X's Moonshot for Circularity | Hacker News Reader

X's Moonshot for Circularity

x.company

52 pointssurprisetalk31 comments

For those as confused as I was, this is not another one of Elon's X companies. Appears to be funded by Alphabet.

> x.com

> x.company

Took me a solid 90 seconds.

Alphabet's X has been around for quite a while, too. I don't know how they let him get away with that, unless "X" is perhaps too generic to trademark.

Wasn't it named as Moonshot Factory? I get a sense that at some point it was part of Google itself.

Getting separated from Google is what effectively killed it.

At Google, these efforts had unlimited funding without much oversight.

At Alphabet, it's basically like running a VC funded startup.

>I don't know how they let him get away with that,

Because Elon's X.com predates Alphabet's X by 16 years...

The domain name? Or a trademark?

X.com was a bank funded by (amongst others) Musk in 1999. They later merged with Confinity to found PayPal.

Ok, but don’t you lose the trademark if you don’t actively use it?

Not necessarily. It's generally a challenge that causes you to lose it. But 'X' is so generic, it's arguable that it might not even be eligible for trademark protection.

Owning the domain name isn't a singularly valid way to assert trademark control; it has to be used. Elon had an "X" company way back when, but it became Paypal; they didn't really use the X name in a public fashion for very long at all.

The reason is probably more-so that Google's "X" isn't apparently a legal entity; its a division within Google. So, it doesn't have consumer sentiment around it, its not a product name they're selling, its not a registered entity, etc. In other words: "Skunkworks" as a term originated from a division at Lockheed, now its a term many companies use, oftentimes in legal & public ways, but Lockheed really doesn't have grounds to stop them from doing so.

Funny you should pick “Skunkworks”. The way that Lockheed Martin uses it, “Skunk Works”, is trademarked and all rights reserved. Even when Lockheed talks about it on their website[0] they put the all rights reserved symbol by it. They go to court to try and protect it - as was the case in Australia, which they lost.

[0] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-are...

Fair! I hadn't known they'd trademarked it and at least tried to enforce it.

I idly wondered if Google owned the "alphabet" of .company names: a.company, b.company, etc. But it appears not.

It almost certainly is.

Who will stop Elon Musk? Google? Haha.. That is laughable. Musk is bigger than anything America has ever seen.

A stock market crash? Much of his wealth and (pre-government) career is about stock pumping.

My hint was that the about page linked to their "Twitter"

That and the fact that the logo isn't the least effort Fivr job ever.

It is a _much_ better logo, which is perhaps surprising given that it's a skunkworks rather than a major social media network. Possibly Musk just fired all Twitter's designers before getting around to the rebrand.

Note for anyone who was initially confused, as I was: This is the Alphabet subsidiary that does blue-sky R&D, not the company formerly known as Twitter.

And to be clear, by bluesky R&D you’re not referring to Bluesky, the Twitter/X alternative, are you?

Bluesky is itself presumably called that because it was _Twitter's_ skunkworks project back in the day.

Also, fun fact: the Bluesky CEO's name means "blue sky" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Graber#Early_life), _but_ she was only hired as CEO a couple years after the project started, so it definitely wasn't named after her. That's some serious nominative determinism; it's a close second on this one: https://news.sky.com/story/shoe-zone-announces-terry-boot-as...

New google moonshot to do "molecular recycling", but their first pilots are for using ML and sensors to better sort waste streams.

This is useful tech, but the solution to most waste is to burn it for power with great emission controls.

If we're eventually going to close the carbon cycle, it would be extremely stupid to go e.g. polyethylene -> CO2 capture from flue gas -> ethylene synthesis with H2 -> polyethylene.

Sorting out the plastic and doing stuff like anaerobic thermochemical conversion is way more efficient. No need to get the oxygen involved.

Is pyrolysis a good option?

We already have companies using ML for recycling https://ampsortation.com/en-us and this includes real-time plastics identification, but they don't do it to the classification level this Google subsidiary claims.

Burning isn't viable atm for many waste streams due to costs, but eventually we'll be forced into it.

Long before then, we'll have an i18n set of industry standards and enforcement mandating the equivalent of a UV-barcode that precisely identifies all plastics.

This tech is merely a stop-gap, but a necessary one.

(Formerly Google X) X has been a thing since 2010…it’s where Waymo started before “graduating”.

Not to be confused with Google X, the short-lived Google Labs experimental UI clone of the OS X dock https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Google_X

These are the experts that make money disappear.

What a joke

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