I’m Daniel. Matt and I are building Inanimate - devices and a platform to transform any home or workplace into an agentic environment. 

You signed up for Lab Notes. It’s a record of our work - what we are doing, who we are meeting, and what we are making - and what inspires us - from lamps and swimming pool documentaries to lighthouses and open source hardware projects - as we build and ship Inanimate.

Let’s dive in.

Here’s what’s been happening this week.

We are exploring five different product directions across five distinct categories, with a focus on enhancing human agency and productivity.

While productivity is about execution, agency is about direction. Our explorations are looking into how agents assist, in context, in the process of decision making, before then aiding or independently executing tasks or whole programmes of work.

We are cranking through explorations. Opening the aperture to let in more ideas, more possibilities, and more light.

We have multiple prototype device types communicating with our platform.

This has pushed us past a complexity threshold. So we are working to stabilise the platform to handle a higher number of devices and device types.

We’re buying a lot of components, exploring fast-to-market devices, and starting to understand what it means for an agent to talk without speaking. 

Finally - thanks to David, a Lab Notes reader in Sweden, for this week’s header image!

Here’s what’s been influencing and inspiring me this week.

Cortical Labs, an Australian startup, makes biological computers, made up of 200,000 lab-grown human brain cells mounted on a chip.

Why build a computer like this? Energy efficiency.

This gave me an idea.

In the spirit of my favourite subreddit, r/theydidthemath, I thought I would answer the question: what’s better - metal or meat?

The human brain has 90B neurons and can handle up to 10¹⁶ operations per second or 1–10 petaflops equivalent. Very approximately, a comparative silicon computer with that level of compute, would be a system like Frontier - a 1.1 exaFLOP super computer, that cost $600M, and consumes 21-25MW!

That is enough energy to power up to 8,000 homes, fast charge 200 electric cars, or run 4 high-speed trains. Compare that to a human brain, which has the energy consumption of a phone charger or a lightbulb. Remarkable!

So while silicon transistors excel in raw computational power, the neurons in the human brain - our messy, beautiful wetware - are millions of times more energy efficient.

Meat beats metal.

Lot2046 was a subscription-based fashion brand created by Vadik Marmeladov. You pay $99 a month, and receive an item of clothing or self-care product in return. Sometimes it’s a t-shirt. Sometimes it’s a tattoo gun. It has a capitalist-nihilist functional aesthetic. There are rules that include “wear the uniform”. It’s some of the best world building out there. It’s mad fun.

Renders are floating around of a bespoke 1-of-1 personal AI computer.

It seems, after a hiatus, LOT2046 is back, as LOT Systems. Who knows where this leads. But entertainment is guaranteed.

There is a lot of science happening on the Artemis II mission. There are also inspiring images and touching human stories coming back too.

Like these wonderful pictures taken by the astronauts as they travelled around the moon.

But how did the images get back to earth? How are we communicating with the astronauts?

The NASA Deep Space Network - an “international array of giant radio communications antennas (with dish diameters of 34 and 70 meters) located at Goldstone (California); Madrid (Spain); and Canberra (Australia).”

It operates 24/7/365, and for the Artemis II mission, it handles all communication, command signals, and system telemetry on the Orion spacecraft.

You can download some great NASA Deep Space Network posters here. Ideal for a kids bedroom, or lets face it, your own lounge (like mine!)

Lab Notes is switching to a new cadence. New updates will be happening every two weeks from now on. 

Until then - look after yourselves!

Daniel