This is the first of a se­ries of ar­ti­cles in which you will learn about what may be one of the sil­li­est, most pre­ventable, and most costly mishaps of the 21st cen­tury, where Microsoft all but lost OpenAI, its largest cus­tomer, and the trust of the US gov­ern­ment.

I joined Azure Core on the dull Monday morn­ing of May 1st, 2023, as a se­nior mem­ber of the Overlake R&D team, the folks be­hind the Azure Boost of­fload card and net­work ac­cel­er­a­tor.

I was­n’t new to Azure, hav­ing run what is likely the longest-run­ning pro­duc­tion sub­scrip­tion of this cloud ser­vice, which launched in February 2010 as Windows Azure.

I was­n’t new to Microsoft ei­ther, hav­ing been part of the Windows team since 1/1/2013 and later helped mi­grate SharePoint Online to Azure, be­fore join­ing the Core OS team as a ker­nel en­gi­neer, where I no­tably helped im­prove the ker­nel and helped in­vent and de­liver the Container plat­form that sup­ports Docker, Azure Kubernetes, Azure Container Instances, Azure App Services, and Windows Sandbox, all ship­ping tech­nolo­gies that re­sulted in mul­ti­ple granted patents.

Furthermore, I con­tributed to brain­storm­ing the early Overlake cards in 2020-2021, draft­ing a pro­posal for a Host OS Accelerator Card com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­col and net­work stack, when all we had was a de­bug­ger’s se­r­ial con­nec­tion. I also served as a Core OS spe­cial­ist, help­ing Azure Core en­gi­neers di­ag­nose deep OS is­sues.

I re­joined in 2023 as an Azure ex­pert on day one, hav­ing con­tributed to the de­vel­op­ment of some of the tech­nolo­gies on which Azure re­lies and hav­ing used the plat­form for more than a decade, both out­side and in­side Microsoft at a global scale.

As a re­turn­ing em­ployee, I skipped the New Employee Orientation and had my Global Security in­vite for 12 noon to pick up my badge, but my fu­ture man­ager asked if I could come in ear­lier, as the team had their monthly plan­ning meet­ing that morn­ing.

I, of course, agreed and ar­rived a few min­utes be­fore 10 am at the en­trance of the Studio X build­ing, not far from The Commons on the West Campus in Redmond. A man showed up in the lobby and opened the door for me. I fol­lowed him to a meet­ing room through a labyrinth of cor­ri­dors.

The room was chock-full, with more peo­ple on a live con­fer­ence call. The dev man­ager, the leads, the ar­chi­tects, the prin­ci­pal and se­nior en­gi­neers shared the space with what ap­peared to be new hires and ju­nior per­son­nel.

The screen pro­jected a slide where I rec­og­nized a num­ber of fa­mil­iar acronyms, like COM, WMI, perf coun­ters, VHDX, NTFS, ETW, and a dozen oth­ers, mixed with new Azure-related ones, in an im­broglio of boxes linked by ar­rows.

I sat qui­etly at the back while a man was walk­ing the room through a big port­ing plan of their cur­rent stack to the Overlake ac­cel­er­a­tor. As I lis­tened, it was not im­me­di­ately clear what that se­ries of boxes with Windows user-mode and ker­nel com­po­nents had to do with that plan.

After a few min­utes, I risked a ques­tion: Are you plan­ning to port those Windows fea­tures to Overlake? The an­swer was yes, or at least they were look­ing into it. The dev man­ager showed some doubt, and the man replied that they could at least “ask a cou­ple of ju­nior devs to look into it.”

The room re­mained silent for an in­stant. I had seen the hard­ware specs for the SoC on the Overlake card in my pre­vi­ous tenure: the RAM ca­pac­ity and the power bud­get, which was just a tiny frac­tion of the TDP you can ex­pect from a reg­u­lar server CPU.

The hard­ware folks I had spo­ken with told me they could only spare 4KB of dual-ported mem­ory on the FPGA for my door­bell shared-mem­ory com­mu­ni­ca­tion pro­to­col.

Everything was nim­ble, ef­fi­cient, and power-savvy, and the team I had joined 10 min­utes ear­lier was se­ri­ously con­sid­er­ing port­ing half of Windows to that tiny, fan­less, Linux-running chip the size of a fin­ger­nail.

That felt like Elon talk­ing about col­o­niz­ing Mars: just nuke the poles then grow an at­mos­phere! Easier said than done, uh?

That en­tire 122-strong org was knee-deep in im­pos­si­ble ru­mi­na­tions in­volv­ing port­ing Windows to Linux to sup­port their ex­ist­ing VM man­age­ment agents.

The man was a Principal Group Engineering Manager over­see­ing a chunk of the soft­ware run­ning on each Azure node; his boss, a Partner Engineering Manager, was in the room with us, and they re­ally con­tem­plated port­ing Windows to Linux to sup­port their cur­rent soft­ware.

At first, I ques­tioned my un­der­stand­ing. Was that se­ri­ous? The rest of the talk left no doubt: the plan was out­lined, and the dev leads were tasked with con­tribut­ing peo­ple to the ef­fort. It was im­me­di­ately clear to me that this plan would never suc­ceed and that the org needed a lot of help.

That first hour in the new role left me with a mix of strange feel­ings, stu­pe­fac­tion, and in­credulity.

The stack was hit­ting its scal­ing lim­its on a 400 Watt Xeon at just a few dozen VMs per node, I later learned, a far cry from the 1,024 VMs limit I knew the hy­per­vi­sor was ca­pa­ble of, and was a noisy neigh­bor con­sum­ing so many re­sources that it was caus­ing jit­ter ob­serv­able from the cus­tomer VMs.

There is no di­men­sion in the uni­verse where this stack would fit on a tiny ARM SoC and scale up by many fac­tors. It was not go­ing to hap­pen.

I have seen a lot in my decades of in­dus­try (and Microsoft) ex­pe­ri­ence, but I had never seen an or­ga­ni­za­tion so far from re­al­ity. My day-one prob­lem was there­fore not to ramp up on new tech­nol­ogy, but rather to con­vince an en­tire org, up to my skip-skip-level, that they were on a death march.

Somewhere, I knew it was go­ing to be a fierce up­hill bat­tle. As you can imag­ine, it did­n’t go well, as you will later learn.

I spent the next few days read­ing more about the plans, study­ing the cur­rent sys­tems, and vis­it­ing old friends in Core OS, my alma mater. I was lost away from home in a bizarre ter­ri­tory where peo­ple made plans that did­n’t make sense with the aplomb of a drunk LLM.

I no­tably spent more than 90 min­utes chat­ting in per­son with the head of the Linux System Group, a solid scholar with a PhD from INRIA, who was among the folks who hired me on the ker­nel team years ear­lier.

His org is re­spon­si­ble for de­liv­er­ing Mariner Linux (now Azure Linux) and the trimmed-down dis­tro run­ning on the Overlake / Azure Boost card. He kindly an­swered all my ques­tions, and I learned that they had iden­ti­fied 173 agents (one hun­dred sev­enty-three) as can­di­dates for port­ing to Overlake.

I later re­searched this fur­ther and found that no one at Microsoft, not a sin­gle soul, could ar­tic­u­late why up to 173 agents were needed to man­age an Azure node, what they all did, how they in­ter­acted with one an­other, what their fea­ture set was, or even why they ex­isted in the first place.

Azure sells VMs, net­work­ing, and stor­age at the core. Add ob­serv­abil­ity and ser­vic­ing, and you should be good. Everything else, SQL, K8s, AI work­loads, and what­not all build on VMs with xPU, net­work­ing, and stor­age, and the heavy lift­ing to make the magic hap­pen is done by the good Core OS folks and the hy­per­vi­sor.

How the Azure folks came up with 173 agents will prob­a­bly re­main a mys­tery, but it takes a se­ri­ous amount of mis­un­der­stand­ing to get there, and this is also how dis­as­ters are built.

Now, fathom for a sec­ond that this pile of un­con­trolled “stuff” is or­ches­trat­ing the VMs run­ning Anthropic’s Claude, what’s left of OpenAI’s APIs on Azure, SharePoint Online, the gov­ern­ment clouds and other mis­sion-crit­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, and you’ll be close to un­der­stand­ing how a grain of sand in that frag­ile pileup can cause a global col­lapse, with se­ri­ous National Security im­pli­ca­tions as well as po­ten­tial busi­ness-end­ing con­se­quences for Microsoft.

We are still far from the va­por­ized tril­lion in mar­ket cap, my let­ters to the CEO, to the Microsoft Board of Directors, and to the Cloud + AI EVP and their to­tal si­lence, the quasi-loss of OpenAI, the breach of trust with the US gov­ern­ment as pub­licly stated by the Secretary of Defense, the wasted en­gi­neer­ing ef­forts, the Rust man­date, my stint on the OpenAI bare-metal team in Azure Core, the es­cort ses­sions from China and else­where, and the de­layed fea­tures pub­licly im­plied as ship­ping since 2023, be­fore the work even be­gan.

If you’re run­ning pro­duc­tion work­loads on Azure or re­ly­ing on it for mis­sion-crit­i­cal sys­tems, this story mat­ters more than you think.

The free AI al­ready on your Mac. Every Mac with Apple Silicon has a built-in LLM. Apple locked it be­hind Siri. apfel sets it free - as a CLI tool, an OpenAI-compatible server, and a chat.

The AI is al­ready in­stalled on your Mac. Apple ships it with ma­cOS. apfel just gives you a way to talk to it - from your ter­mi­nal, from your code, from any­where.

No API keys. No sub­scrip­tions. No per-to­ken billing. It’s your hard­ware - use it.

Every to­ken gen­er­ated lo­cally on your Apple Silicon. Nothing leaves your ma­chine. Ever.

Context win­dow for in­put and out­put com­bined. Enough for most sin­gle-turn tasks and short chats.

The model un­der the hood

Apple ML Research

Three ways to use it.

CLI tool, HTTP server, or in­ter­ac­tive chat. Pick the one that fits.

Pipe-friendly and com­pos­able. Works with jq, xargs, and your shell scripts. stdin, std­out, JSON out­put, file at­tach­ments, proper exit codes.

apfel “What is the cap­i­tal of Austria?”

The cap­i­tal of Austria is Vienna.

Drop-in re­place­ment at lo­cal­host:11434. Point any OpenAI SDK at it and go. Streaming, tool call­ing, CORS, re­sponse for­mats.

Multi-turn con­ver­sa­tions with au­to­matic con­text man­age­ment. Five trim­ming strate­gies. System prompt sup­port. All on your Mac.

> How do I re­verse a list in Python?

Apple built an LLM into your Mac. apfel gives it a front door.

Starting with ma­cOS 26 (Tahoe), every Apple Silicon Mac in­cludes a lan­guage model as part of Apple Intelligence. Apple ex­poses it through the FoundationModels frame­work - a Swift API that gives apps ac­cess to SystemLanguageModel. All in­fer­ence runs on the Neural Engine and GPU. No net­work calls, no cloud, no API keys. The model is just there.

But Apple only uses it for Siri

Out of the box, the on-de­vice model pow­ers Siri, Writing Tools, and sys­tem fea­tures. There is no ter­mi­nal com­mand, no HTTP end­point, no way to pipe text through it. The FoundationModels frame­work ex­ists, but you need to write a Swift app to use it. That is what apfel does.

apfel is a Swift 6.3 bi­nary that wraps LanguageModelSession and ex­poses it three ways: as a UNIX com­mand-line tool with stdin/​std­out, as an OpenAI-compatible HTTP server (built on Hummingbird), and as an in­ter­ac­tive chat with con­text man­age­ment.

It han­dles the things Apple’s raw API does not: proper exit codes, JSON out­put, file at­tach­ments, five con­text trim­ming strate­gies for the small 4096-token win­dow, real to­ken count­ing via the SDK, and con­ver­sion of OpenAI tool schemas to Apple’s na­tive Transcript. ToolDefinition for­mat.

Shell scripts in the demo/ folder. Install apfel first, then grab the ones you want.

Natural lan­guage to shell com­mand. Say what you want, get the com­mand.

Pipe chains from plain English. awk, sed, sort, uniq - gen­er­ated for you.

Explain any com­mand, er­ror mes­sage, or code snip­pet in plain English.

What’s this di­rec­tory? Instant pro­ject ori­en­ta­tion for any code­base.

Change one URL. Keep your code.

apfel speaks the OpenAI API. Any client li­brary, any frame­work, any tool that talks to OpenAI can talk to your Mac’s AI in­stead. Just change the base URL.

from ope­nai im­port OpenAI

# Just change the base_url. That’s it.

client = OpenAI(

base_url=“http://​lo­cal­host:11434/​v1”,

api_key=“un­used” # no auth needed

resp = client.chat.com­ple­tions.cre­ate(

model=“ap­ple-foun­da­tion­model”,

mes­sages=[{

“role”: “user”,

“content”: “What is 1+1?”

print(resp.choices[0].mes­sage.con­tent)

Tailscale should feel nearly in­vis­i­ble when it’s con­nect­ing you and all your de­vices to­gether. But on some MacBooks, for a time, it could be a lit­tle too in­vis­i­ble. We have two fixes for it: one small and slightly quirky, and an­other re­ally use­ful one, avail­able now on ma­cOS.

The small, quirky fix might soon be­come a thing of the past for the vast ma­jor­ity of Tailscale users on Macs. I wanted to doc­u­ment it here: to help other de­vel­op­ers, to mark this mo­ment in time, and qui­etly crow about our win­dowed ma­cOS in­ter­face now be­ing gen­er­ally avail­able.

So here’s the is­sue we had with Tailscale’s icon slip­ping into dark­ness, its lit­tle work-around, and then our greater so­lu­tion.

At its de­but on ma­cOS, Tailscale was a com­mand-line tool and a menu bar util­ity. Some MacBooks, start­ing with 2021 MacBook Pro mod­els, have a notch in the top-mid­dle of their dis­play. And de­pend­ing on how many other apps with menu bar icons are run­ning, the Tailscale ap­p’s icon can be hid­den in­side that notch.

Apple, a com­pany that tra­di­tion­ally fa­vors sim­ple func­tion­al­ity over dense set­tings, does not of­fer users, or de­vel­op­ers, a path out of the dark­ness. If there are more menu bar icons then there is space to the right side of the notch, the menu bar items sim­ply dis­ap­pear into the notch-y ether. If you don’t see it, you can’t click it. There is no no­ti­fi­ca­tion to the user, no over­flow sec­tion, no op­tions to re­arrange the menu bar items.

As of this writ­ing, Apple has some in­di­rect work-arounds, like push­ing more of its own sys­tem icons into a re­vamped Control Center, and of­fer­ing a some­what in­el­e­gant “Scale to fit be­low cam­era” op­tion. Third-party menu-bar-man­ag­ing apps like ICE and Bartender can help, but they add com­pli­ca­tions and over­head.

“We don’t have any con­trol over where things get ren­dered in the menu bar,” said one Tailscale en­gi­neer, who asked to go name­less so as to share their hon­est opin­ion. “You just say, ‘I want to be a menu bar app.’ They shove it up there, and that’s it, you end up where you end up.”

Given this there-or-not-there be­hav­ior, Tailscale de­vel­op­ers re­ceived a num­ber of bug re­ports from users when, af­ter the notched MacBooks’ de­but, their Tailscale icons fell into the mid­dle-screen dis­tance. “They were like, ’Actually, I can’t find my Tailscale. It’s gone. It did­n’t start,” the en­gi­neer said. “We’re like, ‘No, it’s there, it’s just hid­ing be­hind the notch.’ But we kind of got sick of that.”

Mac menu bar icons may not know they are trapped in­side the no-pixel phan­tom zone, but they can re­port that some­thing is block­ing them. Using data from oc­clu­sion­State, the Tailscale app can see that its icon is in mid-bar limbo.

And while it can­not move, it can speak. Specifically, a pop-up mes­sage can say:

This af­fa­ble warn­ing is not per­fect, by any means. The notch warn­ing can be in­ad­ver­tently trig­gered by other dis­play quirks, like open­ing and clos­ing the MacBook lid, mov­ing be­tween mon­i­tors, or some com­bi­na­tion of the two. But it helped triage the “Where are my Tailscale set­tings?” is­sue for a while.

Apple could cer­tainly make some changes to pre­vent this be­ing an is­sue at all. The sys­tem could pre­vent menu bar icons from ren­der­ing in the notch area at all. An over­flow mech­a­nism could stack the icons that would oth­er­wise drop into a neg­a­tive notch zone. Or de­vel­op­ers could be given more in­for­ma­tion and tools about icons’ notch-itive states.

In the mean­time, here’s a look at the Swift code that let our app know it should chirp a bit when hid­den. It should be un­nec­es­sary with the new win­dowed app—un­less you en­able the “Hide Dock icon” op­tion in the win­dowed client op­tions, in which case it might still call out its hid­den na­ture.

As we noted at its September beta re­lease, a win­dowed ver­sion of Tailscale’s ma­cOS app does­n’t re­place the menu bar app, but runs along­side it. It can be pulled up from the Dock or a Spotlight search, and makes a lot of Tailscale data and fea­tures more ac­ces­si­ble.

The win­dowed in­ter­face, en­abled by de­fault start­ing with ver­sion 1.96.2 of our ma­cOS client, of­fers:

* A search­able list of tail­net de­vices and their con­nec­tion sta­tus

* Easily ping, copy IP ad­dresses, and send files through Taildrop to de­vices

* Easy ac­cess to exit nodes, search­able and with one rec­om­mended based on la­tency, per­for­mance, and lo­ca­tion

* A red dot on the Dock icon to note crit­i­cal er­rors

* A “mini player” that shrinks Tailscale down to the bare min­i­mum

* A prod­uct tour of all these things upon in­stalling/​up­dat­ing

Let us know what you think of the new in­ter­face so we can make it bet­ter. We’re work­ing on a com­pa­ra­ble UI for Windows de­vices. And we’re al­ways look­ing for ways to bring a lit­tle bit of func­tional whimsy to our soft­ware.

Software de­vel­op­ment is chang­ing, and so is Cursor.

In the last year, we moved from man­u­ally edit­ing files to work­ing with agents that write most of our code. How we cre­ate soft­ware will con­tinue to evolve as we en­ter the third era of soft­ware de­vel­op­ment, where fleets of agents work au­tonomously to ship im­prove­ments.

We’re build­ing to­ward this fu­ture, but there is a lot of work left to make it hap­pen. Engineers are still mi­cro­manag­ing in­di­vid­ual agents, try­ing to keep track of dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions, and jump­ing be­tween mul­ti­ple ter­mi­nals, tools, and win­dows.

We’re in­tro­duc­ing Cursor 3, a uni­fied work­space for build­ing soft­ware with agents. The new Cursor in­ter­face brings clar­ity to the work agents pro­duce, pulling you up to a higher level of ab­strac­tion, with the abil­ity to dig deeper when you want. It’s faster, cleaner, and more pow­er­ful, with a multi-repo lay­out, seam­less hand­off be­tween lo­cal and cloud agents, and the op­tion to switch back to the Cursor IDE at any time.

When we started build­ing Cursor, we forked VS Code in­stead of build­ing an ex­ten­sion so we could shape our own sur­face. With Cursor 3, we took that a step fur­ther by build­ing this new in­ter­face from scratch, cen­tered around agents.

The new in­ter­face is in­her­ently multi-work­space, al­low­ing hu­mans and agents to work across dif­fer­ent re­pos.

Working with agents is now much eas­ier. All lo­cal and cloud agents ap­pear in the side­bar, in­clud­ing the ones you kick off from mo­bile, web, desk­top, Slack, GitHub, and Linear.

Cloud agents pro­duce demos and screen­shots of their work for you to ver­ify. This is the same ex­pe­ri­ence you get at cur­sor.com/​agents, now in­te­grated into the desk­top app.

We made mov­ing agents be­tween en­vi­ron­ments re­ally fast.

Move an agent ses­sion from cloud to lo­cal when you want to make ed­its and test it on your own desk­top. Composer 2, our own fron­tier cod­ing model with high us­age lim­its, is great for it­er­at­ing quickly.

In the re­verse di­rec­tion, you can move an agent ses­sion from lo­cal to cloud to keep it run­ning while you’re of­fline, or so that you can move on to the next task. This is es­pe­cially use­ful for longer-run­ning tasks that would oth­er­wise get in­ter­rupted when you close your lap­top.

The new diffs view al­lows you to edit and re­view changes faster with a sim­pler UI. When you’re ready, you can stage, com­mit, and man­age PRs.

Alpha users told us that a lot of what they like about Cursor 3 is the way it com­bines the best parts of the IDE with more re­cent ca­pa­bil­i­ties we’ve shipped in an agent-first in­ter­face.

Dive deeper any­time by view­ing files, and go to de­f­i­n­i­tion in the ed­i­tor with full LSPs.

Cursor can use the built-in browser to open, nav­i­gate, and prompt against lo­cal web­sites.

Browse hun­dreds of plu­g­ins that ex­tend agents with MCPs, skills, sub­agents, and more. Install with one click, or set up your own team mar­ket­place of pri­vate plu­g­ins.

With Cursor 3, we have the foun­da­tional pieces in place—model, prod­uct, and run­time—to build more au­tonomous agents and bet­ter col­lab­o­ra­tion across teams. We will also con­tinue to in­vest in the IDE un­til code­bases are self-dri­ving.

This won’t be the last time the in­ter­face for build­ing soft­ware changes. More pow­er­ful cod­ing mod­els will un­lock new in­ter­ac­tion pat­terns. We are ex­cited to con­tinue to build, sim­plify, and trans­form Cursor to be the best way to code with AI.

Upgrade Cursor, and type Cmd+Shift+P -> Agents Window to try the new in­ter­face. Or learn more in our docs.

It’s Like Learning to Ride a Bike

The race is on to test new ve­hi­cles in the un­der­ground Large Hadron Collider tun­nel, ahead of ma­jor works start­ing this sum­mer

The race is on to test new ve­hi­cles in the un­der­ground Large Hadron Collider tun­nel, ahead of ma­jor works start­ing this sum­mer

Update: did you en­joy our April Fool’s day story? While we won’t be rac­ing karts through the tun­nel, we are gear­ing up for ma­jor works to pre­pare for HiLumi LHC and its new tech­nolo­gies. The im­age is based on a real 1991 CERN im­age of the mono­rail used to trans­port peo­ple and equip­ment in the tun­nel dur­ing the life­time of the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), which pre­ceded the LHC.

Following on from the ro­botic mice, CERN en­gi­neers have now de­vel­oped a su­per-charged kart to en­able work­ers to race through the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) un­der­ground tun­nel dur­ing the up­com­ing ma­jor works, start­ing this sum­mer.

The karts promise a power boost to ac­tiv­i­ties dur­ing this pe­riod, known as Long Shutdown 3 (LS3), which will see the LHC trans­formed into the High-Luminosity LHC. These ve­hi­cles will re­place the bi­cy­cles that were used un­til now to travel through the 27-km un­der­ground tun­nel, en­abling en­gi­neers and tech­ni­cians to speed to ar­eas where im­prove­ments to the ac­cel­er­a­tor are re­quired.

“Each kart is turbo-boosted by 64 su­per­con­duct­ing en­gines,” ex­plains pro­ject leader Mario Idraulico. “When the en­gines are cooled to be­low their crit­i­cal tem­per­a­tures, the Meissner ef­fect lev­i­tates the karts, al­low­ing them to zip through the tun­nels at high speeds and, mamma mia, they’re su­per!”

Early tests have been promis­ing, and the next steps in­volve test­ing dif­fer­ent kart de­signs in an un­der­ground race. Safety co­or­di­na­tor Luigi Fratello has en­sured that each dri­ver will be is­sued with Safety and Health Equipment for Long and Limited Stays (SHELLS), al­though his re­sponse to dri­vers want­ing ba­nanas in the tun­nel was “Oh no!”

These karts, al­though de­vel­oped to sup­port CERN’s fun­da­men­tal re­search pro­gramme, show clear ap­pli­ca­tions for so­ci­ety. CERN’s Knowledge Transfer Group has be­gun dis­cus­sions with European startup com­pany Quantum Mushroom to ex­plore aero­space ap­pli­ca­tions and pow­er­ing for next-gen­er­a­tion anti-grav­ity ve­hi­cles.

Surprisingly, the kart pro­ject be­gan from a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween CERN en­gi­neers and on­site nurs­ery school chil­dren — one ex­am­ple of CERN’s com­mit­ment to in­spir­ing fu­ture gen­er­a­tions. “We’re thrilled that the chil­dren’s kart de­signs were the in­spi­ra­tion for the en­gi­neered karts,” ex­claimed school­teacher Yoshi Kyouryuu, mid-way through paint­ing spots on eggs for an Easter egg hunt.

“As ed­u­ca­tors, we pro­mote cu­rios­ity from a young age, which is why we paint ques­tion marks all over our yel­low school walls,” ex­plained school di­rec­tor, Rosalina Pfirsich, look­ing up from her sto­ry­book. “With all the con­tri­bu­tions the chil­dren have made to the up­com­ing High-Luminosity LHC pro­ject, we’ve taken to call­ing them Luma!”

Find out more about the High-Luminosity LHC pro­ject.

Appearing on the Founders pod­cast this week, ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Marc Andreessen made the rather ex­tra­or­di­nary claim that - go­ing back four hun­dred years - it would never have oc­curred to any­one to be “introspective.”

Andreessen ap­par­ently blames Sigmund Freud and the Vienna Circle with hav­ing some­how “manufactured” the whole prac­tice of in­tro­spec­tion some­where be­tween 1910-1920. He sum­marised his own ap­proach to life thus: “Move for­ward. Go.”

Host David Senra, ap­par­ently de­lighted, con­grat­u­lated Andreessen on de­vel­op­ing what he called a “zero-introspection mind­set.”

Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.

But he has since been wrong about a great many things.

And he is en­tirely wrong about in­tro­spec­tion.

If we ac­cept that in­tro­spec­tion is a Viennese in­ven­tion of the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, we have to ex­plain away…well, rather a lot.

Socrates made the ex­am­ined life a con­di­tion of the life worth liv­ing, and he ar­guably died for it. The Stoics built an en­tire philo­soph­i­cal prac­tice around self-ex­am­i­na­tion: Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as a pri­vate ex­er­cise in catch­ing him­self fail­ing to live by his own prin­ci­ples, and he did this while run­ning the Roman Empire, which sug­gests he did­n’t find the two ac­tiv­i­ties in­com­pat­i­ble. Augustine’s Confessions, writ­ten around 400 AD, of­fer a sus­tained and search­ing ac­count of his own in­te­rior life that pre­dates Freud by about fif­teen cen­turies, give or take.

In Chinese phi­los­o­phy, Mencius de­scribes the con­cept of in­tro­spec­tion as “seeking the lost heart,” the re­cov­ery of some­thing in­nate that gets buried un­der the noise of or­di­nary life. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play about what hap­pens when you’re con­sti­tu­tion­ally un­able to stop ex­am­in­ing your­self and start act­ing, and the fact that Elizabethan au­di­ences im­me­di­ately rec­og­nized this as a prob­lem im­plies they were al­ready some­what fa­mil­iar with the prac­tice be­ing sat­i­rized; you can’t par­ody a con­cept your au­di­ence has never en­coun­tered.

Andreessen’s novel idea that Freud in­vented in­tro­spec­tion is an in­ver­sion of the record. What Freud ac­tu­ally did was sys­tem­atize cer­tain ideas about the un­con­scious that were al­ready cir­cu­lat­ing in European in­tel­lec­tual cul­ture and put them into a clin­i­cal frame­work. Half of those ideas were them­selves wrong; but “Freud was of­ten wrong” is a very dif­fer­ent ar­gu­ment from “people had no in­ner lives worth ex­am­in­ing be­fore 1910.”

Andreessen is no stranger to the writ­ten word. His Techno-Optimist Manifesto quotes Nietzsche, he ref­er­ences the Italian Futurists with ad­mi­ra­tion and he’s not un­fa­mil­iar with the Western philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion. So the his­tor­i­cal re­vi­sion­ism can’t be called ig­no­rance; this is, on some level, a cal­cu­lated move. The claim that in­tro­spec­tion is a mod­ern pathol­ogy serves a spe­cific rhetor­i­cal func­tion by dele­git­imiz­ing an en­tire mode of en­gage­ment with hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence, clear­ing it off the table, and leav­ing only ex­ter­nal ac­tion as the proper re­sponse to ~being alive.

Andreessen and his cronies are mak­ing large claims about what hu­man be­ings want and need. His stated per­sonal phi­los­o­phy is ex­plic­itly a vi­sion of hu­man flour­ish­ing: abun­dance, growth, the elim­i­na­tion of ma­te­r­ial con­straints etc. These are claims about what will make peo­ple’s lives go well. But you can’t eval­u­ate those claims with­out some ac­count of hu­man in­ner life, be­cause hu­man in­ner life is where the ques­tion of whether a life is go­ing well ac­tu­ally gets an­swered. You can mea­sure GDP. You can mea­sure life ex­pectancy. You can mea­sure the num­ber of trans­ac­tions per sec­ond your pay­ment proces­sor han­dles. But none, not one sin­gle of these mea­sure­ments will tell you whether the peo­ple whose lives they de­scribe feel that their lives are worth liv­ing, whether they find their work mean­ing­ful, whether they wake up with some­thing that re­sem­bles pur­pose.

The only ac­cess any­one has to those ques­tions is through some­thing like in­tro­spec­tion: ei­ther their own, or some­one else’s hon­est re­ports of their ex­pe­ri­ence, or the ac­cu­mu­lated tes­ti­mony of lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy about what it’s like to be a liv­ing, breath­ing, doubt­ing, hurt­ing, in­ter­nally-scream­ing hu­man be­ing float­ing on a God-forsaken rock in a God-forsaken void. Strip that out and you’re left with a very thin the­ory of hu­man flour­ish­ing. It ba­si­cally runs to more is bet­ter, faster is bet­ter, big­ger is bet­ter with noth­ing else added or sub­tracted or at­tempted.

Perhaps, you find this to be a de­fen­si­ble po­si­tion; but you still have to ac­tu­ally ar­gue for it. You can’t just claim that the ques­tion of what peo­ple find mean­ing­ful is a Viennese in­ven­tion and move on.

The re­sponse to Andreessen’s in­ter­view that keeps cir­cu­lat­ing is that “he hath no soul.”

This is, of course, wrong.

Andreessen al­most cer­tainly has a rich in­ner life. He has en­thu­si­asms and anx­i­eties and aes­thetic pref­er­ences and tribal loy­al­ties and all the rest of it. The prob­lem is­n’t that there’s noth­ing in­side; the prob­lem is that he’s cho­sen not to ex­am­ine what’s there, and has de­vel­oped an elab­o­rate post-hoc jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for that choice by claim­ing that ex­am­i­na­tion is it­self the pathol­ogy.

This is a rec­og­niz­able pat­tern. The Victorian vi­tal­ists who viewed mas­tur­ba­tion as phys­i­cally de­bil­i­tat­ing were wrong about the phys­i­ol­ogy, but they were also en­gaged in mo­ti­vated rea­son­ing: they al­ready knew they wanted to pro­hibit some­thing, and the sci­en­tific-sound­ing jus­ti­fi­ca­tion came later. Andreessen al­ready knows he wants to move fast with­out ex­am­in­ing him­self, and the his­tor­i­cal ar­gu­ment that in­tro­spec­tion is a Freudian man­u­fac­ture serves ex­actly that same func­tion.

The prac­ti­cal con­se­quences of an un­ex­am­ined in­ner life at scale are not the­o­ret­i­cal. The so­cial me­dia plat­forms built by peo­ple who be­lieved be­hav­ioral data was a re­li­able sub­sti­tute for un­der­stand­ing hu­man psy­chol­ogy pro­duced a decade of en­gage­ment met­rics while user well­be­ing de­clined and our en­tire so­cial or­der de­cayed. The en­gi­neers who built these sys­tems weren’t ma­li­cious; they were op­ti­miz­ing for things they could mea­sure, be­cause they’d im­plic­itly ac­cepted the view that mea­sur­able out­puts were a suf­fi­cient model of hu­man flour­ish­ing. Goodhart’s Law ex­acted its toll: the mea­sure be­came the tar­get, and the tar­get was not what any­one would have cho­sen if they’d been forced to ac­tu­ally spec­ify what they were aim­ing for.

Andreessen’s ad­vice to him­self, and ap­par­ently to oth­ers, is di­rec­tional with­out be­ing spe­cific. Forward, he says. Forward to­ward what? His man­i­festo ob­sesses over abun­dance, over the elim­i­na­tion of ma­te­r­ial suf­fer­ing, and a fu­ture in which tech­nol­ogy has lifted con­straints that cur­rently limit hu­man pos­si­bil­ity. These are goals I can get be­hind. But “forward” pre­sup­poses that you know where you’re go­ing, and know­ing where you’re go­ing pre­sup­poses that you know what you want, and know­ing what you want does­n’t hap­pen with­out ex­actly the ex­am­i­na­tion the man has ruled out.

Andreessen’s model of hu­man be­ings is thin. He can ob­serve be­hav­ior. He can track pref­er­ences as ex­pressed through mar­ket choices. He can mea­sure what peo­ple click on and buy and use. What he can’t do, with­out some­thing like in­tro­spec­tion, is un­der­stand why, and the why is where most of the im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion lives.

Four hun­dred years ago, the peo­ple Andreessen imag­ines were bliss­fully un­self­con­scious were read­ing Augustine and Montaigne and ar­gu­ing about Stoic phi­los­o­phy. They were writ­ing di­aries and let­ters that ex­am­ined their own mo­tives with con­sid­er­able care. They were not, in fact, just mov­ing for­ward with­out ask­ing where they were go­ing. That habit is not a pathol­ogy Freud in­tro­duced into an oth­er­wise healthy civ­i­liza­tion. It’s one of the things that makes civ­i­liza­tion pos­si­ble, and pre­tend­ing oth­er­wise does­n’t make you a builder. It just makes you some­one who’s never looked at the blue­prints.

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What Europe does bet­ter

EU com­pa­nies are sub­ject to the world’s strictest en­vi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions. European prod­ucts are de­signed for longevity — less throw­away cul­ture, more re­spon­si­bil­ity.

Made in Europe has stood for top qual­ity and dura­bil­ity for decades. Strict stan­dards guar­an­tee fair work­ing con­di­tions, while shorter sup­ply chains mea­sur­ably re­duce CO₂.

EU providers are sub­ject to the GDPR — the strictest data pro­tec­tion law world­wide. Your data be­longs to you, not ad­ver­tis­ing net­works. Note: US soft­ware can be com­pelled by the CLOUD Act to sur­ren­der data to US au­thor­i­ties — even if servers are lo­cated in Europe.

Economics and sim­i­lar, for the sleep-de­prived

A sub­tle change has been made to the com­ments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the prob­lem about com­ments not ap­pear­ing on perma­linked posts, read­ers?

Update: seem­ingly not

Update: Oh yeah!

Update, September 2008. Hullo there Paul Krugman read­ers. Yes, I did say “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in or­der to gain pub­lic ac­cep­tance”, and as a gen­eral maxim I whole­heart­edly rec­om­mend it. I don’t nec­es­sar­ily, how­ever, ei­ther en­dorse or what­ever-the-op­po­site-of-en­dorse the spe­cific use of that maxim in the con­text of Prof. Krugman’s post about the Paulson bailout plan; I don’t ac­tu­ally have a fully formed view about that plan. I do, how­ever, whole­heart­edly en­dorse “Development, Geography and Economic Theory”, which I think is a ter­ri­bly un­der­rated eco­nom­ics book, and am at this mo­ment rather starstruck at hav­ing one of my es­says ad­mired by the near­est mod­ern equiv­a­lent to my hero JK Galbraith. Anyway, as you were; by way of con­text, the post be­low was writ­ten just as a lot of high-pro­file com­men­ta­tors like Thomas Friedman were aban­don­ing their sup­port for the Iraq War.

The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101

Literally peo­ple have been ask­ing me: “How is it that you were so amaz­ingly pre­scient about Iraq? Why is it that you were right about every­thing at pre­cisely the same mo­ment when we were wrong?” No hon­estly, they have. I’d love to show you the emails I’ve re­ceived, there were dozens of them, hon­est. Honest. Anyway, I note that “errors of pre­war plan­ning” is now pretty much a main­stream stylised fact, so I sus­pect that it might make some small con­tri­bu­tion to the com­mon­weal if I were to ex­plain how it was that I was able to spot so early that this dog was­n’t go­ing to hunt. I will strug­gle man­fully with the sav­age bur­den of boast­ing, self-ag­gran­dis­e­ment and ego-stroking that this will nec­es­sar­ily in­volve. It’s been done be­fore, al­though ad­mit­tedly by a mad­man in the process of dy­ing of syphilis of the brain. Sorry, where was I?

Anyway, the se­cret to every analy­sis I’ve ever done of con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics has been, more or less, my ex­pen­sive busi­ness school ed­u­ca­tion (I would write a book en­ti­tled “Everything I Know I Learned At A Very Expensive University”, but I doubt it would sell). About half of what they say about busi­ness schools and their grad­u­ates is prob­a­bly true, and they do of­ten feel like the most col­los­sal waste of time and money, but they oc­ca­sion­ally teach you the odd thing which is very use­ful in­deed. Here’s a few of the ones I learned which I con­sid­ered rel­e­vant to judg­ing the ad­vis­abil­ity of the Second Iraq War.

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in or­der to gain pub­lic ac­cep­tance. I was first made aware of this dur­ing an ac­count­ing class. We were dis­cussing the sub­ject of ac­count­ing for stock op­tions at tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies. There was a live de­bate on this sub­ject at the time. One side (mainly tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies and their lob­by­ists) held that stock op­tion grants should not be treated as an ex­pense on pub­lic pol­icy grounds; treat­ing them as an ex­pense would dis­cour­age com­pa­nies from grant­ing them, and stock op­tions were a vi­tal com­pen­sa­tion tool that in­cen­tivised per­for­mance, re­warded dy­namism and in­no­va­tion and cre­ated vast amounts of value for America and the world. The other side (mainly peo­ple like Warren Buffet) held that stock op­tions looked aw­fully like a mas­sive blag car­ried out my man­age­ment at the ex­pense of share­hold­ers, and that the proper place to record such blags was the P&L ac­count.

Our lec­turer, in sum­ming up the de­bate, made the not un­rea­son­able point that if stock op­tions re­ally were a fan­tas­tic tool which un­leashed the cre­ative power in every em­ployee, every­one would want to ex­pense as many of them as pos­si­ble, the bet­ter to boast about how in­no­v­a­tive, em­pow­ered and fan­tas­tic they were. Since the tech com­pa­nies’ point of view ap­peared to be that if they were ever forced to ac­count hon­estly for their op­tion grants, they would quickly stop mak­ing them, this of­fered de­cent prima fa­cie ev­i­dence that they weren’t, re­ally, all that fan­tas­tic.

Application to Iraq. The gen­eral prin­ci­ple that good ideas are not usu­ally as­so­ci­ated with ly­ing like a rug1 about their true na­ture seems to have been pretty well con­firmed. In par­tic­u­lar, how­ever, this prin­ci­ple sheds light on the now quite pop­u­lar claim that “WMDs were only part of the story; the real pri­or­ity was to lib­er­ate the Iraqis, which is some­thing that every de­cent per­son would sup­port”.

Fibbers’ fore­casts are worth­less. Case af­ter mis­er­able case af­ter bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that peo­ple who want a pro­ject will tend to make in­nacu­rate pro­jec­tions about the pos­si­ble out­comes of that pro­ject, but about the fu­til­ity of at­tempts to “shade” down­ward a fun­da­men­tally dis­hon­est set of pre­dic­tions. If you have doubts about the in­tegrity of a fore­caster, you can’t use their fore­casts at all. Not even as a “starting point”. By the way, I would just love to get hold of a few of the quan­ti­ta­tive num­bers from doc­u­ments pre­pared to sup­port the war and give them a quick run through Benford’s Law.

Application to Iraq This was how I de­cided that it was worth stak­ing a bit of cred­i­bil­ity on the strong claim that ab­solutely no ma­te­r­ial WMD ca­pac­ity would be found, rather than “some” or “some but not enough to jus­tify a war” or even “some de­risory but not im­ma­te­r­ial ca­pac­ity, like a few mo­bile bi­o­log­i­cal weapons labs”. My rea­son­ing was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly mak­ing false claims and there­fore ought to be dis­counted com­pletely, and that there were ac­tu­ally very few peo­ple who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fa­tally com­pro­mised in this man­ner who were mak­ing the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were peo­ple like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, what­ever other faults they might or might not have had, did not ap­pear to have told any prov­able lies on this sub­ject and were there­fore not com­pro­mised.

The Vital Importance of Audit. Emphasised over and over again. Brealey and Myers has a sec­tion on this, in which they re­mind cal­low stu­dents that like back­ing-up one’s com­puter files, this is a les­son that every­one seems to have to learn the hard way. Basically, it’s been shown time and again and again; com­pa­nies which do not au­dit com­pleted pro­jects in or­der to see how ac­cu­rate the orig­i­nal pro­jec­tions were, tend to get ex­actly the fore­casts and pro­jects that they de­serve. Companies which have a cul­ture where there are no con­se­quences for mak­ing dis­hon­est fore­casts, get the pro­jects they de­serve. Companies which al­lo­cate blank cheques to man­age­ment teams with a proven record of fail­ure and men­dac­ity, get what they de­serve.

I hope I don’t have to spell out the im­pli­ca­tions of this one for Iraq. Krugman has gone on and on about this, seem­ingly with some small ef­fect these days. The rasp­berry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with bland as­sump­tions that peo­ple who had re­peat­edly proved their un­trust­wor­thi­ness, could be trusted. There is much made by peo­ple who long for the days of their fourth form de­bat­ing so­ci­ety about the fal­lacy of “argumentum ad hominem”. There is, as I have men­tioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fal­lacy of “giving known liars the ben­e­fit of the doubt”, but it is in my view a much greater source of avoid­able er­ror in the world. Audit is meant to pro­tect us from this, which is why au­dit is so im­por­tant.

And so the les­son ends. Next week, per­haps, a few re­flec­tions on why it is that peo­ple don’t sup­port the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive pro­ject to bring democ­racy to the Middle East (a trailer for those who can’t wait; the ti­tle is go­ing to be some­thing like “If You Tell Lies A Lot, You Tend To Get A Reputation As A Liar”). Mind how you go.

1 We also learned in ac­count­ing class that the dif­fer­ence be­tween “making a def­i­nite sin­gle false claim with prov­able in­tent to de­ceive” and “creating a very false im­pres­sion and al­low­ing it to re­main with­out cor­rect­ing it” is not one that you should rely upon to keep you out of jail. Even if your mo­tives are no­ble.

this item posted by the man­age­ment 5/27/2004 11:57:00 PM

The lu­nar-bound as­tro­nauts of NASA’s Artemis II mis­sion will go boldly where none have gone be­fore, thanks to the space agen­cy’s first-ever flight of a func­tional toi­let around the moon.

On their voy­ages to the moon, NASA’s as­tro­nauts are fi­nally get­ting some crea­ture com­forts of ter­res­trial toi­lets—such as hav­ing a door and be­ing able to pee and poop si­mul­ta­ne­ously

The lu­nar-bound as­tro­nauts of NASA’s Artemis II mis­sion will go boldly where none have gone be­fore, thanks to the space agen­cy’s first-ever flight of a func­tional toi­let around the moon.

On their voy­ages to the moon, NASA’s as­tro­nauts are fi­nally get­ting some crea­ture com­forts of ter­res­trial toi­lets—such as hav­ing a door and be­ing able to pee and poop si­mul­ta­ne­ously

When as­tro­nauts first made their way to the moon, they did so with­out a toi­let. The Apollo pro­gram’s sys­tem of plas­tic bags and fun­nels was so un­wieldy and messy that crew mem­bers found it “objectionable” and “distasteful,” ac­cord­ing to a sub­se­quent NASA re­port. But now, more than a half cen­tury since the last crewed lu­nar voy­ages and their toi­let trou­bles, the four as­tro­nauts of NASA’s Artemis II mis­sion will take flight with a more com­modi­ous bath­room in tow.

The space agen­cy’s Universal Waste Management System (UWMS)—more col­lo­qui­ally called just “the toi­let”—was cre­ated to solve long­stand­ing potty prob­lems faced by as­tro­nauts and to of­fer a more fa­mil­iar bath­room ex­pe­ri­ence on the fi­nal fron­tier. Lunar as­tro­nauts will now be spoiled by ameni­ties that in­clude han­dles to help them stay steady in mi­cro­grav­ity, a sys­tem that can han­dle both urine and fe­ces si­mul­ta­ne­ously, urine-col­lec­tion de­vices that work for both male and fe­male as­tro­nauts, and even a door for the help­ful il­lu­sion of pri­vacy in a cramped crew cap­sule.

The new de­sign is more than a decade in the mak­ing. Space in­fra­struc­ture com­pany Collins Aerospace first en­tered into a con­tract with NASA to de­velop the pro­ject in 2015. In that time, pro­ject sci­en­tists have over­come fun­da­men­tal is­sues with past space toi­lets while imag­in­ing and meet­ing fu­ture needs so that the same sys­tem used by Artemis II as­tro­nauts could be adapted for moon and Mars mis­sions in decades to come.

If you’re en­joy­ing this ar­ti­cle, con­sider sup­port­ing our award-win­ning jour­nal­ism by sub­scrib­ing. By pur­chas­ing a sub­scrip­tion you are help­ing to en­sure the fu­ture of im­pact­ful sto­ries about the dis­cov­er­ies and ideas shap­ing our world to­day.

“I think of waste man­age­ment as an evo­lu­tion of de­sign,” says Melissa McKinley, pro­ject man­ager and prin­ci­pal in­ves­ti­ga­tor for NASA’s UWMS team. “The toi­let has built on de­signs from Apollo, the space shut­tle and even the International Space Station…. There is so much learn­ing that goes into it.”

In the tight quar­ters of Apollo crew cap­sules, as­tro­nauts strapped ad­he­sive-rimmed plas­tic bags and tubes to them­selves when­ever they had to defe­cate or uri­nate. Attaching the awk­ward bags was dif­fi­cult enough in weight­less con­di­tions, but the as­tro­nauts also had to man­u­ally mix in a packet of ger­mi­cide to pre­vent the buildup of bac­te­ria and gases within the sealed bag.

The sys­tem was in­fa­mously prone to leaks, such as dur­ing the Apollo 10 mis­sion, when as­tro­nauts no­ticed “a turd float­ing through the air,” and dur­ing the Apollo 8 mis­sion, when the crew had to chase down blobs of vomit and fe­ces that es­caped into the cabin. A NASA re­port re­leased af­ter the end of the Apollo mis­sions noted that waste dis­posal “must be given poor marks” when it comes to crew sat­is­fac­tion.

“I used to want to be the first man to Mars,” said as­tro­naut Ken Mattingly dur­ing the Apollo 16 mis­sion, af­ter de­scrib­ing the sys­tem. “This has con­vinced me that, if we got to go on Apollo, I ain’t in­ter­ested.”

Based on these scathing re­views, NASA sci­en­tists knew they had to cre­ate a more stream­lined sys­tem. After all, “the toi­let is a ‘mission-critical’ sys­tem, so if it breaks down, the whole mis­sion is in jeop­ardy,” says David Munns, a sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy his­to­rian at the City University of New York.

So be­fore the space shut­tle pro­gram, they en­gi­neered a toi­let that could work in a low-grav­ity en­vi­ron­ment. It looked much like a typ­i­cal ter­res­trial toi­let but re­quired the as­tro­nauts to strap in and use a vac­uum hose to pre­vent waste from float­ing back up into the space­craft.

Early toi­lets on both the space shut­tle and the International Space Station (ISS) used this vac­uum sys­tem—with the key dif­fer­ence be­ing that the ISS model re­cy­cled some waste­water, whereas the space shut­tle’s ver­sion vented it into space. Both sys­tems were sig­nif­i­cantly im­proved over the “toilets” of the Apollo years but still had big lim­i­ta­tions. They weren’t built with fe­male anatomy in mind and could­n’t process urine and fe­ces at the same time, and while they pro­vided some sem­blance of pri­vacy with a cur­tain, there was­n’t yet a solid door.

The UWMS is the aero­space-en­gi­neered cul­mi­na­tion of all these pent-up prob­lems with the user ex­pe­ri­ence. 3D-printed from ti­ta­nium, its light­weight, stan­dard­ized de­sign means it can eas­ily fit in many dif­fer­ent types of space­craft, in­clud­ing the ISS, the Artemis mis­sions’ Orion cap­sule and po­ten­tial fu­ture ve­hi­cles that have yet to be built.

The first ver­sion of the UWMS was tested on the ISS in 2020, and fi­nal in­stal­la­tion was com­pleted in 2021. It fea­tured urine and fe­ces sys­tems that could be used si­mul­ta­ne­ously, mod­i­fi­ca­tions to make these sys­tems more uni­sex and the much-cov­eted bath­room door. With fur­ther mod­i­fi­ca­tions to help the same sys­tem func­tion on a lu­nar mis­sion, a ver­sion of the UWMS has also been in­stalled in the Orion cap­sule for Artemis II, the pro­gram’s first crewed launch—and UWMS pro­ject sci­en­tists are on the edge of their seats, ea­ger to learn whether the mis­sion’s four as­tro­nauts are happy with the de­sign.

“I am very ex­cited for the crew to use this,” McKinley says. “We’ll know so much more when this mis­sion comes back…. It’s re­ally go­ing to drive [waste man­age­ment] on fu­ture Artemis mis­sions and the lu­nar cam­paign—as well as the Mars cam­paign to come.”