Leo's Blog Discussion Mega-Thread

[zurew]

@Human Mint How much philosophy and spiritual work have you done before you discovered Leo's content?

[Human Mint]

19 minutes ago, zurew said:

@Human Mint How much philosophy and spiritual work have you done before you discovered Leo's content?

Probably one year.

 

[Davino]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

What were you publishing?

What science were you doing?

New Space, in a top research centre. There’s currently a big shift happening with nanosatellite Low Earth Orbit constellations. In the past, only space agencies like NASA or a few large organizations could afford to build and operate satellites, which were typically large, very expensive, and placed in high orbits to last for decades.

Now things are very different. Thanks to miniaturization and cheaper launch options, it’s possible to deploy small satellites for a few thousand euros each. This opens the door for much more flexible uses, from Earth observation to communications and scientific experiments. The trade-off is that these satellites are much simpler individually, so large-scale services (like global internet coverage) require hundreds or even thousands of them working together as a coordinated network.

This introduces a new engineering challenge: managing not just a single complex satellite, but an entire distributed ecosystem in orbit. Each satellite is already a layered system (hardware, software, onboard processing, and reconfigurable or programmable components) and when you multiply that by a large constellation, the complexity grows significantly.

My research focused on this problem. I developed a theoretical observability framework across all these layers; meaning a structured way to monitor and understand what is happening inside each layer of the satellite and across the whole constellation. The idea is to define how information should be collected at every level, how it can be communicated between heterogenous layers, and how system-wide behavior can be inferred efficiently from that data, given very short windows of earth communication.

After developing the theoretical model, I implemented and tested it in a real nanosatellite payload, and also used a virtualized environments to simulate large-scale network interactions. This allowed me to validate that the approach is technically feasible in realistic conditions.

I was the first to openly publish a solution to this problem. It is believed that companies such as SpaceX have developed similar capabilities internally, but because they provide a significant competitive advantage, those solutions are not publicly disclosed. The good thing of public research centres is that I got all the very expensive infrastructure needed to conduct my research and then the solution was freely published (after of course very well mentioning in my paper whose funds helped me to do so). This kind of work is particularly important as New Space companies continue to scale up the number of satellites in orbit and need more efficient ways to manage them.

After I finished this work I left the research centre, I was just there for the mental high challenge, now I'm working in technology strategy advisory, which is more lucrative and equally challenging.

 

PD: Really bad experience to write a paper and get it published. I particularly disliked by how autistically peaky the format and paper had to be written in, you make a wrong table format and a year long work doesn't get published. What most annoyed me was finishing all the work, writing the paper and then see how all the research bosses and higher peers sneakily signed the document as co-authors and you couldn't do shit about that. Of course some colleagues I wrote myself the name as they really contributed with their expertise, but the other 8 who just signed, lmao. It's me who has been nights without sleep trying to solve this problem, not you who just signed the paper; I thought to myself.

Edited 3 hours ago by Davino

[AtmanIsBrahman]

21 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

I have and I do criticize academic philosophy sharply. Most academic philosophers are science-brained. Their philosophy is just a thin cover for science.

Are philosophers who existed before science also science-brained then? Take Aristotle as an example. He existed before science (I guess you could argue he kind of invented it). The correct label for him is rationalist.

I think what you're really critiquing is rationalism, not science.

 

 

[Thought Art]

@AtmanIsBrahman https://www.instagram.com/p/DY7H5tWEhZL/?igsh=MWdvbmZlaHFsaTFwZw==