Brad Porter
@BradPorter_
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Founder and CEO, Collaborative Robotics. I post about engineering leadership, AI, and robotics. Formerly CTO Scale AI, VP of Robotics at Amazon.
Joined June 2017
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At Cobot, we've raised $130M in the past 9 months in one of the tightest fundraising climates we've seen. And we've raised from the top firms...
@neo
@khoslaventures
@sequoia
@generalcatalyst
@lux
. My perspective on VCs has changed. 🧵
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Excited to share we've closed $100M Series B funding led by
@generalcatalyst
. The support
@htaneja
and team have shown is amazing. Excited to have Paul Kwan join our Board and
@teresacarlson
on board as an Advisor.
#fundraising
#robotics
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Wow, 3 of our investors in the Midas top 10!!! Congrats to
@Alfred_Lin
,
@vkhosla
, and
@htaneja
. At Cobot, we feel incredibly fortunate to have the caliber of investors we do. We're excited to be building the future with you all!
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Tesla FSD 12 feels like a ChatGPT 3.5 moment. It’s not perfect, but it’s super impressive and you can tell it’s something very different. Can’t wait for the ChatGPT 4 equivalent.
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@jansulek
@DavidSacks
@elonmusk
If only Elon or his team knew spam bots were a big and challenging problem before the deal, then they could have put something into the contract.
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Excited to announce the opening of our Seattle team and the creation of our Foundation Models AI team under the leadership of
@mjvogelsong
. Follow him for more updates in the world of robotics and AI.
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@mountbranch
FWIW, I was in the FRB local branch in Los Gatos yesterday afternoon. There were maybe 8 customers there. Felt like business as usual. Banking transactions were being handled efficiently with good service.
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Yikes, this seems to already be going viral on LI. We put out our Series B pitch narrative... an Amazon-style evidence-based narrative... and shared that
@JeffBezos
invested in our last round at Cobot. Check out the Medium article here...
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Wrote up my thoughts on what I think is happening in the Robotics Foundation Models space.
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@KTmBoyle
Are we starting a new culture war on women without kids? That seems like it’s not going to be fun for anyone.
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@rohitdotmittal
“Slum” is pretty extreme word for communities of 2,500sq ft+ homes going for $1,000/sq ft full of families where one or more adult is working 10+ years in big tech sending their kids to $60K/year private schools and aspiring to live in Atherton.
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Very excited to announce we've raised an additional $30M in our Series A, led by
@sequoia
.
@khoslaventures
and
@MayoClinic
also joined in the round, further filled out by
@neo
,
@CalibrateVC
,
@1984Ventures
,
@FuelCapital
and
@MVPventures
!
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Couldn’t be more excited to join Scale AI as CTO... “Amazon’s Top Robotics Engineer Joins AI Startup Scale”
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@ecomEddie
How did this marketing gig come about? Previous connections? Past body of work? Did Mike have a network and reputation to fall back on?
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Dang, I just taught GPT-4 a new card game that it didn't know. After it described the rules to me, I asked it if it could simulate playing the card game with me? It said yes and now I'm interactively playing a card game I remember from my childhood again.🤯
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@fchollet
The thing is, humans can’t generalize out of distribution either. There’s no magic. We might have some better self-prompting structures and frameworks for structured reasoning, but even there we can’t go out of distribution. We’re just recombining known concepts.
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I've had a front row seat to the rise of the internet at Netscape, the rise of cloud computing at Tellme & Amazon, the rise of AI at Scale AI. I am a deep believer the next wave is collaborative robotics. Here are my thoughts on where we're going... 1/N
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@travis_cook_
@PR_Honeycutt
I went to MIT and am an Eagle Scout. Learned more about leadership from Scouting than from MIT. Obviously learned more about engineering at MIT. Proud of both. Neither were easy.
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My thoughts on Tim Bray's departure...
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@KTmBoyle
@pewresearch
Ah, got it. Childlessness seems like an active line of attack in the Presidential campaign. Then the old clip of Vance proposing parents can vote on behalf of their kids resurfacing. Seems like some people are trying to make this a new front in the culture wars.
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@archieLurker
@jansulek
@DavidSacks
@elonmusk
This was a hostile take-over bid. What duty did Twitter have to disclose any of their methodologies?
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I'm excited to share that our Distance Assistant software and AI is now available as Open Source on github. We released it under the MIT License.
#DistanceAssistant
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The problem with humanoid robots is not in the actuation. It’s not about tendons, motors or linear actuators. Those work. The problem is all controls.
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This is the humanoid I’ve been most excited to see. Still sitting in the uncanny valley, but I expected BD to create something technically superior to anything else out there. They didn’t disappoint. That range of motion and strength is amazing.
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@sm
Ugh, please don’t consider this a red flag. For some folks, interviews are intense, exhausting and intimidating. Trying to come up with an intelligent question at the end of a day of interviews is not that easy. I expect to have to lead the conversation with some candidates.
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@fchollet
We are parametric curves fitted to a data distribution. Our context window and model update mechanisms might be a little different, but we’re absolutely just N-dimensional fitted curves. 100%
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@WillManidis
Who cares about reviews, what are customers saying? If customers aren’t biting, then radically cut your burn and lean hard into the customers that are finding value. Grind. We did this at Tellme. Got to cash flow positive then sold to Microsoft.
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@NathanFrisby7
@jansulek
@DavidSacks
@elonmusk
If anything, it seemed like Elon was trying to say they had a bigger bot problem than they admitted and he was the one to fix it.
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Ok, after a day of not getting founder mode vs manager mode, I think I finally get it.
Lots of founders have never led at any scale. At some point, someone told them they should hire experienced executives to help scale their business.
Those founders, who never led at any
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Excited to share the work we're doing at Collaborative Robotics on ACoP, our Auditable Collaboration and Planning Framework, to enable a new level of human/robot collaboration by fusing our cobots with LLMs.
#NVIDIArobotics
#OpenAI
#robotics
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Reminded again recently... if you hire people who love interesting work, your job is to make sure they get enough of what they love.
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@paulg
As
@alexandr_wang
points out, diversity and merit were never in conflict. The challenge has been where excellence = “reminds me of me” and intelligence = “went to a school I think has a lot of smart people.” Bringing awareness to and attempting to eliminate these biases was/is
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The rumors are true. I will be leaving Amazon at the end of the month to pursue a new opportunity. I’m incredibly proud to have been part of such an amazing technical community of fearless builders. I’ll share more on what I’m doing next soon.
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I walked around Cambridge and Boston at night this week and it felt entirely safe and comfortable. Magical really. And I wasn’t the only one, the city was vibrant at night. This is not the experience I’ve had in Seattle or SF in the past 10 years. There might be a model here.
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@sama
This, combined with Starlink, is enabling the rise of the digital nomads. It’s going to be great. We need simpler tax laws though to account for these digital nomads. Traded email with a state regulator in Wyoming today on this very topic.
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@Alloutnikhil
The smoothness it exhibits negotiating around bikes or parked cars. The way it will smartly use wider lanes to go around. The fact that it subtly goes off the throttle at the top of hills or curves or if a car is coming up fast and merging quickly. All very “human-like”.
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Very excited to share that I've founded Collaborative Robotics to realize a vision where robots work, adapt, and react around you.
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@etotheipie
Feels like maybe they asked ChatGPT for some examples? Might not be fair to blame ChatGPT for such a bad list, but I’m otherwise struggling to find a plausible source for such a bad list? Thanks for summarizing.
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When an investor says no, they're not saying you have a bad idea. They're not saying your business won't work or be valuable. They're not saying you're a bad founder or have a bad team. Instead they're saying "this just isn't what I'm looking to buy right now."
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My wife is attending
@GeorgeCloooney
‘s AFI Lifetime Achievement Award event today. But I got to attend
@Coach_Hopkins
Coach of the Year event today! I think we know who got the better deal... sorry George!
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As Scale AI's CTO, I had a front row seat to the advances being made across the AI space. Here's what I observed... 1/N
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💯… the real world is unforgiving. Those of us who have deployed 100s of thousands of robots feel this intimately. Getting into the field early and learning those painful lessons quickly is the number one thing that matters.
Humanoids are cool on paper.
Then you deploy them in the real world and realize how suboptimal they are for everything.
The humanoid pilots that are starting to happen now aren’t a good thing for humanoids. Better for these companies to sell hype than to sell the actual
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Great event! What stood out for me is every founder I met was very deep in their field and simultaneously obsessively focused on the commercial side.
If that’s Lux’s secret formula: deep founders obsessed about how to build real businesses… it’s working. I felt like I fit in.
Incredible few days with Lux portfolio founders and CEOs.
Weather, scenery etc were beautiful.
But most beautiful was seeing relationships built and cultivated over decades come to life. Founders sharing secrets, advising each other, promising intros to customers/investors,
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The best buyers in the business, the very top VCs, have taste. The know what they like. They might use phrases like "prepared mind", but it really means they know what they'd like to add to their portfolio while also being open to something unique. 🖼️
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@adamhjk
When “hey” consistently means “hey, I need something, but I won’t tell you until you acknowledge me” then it does become stress inducing to get “hey” a lot. If “hey” means “hey, just checking in to connect with you as a human and see how you’re doing” then “hey” is great.
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Can we start the campaign for an age limit for Presidents now? Let’s not have this happen again. 70 seems like the max.
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Sharing my thoughts on the challenges with humanoid robots.
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”Dara O'Rourke, a senior principal scientist on Amazon's sustainability team, said the company built a ‘comprehensive’ carbon accounting system that helps it pull data from its various businesses.”
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Super insightful comments by
@karpathy
on
@elonmusk
's leadership style. This is a must watch. There's a lot of gold to unpack here.
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@CliffordManess
@JonErlichman
For 2018, we had just over 100,000 robots helping us worldwide. Hoping by 2040 we have an Alexa-enabled Star Trek replicator perfected.
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@kocienda
@mikekarnj
Reminds me of Amazon’s Bias for Action Leadership Principle: “Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.”
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When are we going to realize we need nuclear reactor-powered CO2 sequestration plants? Seems inevitable. It’ll be expensive, but not as expensive as societal collapse.
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This is also why we call it a pitch. You're selling something. You have to pique their interest. You have to have something unique that gets the buyer interested. Be fresh, be interesting, be credible, be valuable.
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ChatGPT/Bard seems like the closest thing I’ve seen to Netscape/Internet Explorer since Netscape/IE. The rate of innovation in web browsing in those 3 to 4 years was mind blowing. We’re what 8 or 9 weeks from when ChatGPT 4 came out? 🤯 Buckle up.
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So next time you're pitching, think hard about why someone with discerning taste would want to buy a part of your company? Be authentic. No one wants to buy fake.
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As hard as it was to jump from something as cool as leading Robotics for Amazon... all my instincts told me Scale AI was a truly unique opportunity. Thrilled to have Tiger Global's backing as we continue to build the foundation for AI everywhere.
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In my opinion, hands down the best accelerator out there. Maybe the most exclusive too. Better founder-friendly terms as well. Plus Neo is amazing to have on your cap table.
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@rwcorty
@KEBRhoades
And if only they had a large pool of people who could use extra pay living in close proximity to these jobs.
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@jbryanporter
Wow, what facility was that? That's an older generation of Amazon's robotic technology. The current/next generation is showcased here.
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The work Dara and his colleagues have done here is incredible. The fine-grained carbon data allows us to convert carbon usage insight to action at scale all across Amazon. There’s nothing more fun than working with brilliant peers to tackle such a hard and important problem.
”Dara O'Rourke, a senior principal scientist on Amazon's sustainability team, said the company built a ‘comprehensive’ carbon accounting system that helps it pull data from its various businesses.”
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What not everyone knows is both
@fubini
and Art Clarke (XYZ) are part of the Tellme mafia, along with
@Alfred_Lin
(Sequoia)
@davidweiden
(Khosla)
@ramyadeeb
(1984vc)
@CharlesMoldow
(Foundation Capital), the Partovi brothers (
@apartovi
@hadip
Neo),
@emilmichael
,
@giannandrea
.
Ross Fubini's XYZ Venture Capital has backed Anduril and 15 other Palantir alumni startups.
Now with $325 million in new funds and partners Camille Ricketts and Art Clarke of Notion and Apple joining, the firm is branching out.
My latest in
@Forbes
:
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@mark_riedl
Most of these big tech companies are deeply dependent on high-margin ad sales. Ad budgets are usually the first budgets that get trimmed in a downturn, which hits big tech (less Apple) first. Have to cut expenses quickly to stabilize earnings until ad spending recovers.
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Key panel from our new robot. We believe if we’re building something human-capable without being a humanoid, we need something humans will love and trust.
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@can
Globally, the baggage mishandling rate is 7.6/1,000 passengers. Those just aren’t great odds.
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Reading a lot on Radical Candor. Feels like Radical Candor runs the risk of absolving individuals of the responsibility for introspection by shifting responsibility to peers to do the work of exposing your flaws. Feels like empathic individuals might opt out of that culture?
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Amazing technology coming out of an incredible team. Super excited about the innovations in Robotics at Amazon right now.
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Continuing my series on the path to human-capable robots, today I've stepped back a little bit to share my thoughts on how to build or identify really great robotics startups.
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And recognize that just because a lot of people might not be looking for what you're selling (a fraction of your company), that doesn't mean no one is interested. You may just have to keep pitching until you find that right buyer.
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Told my daughter that my biology professor was now going to be a Cabinet member! She replied “I hope you didn’t sleep through his classes!” Oops! Congrats Prof Lander!
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To understand this, we need to flip our perspective a bit. Think of VCs not as investors, but as buyers. Instead of buying clothing, or homes, or luxury goods, or classic cars, investors are buying a portion of a company. 💎
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@vikushavas
The cities I’ve experienced that truly felt different (all for different reasons)… Nashville (the music), Prague (the architecture), Monaco (the money), Shanghai (the scale and newness of everything).
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Tonight’s dilemma... finish writing our parent statements for our daughter’s private school applications... or mess around with trying to get GPT-3 to do it for me?
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In the past couple of weeks, I've posted 3 long-form articles covering:
1) The Problems with Humanoid Robots
2) The Path to Human-Capable Robots
3) The Path to Great AI for Human-Capable Robots
If you're interested in this space or know people who are, please share. I try to go
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If you haven’t been rejected because a VC thought your valuation was too high, your valuation was probably too low!
Rejection is part of the process. Your baby is going to be called ugly.
Focus on finding investors who believe in your vision, not persuading skeptics.
Last year a VC begged to meet with us
When we sent over our numbers, they concluded that our MRR was "almost meaningless"
Then they ended the email by trying to invest at half our valuation
We did not take their money
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I see various threads where founders suggest the right thing is to be dismissive or even rude to potential investors. This doesn't make sense in the framework below. Being rude to potential buyers just turns off a potential buyer. Being unavailable or exclusive is different.
At Cobot, we've raised $130M in the past 9 months in one of the tightest fundraising climates we've seen. And we've raised from the top firms...
@neo
@khoslaventures
@sequoia
@generalcatalyst
@lux
. My perspective on VCs has changed. 🧵
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If you're going to build a new business and a new product, build something that gets better as AI improves.
This is something I learned working for Bezos, build your business around the things that won't change.
That's what we did... 3/N
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@DavidSacks
@elonmusk
Elon vs Spam Bots: round 1 to the spam bots, “there are just too many!”
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So critical to live and breathe your data with a tool like Scale Nucleus. Great insights here and appreciative of being included.
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Do your research and try to understand what they like to buy and why? Be willing to customize your pitch or adjust the deal to get the buyer you want. Tell them why you'd be excited for them to own a part of your company.
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@AdamMGrant
One of the most helpful pieces of advice I ever received is that well-intentioned feedback is a gift, but you get to decide if you accept it.
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If you want to read more about how AI impacts the future, I highly recommend "The Age of AI and Our Human Future" by
@henrykisssinger
@ericschmidt
and Dan Huttenlocher. 15/15
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@ItzikBasman
@espinsegall
Sometimes buying influence is like buying insurance. Maybe you never need it. But when you do, it’s good to have. Justice is hard to come by when one party bought influence/insurance/assurance already.
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Big things happening at Scale. Data-labeling is just the tip of the ice berg.
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We’re continuing to expand our robotics work!
A new Amazon innovation hub that will create 200 new tech and advanced manufacturing jobs is coming to Westborough, Mass.
@BostonGlobe
has more details here.
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In 1981 Steve Jobs said “I want to put a ding in the universe.” In 2005 Steve Jobs also said “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.” Be aware, when you attempt to make a ding in the universe, sometimes the universe will try to ding you back.
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“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Where are you now Archimedes... we could use your help with a boat.
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