Feb 21, 2023 - Selling sunlight

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Hey, fellow weirdos.

I’m excited for today’s digest because we have…

San Francisco: Heads up. We’ve got another popular AI demo night coming to the Bay Area. Come hang with the Product Hunt team, Mercury, and Jam.dev on April 9th and demo or discover some of the coolest AI products being built today.

Spots filled up fast for our last event, so be quick and RSVP here!

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PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT

Selling sunlight in the dark

No, that headline is not just a poetic analogy. A startup called Reflect Orbital is literally (kind of) selling sunlight.

Reflect is working to create satellites that reflect light from constellations onto solar farms. This would turn essentially useless nighttime solar panels into 24/7 energy-generating machines.

Founder Ben Nowack tweeted a video showing the team’s process for testing the concept, which involved putting a mirror on a hot air balloon, pointing it at solar panels, and watching the additional power harnessed by the panels skyrocket. Eureka!

It’s a pretty cool and inspiring video that’s racked up 2 million views so far. Side note: It helps that Nowack knows how to make really cool videos — he’s been doing it for a while on his YouTube channel, BenNBuilds. He also worked as an “On-Camera Science communicator” on a Mythbusters spinoff.

Of course, all of that is only possible because of his engineering expertise which got him started as a SpaceX intern and later took him to a medical, drone-delivery, unicorn startup called Zipline, where he worked with his co-founder, Tristan Semmelhack.

Another thing I loved about Nowack’s tweet was this: “We think sunlight is the new oil and space is ready to support energy infrastructure.“ LFG.

SPONSORED BY

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HOT RIGHT NOW

Talking points from Planet Internet

🤖 Transformer or monstrosity? Dyson just dropped its new robot vacuum in the US and Canada and the PH team is internally split on whether it’s beautiful or an eyesore.

🧠 Nvidia is the “it” company of AI: It surpassed the market value of Alphabet and Amazon and announced new superchips that supposedly reduce cost and energy consumption by up to 25x. The talking point that we suggest you start your next conversation off with, though, is that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang thinks we’re just five years away from AGI, or full AI that outperforms humans.

NEW TOOLS

DEV TOOLS

  • icl.host gives you HTTPS in a local dev environment. 

  • EVM Sandbox is a production-ready Web3 staging environment.

  • Bytebot uses AI to streamline web scraping and automation scripts. 

  • 16x Prompt is a more streamlined ChatGPT for coding. 

  • Athina AI monitors your LLMs and detects any potential hallucinations.

NO-CODE

  • Peaka is a data integration platform so you can query all your data sources as a single source with zero-ETL.

  • Synthflow lets you create human-like AI agents without writing code.

  • Droip is a full-fledged no-code website builder for WordPress.

OPEN SOURCE

  • Speedometer measures web app responsiveness by timing simulated user interactions on various workloads.

  • xAI (aka Twitter) open-sourced Grok to let developers use the weights and architecture for free in their own projects.

Until next week

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