
My Indian national neighbor is working with the HOA to BAN SMOKING MEATS.
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Christian Toivola retweeted
I lived in this delusion for many years. The sweet summer child of a high-trust, homogenous upbringing. Beautiful innocence, really. Wish I could have it back. But now I own a 9mm and a .45 instead.
Do people in Europe understand now why Americans “cling to their guns”?
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Christian Toivola retweeted
anthropic’s lead engineer btw.
Hi, I'm Felix. I'm an eng lead working on Claude. I love watching people take flight and do things they never thought possible.
We often describe that as "being more ambitious" when using AI, which is tricky advice to follow. I wrote a tutorial:
felixrieseberg.com/how-to-be-more…
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Christian Toivola retweeted
🚨 BREAKING 🚨
ATF Releases NFA guidance in response to the Texas NFA lawsuit:
"Effective October 9, 2026, ATF will no longer require individuals to seek ATF approval under the NFA before making or transferring short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, silencers, and “any ined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(e). ATF will also no longer require such items to be registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. These policies apply uniformly to anyone otherwise subject to these requirements, not just to the plaintiffs in the litigation."
ATF Releases NFA guidance in response to the Texas NFA lawsuit:
"Effective October 9, 2026, ATF will no longer require individuals to seek ATF approval under the NFA before making or transferring short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, silencers, and “any ined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(e). ATF will also no longer require such items to be registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. These policies apply uniformly to anyone otherwise subject to these requirements, not just to the plaintiffs in the litigation."
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Christian Toivola retweeted
Palmer Luckey reveals the startup he'd build today: oxytocin doping to end divorce
"I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling."
"We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids."
"And we can, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine."
"It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake, and it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply right now, and if you do that, maybe you won't die alone."
"It's pure biology. It's used for women who don't bond with their kids, and now for women who don't bond with their husbands. It's also used for kids with various neurological issues, some kids with autism who struggle with pair bonding."
"The cool thing is it's a self-reinforcing loop. We understand that very well. Unlike most drugs, it doesn't form a chemical dependency. It actually unburdens you from a chemical dependency."
"I would try to end the tragedy of divorce with oxytocin doping for marriage counseling."
"We understand mammal pair bonding pretty well. There's a lot of people who want to stay together. Most want to stay together should stay together, especially for their kids."
"And we can, if people think SSRIs are fine, which they're not, but if they were, then oxytocin doping to stay together is definitely fine."
"It's the mammal pair bonding chemical. There's things you can do to increase the uptake, and it's very well understood. Also, totally unregulated, which is great. Unregulated spaces are a lot easier to do. You can go buy a kilogram of oxytocin on Sigma Aldrich Chemical Supply right now, and if you do that, maybe you won't die alone."
"It's pure biology. It's used for women who don't bond with their kids, and now for women who don't bond with their husbands. It's also used for kids with various neurological issues, some kids with autism who struggle with pair bonding."
"The cool thing is it's a self-reinforcing loop. We understand that very well. Unlike most drugs, it doesn't form a chemical dependency. It actually unburdens you from a chemical dependency."
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"Three sources, and the order matters because each one says something the previous one cannot"
AI haiku like this makes my blood boil. @AnthropicAI - what in the world is this shit? Why can't a model like Opus write like a human being?
AI haiku like this makes my blood boil. @AnthropicAI - what in the world is this shit? Why can't a model like Opus write like a human being?
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Christian Toivola retweeted
My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You know what? Every person should hear it
Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do
Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do
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Christian Toivola retweeted
🇩🇪 Friedrich Merz, canciller alemán:
"Simplemente ya no somos lo suficientemente productivos. Todos pueden decir: 'Ya estoy haciendo mucho'.
Pero cuando regresen de China, señoras y señores, verán las cosas con más claridad.
Con el equilibrio entre trabajo y vida personal y una semana laboral de cuatro días, no podemos sostener la prosperidad a largo plazo en nuestro país. Simplemente tenemos que trabajar más duro." x.com/clashreport/st…
"Simplemente ya no somos lo suficientemente productivos. Todos pueden decir: 'Ya estoy haciendo mucho'.
Pero cuando regresen de China, señoras y señores, verán las cosas con más claridad.
Con el equilibrio entre trabajo y vida personal y una semana laboral de cuatro días, no podemos sostener la prosperidad a largo plazo en nuestro país. Simplemente tenemos que trabajar más duro." x.com/clashreport/st…
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Ah! Yes, I know! We need a Lenin-style politburo.
WOAH 🚨 Lead Anchor at CNN Jake Tapper comes out and admits THEY ALL KNEW Joe Biden wasn’t really President and calling the shots
He says there was an elite inner circle of advisors who would make the decisions and “steer the country.” He gives the names of the people in that tream media ALL KNEW Joe Biden wasn’t making decisions
“Tell me about the word choice, and then tell me about those people who were really calling the shots around the president.”
Jake Tapper “So the Politburo, not a term we came up with, it's a term from within the Biden administration, as the name would suggest is a tightly held group of senior advisors — these were the individuals that help steer the government.”
The mainstream media was in on the coverup. How are there no consequences for these people
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