Zigurd

All orbital data networks are competing against terrestrial wireless, which is much cheaper and faster to expand, and it doesn't deorbit itself in five years because it's run out of maneuvering fuel. Selling space technology into a shrinking TAM takes bravado, or in the case of Amazon, it takes having a business that can carry you if the bet doesn't pay off.

The TAM eventually boils down to whatever floats or flies over the oceans, military customers, and places where the wireless network operator is too feckless to provide coverage to your cottage at the end of 2 miles of driveway.

Sergey has gone a bit culty. But yeah. There are no moats that can keep out everyone who has built and operated data centers before the AI bubble. For these players, overspending, up to a point, is a defensive move.

The cult definitely has some Jonestown overtones: the singularity is coming so things so mundane as a bond rating are of no concern. One way or the other.

Crew Dragon has a launch escape system. Starship can't, at least not without some fundamental changes.

Marginally greater skepticism is probably a good thing in terms of avoiding a big shock when some big AI player, like Oracle for example, gets into serious financial trouble.

They also put down a deposit for a roadster.

Putting a crew on starship means either developing a crew escape mechanism, or demonstrating it is safe without one, and convincing regulators that's true because Elon would never exaggerate safety claims.

Overriding safety systems is itself a safety capability. But this wasn't a failure of the safety systems. It wasn't even a failure of the train drivers who had been over using safety system overrides. It was a management failure for not noticing that over use of overrides.

If I read the description correctly, those hardware level systems were manually overridden, which should only be done in extremis. My guess is that this is going to turn into a normalization of deviance case, since such a cavalier attitude toward safety was unlikely to be one person's first time doing something so dangerous. There was no dilemma here and no time pressure.

Your suggestion about limiting speed after a shut down is a good one. On top of that, the rail operators should have spotted a trend of repeated safety system overrides and investigated why that was happening.

I'm totally not on the spectrum so I've only watched about 80% of the Plainly Difficult channel on YouTube, but if you want a painless and entertaining, if you're into that kind of thing, way of learning about train signaling and safety, and how safety systems have evolved, I highly recommend it.

Leadtime for nuclear power, unless you wanna buy a sketchy Russian submarine reactor that's been rusting in an arctic bay, is decades longer than even the supply constrained gas turbines.

I don't know why you think solar needs two forms of back up. Batteries are very reliable.

It's worthy of a book length history: some records were shredded, and some undoubtedly lost forever, but German citizens occupied Stasi offices and preserved records. At least some of the shredded records were digitized and reconstructed. There are over 100 million pages of archived Stasi documents in German archives today.

Compared with gas turbines? The main reason power is supply constrained is that gas turbines are a precision high-tech product that fails catastrophically if you don't build it right and maintain it.

Bloom fuel cells are a plausible alternative, but they are in the process of building out their manufacturing capacity, and operating experience at data center scale hasn't been tested. Bloom's process also involves extremely high temperatures, which could result in uptime and maintenance issues.

I have a fairly narrow use case: I'm developing apps in Dart/Flutter. Gemini works well for that.

What's particularly hilarious about this robot thing is that it's not about industrial robots, which might matter. It's about humanoid robots, which is a strong contender for 1Am3s7 idea of the 21st century. Worrying about China's humanoid robots is bad policy in a laughably inconsequential way.

It has been amusing observing supposedly genius level tech industry leaders kiss Trump's ass, and how that aged like milk. Cozying up to Putin is next level idiocy.

The Germans knew to identify ex Stasi and their informants so they know who to beware of.

Basically true but is it any more important than that retired cops moved to Idaho for the neonazi vibe?

Their status in society should be comparable to former Stasi. You probably haven't heard much about how former Stasi were treated, and how they still are perceived.

There is a kind of feral animal instinctual intelligence in some things Trump does. He is in fact an expert bully. He knows that when the tech industry people bend the knee a little bit, the correct follow up is to get them to lick his shoes.

More or less small than the tacky "gold" crap he's had glued to the walls of the White House?

If this is how he chooses to spend his last five days of being relevant...

That's the thing about capital allocation: you can reduce risk as much or more by buying batteries and more solar panels, and you can get it next week at a reliable price.

Nuclear is expensive because of risk, and a lot of that risk is just project risk. Nuclear doesn't get built on time or on budget because project management so often goes sideways. It's not the permits or the protesters.]

Maduro was a shit. The operation to take him out was a masterpiece. But for what?

The US isn't better off. Venezuelans haven't seen benefits yet. Trump learned the wrong lesson from a brilliant military operation and was convinced that he could do Iran just as easily. Perhaps the biggest wrong lesson in 150 years.

The two most recent reactors built in the US used a modern modular design that was supposed to reduce the chances of construction delays. They weren't late because of planning or permitting.

The modularity was supposed to enable offsite construction of modules in a controlled environment and make it more reliable. What happened in real life is that some modules needed rework and that was only discovered after delivery. That massively fucked the schedule.

Misallocation of capital is anti-environmental. If you allocate capital to projects that have decades long delays, you have burned that capital at the start of the project, not at the end of it when you take delivery of a working power plant.

Nuclear is bad capital allocation. The reasons nuclear is expensive are very very difficult to overcome, whereas if you can make a solar cell cheaper, solar gets cheaper. Nuclear operating expenses, nuclear safety and security expenses, and decommissioning expenses constitute multiple difficult problems none with straightforward solutions.

Raw milk, tho?

The typical citizen soldier wasn't capable of atrocities, which is why they had the special selected einsatzgruppen. ICE rhymes with that word.

He created JD Vance in a test tube. Like a pathogen leaking from a lab.

The Flock CEO is another example of investor blindness to founder weirdness. It used to be a positive signal if a founder was a bit odd. But compared to current tech industry leaders, what's odd?

Garrett Langley scares the normies. That's fine if your audience is just cops. But it doesn't go over well with the public at large. By many accounts Steve Jobs could be a raging asshole, but he never showed that face to the public. But if the people advising you are accelerationists with a thing for the antichrist, you're going to be clueless about what normal people think of you.