The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX is finite. There are only so many nation-states and large corporations that want to launch payloads into orbit.
And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.
So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.
All markets are finite. But you're thinking too finitely -- remember that there was a proposal to use Starship (BFS?) as a point-to-point method of people transport too (London to Sydney in under 50 minutes I seem to remember).
You also have other services: Starlink is an obvious one they're pursuing now, but there's many other things that they could branch into with no effective competition right now, from harvesting resources such as Helium-3 to Rare Earths (ironic name), to... (thinks for several minutes) banishing people to the Phantom Zone?
But you get what I mean, it's not just about rockets, it's about the things cheap and reliable rocketry enables.
Musk is a genius creating really exciting ideas. No doubt about that.
But as they say,"the devil is in the details"
- Can Starship transport people from London to Sydney safely economically, compared to Boom, which is working on a supersonic passenger aircraft ?
-Why can the boring machine dig tunnel at much lower cost than it's competitors? Maybe it's because the everyone else tries to dig tunnels for trains, which have a much larger diameter than Musk's boring machine, which only fits his "Teslas at a tunnel" concept?
And it might be a good idea. Worth a try. But be honest about it.
-Sure, data centers in space probably have some great uses, and I'm happy he's trying, but will they ever be more economical than deploying servers on the ocean? On countries with very cool climate?, powered by new energy technologies?
I'm not sure I understand. From a quick google search it seems like they are designing and manufacturing it themselves (with a few partners). Am I missing something, or is your information out of date?
The industrial bases of entire nations military aviation have been taxed for years/decades to produce supersonic capable engines simply for high maintenance fighters, now do that for affordable maintenance low headcount passenger jets. I'm not going to say impossible, but it will take more than VC money and anonymous 'partners' to convince me its likely.
For it to have a chance the US gov. needs to do IP transfer and pair them with NASA for test as they did with SpaceX, more realistically simply twist Pratt&Whitneys arm a bit...
Boom is planning to operate at Mach 1.7 (approx. twice that of current aircraft) with a range of about 4250 nautical miles (4900 miles, 7900 km). Over land they're only going to fly at Mach 1.3 to reduce sonic boom effects.
That's not enough range to do London - Sydney, it's not enough to do Los Angeles to Sydney either, or Los Angeles to Tokyo, it's basically a replacement for trans-Atlantic flights only because even US cross-continental Mach 1.3 is only about 50% faster than a 737 (3h vs. 5h)... It's pretty much geared to the prestige market only.
Under an hour to anywhere on the planet, meanwhile, is absolutely someone would be a premium for -- and they'll do it for most/all long haul flights if it was available.
Starship isn't a proven manned transport vessel yet. And Boom was founded in 2014.
If I was to hazard a guess, the BFS concept is 2035 at the earliest, most likely 2040 -- and it'll be at a much smaller scale than previously advertised.
Which hasn't yet been proven to be either technically or economically viable, even on paper. It's a pipe dream.
The cynical viewpoint is that this is Elon capitalizing on current datacenter hype to inflate SpaceX's valuation based on theoretically overcoming tremendous amounts of hard physics problems, over the next 5-10 years. As he did with FSD, Boring Company / Hyperloop, Twitter, etc.
Neither was reuse of rockets and I remember the ex-boss of Arianespace laughing at those bozos of SpaceX who try to pretend that they are a serious space business.
Musk made some bad bets, but also some good ones (Falcon rockets, Starlink) and some at least promising ones (Starship, Neuralink). And Twitter bought him enormous political influence - I wouldn't consider this a failure either, from the realistically-cynical point of view. That cannot be measured by revenue alone.
I think the jury is still out on the impact of all the other social networks.
If the connection between fast falling birthrates and smartphone addiction is proven, the total global loss of life (in this case, never born life) due to the products that many of us here helped craft into perfection may rival that of Mongol expansion under Genghis Khan, and Twitter/X is hardly the worst offender in that group. Even Twitter's impact on the balance of left/right politics in the world is relatively transient and small when judged against this horrible development whose aftereffect will stalk the world for a century.
Yes, it wasn't an actual intent of people like Zuckerberg, but as far as catastrophic failures of civilizations go, they don't have to be intended.
Then there is the role of Starlink terminals in an actual war.
The losses caused to the Russians by drones using Starlink for connection are pretty painful, and when SpaceX switched off non-whitelisted terminals in the theatre of war, the Russian army was thrown into disarray due to sudden failures of communication between their units. AFAIK they haven't yet fully overcome that problem.
The Russians certainly wish to have something like Starlink right now, in 2026.
In the first weeks of the war, Russia targeted communications infrastructure in Ukraine. They performed cyberattacks against Viasat, rendering thousands of satellite modems unusable. They performed destructive cyberattacks against Ukraine government and telecommunications targets. Cell towers and fibre optic lines were targeted, as well as electricity infrastructure. And they started aggressively jamming wireless communications. Much of this was disastrously effective.
Starlink was one of the only reliable ways Ukraine had for remote military communications, without which Ukraine would have not been able to defend its territory nearly as effectively. Though it's impossible to know, it's plausible that Ukraine might not exist today but for Starlink.
Personally, I don't think so, but let us at least try to be consistent.
"If an unpopular person's corporation C succeeded at activity X, it is the success of the regular employees and everyone but him, but if his another corporation D failed at activity Y, it is solely his responsibility and shame (if not a proof of outright fraud)" is a classical emotionally charged double standard.
Do you think there's a single Apple fanboy who thinks that Steve Jobs ever had any novel insight in programming, or had any novel insight in circuit design?
Now, with that answer in mind, allow me to contend that there isn't a single Elon fanboy who thinks that Elon is personally inventing automotive and rocketry technologies out of whole cloth.
What both men did well is identify promising unconventional technology pathways and steer capital investment towards them. Jobs had a knack for understanding computers as a consumer product, and for communicating the value of new products. Musk has a knack for understanding the limits of physical engineering, and the wealth (and appetite for risk) to spam the right "build" buttons endlessly.
Beyond a narrow range of remarkable competencies, neither are particularly interesting persons. I wouldn’t look to either of them for takes on sociology, politics, biological sciences, philosophy or chord progressions.
Do they, really? Because putting data centers in space would mean multiplying the infrastructure cost by a few orders of magnitude, while being far, far away from cheap energy - photovoltaics would work, certainly, but it will take a lot of it, and it's not like you can just slap panels on the roof - easy cooling, and people.
It's a ridiculous idea, and I don't believe it's what they are really pursuing.
I still have no idea how that would work. Imagine launching an entire data center building into space, and then imagine also launching a solar array to power it, and then also launching a gigantic radiator to cool it... and the radiator is full of some kind of liquid that can never leak even though it's in a vacuum.
Like, sure, but also, that seems like a lot of work, a lot of extra cost, and a lot of risk, all just to avoid building it in Kansas.
It was also hard for many people to imagine a reusable booster, a belly flopping Starship, catching the largest booster ever built with “chopsticks”, a 10,000 satellite constellation, etc.
Orbital compute is technically very feasible. We’re not talking about a datacenter-sized structure, but a lot of rack-sized satellites connected by laser links. SpaceX has gotten pretty good at building, launching, and managing large constellations.
Economically it obviously it has challenges, but there are some advantages (6x solar production, free real estate, less regulation, arguably simpler cooling) to balance the extra costs (launch, radiators, lack of access for maintenance, limited lifespan, etc).
>It was also hard for many people to imagine a reusable booster, a belly flopping Starship, catching the largest booster ever built with “chopsticks”, a 10,000 satellite constellation, etc.
I don't actually think this would be hard to imagine. I've been a huge fan of Space X since it's launch exactly because these types of things do seem feasible because they save so much of money if they are achievable.
A moon base with a secondary launch site, yes. Mining asteroids for precious metals, definitely. I'm not some Luddite.
My only point here is that you can build a data center on the ground trivially easily. Any data center that can exist in space could much more easily exist on the ground... where you can update it and fix things that go wrong. The only issue is politics. I'm entirely happy to be wrong here. If someone can explain the thesis, I'd be happy to get on board.
Solar power is already one of the cheaper (and cleaner!) forms of power generation. In dawn dusk sun synchronous orbits where satellites are always fully illuminated the panels will produce around 6 times as much electricity as those on the ground. And you don't need batteries to operate 24/7 (and as a bonus, the satellites will follow the work day demand curve through the day, reducing latency, at least for some people).
A fully reusable Starship will drastically change the economics of both initial launch as well as maintenance. I expect it will become more feasible to send vehicles to refuel/repair/replace components and keep satellites flying longer. Especially for orbital compute where there will be relatively few dense orbital planes. SpaceX showed modular servers in their video https://youtu.be/k3Un1TizSNg?si=14-bjxXkiyM6cxpg&t=36
First off, let’s not pretend rocket launch dependent solar is “cleaner.” Be reasonable. Solar + saline batteries is pretty damn clean.
Yes, I watched the video. It’s talking about solar and radiators. I agree, if we can solve solar and radiators, it’s feasible tech.
I’m still not entirely sure it’ll be competitive with solar data centers on the ground. I realize I’m no expert, but it just seems like a bizarre way to do computing.
Everything I like about Space X is about doing things that you can't do on earth, because you can't do them on earth feasibly.
> Everything I like about Space X is about doing things that you can't do on earth, because you can't do them on earth feasibly.
I agree those kinds of things are more exciting, but the other angle is SpaceX needs an excuse to do lots of Starship launches, just like Starlink has done for Falcon 9. If orbital compute can at a minimum be profitable enough to pay for the launches it will help bring the cost of Starship down and the reliability up, allowing SpaceX to do more with Starship.
(Of course if orbital compute merely breaks even then maybe the current valuation isn’t justified)
> catching the largest booster ever built with “chopsticks”
I've heard this often. It's not what happens. More correct to say that engineers (not Musk) got a booster to land in a pre-specified spot. The "chopsticks" aren't waving around to catch anything flying by. The booster comes to them.
LMAO, ok, how about “precisely landing the largest flying structure ever built such that it could be grabbed by two mechanical arms attached to the launch pad”?
That will make it clear it’s not actually a giant Mechazilla robot reaching out to grab the booster using literal chopsticks where ever it happens to come down.
You should actually stop and try to imagine it, or failing that, read some of the proposals from companies who want to do it.
None involve launching buildings.
You can look at their models for comparisons with Kansas. There is literature and papers you can read about this. Some go back decades if you include space power transmission, which are related.
That's the cool part, scoofy. You don't need to understand how it will work, you don't need to take any physics classes, round up enough investors, seek out and explain the basic ideas with the people who will make it happen, or invent anything new. Nor do you need to understand political sciences, taxation, jurisdictions, supply chains, or anything else needed to understand the question behind the Data Centers in Space solution.
You aren't even being roped into it with taxes, nor do you have to buy a single share. Other than willingly reading about it on whichever news sources you choose, your observed life will not change a single bit.
You can choose to seek out that info, or you can remain blissfully ignorant. But please don't join the online cacophony of people polluting the threads thinking everyone wants to understand just how ignorant they are.
I get it, I really do. It's a hard task and you don't understand it. But WHY do you feel the need to share that you don't understand? Do you think it makes you look smarter? Do you feel like you fit in more now? If you seek to understand, why aren't you asking questions??
>You aren't even being roped into it with taxes, nor do you have to buy a single share.
Because of the eventual index inclusions, and insane market cap, this affects nearly everyone with a retirement account. Unless you aren't tracking big indexes for some reason.
And some of our compute will run in space, the point is that it's all happening in the background. Most people have no idea how their retirement accounts work beyond knowing it's a bunch of companies pooled together. You don't need to understand how stocks get traded through Alternative Trading Systems, how the companies can decide to take profits vs paying out dividends, etc. A lot of the information is freely available, but you don't need to understand it or take any action.
It's much more likely SpaceX will continue building more ground data centers and using their sat relays to make global connection faster than ground connections can allow.
Yes but the statement is in fact a milestone to meet in order to vest Class B stock options, specifically SPCX needs to put 100 terawatts of compute [1] in outer space and beam it back to somewhere, my guess is Earth.
There's even more rewards for putting a million people on Mars and reaching a market cap of 7.5T by a certain date. Oh yeah he has to stay employed too.
From the SEC Form 3 filed June 12th:
1) This Form 3 does not include 1,302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock issued to and held of record by the Reporting Person, which may be voted by the Reporting Person, and the vesting of which is subject to the satisfaction of certain performance and other conditions. 1,000,000,000 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 15 equal tranches ranging from $500 billion to $7.5 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("SpaceX CEO Award"). 302,072,285 shares of restricted Class B Common Stock vest upon (i) the Issuer's achievement of specified market capitalization milestones across 12 equal tranches ranging from $1.065 trillion to $6.565 trillion, with each milestone reflecting $500 billion in additional valuation, and (ii) the Issuer's completion of non-Earth-based data centers capable of delivering 100 terawatts of compute per year, in each case, subject to the Reporting Person's continued employment ("AI CEO Award")
The way people just casually use that word again now is so sad. And I don't even mean that in an "I'm offended" way, but more of "I'm embarrassed by the way you're trying to be offensive" way.
> I'm embarrassed by the way you're trying to be offensive
Oooor, try this one on for size:
What if they're not out to cause offense and the malice you impute is just an illusion under which you yourself are laboring alone? What if it was a well understood and not particularly offensive vernacular usage from before people decided they ought to spend their time being offended on behalf of hypothetical listeners?
Why use a word that has some offensive quality to it when other words would be just as effective in communicating whatever you're trying to communicate? You're actively making a decision that you know will cause some level of offense. So the only conclusion I can make is that some level of offense is intended.
In 2004 I used to volunteer as a tutor at an afterschool center in a low income housing project. One day a middle schooler was complaining about how much homework they had and I ribbed them a little, "oh, poor baby."
They were stung. "I'm not poor!" I felt so bad about it that it's stuck with me all these years. Does that mean because I've seen first hand how hurtful it can be that I should chide people whenever they use the P word?
"Chide" is not the word I would use because there is a very obvious difference between the offensiveness of "poor" and "retard", you obviously know that. But yes, if I heard another volunteer at a program for low income kids use "poor" in that offhanded context and I saw the pain it caused in those kids, I think it's reasonable to take that volunteer aside and say "be careful using terminology like 'poor' as it can be surprisingly hurtful to kids that are self-conscious about that". You can do that sort of thing in an informative and compassionate way without being "chiding".
And that analogy isn't even accurate because I'm not the one informing you that the word can be hurtful. You're using it already knowing that. So a better question is did you continue to say "oh, poor baby" to the kids who were hurt by your original comment?
Why would you think I'd continue to say it after realizing I'd inadvertently hurt the kid's feelings? You are making assumptions of ill will from me in the anecdote I shared just like you are making assumptions about the OP intending offense because you didn't like their word choice.
>Why would you think I'd continue to say it after realizing I'd inadvertently hurt the kid's feelings?
I don't think you would continue using it, that was the point I was making and it sounds like you now agree with me that we shouldn't be knowingly offensive.
And my point is that I went out of my way not to use it any more in that circumstance.
Yet in the years since, I still talk about poor decisionmaking, poor luck, poor performance, and poor word choice. Because it would be poor logic to go through life auditing everything I say just in case a middle schooler with a somewhat poor vocabulary might mistake my meaning.
Which brings me right back to "there is a very obvious difference between the offensiveness of 'poor' and 'retard', you obviously know that."
"Poor" has non-offensive uses so you can continue to use it in other ways. You don't need to advocate for the non-offensive uses of a slur. You know regardless of the context, some people will be offended by its use.
Mercy me, a slur? Retarded also has a non-offensive meaning. It just means slowed.
In fact, while I wasn't around at the time I'd wager that "mentally retarded" came into an official usage specifically because it was a clinical, sterile, bloodless, and utterly anodyne descriptive term. Moron, imbecile, and idiot all were once clinical terms. And then people throw them back and forth at each other to call each other stupid, they gained an offensive connotation and new terms were needed.
In 20 years will you find it absurd if people say that "differently abled" is a slur? Will you say "this is nuts, we literally came up with that term to avoid offense?" I will!
I just showed this to a Black person and they said it was regarded, whatever that means.
More seriously. Is "moronic" okay? It's just an ever so slightly more archaiac way to say retarded. The meaning, the negative connotation, the level of offense—it's synonymous and analogous across the board in its time.
Is it okay because "nobody means it like that, they're just using it as a synonym for stupid?" If so, congratulations, you now understand the other side of the argument better than when you started.
Yes, I think there is an intention to cause or risk offense. On the other end, I think there is an intention to be offended and failure to mitigate.
It is a fairly common conflict that arises as a flashpoint in many areas. Different social and legal theories come up with radically different standards.
If someone has a cold, should they not go shopping out of caution for others? If someone is immune compromised, is it their responsibility to take precautions in a store?
oh, no it's exactly as jimmy valmer puts it, there is nothing against mentally disabled people, it is just it's something so stupid that one can't even decide were to start to describe all the points in which is stupid, so stupid doesn't possibly cut it
Bringing back and pinning the word to not derail the discussion of "mental illness", "mental handicap", "slow learner", etc or its use as an offensive?
I think the main issue is that no matter which word/phrase is used, some people will use it as a slur, and changing it so often causes more issues than it solves.
For what it’s worth, I’m not trying to be offensive or edgy when I say that word with friends. “The grass is green and that thing (random topic) is retarded.”
You know that many people are offended by that word and yet you use it anyway when other words would get the exact same message across without the offense. The only reasons to use that specific word are either the desire to cause offense or to revel in the possibility of causing offense.
If someone refers to themselves by a particular slur, that does not grant you any social leniency to call them that too. Consider that exact situation with any other particular slur.
I have not called musk redarded, i have called the idea retarded.
Same as master branch or master/slave communication idiocy. People that get this hung up really have too much free time on their hand, or have too much to gain in discussing language instead of discussing the actual problem.
For example: see how many commenters here are debating words instead of debating the validity of yet another hype-inducing value-pumping statement for clueless investors and fanboys.
On local fintech radio the week it was first announced they spent 3-4 days discussing the financial implication, then just one discussing the feasibility. Guess we're lucky we got one whole day of engineering discussing things for a change
Musk using a slur about himself doesn't grant permission for others to use it. Would monegator have used the n-word if Musk had used it to describe himself? Hopefully not. And let's be honest with each other: Musk says things like this for shock value, because it's not an acceptable word.
Space is an abysmal environment for running compute. It offers no real advantages over doing the same thing on Earth, and it's more expensive, too! Energy is far cheaper and more abundant here than in space. And get ready to figure out things like:
- Heat dissipation
- Radiation shielding
- Either the most complex in-space construction ever undertaken, or the most complex distributed computing problem ever undertaken (no, Starlink satellites aren't good enough, we're orders of magnitude away from replicating the speed and reliability of connections within a single room)
- Zero flexibility, zero repairability, zero upgradability. Either it's working, or you make it burn up in the atmosphere with no in-between. Add on that the rationality of sending mountains of precision-manufactured tech containing many uncommon metals only for them to be completely lost. This makes the pricing even worse, in addition to
- Already high costs for designing, building and launching all that in addition to all the extra weight overhead you're taking in components that don't do computation, when the alternative is building a glorified warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
It just doesn't make any sense. It's a project tied up in hype and created solely so spaceflight can be hastily duct taped to the AI investment hysteria. Ask yourself why no one brought this up before or outside the context of AI, despite the lowering of space launch prices and data centers both existing before any of it.
> why no one brought this up before or outside the context of AI
AI compute is different (slightly higher latency is fine for inference, and there's no issue for training), and there has never been so much backlash against data centers or other infrastructure buildout. If an increasingly-non-minority of politicians get their way it will in fact be cheaper and faster to get some servers shipped to space than it will be to get the permits and build it out here on earth.
Also, most Datacenter maintenance is just dealing with the problems you see with space- power and cooling. Solar is 5x better in space and a lot more consistent. Here on land they're shutting down nuclear and imposing so many new regulations on gas and coal (and now on solar and wind) that there aren't many grids that can support growth at the scale that's being requested.
Nobody is claiming that all compute is going to space, which is what you seem to think you're arguing against. There's high-dollar demand for it right now, so if we want to be multi-planetary it's the perfect time to start tackling the "compute in space" problem that needs to be solved. Or you need to prove to future people that "All compute can be forever located on Earth" which seems a lot harder sell.
But it'll have to start with Sinophobia so nobody wants to touch it. LEO objects are just such a non-issue that you'd have to really be grasping at straws (though the "Data centers will consumes earth's water" people can probably fall for it)
Assume reusable spaceflight eventually brings launch cost close to the cost of fuel. This is close to happening.
The overhead of building out grid and power infrastructure on land would then exceed the installation speed and cost relative to space based deployments.
Also assume the compute that does make it to space has a short shelf life anyways so lack of ability to repair is a non issue. As we scale manufacturing on land this will increasingly be the case.
China has already run experiments and served models from space, so we know the heat dissipation equation is solvable.
Finally you’d arrive at a similar model that’s already proven successful with Starlink but applied to serving inference.
The key question is speed to scale new deployments to meet demand. If the markets demand is near infinite, they will choose to fund space based deployments over slower land deployments.
That makes no sense to me. You've cited one overhead for building on land but just didn't bring up the billions of overheads for deploying satellites. The associated costs of launching this stuff into space blows the price of boring old power grid infrastructure out of the water, even with launch prices assumed to be the cheapest they can be. For instance, the extreme additional costs of equipping each payload with their individual systems of power generation, flight computers, maneuvering systems, structural components, communications infrastructure, heat dissipation hardware, radiation shielding and so much more. You have to pay the price in weight and money for all of these inefficient small-scale components for each unit launch, compared to plugging in an additional server rack and taking advantage of the economies of scale in a centralized data center that already solve all of these things. And that's before you get into the costs of designing, mass-producing and operating these things, compared to the costs of running a normal data center. And that thing about reusability that I mentioned also cuts into the margins. Data centers can keep working even if their hardware is a generation out of date, they can sell off old equipment, they can repair individual components instead of throwing out a whole rack. This is literally setting your GPUs on fire. It's just one more thing that makes it even more expensive.
Heat dissipation in space is possible, of course, but every kilogram you spend on heat is a kilogram you could've spent on something else. When you're talking about boxes that generate so much heat, you're going to need to spend a lot on that ancillary hardware in each unit that, again, makes it even less rational.
Then the concerns about megastructures or distributed computing go unanswered - to my knowledge, we simply don't have the technology for either of these right now. Starlink isn't close to solving it - the bandwidth of a Starlink satellite is nothing in comparison to the bandwidth of a single current-gen server GPU connection.
Energy is not cheaper on earth. Solar in space gets 24/7 power at a 30%+ rate vs the surface. Radiative cooling is passive and cheaper because there are no HVACs or chillers and high temperature chips reduce the need. The ISS does this already. Radiation really isn't a big issue with ECC and redundancy and optical links are fine for batch training.
The only hard part making the math work is the launch cost. They need reusable and reliable starship economics. If they hit that goal, it will become cheaper for pre-training, which is 70%+ of the budget for the frontier models.
> It offers no real advantages over doing the same thing on Earth
Abundant solar energy, free real estate, less regulation, less backlash from NIMBYs, simpler (yes) cooling.
> Energy is far cheaper and more abundant here than in space.
Huh? The sun is obviously the most abundant source of energy in the solar system.
Satellites in a dusk dawn sun synchronous orbit can be fully illuminated 24/7, so they receive ~6x more solar energy than panels on earth. They also don’t need batteries to operate 24/7, and the panels don’t need glass to deflect hail.
> Heat dissipation
Yes, it will require large radiators. They’re mechanically simpler than terrestrial cooling though.
> Radiation shielding
It turns out generative AI is somewhat uniquely robust to occasional bit flips.
- Either the most complex in-space construction ever undertaken, or the most complex distributed computing problem ever undertaken (no, Starlink satellites aren't good enough, we're orders of magnitude away from replicating the speed and reliability of connections within a single room)
It won’t be a single structure, and will only be used for inference, so latency between satellites/racks doesn’t matter.
- Zero flexibility, zero repairability, zero upgradability. Either it's working, or you make it burn up in the atmosphere with no in-between. Add on that the rationality of sending mountains of precision-manufactured tech containing many uncommon metals only for them to be completely lost. This makes the pricing even worse, in addition to
- Already high costs for designing, building and launching all that in addition to all the extra weight overhead you're taking in components that don't do computation, when the alternative is building a glorified warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
I think people vastly underestimate how much a fully reusable Starship will change the economics of space operations.
Not only the initial launch costs, but things like refueling and repairing satellites becomes more economical. I wouldn’t be surprise if SpaceX sends Starships to refuel/maintain satellites to keep them in orbit longer. In fact, SpaceX’s own animation shows modular servers sliding in and out of the satellites.
Space-grade photovoltaics are >10x more expensive than ground based panels. Add some (Tesla) utility scale batteries and it can run 24/7. No need for expensive radiators or rocket launches. And personnel can upgrade the hardware every time there's a new generation of GPU's.
Putting datacenters in deserts around the equator is a much better idea than in Space. If you're really optimizing for cost that is. If you're optimizing for SpaceX meme-stock valuation the former wins
A global centralized internet provider? I mean, just that, might be a trillion dollar company. Let alone build out datacenters? Those are not easy or cheap here on earth. You can build out datacenters at scale with minimal need for power or cooling. I think the current rate for a data center (not gpu) is 120million. Datacenters are super hip now too.
Elon has always been a Department of Defense/intelligence asset larping as a capitalists. You can't exactly go to congress and get a quarter of the government budget to do globe spanning surveillance from space, or convince them to let you fund, build and maintain a platform for psyopping your own civilian population (x) So you go get your illegal projects funded through capital markets with through an asset like Elon. As soon as the department of defense started focusing on subterranean warfare and how its the future of wars Elon starts a tunneling company.
Elon is just Howard Hughes v2, they're running the same script again.
Is the TAM for airlines finite? They ship an indefinitely growing volume of cargo and people. Reusable rockets will be no different. Cargo into space, people in point-to-point orbital flights and to Mars.
Not a sound argument because you would have said the same thing before they did Starlink. "The TAM for launch services is finite. There are only so many countries/companies that want to launch satellites."
Musk would argue infinite. They literally want to create offworld colonies, with everything that entails. Obviously it's crazy, but it beats the pants off more adtech.
I'm bullish on DC in space with laser links. The whole sentient sun/railgun on the moon... hey, go big or go home. I would have probably just asked MBS for money on that one, and renamed the railgun "the line (of ketamine)".
It’s insane enough to consider undertaking the risk of a moon or mars colony. But doing so with him as the sole load bearing link in your supply chain? What if mars turns out to be woke and you’re fed into a wood chipper like USAID?
Last week a 13 year old video of ceo of Ariane Airspace got popular on twitter. When asked about spacex and reusable rockets he said: "there are only 25 satellites launched a year, every year, and that’s not going to change"
Currently a single Starlink launch is 25 satellites. And there are 100 such launches a year.
That doc is very useful and confidence inspiring in terms of being mainly about people and process, rather than about one single technical solution.
Relevant parts for those who have cool-downs at the top of mind:
> Across Homebrew’s history far more users have been protected by shipping zero-day fixes quickly than have been exposed to npm-style token-theft or crypto-mining attacks, so a global cooldown would be a net negative for most users’ security. The deeper reason Homebrew does not need a general cooldown is that, unlike language package managers, it already separates publishing from distribution: an upstream release does not reach users until it has passed human review, CI and checksum verification, which is the very review window that language-ecosystem cooldowns are trying to recreate.
[...]
> For ecosystems with a track record of fast-moving supply-side attacks, Homebrew applies a download cooldown: a freshly-published upstream version is not adopted immediately, giving the wider community time to detect and report a malicious release before Homebrew users are exposed. Cooldowns have been added for:
Bundler
RubyGems livecheck
npm and pip defaults
PyPI resource resolution
npm and PyPI in bump
In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity.
To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets.
To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.
Vite isn't a product. It's a tool. It will be succeeded if necessary. It happened to Webpack after Microsoft hired the creator, and the JS community pivoted hard. Bundlers and compilers in the JS world happen once a decade it appears.
I was at the hardware store this morning. I bought a hammer. It sure seemed like a product... with the whole "being displayed on store shelves" and "available for purchase" thing.
There were several different hammers there, bearing different branding and having different manufacturers.
> No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.
A foundational tool in an open ecosystem doesn't mean a monetisable product. I struggle to think of even a single example of a foundational tool with a business model.
And of course, not everything needs a business model. But if you're getting VC funding, you kind of need one.
This is the kind of problem I think only UBI solves because there is no apparent business model that can sustain ~20 employees working on software like this, they need to make at least a couple million a year to pay those people!
This will not reassure you, but the reason it isn't necessarily really bad is because it's only incrementally worse than the really bad news came out last month:
> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.
"Hundreds of companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers—the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors that let developers and agents use an API."
I'm waiting for the Enterprise space to wise up. For anyone who's ever worked with any reasonably large company as a vendor (especially a small one) you know how painful redlines in legal can be. Why TF haven't enterprise made it more painful for these events? Basically state that if the service is purchased/sold/shuttered prior to the contract expiry date that a significant penalty (e.g. full refund) is required and including some portion of investment made to onboard said service/product/tool.
I can't even imagine the money wasted on turn-and-burns in the F1000 alone. The US needs a wake up call with respect to consumer / buyer protections. The life of the snake oil salesman is plentiful these days, and you have a lot of AI-psychotic executives who can't seem to get enough.
> Why TF haven't enterprise made it more painful for these events?
They mostly have. By mostly refraining from dealing with startups and companies they deem either “too young” or "too small" to be reliable partners. And, when they do, imposing long sales cycles.
And thus the enterprise well is poisoned for most startups.
A place I worked some years ago we even had an escrow foisted on us by our larger partner in the agreement so that they’d be able to continue running the software we were building if we went under.
Honestly, it was a pain in the ass and meant that for them alone we ended up running an older version of the software than we offered to clients because as we developed its capabilities it became ever more integrated into our core platform and we weren’t about to escrow that.
When the agreement came up for renewal at the three year mark we managed to get the escrow clauses removed.
A lot of money is made this way. It'll take an act of Congress (or something on that level) but many of us are already "on the take" so to speak, so I doubt it'll ever happen.
This is why it's good to consider an open-source product backed by an enterprise support company. Growthbook is an example. If they go poof you still have dozens to hundreds of other companies, and open source base, and can collaborate with the other users (companies) to crate a foundation to carry on development if needed. Or just patch it yourself. There's a continuum depending on how critical and how deeply you exploit it.
what is the value in destroying those relationships? I assume it was acquisition to defend against another company owning a key part of their delivery pipeline, but killing the public product is just bad press.
the relationships and enterprise customers they have are probably wildly blown out of proportion and few if any actually used the product in production.
They can also keep the product running behind the scenes for a select few and just shut down the public facing part
What's WILD is people ending up relying on these essentially startup-slops that just serves to give you future technical debt once you have to eventually moved away because they got acquired by $INSERT_BAD_GUY_OF_THE_MONTH
The only people "relying" on this are other startups whose VC benefactors force them to use other products under their portfolio in order to goose up their numbers.
For context I was the founding member of our customer eng team, the main drive for Stainless adoption came from engineering teams who didn’t have the time/capacity/expertise to implement high quality SDKs + maintain the whole release pipeline automation across multiple languages. The pitch is „we want you to focus on your domain of expertises. We handle all the plumbing for your end users to have the best DX possible when using your services“. Which is IMHO very compelling
It is indeed, and I totally understand why people want something like that! Shame about the closing of the service though, which will pretty much make everyone turn away from similar solutions in the future if they're provided by a startup, as the rugpull Stainless is about to do will be a bitch to deal with for many.
The goal for the customers was to save time, little did they know Anthropic had other ideas for them :)
I see it differently. I don’t think it is fair to describe it as a rug pull, the sdks we generated are owned by customers and aren’t going away. They own the repositories. We also implemented a self-service option just for the transition out from Stainless SaaS.
The most important part in my opinion is that with Stainless we were able to prove that a profitable market for SDK codegen exists and that people do care a lot about the quality of the generated code. New and existing players can take advantage of the segment we contributed developing. We also proved that a whole set of companies are ready to pay to provide an excellent developer experience to their end users.
At the same time the whole ecosystem is being reinvented by AI, it is possible that Stainless as it was doesn’t make sense in a future where everything is agentic, it’s hard to say.
I personally believe there is still a lot of values that can be found in the space Stainless built — and I’m sure Fern and others will continue to grow and develop solutions around OpenAPI
You may not even see it. I worked in a startup whose founder had money dipped into about a dozen products in the cyber security vertical. Many of those startups, I later found out, had access or used products from others in his portfolio. Basically taking $50k and cycling it through all of them buying something from the other one. I doubt it was a money laundering scheme, but it sure was convenient to just add logos of "customers" to the Nascar pitch slide.
Go to the website of pretty much any AI startupslop, Google who led their series A, then Google who led the series A of the other AI startups (it’s always other AI startups) whose logos they show as users/testimonials/case studies on their landing page. You’ll start seeing a pattern.
that makes so much sense. I always wondered how the fuck did all those ZIRP era "hello world as a service" bullshit startups have any customers at all.
Stainless wasn’t created during the zero-interest era. And we had paying customers since literally the first month of existence. We developed everything in close collaboration with customers
It may be that there are many projects relying on Stainless, or, as a sibling comment points out, it may be portfolio-based stack selection rather than actual feature dependence.
Either way, it does seem irresponsible and tone deaf for an acquiring/hiring company and an acquired/hired company to send these conflicting signals. If one puts oneself out there as dependable in the face hopes and needs of other, smaller, up-and-coming projects, then a rapid wind-down for $ is incongruent with such a posture.
So much so that, at least for my part, I'd be quite reluctant to hire someone who had engaged in this sort of bob-and-weave pursuit.
FWIW I've been on a OS X for many years now, but I still miss keyboard shortcuts in Windows. So much more consistent across the operating system and applications...
I've used macOS for years and still don't understand their windows minimize/restore logic. I'm always hunting for my minimized window. Yes, the fault probably lies with me.
OTOH the Windows UI is far better well designed and intuitive. But yeah... I'd rather fumble around in macOS: Windows is always trying to upsell a service that I don't need. If I say no it will helpfully keep reminding me (my answer is never going to change). I have 32GB ram and a recent processor being fed tons of wattage -- it feels so bog slow.
reading all these comments about windows having better shortcuts and window management features makes me feel like i'm taking crazy pills. windows for me was hands down the worst experience in ux. the shortcuts in macos are so well thought out and consistent.
now i'm using kde in linux land and it's the best and most customizable experience. I can't imagine going back to windows ever and would be missing a lot from linux if i went back to macos(though it would be fine).
I give you a well thought out macos shortcut for example. Ok, it is for a niche feature people rarely use... Screenshots, put straight to the clipboard.
On windows you have 2 options, bot pretty unintuitive:
1. You can either press PrintScreen button... (OK boomer, who uses a full size keyboard? My RGB clicky-keys 57% keyboard doesn't even have backspace, return, escape or delete, I don't even know when I saw a keyboard with Printscreen. My Neofetch-fork does save the screen, and otherwise no need for screenshots...)
2. Or you may press Win+Shift+S. Ok it is hard to memorize, how does S even relate to Screenshot?
Meanwhile on the intuitive MacOs to do this you only have to press Command+Option+Shift+4. So intuitive and easy!!! Also way easier to press, just try it! Only 4 keys to press at the same time, in a very convenient layout, way better than that illogical windows shortcut.
Sarcasm aside: It is clear why Microsoft is well known for the fact that in the 1990s they put a lot of effort to usability research, and why Apple is famous about Steve Jobs being the BDFL, and things had to fit his personal taste.
there's good reason the equivalent shift-command-s isn't bound to screenshot by default... it's the command to save a file and there's no good way to do partial screenshot and full screen screenshot with just command-shift-s + option if you want the option to put it into memory instead of a file. they chose command-shift-3 for full screen screenshot. command shift 4 for partial screenshot and add option to do either of those into memory which is a very common paradigm in macos shortcuts. the option key does something slightly different to the original shortcut in system shortcuts. in any event windows didn't get the non-printscreen version of a screenshot tool until very late in the game and osx had it in for a long time.
that issue isn't even an issue if you really want screenshots to be something else. you can change basically any shortcut in one place in macos. same with kde.
I don’t see much difference to be honest. I didn’t pick up Mac OS until later in life, so windows shortcuts are embedded in my brain. That said, I find Mac shortcuts just as simple to memorize. I’ve used cmd shift 4 thousands of times now and I don’t even think about it, I just press it.
Command+Shift+4 is area snipping, as you said, but pops up the viewer window
Command+Control+Shift+4 is snipping, but to clipboard. I mixed up the shortcuts, yet my fingers are getting used to it anyways, still I find it terrible default UX compared to other desktops.
It probably depends pretty heavily on your workflow. MacOS is designed around doing things visually with a trackpad. If you don't want to work that way, you're just out of luck, because that's the "right way" and if you disagree you're wrong. An example using my preferred workflow: I like to map the applications I use to <meta> (or option on mac) + number keys on the keyboard. So <meta>+1 is my editor. <meta>+2 is my terminal. <meta>+3 is my browser. Etc. If I have multiple windows open, just hit that combo again to cycle in a least-recently-used cycle. I don't have to raise all of the windows from the dock with my mouse and then go find the one I want. I don't have to open some mission control thing and go hunting for a window. I don't have to swipe to another space to remember where I put the window. I don't have to command+tab to a certain number of times to get to the window. I know exactly how to get the application I want with 1-3 key presses. Then once I've raised the window I want, I often want to tile it to one side or the other or fullscreen it with another keyboard shortcut.
Getting this to work on MacOS is a huge PITA. I tried app shortcuts in settings and they'd just randomly not work sometimes for some apps. Apps can override global shortcuts? What??? I tried the "shortcuts" app and it also similarly wouldn't work for some apps and would often forget my key bindings on an update. Tiling via the keyboard would randomly not work either. Multiple apps couldn't fix it. I finally found hammerspoon and scripted an option that consistently works. Rectangle finally solved my tiling issues. But why do I need 3rd party apps that involve writing my own scripts to get basic OS behavior? This is stock Windows behavior.
Beyond that it's just a bunch of papercuts. My dock randomly appears on the wrong screen. My windows sometimes don't get focus when I click on them. The coreutils are old and suck compared to the linux equivalents. Things built cross-platform are often the worst on Mac. Even though they're both sitting behind virtualization, WSL just feels much more integrated than running containers on mac. My usb mic randomly stops working...I've literally had more mic problems on Mac than I did on Linux. Sometimes I need to force kill my browser, and it'll sit for several minutes as a zombie descendant of pid 1 before getting cleaned up, preventing me from opening a new instance of the thing that should be killed. When I had initially mapped tiling to <option>+something, and it didn't work, I'd get a fun unicode character in my text instead, so I had to install an ascii-only keyboard layout to stop myself from looking like a moron who couldn't type. I'm guessing if you're a mac native, the shortcuts make more sense, but after 20 years of windows/linux shortcuts burned into my brain, moving to a mac for work has made me have to pointlessly relearn everything, and it still feels very unnatural.
The hardware is great, but the OS makes me hate this machine with a passion.
macOS does not and never has had a good strategy for handling minimizing windows. Keep in mind that prior to Mac OS X, you couldn't minimize windows at all, you could only roll them up. When OS X added the dock, they made minimized windows go there. Except, the Dock is an icon grid, so there's no way to see window titles, and the windows themselves are so small that it is difficult to identify them at a glance. Making things worse, the Dock is also a place you put app icons, so now you have an icon to show all your non-minimized app icons, right next to all your minimized window icons.
Meanwhile, Windows had minimize since version 2[0], except for whatever reason windows minimized to desktop icons, and there was no desktop folder. They'd known they'd invented a worse version of Mac OS, and in Windows 95 they made sure that there was not only a real desktop, but also a list of all open windows. This design was so successful that the only major tweak that stuck was merging the taskbar and Quick Launch[1] into something that superficially resembles the OSX dock, but is just plain better[2] because clicking an app icon actually shows you all the open windows.
[0] I don't have a Windows 1 install to check with.
[1] Strictly speaking you could put anything in Quick Launch, but only apps go in the Win7 taskbar
[2] Oldschool NeXT users will point out that in NeXTSTEP, minimized windows had an actual title on them, and the app icon instead of a screenshot of the window at tiny scale.
Early macOS also had rollup windows. I greatly prefer that to minimized windows in macOS, which are impossible to quickly access outside of the mouse or unminimizing all windows with a key combination which I can't remember.
A lot of shortcuts are shared between windows and linux and fairly consistent across applications. Mac is the one that takes a decided "we're different" approach to shortcuts. I.e., Alt+L for address bar instead of Alt+D, Command swapping with Control, Q instead of W for closing tabs, Command+Control+Q for locking a computer instead of Super+L, etc
They didn't mention cross-OS shortcuts, though. I interpreted "across the operating systems" as meaning "across the various versions of Windows". Yes, Windows is more consistent with their own common shortcuts. But Macs have exceedingly consistent shortcuts across Mac applications, compared to my experience with Windows and especially Linux.
I might also point out that Mac had keyboard shortcuts before Windows existed, so it's not really fair to describe them as the "different" one when MS chose their own, different shortcuts for Windows.
Apple also invented their own key “Apple” now “CMD” for operation like copy / paste to explicitly not have the issue to overload the already know escape sequences. Windows being on a system without a normalized keyboard had to reuse keys that are common to keyboards used back then. Vertical integration played into apples cards even back then.
With regards to the windows key, I have grown to appreciate it, I am on a X11 desktop and map all my window functions to it which makes a lot of sense, then ctl and alt can be freely used by applications however they like. I suspect this is sort of what microsoft wanted when they specified it but were hamstrung by their own backwards compatibility(they were not able to make the hard decision to move close to window+f4 for example).
The otherwise useless context key makes a great compose key.
On a theoretical level one would almost want one dedicated control key per level(os_key to send commands to the kernel, window_key to send commands to the windowing system, program_key to send commands to applications, user_key reserved for user custom bindings not to be pre bound by applications) I am not sure what role chording should have under this scheme. allowing a higher level to use the lower level button? a window manager cannot use os+key or app+win+key but they can use win+os+key. an app could use app+win+key. I would also like a unicorn, oh well, fun to think about.
Many of those shortcuts already existed in macOS before they were added in Windows. Inversely, a lot of desktop Linux stuff was designed specifically to mimic the Windows behaviour.
So, really, it's Microsoft that decided "we're different".
Also, as somebody who sort of lives in the terminal, the lack of the Command/Ctrl distinction is one of the things that really bothers me about Windows. In default GUI applications, application shortcuts use Command, and Ctrl is used almost exclusively for headline-style shortcuts (ctrl-k for kill line, ctrl-a for home, ctrl-e for end, etc). Ctrl-a Ctrl-shift-e is kind of baked into my brain as "select whole line".
This is definitely a Mac-apologia to the extreme argument. Microsoft isn’t event the one that came up with the layout, it was the IBM compatible PC keyboard layout that was specifically designed as a keyboard standard to be used across the whole industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard
And then Windows gained critical market share mass long, long before macOS did, and when it did they simply adopted the already popular IBM keyboard layout, which is common sense. Common sense would be for Apple to do the same when their mass market PC OS came along later down the road, even if technically neXTSTEP Classic macOS had their own layout, that OS was essentially irrelevant in the computing industry until Apple used it as the basis for modern macOS (and thus their macOS keyboard layout was not known to basically any normal person). macOS/OSX as we know it didn’t launch until well after windows was already very popular and thus had continued the already cemented IBM PC keyboard layout.
I’m all for Apple being unique and using their own layout if that’s what they wanna do/design around, but there’s exactly zero arguments available that actually they had the standardized and popular keyboard layout first and IBM/microsoft were the weird ones. That’s simply not accurate whatsoever.
On the other, as a Windows desktop person I can't live without Home/End/PgUp/Pgdown, and in different combinations with Shift/Control. That's one of reason I can't fully enjoy MacBook, not to mention the incredible fact that it doesn't have a Delete key. No, it's not the same that you can use modifier key with backspace, modifier keys are used for extra functionality, i.e. to delete to begining or end of the word, etc.
Sure, but using modifier keys. What if I want to add shift to the mix to select, let's say to the beginning of line or document? You'll need to press two modifiers. That's not optimal. And I use these all the time while editing.
And I don't consider this a MacBook flaw particularly, it's more or less general laptop flaw nowadays. If anything, other manufacturers have even more imagination to mess up keyboard layout.
Eh, I dunno. I played piano, so I'm not allergic to pressing 10 keys and a couple of foot pedals at once if needed. Here, that means I rarely consciously think about what chord I'm pressing to select from here to the beginning of the word/line/document.
The big one for me on Mac was refreshing a web page being CMD+R rather than F5.
Not to mention the muscle memory for pressing CTRL in the corner of the keyboard rather than CMD where Alt is.
Though I will say that having "Copy" (cmd-c) being different from ^C (ctrl-c) was kind of nice. Though Terminal has done a nice thing of making it so if you highlight text, Ctrl-C copies the first time you press it, and sends ^C the second time.
Conversely, when I use a PC, I have to stop and wonder why alt-R doesn't reload the web page like it's supposed to, and alt-C doesn't copy, and I have to stretch my pinky all the way over to use that shortcut. And what's the mnemonic for "F5 means reload"?
Which is to say that neither Windows nor Mac shortcuts are inherently better. It's just what we're used to. IME, the main difference is that once you learn the Mac shortcuts in a handful of apps, they'll pretty much work on the other apps you encounter, too.
A big issue with the macOS style I'd that there isn't a modifier key free for the user to build their own shortcuts around. The Win/Super key is a very good place to hang custom shortcuts off of on Windows and Linux.
If you want a little more consistency for muscle memory, ctrl+L goes to the address bar on Windows the same way cmd+L goes to it on Mac. Same for ctrl+W and cmd+W to close tabs.
The MacOS is a pretty nice system but their window management has been and still is shit. I get that tilling 4 windows doesn’t look good but all the view swapping and desktop switching stuff gives me a headache and sucks. Also that half second transition to full screen sucks. Windows seems so freeing when it comes to window management. Simple transition free resizing. Snaps into corners. The rapid transition free minimize and restores etc.
Windows menu navigation by keyboard allows almost everything to be done with no mouse, and macOS doesn’t. Alt-space, X will maximize a window from 3.0 to 11. Not a direct shortcut, more like the / menu of Visicalc or Lotus 1-2-3. Not as fast, but close, and better because it’s discoverable - if you forget, the menu is open and you can see the next step.
General Electric has a history of using that exact trick... just with jet engines and power generators and medical devices that can represent much larger amounts of revenue.
GE's latest trick is to roll long term maintenance contracts into the price of the product and then sell off the unit holding the bag on the maintenance contract. Very shady but very clever.
And even if their internet service provider is uniquely capable for now, it only fills a strategic need for certain customers.
So instead, Musk and Co. need to find bubbling market trends that look like they will have huge gigantic TAMs to justify the potential growth of this company.
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