It's such a wild tale. What a wonder-land setup; this amazing research firm that so cyclically pulls in interesting projects and uses that to pull in interestin

It's such a wild tale. What a wonder-land setup; this amazing research firm that so cyclically pulls in interesting projects and uses that to pull in interesting people which helps it get more interesting projects. What a whole different world that feels like! > Not assigning this systems engineering-style contract to an academic department makes sense. Most academic departments are just not staffed and structured in a way to make projects like this feasible. But it’s unclear how an outfit like Raytheon would have done working through problems like the one described above. Would they have been able to solve them? If so, how quickly? What a set of ideas to obsess over (at least to me)! The initial arpanet contract was for equivalent of $8m. Big players were mostly no-bidding it. I wish tech had more people asking for outlandish bat shit wild stuff, stuff we don't even know if we can do. But just as much, I guess what's equally crazy is that this was kind of just one ask: it happened to be an extremely good ask, opened up so many further frontiers for exploration. We can come up with absurd abstract problems & challenges, but which problems are abstract enough to be get new inquiries after? What expands thought-spaces as we work it?