4 ms·

In terms of SpaceX (the space portion of it) they've produced the cheapest way to get any payload into space. If you pay anybody else, you will overpay drastica

In terms of SpaceX (the space portion of it) they've produced the cheapest way to get any payload into space. If you pay anybody else, you will overpay drastically depending on who you want to take your payload into space. In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers, new antibiotics, precision targeting in oncology, using AI to flag healthcare anomalies in imaging. The benefits are easy to miss, but they're snowballing into place, there's definitely an explosion of useless crap, but you have to look for the real things and you will come to find, that AI is giving us things we otherwise either might not have discovered or wouldn't have within our lifetimes.

cowmix 5mo ago
You'll overpay -- but not by trillions.
- waterheater 5mo ago
  On one order, correct, but it's still on the order of hundreds of millions to billions. Also, keep in mind that a stock price discounts expected future cash flows. Is it likely that SpaceX will have a near-peer competitor within a few years? No, it's not, and that market share is being priced-in.
  - hattmall 5mo ago
    Is it likely that SpaceX will have actual reasonable demand? Their major customer is Starlink. How legitimately confident are we in the numbers with regard to price reduction vs creative accounting to offload costs to Starlink and subsidize the launches to appear to offer huge cost reductions? If there exists sufficient demand for the product of space launches then it's probably reasonable to expect their to be a near-peer competitor soon, but that's only if SpaceX were to be profitable, which it isn't, even with the subsidization by Starlink on the order of many billions.
    - hvb2 5mo ago
      > If there exists sufficient demand for the product of space launches then it's probably reasonable to expect their to be a near-peer competitor soon Space is not that easy. Even with unlimited money, it'll probably take 10 years to build a rocket like starship. Going from nothing to orbit needs a lot of money but more money doesn't make that faster.
  - m4rtink 5mo ago
    There is about 3 chinese orbitallaunchers with some reusability support flying & about as much scheduled to debut this year. But other than that, yeah - outside of China, progress has been horrendously slow & Blue Origin, the only other US company that demonstrated a partially reusable rocket just had a devastating pad explosion, destroying one of their 2 rockets and their only launchpad.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  Sure but SpaceX can get you into orbit for $1400 per kilogram, and future projection and goal is $100 per kilogram. The competition is at $15,000 per kilogram. I think it's a no-brainer for anybody trying to get anything into orbit. Unless someone figures out superior tech that surpasses SpaceX, I'm just not seeing why anyone would spend more for less capable and costly rockets.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dh2022 5mo ago
    At the rates you quote, $1 T (the size of the market) is 714,285 tons of stuff in the space each year. I don’t think there is enough space in space for that much cargo.
    - m4rtink 5mo ago
      Let me introduce you to the 30 km long rotating O'Neill Cylinder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder Although realistically this will be built from lunar materials, you still need to lift a lot of mass to build the necessary industrial processing and mass drivers to launch it from the Moon to some Lagrange point. And there are many other useful space megastructures that can be built in space from common materials, like giant solar arrays beaming power down via microwaves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power Most of these proposals date from even 1980s.
      - dh2022 5mo ago
        I guess for a trillion dollars vine can built Elysium. Generating solar power in space (vs. on the ground) makes as much sense as running AI inference in data centers in space.
        m4rtink 5mo ago
themafia 5mo ago
> they've produced the cheapest way Were we struggling to do this before? Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Was some other achievement held back because we couldn't accomplish this? What is now enabled? > to get any payload into space. A limited set of payloads into space. No vehicle can get "any payload" to space at a fixed price. > The benefits are easy to miss, You've listed a bunch of reasons to publish papers. What is the actual ground level change that's occurred? Are those antibiotics produced? Do they actually work just as predicted? Why is that first world problems are exclusively listed but basic problems like world hunger are never even approached? > or wouldn't have within our lifetimes. And your life, your actual life, benefits, how?
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > Were we struggling to do this before? We literally couldn't. > Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Starship will bill NASA 1/20th what SLS does. > What is now enabled? LEO. Artemis. Out of all of these companies, being confused about SpaceX is super weird.
  - harimau777 5mo ago
    I think you missed the core of their question: What has actually gotten better in practical terms for the average American?
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > What has actually gotten better in practical terms for the average American? Starlink has made connectivity cheaper and more available. Earth imaging has made various food production processes more efficient. Weather forecasts have become more accurate. If you’ve genuinely missed the massive economy that LEO has become, it will be a fun thing to catch up on.
      - autoexec 5mo ago
        > Starlink has made connectivity cheaper and more available. Yeah that's working out great for the average American isn't it (https://natlawreview.com/press-releases/2026-consumer-trust-survey-73-americans-say-their-internet-bill-increased https://natlawreview.com/press-releases/2026-consumer-trust-...) > Earth imaging has made various food production processes more efficient. I'm not even going to bother sourcing the fact that food prices have only massively gone up negating any gains in productivity. The average American struggling to buy basics like eggs and meat aren't feasting on more efficient food production. > Weather forecasts have become more accurate. I'm sure the growing homeless population is happy to know they can better predict the weather they'll be sleeping in. This is all totally worth supporting a nazi billionaire
rockskon 5mo ago
Isn't AI routinely making significant mistakes in analyzing medical imaging?
- stingraycharles 5mo ago
  My understanding is that it’s better than doctors themselves. But it’s probably the same as with autonomous driving: the bar isn’t just “be as good as humans”, it’s “be flawless”.
  - BobbyTables2 5mo ago
    I’ve seen the same. But I don’t see that as a glowing beacon of progress. A whole lot of doctors, if not most, didn’t pick their profession out of an interest in medicine…
  - haldujai 5mo ago
    It’s actually quite a lot worse than even doctors in training except for highly constrained experimental settings and a few very nice applications that are mostly too tedious/impractical for a human to do or are very basic detection tasks. I am a radiologist and researcher predominately focused on AI.
    - marcus_holmes 5mo ago
      Thanks for the informed take :) Do you think this will result in more routine/boring/tedious tests? Is the bottleneck on these things the human time to analyse them?
      - haldujai 5mo ago
        I don’t think so, not beyond the current trend in medicine which is going up anyway. For some things, like 3D volume segmentation of structure or disease (e.g. CVA/stroke volume, cardiac muscle mass, iron quantification) the bottleneck is the time it takes so we currently use approximations like single longest dimension, circular regions of interest, etc. AI will dramatically increase accuracy allowing for more accurate treatment and easier large scale research with quantitative endpoints. Other things people think of like detection of aneurysms, fracture, lung nodules are not “hard” but AI has already added and will continue to add the second-reader benefit which will reduce detection errors. For this category the clinical benefit is as of yet unclear and we know that increased detection does not necessarily translate into improved patient outcomes and can in fact make them worse from over-diagnosis which means investigation related harms and over-treatment. We were already in a phase of “over detection” in much of radiology with advances in imaging technology so the incremental benefit of current AI remains to be seen and I personally think is going to be much more limited. I had a case recently where a 2 mm brain aneurysm was missed on 3 CT scans over 10 years but was picked up by AI so now is being followed annually. This is too small to treat considering the risks and a serious argument could be made that 10 years of stability is proof enough that this is almost certainly clinically irrelevant for this patient. Far more interesting areas of AI in imaging are in acquisition of acceleration (i.e. the medical equivalent of upscaling) which can dramatically decrease costs and increase accessibility as well as analyzing imperceptible features. It may not be a popular take here but in my opinion the future of radiology is like what we see in software engineering today - a skilled human equipped with AI will outperform humans without AI and AI without humans, the latter of which we are still several years away from prototyping due to various technical hurdles.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
zwarag 5mo ago
I have yet to see an application outside of harnesses and LLMs itself where adaptation has happened on a larger scale. Devs are fine with babysitting their LLMs. People like to use LLMs to improve their mails and so on. But outside of that, the adaptation is not there yet. Don't get me wrong. I love LLMs and use them myself. But the biggest gain for me is easier context switch and text manipulation. It's not the: replace X with a bunch of LLMs every CEO is dreaming of. So yes, you have higher productivity, but is the eval of those companies legit? x doubt.
- hypendev 5mo ago
  What is a larger scaler for you? What is "outside harness an LLM"? What is _the proof_ if all the proofs are not _proofs_? I don't babysit my LLM based services which are used by coaches and clients around the world. One of my LLM based solution get 30-4k daily hits and I have users coming back on the regular to use it. without babysitting, doing things that would take them hours of manual work and research. I don't babysit the developers I work with and our clients, which both use LLM's themselves and at scale with their clients, serving all kinds of LLM powered services to millions of users worldwide. You are not "seeing" the large adoption because: - The technology is "a few years old" in its usable state - The corporate adoption cycle is slow - You have to understand the technology to use it in a good way, which most corporate devs and PM's do not So it will take a bit for the "obvious" adaptation on large scale. But you won't "know" when the large adoption happens. Silent inference is growing every day, and that is what real adoption looks like - not an LLM being in your face chatbox, but running in the background, sorting, finding, fixing things, aligning data, figuring out analytics, tuning the ads, cleaning the datasets.
- tristanj 5mo ago
  One third of all software code is written by AI. At the frontier AI labs it's 80%+. It has completely upended the software industry. How is that not a massive adaption?
  - davemp 5mo ago
    > One third of all software code is written by AI. I find it interesting that using lines of code as a metric is making a comeback.
ozgrakkurt 5mo ago
> In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers What a story this is
- CookieCrisp 5mo ago
  What part is wrong?
UniversalBlue 5mo ago
Sorry but SpaceX has done absulutely nothing for space other than take billions in GOV funding and never delivering what they promised years ago. Hell the only cargo they ever shipped was a banana...
- adammarples 5mo ago
  They've shipped lots of satellites into low earth orbit, that's their starlink business and it's where all of the revenue in spacex comes from, and it is a good business in itself.
ilovecake1984 5mo ago
[dead]
itake 5mo ago
People want to buy SpaceX, not Twitter, Tesla, xAI. Unfortunately Elon has been conflating the three.
- moduspol 5mo ago
  Plenty of people want to buy Tesla. Not saying they're prescient, but the market cap represents that.
- joquarky 5mo ago
  I remember when the music industry would release albums with one good song and make you buy the crap instead of selling the single at a lower price.
  - itake 5mo ago
    and the 2008 crash's mortgage backed securities...
sharts 5mo ago
Do those help starving or homeless people? I don’t think so.
- kridsdale1 5mo ago
  Those people are not in the economy. And they can get their diseases cured by an AI discovered fix, via medicare.
joquarky 5mo ago
I don't need anything launched into space. Math problems being solved doesn't make necessities easier to afford. New healthcare discoveries seem moot when only the wealthy get access (Elysium anyone?). I'm not seeing how a typical person is getting any benefit. The only visible change they are seeing is getting exposed to more elaborate scams.
GPerson 5mo ago
That proof has almost no significance because the average mathematician cannot spend 2 million dollars on inference.

cowmix 5mo ago

You'll overpay -- but not by trillions.

waterheater 5mo ago
On one order, correct, but it's still on the order of hundreds of millions to billions. Also, keep in mind that a stock price discounts expected future cash flows. Is it likely that SpaceX will have a near-peer competitor within a few years? No, it's not, and that market share is being priced-in.
- hattmall 5mo ago
  Is it likely that SpaceX will have actual reasonable demand? Their major customer is Starlink. How legitimately confident are we in the numbers with regard to price reduction vs creative accounting to offload costs to Starlink and subsidize the launches to appear to offer huge cost reductions? If there exists sufficient demand for the product of space launches then it's probably reasonable to expect their to be a near-peer competitor soon, but that's only if SpaceX were to be profitable, which it isn't, even with the subsidization by Starlink on the order of many billions.
  - hvb2 5mo ago
    > If there exists sufficient demand for the product of space launches then it's probably reasonable to expect their to be a near-peer competitor soon Space is not that easy. Even with unlimited money, it'll probably take 10 years to build a rocket like starship. Going from nothing to orbit needs a lot of money but more money doesn't make that faster.
- m4rtink 5mo ago
  There is about 3 chinese orbitallaunchers with some reusability support flying & about as much scheduled to debut this year. But other than that, yeah - outside of China, progress has been horrendously slow & Blue Origin, the only other US company that demonstrated a partially reusable rocket just had a devastating pad explosion, destroying one of their 2 rockets and their only launchpad.
giancarlostoro 5mo ago
Sure but SpaceX can get you into orbit for $1400 per kilogram, and future projection and goal is $100 per kilogram. The competition is at $15,000 per kilogram. I think it's a no-brainer for anybody trying to get anything into orbit. Unless someone figures out superior tech that surpasses SpaceX, I'm just not seeing why anyone would spend more for less capable and costly rockets.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- dh2022 5mo ago
  At the rates you quote, $1 T (the size of the market) is 714,285 tons of stuff in the space each year. I don’t think there is enough space in space for that much cargo.
  - m4rtink 5mo ago
    Let me introduce you to the 30 km long rotating O'Neill Cylinder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder Although realistically this will be built from lunar materials, you still need to lift a lot of mass to build the necessary industrial processing and mass drivers to launch it from the Moon to some Lagrange point. And there are many other useful space megastructures that can be built in space from common materials, like giant solar arrays beaming power down via microwaves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power Most of these proposals date from even 1980s.
    - dh2022 5mo ago
      I guess for a trillion dollars vine can built Elysium. Generating solar power in space (vs. on the ground) makes as much sense as running AI inference in data centers in space.
      - m4rtink 5mo ago

themafia 5mo ago

> they've produced the cheapest way Were we struggling to do this before? Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Was some other achievement held back because we couldn't accomplish this? What is now enabled? > to get any payload into space. A limited set of payloads into space. No vehicle can get "any payload" to space at a fixed price. > The benefits are easy to miss, You've listed a bunch of reasons to publish papers. What is the actual ground level change that's occurred? Are those antibiotics produced? Do they actually work just as predicted? Why is that first world problems are exclusively listed but basic problems like world hunger are never even approached? > or wouldn't have within our lifetimes. And your life, your actual life, benefits, how?

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> Were we struggling to do this before? We literally couldn't. > Was the overall percentage reduction in costs? Starship will bill NASA 1/20th what SLS does. > What is now enabled? LEO. Artemis. Out of all of these companies, being confused about SpaceX is super weird.
- harimau777 5mo ago
  I think you missed the core of their question: What has actually gotten better in practical terms for the average American?
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > What has actually gotten better in practical terms for the average American? Starlink has made connectivity cheaper and more available. Earth imaging has made various food production processes more efficient. Weather forecasts have become more accurate. If you’ve genuinely missed the massive economy that LEO has become, it will be a fun thing to catch up on.
    - autoexec 5mo ago
      > Starlink has made connectivity cheaper and more available. Yeah that's working out great for the average American isn't it (https://natlawreview.com/press-releases/2026-consumer-trust-survey-73-americans-say-their-internet-bill-increased https://natlawreview.com/press-releases/2026-consumer-trust-...) > Earth imaging has made various food production processes more efficient. I'm not even going to bother sourcing the fact that food prices have only massively gone up negating any gains in productivity. The average American struggling to buy basics like eggs and meat aren't feasting on more efficient food production. > Weather forecasts have become more accurate. I'm sure the growing homeless population is happy to know they can better predict the weather they'll be sleeping in. This is all totally worth supporting a nazi billionaire

rockskon 5mo ago

Isn't AI routinely making significant mistakes in analyzing medical imaging?

stingraycharles 5mo ago
My understanding is that it’s better than doctors themselves. But it’s probably the same as with autonomous driving: the bar isn’t just “be as good as humans”, it’s “be flawless”.
- BobbyTables2 5mo ago
  I’ve seen the same. But I don’t see that as a glowing beacon of progress. A whole lot of doctors, if not most, didn’t pick their profession out of an interest in medicine…
- haldujai 5mo ago
  It’s actually quite a lot worse than even doctors in training except for highly constrained experimental settings and a few very nice applications that are mostly too tedious/impractical for a human to do or are very basic detection tasks. I am a radiologist and researcher predominately focused on AI.
  - marcus_holmes 5mo ago
    Thanks for the informed take :) Do you think this will result in more routine/boring/tedious tests? Is the bottleneck on these things the human time to analyse them?
    - haldujai 5mo ago
      I don’t think so, not beyond the current trend in medicine which is going up anyway. For some things, like 3D volume segmentation of structure or disease (e.g. CVA/stroke volume, cardiac muscle mass, iron quantification) the bottleneck is the time it takes so we currently use approximations like single longest dimension, circular regions of interest, etc. AI will dramatically increase accuracy allowing for more accurate treatment and easier large scale research with quantitative endpoints. Other things people think of like detection of aneurysms, fracture, lung nodules are not “hard” but AI has already added and will continue to add the second-reader benefit which will reduce detection errors. For this category the clinical benefit is as of yet unclear and we know that increased detection does not necessarily translate into improved patient outcomes and can in fact make them worse from over-diagnosis which means investigation related harms and over-treatment. We were already in a phase of “over detection” in much of radiology with advances in imaging technology so the incremental benefit of current AI remains to be seen and I personally think is going to be much more limited. I had a case recently where a 2 mm brain aneurysm was missed on 3 CT scans over 10 years but was picked up by AI so now is being followed annually. This is too small to treat considering the risks and a serious argument could be made that 10 years of stability is proof enough that this is almost certainly clinically irrelevant for this patient. Far more interesting areas of AI in imaging are in acquisition of acceleration (i.e. the medical equivalent of upscaling) which can dramatically decrease costs and increase accessibility as well as analyzing imperceptible features. It may not be a popular take here but in my opinion the future of radiology is like what we see in software engineering today - a skilled human equipped with AI will outperform humans without AI and AI without humans, the latter of which we are still several years away from prototyping due to various technical hurdles.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

zwarag 5mo ago

I have yet to see an application outside of harnesses and LLMs itself where adaptation has happened on a larger scale. Devs are fine with babysitting their LLMs. People like to use LLMs to improve their mails and so on. But outside of that, the adaptation is not there yet. Don't get me wrong. I love LLMs and use them myself. But the biggest gain for me is easier context switch and text manipulation. It's not the: replace X with a bunch of LLMs every CEO is dreaming of. So yes, you have higher productivity, but is the eval of those companies legit? x doubt.

hypendev 5mo ago
What is a larger scaler for you? What is "outside harness an LLM"? What is _the proof_ if all the proofs are not _proofs_? I don't babysit my LLM based services which are used by coaches and clients around the world. One of my LLM based solution get 30-4k daily hits and I have users coming back on the regular to use it. without babysitting, doing things that would take them hours of manual work and research. I don't babysit the developers I work with and our clients, which both use LLM's themselves and at scale with their clients, serving all kinds of LLM powered services to millions of users worldwide. You are not "seeing" the large adoption because: - The technology is "a few years old" in its usable state - The corporate adoption cycle is slow - You have to understand the technology to use it in a good way, which most corporate devs and PM's do not So it will take a bit for the "obvious" adaptation on large scale. But you won't "know" when the large adoption happens. Silent inference is growing every day, and that is what real adoption looks like - not an LLM being in your face chatbox, but running in the background, sorting, finding, fixing things, aligning data, figuring out analytics, tuning the ads, cleaning the datasets.
tristanj 5mo ago
One third of all software code is written by AI. At the frontier AI labs it's 80%+. It has completely upended the software industry. How is that not a massive adaption?
- davemp 5mo ago
  > One third of all software code is written by AI. I find it interesting that using lines of code as a metric is making a comeback.

ozgrakkurt 5mo ago

> In terms of AI, we've seen even here on HN everything from mathematical problems that remaind unsolved, being solved, mathematical proofs being used to disprove theories, heck we even learned more about alzheimers What a story this is

CookieCrisp 5mo ago
What part is wrong?

UniversalBlue 5mo ago

Sorry but SpaceX has done absulutely nothing for space other than take billions in GOV funding and never delivering what they promised years ago. Hell the only cargo they ever shipped was a banana...

adammarples 5mo ago
They've shipped lots of satellites into low earth orbit, that's their starlink business and it's where all of the revenue in spacex comes from, and it is a good business in itself.

ilovecake1984 5mo ago

[dead]

itake 5mo ago

People want to buy SpaceX, not Twitter, Tesla, xAI. Unfortunately Elon has been conflating the three.

moduspol 5mo ago
Plenty of people want to buy Tesla. Not saying they're prescient, but the market cap represents that.
joquarky 5mo ago
I remember when the music industry would release albums with one good song and make you buy the crap instead of selling the single at a lower price.
- itake 5mo ago
  and the 2008 crash's mortgage backed securities...

sharts 5mo ago

Do those help starving or homeless people? I don’t think so.

kridsdale1 5mo ago
Those people are not in the economy. And they can get their diseases cured by an AI discovered fix, via medicare.

joquarky 5mo ago

I don't need anything launched into space. Math problems being solved doesn't make necessities easier to afford. New healthcare discoveries seem moot when only the wealthy get access (Elysium anyone?). I'm not seeing how a typical person is getting any benefit. The only visible change they are seeing is getting exposed to more elaborate scams.

GPerson 5mo ago

That proof has almost no significance because the average mathematician cannot spend 2 million dollars on inference.