Starship is trying to get launch cost down to $10 per kilogram to low earth orbit. At that cost it is not clear to me that cables are better except for short distance point to point backbones. One other issue with cables is regulation or monopoly.
The Falcon launch business is profitable on its own, which may be what GP meant. Once you include the ~$3 billion in Starship yearly R&D the space segment goes into the red.
The word ‘crank’ is a dismissive insult. Wolfram is definitely eccentric, probably hard to work with, but also undoubtedly smart. What good does it do to dismiss him? He’s doing nothing wrong spending his own money the way he wants to. And who knows something will come out of this. Similar to GP I’d like to see more of this.
There does appear to be a limited walk back for dual intent visa holders (H1B and L1)
“A spokesperson for US Citizenship and Immigration Services, however, told Semafor that H1-B visa holders and high-skilled workers might not be affected in the near term.”
Speaking of zoned SSDs (ZNS or FDP), are any of these available today without having to ‘call sales’? I wanted to experiment with this maybe 2 years back and there was nothing.
Yes they are crowded. There are engineering solutions to that, including formation flying based on absolute positioning and space tethers. It is a great time to be an engineer.
You are creating 20 other engineering problems but not 20 other physics problems. You cannot put those in the same bucket.
It remains to be seen how efficiently those engineering problems can be solved, but none of the commentators here have any real insight about that (myself included). My money is on the ingenuity of the engineers that are working these problems.
The plan is to launch a constellation of smaller AI sats not a monolithic large data center. The calculations I have seen actually have a smaller radiator area than solar panels. Scott Manley’s has a video on this where he goes into some numbers.
I don’t think people are confused between the two. What’s happening is that drive by objections have no real way to assess viability. That calculation you ask for has line items in it that greatly depend on engineering optimizations that, unless you work in the field, are hard to estimate accurately.
The problem putting them in space solves is the approx 5X more solar energy without needing batteries for day and night cycles, along with some smaller wins due to less structural support needed due to microgravity.
If you mean whether he’s putting his money where his mouth is, he is doing that by risking the future of the company that is his biggest asset on it. It may not be exactly 3 years. But is will very likely happen.
The always on orbit exists and is called a dawn-dusk Sun synchronous orbit. It is an orbit that is always above the terminator (line between night and day) where it can face the Sun 100% of the time.
This orbit has to rotate about a degree every day to follow the terminator as the earth orbits the Sun. It uses the equatorial bulge of the earth to achieve that rotation without have to spend rocket fuel. It is really quite interesting.
So far only Nasdaq has changed its rules and will allow fast entry in 15 trading days. S&P has not changed its rules, not yet at least. Total indexed capital of Nasdaq is 1.4T vs 16T in the S&P500. Stated reason for fast tracking is that the indices are supposed to be a broad representation of the market, and leaving a 2T company out would be a significant tracking error.
I do agree that the optics of this aren’t great, and it’s rather easy to be cynical about motives.
I don’t think your argument holds, or at least, there is missing data. We have a different administration now, and I suspect it significantly reduced the number takedown requests, maybe by an order of magnitude. I would expect that the remaining requests are for unambiguous legal issues and therefore have a higher rate of granting them.
What exactly has Elon done to limit your freedom? For me, Elon has increased my freedom because I can read about certain viewpoints that were previously censored on Twitter.
> So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. Really not sure how to solve it. It is good when people get excited about a language. It just can be very annoying for everyone else sometimes.
This rings very true, and I've actually disadvantaged myself somewhat here. I was involved in projects that made very dubious decisions to rewrite large systems in Rust. This caused me to actively stay away from the language, and stick to C++, investing lots of time in overcoming its shortcomings.
Now years later, I started with Rust in a new project. And I must say, I like the language, I really like the tools, and I like the ecosystem. On some dimension I wish I would have done this sooner (but on the other hand, I think I have a better justification of "why Rust" now).
I have not been proclaiming scary good every week for the last 10 years. In fact, I have cancelled my subscription at least two times, once on v13 and once on v14, with the reason ‘not good enough yet.’ I am telling you that for me personally it has crossed a threshold very recently.
Starship is trying to get launch cost down to $10 per kilogram to low earth orbit. At that cost it is not clear to me that cables are better except for short distance point to point backbones. One other issue with cables is regulation or monopoly.