7 ms·

[flagged]

01100011 5mo ago
You've got to give him credit though. His caustic managerial style seems to have borne fruit despite his lack of engineering or technical skills. He has been supremely effective at defining a vision(however delusional) and attracting funding. Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.
- nomel 5mo ago
  > Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. How much did he bring in that timeline?
- Forgeties79 5mo ago
  Don’t buy into the 2010’s Tony stark persona. His momentum is clearly slowing because he can’t put his politics and rather fucked social values behind business sense. I have immense appreciation for what SpaceX has done for humanity. I’m not being dramatic. Reusable rockets alone is an incredible achievement. But he’s lost the plot. He needs to drop his right wing bullshit and stardom chasing if he wants to be taken seriously again. The dude won’t even acknowledge his own kid because of his politics. I will never trust someone who makes that decision, personally. His judgment is beyond clouded. The Elon bros will be mad but whatever. One day he’ll maybe remember why folks liked him. Hitching his wagon to Trump was a dumb move.
  - JackFr 5mo ago
    I think it’s tough to stay grounded when you’re as rich as he is. (To be clear, my intent is to explain and not excuse the path he’s taken.)
  - Petersipoi 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Forgeties79 5mo ago
      > Before he bought Twitter, you could be banned from essentially all the big social networks for bullshit such as "misgendering" If you think musk hasn’t banned people for bullshit you’re not looking at all. The site has suspended literally millions of people since he took over. He banned the jet tracker by creating a curated doxxing policy specifically designed to cover his ass. You need to spend 5min with a search engine. The myth that he has made it more open and free speech friendly is just that.
    - whattheheckheck 5mo ago
      [flagged]
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    Not getting invited to the EV summit would have pissed me off if I were in his place. The Trump thing; it sounds like the government was going to go after him for various violations, and hitching his wagon to Trump was his way of getting out of that jam.
    - Forgeties79 5mo ago
      I don't really care about what motivated him to behave this way if I'm being honest. He has poor impulse control and terrible social/political values. The damage and chaos he brought to the federal government is nearly impossible to overstate. Two of my family members lost their jobs for nothing because of their wild cutting, and they didn't even work for the federal government. A good friend lost a million dollar AI research grant because they had the word "accessibility" in their initial proposal (accommodating screen readers on computers, how woke and awful!) That's how far reaching his farcical "efficiency" endeavor was. He is a bad person and we should not support him. There is no context that will make what he's done the last few years acceptable.
- avmich 5mo ago
  > despite his lack of engineering or technical skills At least he has B.Sc. in physics and got admitted into Stanford. I think what Elon says is better explained not as a promise what would happen, but rather as a goal which they're going to aspire to. It kinda supports the idea "we're in business of converting impossible into late". If Elon will start offering more "realistic" schedules, the pace of SpaceX will slow down, perhaps considerably. So, yes, it's "Elon time", which historically isn't particularly precise, but still useful.
  - wahnfrieden 5mo ago
    The physics degree is a deception and perhaps fabricated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594076 (and it was a BA not BSc though that matters less) And the Stanford admittance was for materials science, not physics as he lies about
    - avmich 5mo ago
      I agree, but the idea that he doesn't have skills is still incorrect.
      - avmich 5mo ago
        Correction: I agree he got into Stanford for material sciences. Still can not be characterized as having no skills.
    - tzs 5mo ago
      > and it was a BA not BSc though that matters less I've got no opinion on the existence and legitimacy of any degrees Musk may or may not have, but whichever he does have you really can't infer much at all from whether a STEM degree in the US is a BA or a BS without looking at the specific requirements for the degrees at the particular school. Some schools might give a BA for a program and other schools might give a BS for a nearly identical program. All of these happen in the US: • BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS). • BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics. • Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation. • Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance. • Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS. • Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
- dodu_ 5mo ago
  You absolutely do not, under any circumstances, have to give him credit. Chronic over-promise, underdelivery. Where was the nearly 3T of fraud he said he'd uncover in the US government, again? Was that a clear win for the country? But hey at least he's effective at getting people to give him money, I guess, which is an indistinguishable "skill" from that of someone who is able to convince people to buy an online course on how to make money online. He just does it at a bigger scale so people are quick to suck him off. How we are still falling into the "money = smart/competent" trap in <<current year>> is beyond me.
  - inglor_cz 5mo ago
    People fuck up. I fucked up three things yesterday. Fortunately I am not as known as Musk, so no one tears into me at Hacker News and my fuckups remain hidden. Nevertheless... "underdelivery." Both Falcon and Starlink are quite major improvements over previous status quo. It is not just a question of having a nice WiFi during your flight. If you are interested in some very practical consequences, look at the Russo-Ukrainian war and the role Starlink plays there.
    - dodu_ 5mo ago
      Unelected cronies arbitrarily slash and burn programs that are supposed to require congressional approval (aka representatives of the people) to enact and remove, likely resulting in millions of preventable deaths: "Tee hee he just made a silly oopsie poopsie just like me when I take down prod for a few minutes"
neuronexmachina 5mo ago
I'm basically assuming that "space-based data centers" are some Glomar Explorer-style cover for something else.
- gct 5mo ago
  They'll put up thousands more starlinks and track every mobile device on the planet simultaneously, might as well have a homing beacon in your pocket.
  - yellowbkpk 5mo ago
    Check out this video that goes into a very deep technical explanation about how the satellites can be used as a Synthetic Aperature Radar to build a realtime representation of the entire globe at meters of resolution: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A https://youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
    - piloto_ciego 5mo ago
      Oooh, yeah, this is going to be a key to it too, Gorgon Stare on steroids.
- Enginerrrd 5mo ago
  Yeah, I agree. A massive radar network, passive or active is the most likely possibility I have come across. You'd need a LOT of compute at each node to get the most out of the network. I found this video[1] to be a pretty convincing analysis of the absolute max capability you could expect, and it would indeed be impressive. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
  - m4rtink 5mo ago
    Well, that likely already exists as Starshield - not to mention all the pubmic SAR sats everyone has by this point.
- trothamel 5mo ago
jiggawatts 5mo ago
[flagged]
- winfredJa 5mo ago
  issue is land based will still be cheaper. there are lot of cool things we can do in space, i’m not convinced putting data center is one of them.
  - jiggawatts 5mo ago
    Elon explained the logic at length in an interview: Cheaper != Available. The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it. Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least). Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger solar panel onto a satellite is a trivial engineering excercise and has no blockers in 2026. Disclaimer: Personally, I suspect all this AI-in-space "talk" from Elon is just cheap marketing to boost the IPO of xAI.
    - dullcrisp 5mo ago
      Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth? Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.
      - piloto_ciego 5mo ago
        You have to ask permission to build it somewhere. Nobody is going to stop you in space.
      - ericd 5mo ago
        In space, that solar panel is always in the sunlight. No clouds, no night time. Weirdly enough, earth is a more challenging environment in some ways for solar. You need to lay out >3x the number of panels on earth to get the same power production, and you need batteries or a grid interconnection as a buffer. Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in many areas on earth. Locally, we have a number of people complaining about solar arrays going up on farmland, even though it's the farmers choosing to do it. "It's an eyesore".
novok 5mo ago
He is talking about energy costs.
- Enginerrrd 5mo ago
  Right but it's famously difficult to cool things in space since you have basically zero convective or conductive heat transfer, so I don't think that makes a lot of sense.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
nailer 5mo ago
This person made self driving cars work years after they’d been written off, made reusable rockets and has people with locked-in syndrome speaking to their families. Why do you think he wouldn’t be sane?
- gamblor956 5mo ago
  We had all those things without Elon Musk and the alternatives do it better.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
piloto_ciego 5mo ago
Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.
- MattDamonSpace 5mo ago
  It really depends on scale. There will be enough terrestrial vetoes that if what we build is 10-1000x what people are already halting through legal challenges…
  - piloto_ciego 5mo ago
    I doubt it. Like, I hate to have to be the bearer of bad news, and maybe it’s my weird arctic anarchist soul, but, the old world order, the need for these companies to follow rules at least in spirit? That’s dead now. There are no laws but the laws of physics and the the laws others force your organization to follow. I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in my 20s. But we are in a new world now and the old rules don’t apply. A company that has the backing of the government to launch their spacecraft will simply do it. You think Texas is going to stop them? Or Florida? Or even California? Of course not. A lot changes in a world where you can plan things out with AI. A lot changes in a world with abundance. If we play our cards right we could have the culture, but that means letting go of the conservative yearning to put things back to how they were. The old world is 10 light years away now, it wasn’t as great as we remember it and it ain’t coming back. And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.
    - Dylan16807 5mo ago
      > And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school. Yeah, but that choice is nonsense. Mandate that datacenters on the ground are on 100% green power and quiet, and they'll still be way way more cost effective than the orbital option.
aaron695 5mo ago
[dead]
senectus1 5mo ago
long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here... in the very broad shoulders of long term, he's probably right.. its why the concept of a dysonsphere is around. you can get uninterrupted 24/7 free energy. but yeah, the tech is a long way away. *Edit: lol My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. i think 2-3 years is a very unlikely outcome.
- Melatonic 5mo ago
  I agree - long term I can see highly distributed compute ( like tons of small satellites ) becoming a cool space thing. And eventually a ringworld like thing or dysonsphere But 2 to 3 years?! Seems crazy
- tsimionescu 5mo ago
  Dyson spheres (or the more plausible sounding Dyson swarms) are not an actual physically possible thing, they're just a nice sounding sci-fi trope, like teleporters or replicators. Freeman Dyson invented the concept as a joke against SETI, especially designing it to sound quasi-plausible. In reality, there is no way to create a stable structure of this size, it would be like trying to balance a building on the top of a pinhead - except the pinhead is a chaotic, unpredictable star. And the amount of energy required to displace multiple planets worth of mass, manufacture some amount of it into complex satellites, and then displace this amount again to a "stable" Solar orbit simply doesn't exist in the Solar system, on any plausible time scale (it would take many thousands if not millions of years worth of solar power to do so).
- laughing_man 5mo ago
  His timelines always assume absolutely everything goes right, and there are no legal or regulatory problems.
legitster 5mo ago
One of the underrated topics about space right now is the potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot. We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand. My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.
- dzhiurgis 5mo ago
  > potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot. IDK I think plenty of people will want to go to space or even cut 24 hour flights across the world to 90 minutes. As for experience - it's going to be pricy, but look how many multi-million dollar yachts are out there, parked, doing nothing. People do have money for such experiences.
  - scared_together 5mo ago
    I think for travel around Earth, supersonic passenger aircraft are more feasible than rockets. Even if we consider sonic booms, a lot of routes where rockets would be desirable are across uninhabited oceans.
    - dzhiurgis 5mo ago
      Somewhat agree. Boom has demonstrated something, but Starship looks more ready than them. Plus it's going to be vastly more faster and more impressive. Sonic boom can't be the limiting factor forever.
      - dingaling 5mo ago
        > Boom has demonstrated something They didn't even demonstrate performance on par with their 1950s era T-38 chase plane, and now they've retired their 'demonstrator' and pivoted into data centre power turbines.
- dopa42365 5mo ago
  Before LEO internet constellations, even the leading nations had just ~20-25 launches per year each, and a good chunk of those were for ISS services. Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.
iamgopal 5mo ago
He is talking about distributed AI, with their own AI chip, ( may be they can work at higher temperatures allow it to slowly cool to space ? ) not space station size server farm. By that, energy requirements will also be reduce, my biggest concern is, if every one starts doing it, in no time, millions of satellites will be in the space
pveierland 5mo ago
Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies. > In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error. If you wish to continue scaling compute it then becomes a question of time before you'd want to go off planet. Personally I'm quite keen to see near term space based compute explored, as it could end up becoming a much better trade-off than allocating ever more ground to power and operate terrestrial compute which directly conflict with the biosphere. SpaceX started the Starlink design phase in 2015 - started launching Starlink satellites in 2019 - and they now have the most dominant satellite constellation ever deployed by a large factor. They have their own launch systems, launch sites, satellite bus, communication stack - both in-house designed and built. What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute? Radiation hardening and cooling? These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations. There's napkin math all over the internet on this, but it really seems like small challenges compared to the other engineering SpaceX have already sorted. Beyond radiation / cooling / servicing - it seems like the biggest hurdle is to crack the scaling of designing / scaling the necessary amount of compute they will need to scale space based compute according to the laid out plans.
- Teever 5mo ago
  All of this may be true but the scale that Musk is talking about would require an immense amount of solar panels -- and if he has the means to produce so many solar panels why not use them to solve our climate and energy crisis on Earth? Seems more like a grift to me, after the car grift and the Mars grift didn't pan out.
  - cameldrv 5mo ago
    I’m not saying the math checks out, but the argument is that you get full sun with no atmospheric losses 24/7, so you produce way more energy per panel, and you don’t need batteries, because the power production is consistent and predictable.
ulfw 5mo ago
I am sick of living in this world where the richest scam artist can get richer and richer and richer with lies and lies and lies and empty promises and there is no SEC, no anything to stop him.
- parasubvert 5mo ago
  What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws. For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a lock on the leading the car industry's direction & doing a lot to drive practical electrification globally.
  - thelastgallon 5mo ago
    > What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws. Elon must have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
- flanked-evergl 5mo ago
  Elon musk is not a scam artist.
ryzvonusef 5mo ago
> Yes, Elon is very sane. tbf, a 'sane' person wouldn't have started a rocket company and an ev company, at the same time, in a recession. He has never been sane. and that has made all the difference.
- fulafel 5mo ago
  Tesla and SpaceX were both founded outside of recessions about 1 year apart, between the early 2000's recession and the great recession.
- illiac786 5mo ago
  You are saying he got lucky? That doesn’t necessarily mean he will continue to be lucky.
  - onehair 5mo ago
    They mean, to attempt things that seem very difficult to normies like you and me, and be successful at it, one needs to be insane.
    - kamaal 5mo ago
      I think Elon Musk is quite literally the living example of what high agency lifesytle would look like. One could argue he likely knew way less than your day job rocket scientist or battery experts when he started out. But these people believe so as long something is not impossible by known physics it is doable, and hence there is a way to get it done. And then they do it. That is you wake up everyday, and do whatever it take to get things done. You keep moving forward, you keep taking the next steps. Of course you need lots of other aspects of human enterprise like tenacity, productivity etc for all this. But once you get the root value right, all things descend from there on.
      - marcus_holmes 5mo ago
        I think you mean "luck"
drivingmenuts 5mo ago
Pretty normal for Elon: big promises, generate interest and funding, then fail to deliver. But by that time, he’s got his trillion-dollar paycheck and is working on his next scheme. We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.
- inglor_cz 5mo ago
  "We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them." US history is more complicated than that, and aside from those four years of hot war, more ambiguous. Henry Ford was a big Nazi sympathizer, and the Apollo program was led by an actual card-carrying Nazi engineer with a history of overseeing slave labor in a concentration camp. Which is not meant to defend Nazis, just correct the myth that the US was once somehow morally pure in this regard.
- bvcp 5mo ago
  elon musk isnt a nazi
  - drivingmenuts 5mo ago
    Granted that he is not a member of the NSDAP, but he does support and encourage hard right-wing groups which attempt to fulfill roughly the same mission. His actions certainly meet the more modern definition of nazi than they do any other political description. While he has considerable wealth, his value as a human being is near-zero, in my opinion.
    - bvcp 5mo ago
      i disagree that he even meets the “modern definition”, in my opinion
xboxnolifes 5mo ago
Even as just an investor sell, its pretty smart. Basically nothing changes for SpaceX, they just keep trying to improve launch throughput. If that payload does end up being data centers, great, he's right. If it doesn't, oh well, he still has a hugely successful space program. Not that I think we'll end up increasing our total launch payload throughput by over 3000x within 3 years like he suggests.
verytrivial 5mo ago
He's trying to position his commercial space launch business in front of the apparently unlimited firehouse of Ai capital. "IN SPACE" is worse in every way as a compute environment.
toasty228 5mo ago
Grifter gonna grift Still waiting on these 2014 fully self driving cars, back when Uber promised to buy every single model S they could produce. Now he's late on his mars promises so he's pushing some new bullshit timeline.
fragmede 5mo ago
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man" -George Bernard Shaw

[flagged]

You've got to give him credit though. His caustic managerial style seems to have borne fruit despite his lack of engineering or technical skills. He has been supremely effective at defining a vision(however delusional) and attracting funding. Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. But we may end up with a world-leading launch provider based in the US and that's a clear win for the country.

nomel 5mo ago
> Will we get to Mars soon? Hell no. How much did he bring in that timeline?
Forgeties79 5mo ago
Don’t buy into the 2010’s Tony stark persona. His momentum is clearly slowing because he can’t put his politics and rather fucked social values behind business sense. I have immense appreciation for what SpaceX has done for humanity. I’m not being dramatic. Reusable rockets alone is an incredible achievement. But he’s lost the plot. He needs to drop his right wing bullshit and stardom chasing if he wants to be taken seriously again. The dude won’t even acknowledge his own kid because of his politics. I will never trust someone who makes that decision, personally. His judgment is beyond clouded. The Elon bros will be mad but whatever. One day he’ll maybe remember why folks liked him. Hitching his wagon to Trump was a dumb move.
- JackFr 5mo ago
  I think it’s tough to stay grounded when you’re as rich as he is. (To be clear, my intent is to explain and not excuse the path he’s taken.)
- Petersipoi 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    > Before he bought Twitter, you could be banned from essentially all the big social networks for bullshit such as "misgendering" If you think musk hasn’t banned people for bullshit you’re not looking at all. The site has suspended literally millions of people since he took over. He banned the jet tracker by creating a curated doxxing policy specifically designed to cover his ass. You need to spend 5min with a search engine. The myth that he has made it more open and free speech friendly is just that.
  - whattheheckheck 5mo ago
    [flagged]
- fragmede 5mo ago
  Not getting invited to the EV summit would have pissed me off if I were in his place. The Trump thing; it sounds like the government was going to go after him for various violations, and hitching his wagon to Trump was his way of getting out of that jam.
  - Forgeties79 5mo ago
    I don't really care about what motivated him to behave this way if I'm being honest. He has poor impulse control and terrible social/political values. The damage and chaos he brought to the federal government is nearly impossible to overstate. Two of my family members lost their jobs for nothing because of their wild cutting, and they didn't even work for the federal government. A good friend lost a million dollar AI research grant because they had the word "accessibility" in their initial proposal (accommodating screen readers on computers, how woke and awful!) That's how far reaching his farcical "efficiency" endeavor was. He is a bad person and we should not support him. There is no context that will make what he's done the last few years acceptable.
avmich 5mo ago
> despite his lack of engineering or technical skills At least he has B.Sc. in physics and got admitted into Stanford. I think what Elon says is better explained not as a promise what would happen, but rather as a goal which they're going to aspire to. It kinda supports the idea "we're in business of converting impossible into late". If Elon will start offering more "realistic" schedules, the pace of SpaceX will slow down, perhaps considerably. So, yes, it's "Elon time", which historically isn't particularly precise, but still useful.
- wahnfrieden 5mo ago
  The physics degree is a deception and perhaps fabricated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35594076 (and it was a BA not BSc though that matters less) And the Stanford admittance was for materials science, not physics as he lies about
  - avmich 5mo ago
    I agree, but the idea that he doesn't have skills is still incorrect.
    - avmich 5mo ago
      Correction: I agree he got into Stanford for material sciences. Still can not be characterized as having no skills.
  - tzs 5mo ago
    > and it was a BA not BSc though that matters less I've got no opinion on the existence and legitimacy of any degrees Musk may or may not have, but whichever he does have you really can't infer much at all from whether a STEM degree in the US is a BA or a BS without looking at the specific requirements for the degrees at the particular school. Some schools might give a BA for a program and other schools might give a BS for a nearly identical program. All of these happen in the US: • BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS). • BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics. • Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation. • Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance. • Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS. • Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
dodu_ 5mo ago
You absolutely do not, under any circumstances, have to give him credit. Chronic over-promise, underdelivery. Where was the nearly 3T of fraud he said he'd uncover in the US government, again? Was that a clear win for the country? But hey at least he's effective at getting people to give him money, I guess, which is an indistinguishable "skill" from that of someone who is able to convince people to buy an online course on how to make money online. He just does it at a bigger scale so people are quick to suck him off. How we are still falling into the "money = smart/competent" trap in <<current year>> is beyond me.
- inglor_cz 5mo ago
  People fuck up. I fucked up three things yesterday. Fortunately I am not as known as Musk, so no one tears into me at Hacker News and my fuckups remain hidden. Nevertheless... "underdelivery." Both Falcon and Starlink are quite major improvements over previous status quo. It is not just a question of having a nice WiFi during your flight. If you are interested in some very practical consequences, look at the Russo-Ukrainian war and the role Starlink plays there.
  - dodu_ 5mo ago
    Unelected cronies arbitrarily slash and burn programs that are supposed to require congressional approval (aka representatives of the people) to enact and remove, likely resulting in millions of preventable deaths: "Tee hee he just made a silly oopsie poopsie just like me when I take down prod for a few minutes"

neuronexmachina 5mo ago

I'm basically assuming that "space-based data centers" are some Glomar Explorer-style cover for something else.

gct 5mo ago
They'll put up thousands more starlinks and track every mobile device on the planet simultaneously, might as well have a homing beacon in your pocket.
- yellowbkpk 5mo ago
  Check out this video that goes into a very deep technical explanation about how the satellites can be used as a Synthetic Aperature Radar to build a realtime representation of the entire globe at meters of resolution: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A https://youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
  - piloto_ciego 5mo ago
    Oooh, yeah, this is going to be a key to it too, Gorgon Stare on steroids.
Enginerrrd 5mo ago
Yeah, I agree. A massive radar network, passive or active is the most likely possibility I have come across. You'd need a LOT of compute at each node to get the most out of the network. I found this video[1] to be a pretty convincing analysis of the absolute max capability you could expect, and it would indeed be impressive. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
- m4rtink 5mo ago
  Well, that likely already exists as Starshield - not to mention all the pubmic SAR sats everyone has by this point.
trothamel 5mo ago

jiggawatts 5mo ago

[flagged]

winfredJa 5mo ago
issue is land based will still be cheaper. there are lot of cool things we can do in space, i’m not convinced putting data center is one of them.
- jiggawatts 5mo ago
  Elon explained the logic at length in an interview: Cheaper != Available. The availability of power is the constraint almost everywhere, no matter how much money you throw at it. Gas turbine production has a many-year backlog. Everybody that can make the single-crystal superalloy turbine blades is fully booked for most of a decade and can't expand capacity for years (at least). Meanwhile, putting a slightly larger solar panel onto a satellite is a trivial engineering excercise and has no blockers in 2026. Disclaimer: Personally, I suspect all this AI-in-space "talk" from Elon is just cheap marketing to boost the IPO of xAI.
  - dullcrisp 5mo ago
    Okay but why not take that slightly larger solar panel and leave it on Earth? Is the sunlight millions of times brighter beyond the atmosphere? I don’t get it.
    - piloto_ciego 5mo ago
      You have to ask permission to build it somewhere. Nobody is going to stop you in space.
    - ericd 5mo ago
      In space, that solar panel is always in the sunlight. No clouds, no night time. Weirdly enough, earth is a more challenging environment in some ways for solar. You need to lay out >3x the number of panels on earth to get the same power production, and you need batteries or a grid interconnection as a buffer. Also, there's a populist backlash on building datacenters, power transmission infra, and power generation in many areas on earth. Locally, we have a number of people complaining about solar arrays going up on farmland, even though it's the farmers choosing to do it. "It's an eyesore".

novok 5mo ago

He is talking about energy costs.

Enginerrrd 5mo ago
Right but it's famously difficult to cool things in space since you have basically zero convective or conductive heat transfer, so I don't think that makes a lot of sense.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

nailer 5mo ago

This person made self driving cars work years after they’d been written off, made reusable rockets and has people with locked-in syndrome speaking to their families. Why do you think he wouldn’t be sane?

gamblor956 5mo ago
We had all those things without Elon Musk and the alternatives do it better.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

piloto_ciego 5mo ago

Honestly, I think he's spot on, and I normally am not fond of Elon's public behavior. I mentioned in another thread that they're getting around having to ask permission to build datacenters by doing it in space. The entire thing is to avoid NIMBY stuff I'd bet.

MattDamonSpace 5mo ago
It really depends on scale. There will be enough terrestrial vetoes that if what we build is 10-1000x what people are already halting through legal challenges…
- piloto_ciego 5mo ago
  I doubt it. Like, I hate to have to be the bearer of bad news, and maybe it’s my weird arctic anarchist soul, but, the old world order, the need for these companies to follow rules at least in spirit? That’s dead now. There are no laws but the laws of physics and the the laws others force your organization to follow. I recognize that that is distressing to people, hell, it’s been obvious to me since I was at OWS in my 20s. But we are in a new world now and the old rules don’t apply. A company that has the backing of the government to launch their spacecraft will simply do it. You think Texas is going to stop them? Or Florida? Or even California? Of course not. A lot changes in a world where you can plan things out with AI. A lot changes in a world with abundance. If we play our cards right we could have the culture, but that means letting go of the conservative yearning to put things back to how they were. The old world is 10 light years away now, it wasn’t as great as we remember it and it ain’t coming back. And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school.
  - Dylan16807 5mo ago
    > And if I had to choose, I’d much rather have datacenters in orbit than one burning hydrocarbons loudly 2 blocks from my kids’ school. Yeah, but that choice is nonsense. Mandate that datacenters on the ground are on 100% green power and quiet, and they'll still be way way more cost effective than the orbital option.

aaron695 5mo ago

[dead]

senectus1 5mo ago

long term is doing a lot of heavy lifting here... in the very broad shoulders of long term, he's probably right.. its why the concept of a dysonsphere is around. you can get uninterrupted 24/7 free energy. but yeah, the tech is a long way away. *Edit: lol My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. i think 2-3 years is a very unlikely outcome.

Melatonic 5mo ago
I agree - long term I can see highly distributed compute ( like tons of small satellites ) becoming a cool space thing. And eventually a ringworld like thing or dysonsphere But 2 to 3 years?! Seems crazy
tsimionescu 5mo ago
Dyson spheres (or the more plausible sounding Dyson swarms) are not an actual physically possible thing, they're just a nice sounding sci-fi trope, like teleporters or replicators. Freeman Dyson invented the concept as a joke against SETI, especially designing it to sound quasi-plausible. In reality, there is no way to create a stable structure of this size, it would be like trying to balance a building on the top of a pinhead - except the pinhead is a chaotic, unpredictable star. And the amount of energy required to displace multiple planets worth of mass, manufacture some amount of it into complex satellites, and then displace this amount again to a "stable" Solar orbit simply doesn't exist in the Solar system, on any plausible time scale (it would take many thousands if not millions of years worth of solar power to do so).
laughing_man 5mo ago
His timelines always assume absolutely everything goes right, and there are no legal or regulatory problems.

legitster 5mo ago

One of the underrated topics about space right now is the potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot. We're simply out things we can profitably send to space so SpaceX and others are trying to come up with ideas to induce demand. My understanding is that Starlink mostly grew out of the same need to justify scaling up rocket production.

dzhiurgis 5mo ago
> potential supply of rockets outstrips demand by a lot. IDK I think plenty of people will want to go to space or even cut 24 hour flights across the world to 90 minutes. As for experience - it's going to be pricy, but look how many multi-million dollar yachts are out there, parked, doing nothing. People do have money for such experiences.
- scared_together 5mo ago
  I think for travel around Earth, supersonic passenger aircraft are more feasible than rockets. Even if we consider sonic booms, a lot of routes where rockets would be desirable are across uninhabited oceans.
  - dzhiurgis 5mo ago
    Somewhat agree. Boom has demonstrated something, but Starship looks more ready than them. Plus it's going to be vastly more faster and more impressive. Sonic boom can't be the limiting factor forever.
    - dingaling 5mo ago
      > Boom has demonstrated something They didn't even demonstrate performance on par with their 1950s era T-38 chase plane, and now they've retired their 'demonstrator' and pivoted into data centre power turbines.
dopa42365 5mo ago
Before LEO internet constellations, even the leading nations had just ~20-25 launches per year each, and a good chunk of those were for ISS services. Other than the occasional GNSS, weather, scientific, broadcast and surveillance satellite, there's not all that much worth sending into space.

iamgopal 5mo ago

He is talking about distributed AI, with their own AI chip, ( may be they can work at higher temperatures allow it to slowly cool to space ? ) not space station size server farm. By that, energy requirements will also be reduce, my biggest concern is, if every one starts doing it, in no time, millions of satellites will be in the space

pveierland 5mo ago

Beyond aggressively optimistic timelines, I find it difficult to disagree with the premise. The aggressively optimistic timelines is also what makes it feasible to even attempt these things, where e.g. the amount of iteration required for Starship would have broken most other companies. > In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale. In the long term - all mass and energy available is outside of Earth - what is here is not even a rounding error. If you wish to continue scaling compute it then becomes a question of time before you'd want to go off planet. Personally I'm quite keen to see near term space based compute explored, as it could end up becoming a much better trade-off than allocating ever more ground to power and operate terrestrial compute which directly conflict with the biosphere. SpaceX started the Starlink design phase in 2015 - started launching Starlink satellites in 2019 - and they now have the most dominant satellite constellation ever deployed by a large factor. They have their own launch systems, launch sites, satellite bus, communication stack - both in-house designed and built. What is really going to be that difficult with space-based compute? Radiation hardening and cooling? These are clear engineering challenges that can be simulated, tested with earth analogs, and then rapidly iterated across design generations. There's napkin math all over the internet on this, but it really seems like small challenges compared to the other engineering SpaceX have already sorted. Beyond radiation / cooling / servicing - it seems like the biggest hurdle is to crack the scaling of designing / scaling the necessary amount of compute they will need to scale space based compute according to the laid out plans.

Teever 5mo ago
All of this may be true but the scale that Musk is talking about would require an immense amount of solar panels -- and if he has the means to produce so many solar panels why not use them to solve our climate and energy crisis on Earth? Seems more like a grift to me, after the car grift and the Mars grift didn't pan out.
- cameldrv 5mo ago
  I’m not saying the math checks out, but the argument is that you get full sun with no atmospheric losses 24/7, so you produce way more energy per panel, and you don’t need batteries, because the power production is consistent and predictable.

ulfw 5mo ago

I am sick of living in this world where the richest scam artist can get richer and richer and richer with lies and lies and lies and empty promises and there is no SEC, no anything to stop him.

parasubvert 5mo ago
What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws. For all the lies, bad behavior, and broken promises, SpaceX's achievements and reliability record is still incredible, X/Twitter hasn't crashed and burned after all the layoffs and drama, and Tesla (until recently due to his meddling) had a lock on the leading the car industry's direction & doing a lot to drive practical electrification globally.
- thelastgallon 5mo ago
  > What makes Elon complicated is that he is not just a scam artist. He has an eye for talented people that do good engineering while working for him, in spite of his personal flaws. Elon must have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
flanked-evergl 5mo ago
Elon musk is not a scam artist.

ryzvonusef 5mo ago

> Yes, Elon is very sane. tbf, a 'sane' person wouldn't have started a rocket company and an ev company, at the same time, in a recession. He has never been sane. and that has made all the difference.

fulafel 5mo ago
Tesla and SpaceX were both founded outside of recessions about 1 year apart, between the early 2000's recession and the great recession.
illiac786 5mo ago
You are saying he got lucky? That doesn’t necessarily mean he will continue to be lucky.
- onehair 5mo ago
  They mean, to attempt things that seem very difficult to normies like you and me, and be successful at it, one needs to be insane.
  - kamaal 5mo ago
    I think Elon Musk is quite literally the living example of what high agency lifesytle would look like. One could argue he likely knew way less than your day job rocket scientist or battery experts when he started out. But these people believe so as long something is not impossible by known physics it is doable, and hence there is a way to get it done. And then they do it. That is you wake up everyday, and do whatever it take to get things done. You keep moving forward, you keep taking the next steps. Of course you need lots of other aspects of human enterprise like tenacity, productivity etc for all this. But once you get the root value right, all things descend from there on.
    - marcus_holmes 5mo ago
      I think you mean "luck"

drivingmenuts 5mo ago

Pretty normal for Elon: big promises, generate interest and funding, then fail to deliver. But by that time, he’s got his trillion-dollar paycheck and is working on his next scheme. We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them.

inglor_cz 5mo ago
"We used to eliminate Nazis, not invest in them." US history is more complicated than that, and aside from those four years of hot war, more ambiguous. Henry Ford was a big Nazi sympathizer, and the Apollo program was led by an actual card-carrying Nazi engineer with a history of overseeing slave labor in a concentration camp. Which is not meant to defend Nazis, just correct the myth that the US was once somehow morally pure in this regard.
bvcp 5mo ago
elon musk isnt a nazi
- drivingmenuts 5mo ago
  Granted that he is not a member of the NSDAP, but he does support and encourage hard right-wing groups which attempt to fulfill roughly the same mission. His actions certainly meet the more modern definition of nazi than they do any other political description. While he has considerable wealth, his value as a human being is near-zero, in my opinion.
  - bvcp 5mo ago
    i disagree that he even meets the “modern definition”, in my opinion

xboxnolifes 5mo ago

Even as just an investor sell, its pretty smart. Basically nothing changes for SpaceX, they just keep trying to improve launch throughput. If that payload does end up being data centers, great, he's right. If it doesn't, oh well, he still has a hugely successful space program. Not that I think we'll end up increasing our total launch payload throughput by over 3000x within 3 years like he suggests.

verytrivial 5mo ago

He's trying to position his commercial space launch business in front of the apparently unlimited firehouse of Ai capital. "IN SPACE" is worse in every way as a compute environment.

toasty228 5mo ago

Grifter gonna grift Still waiting on these 2014 fully self driving cars, back when Uber promised to buy every single model S they could produce. Now he's late on his mars promises so he's pushing some new bullshit timeline.

fragmede 5mo ago

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man" -George Bernard Shaw