consensus1

Who has delivered better value for money on government contracts than SpaceX?

Envy is a hell of a drug

Have you got any evidence for these claims?

I'm not seeing it.

> “Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?” Musk states on 13 December 2013.

> “any day 1st - 8th . play it by ear if you want. always space for you,” Epstein replies.

> Musk then sends several emails relaying his schedule, and the two settle on 2 January as a date for the visit. The email exchange ends with Epstein telling Musk that he would need to remain in New York and sending his regrets that they could not meet.

> “Bad news- Unfortunately , my schedule will keep me in New York . I was really looking forward to finally spending some time together with just fun as the agenda. so i am very disappointed. Hopefully we can schedule another time in the near future,” Epstein wrote.

> In November 2012, Epstein sent Musk an email asking “how many people will you be for the heli to island”.

> “Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk replied, in an apparent reference to his former wife Talulah Riley.

> Musk followed up with an email on 25 December in response to another Epstein message that encouraged him to visit and offered use of his helicopter.

> “Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for,” Musk wrote.

> “Understood , I will see you on st Barth, the ratio on my island might make Talilah uncomfortable,” Epstein responded.

> “Ratio is not a problem for Talulah,” Musk said.

> On 2 January 2013, Musk sent Epstein an email suggesting that the visit wouldn’t take place saying: “Logistics won’t work this time around.”

They don't have to be willing because hiding the losses would be a crime. And it still doesn't matter b/c anyone with a calculator can tell you exactly what the value of their position is on any given day. The $94 billion is 2.4% of Google's market cap, so even if SpaceX goes to zero it will be barely noticeable from the background noise of the stock price movement.

You should stop asking people for money for any other reason except that you provide value in return. Your enjoyment is your own business.

I don't have a CS degree, and I am talking about inbound recruiter emails, so it's not credentialism or networking. I did get my current job via networking though, but networking in this industry isn't really any more than "I used to work with this guy and he is good so give him an interview."

If somebody is paying you to do something and someone else comes along that can do that thing much better than you and/or for less money you've got a problem. Whether or not you call the person paying that money a customer or use some other term the fundamental issue is the same.

The AI will not stop them, or anyone else, from doing what they enjoy. It will stop them from getting paid for it. And nobody has the right to get paid for having fun. To get paid you need to deliver customer value.

US fintech. Language / framework agnostic.

Why would that be different? It seems right now that tech billionaires are the group that is most in favor of advancing technology. What politically powerful group would it be more in my interest to hold power?

Sample size of 1 here, but my inbox is absolutely overflowing with recruiters. Sample size of more than 1 - the SWE who were laid off recently from my company are finding new jobs quickly.

Certainly the job market is more brutal than it was during the covid mass hiring spree, but it doesn't seem any worse than historical average. My view is anecdotal but I haven't seen any real data on the other side of it either.

It does and has done so consistently throughout human history, so I do not believe this will be any different. I couldn't care less what the shared amount of money is because it some billionaire gets another million and I get a thousand, that means I win regardless of whether or not that increases the wealth differential.

Rockets have a self destruct feature to avoid exactly this type of contingency

It is an indisputable fact that "commercial advantage" in terms of copyright means selling copies. It is also an indisputable fact that Anthropic did npt do that.

I would like to see a citation on that b/c I am unaware of it. The only case I see in SDNY is the NYT v OpenAI case which has not been ruled on yet. https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/copyright-law-20...

You are asking to prove a negative. But even assuming that the model is capable of returning every bit of its training data verbatim (a mathematical impossibility) that would not be enough as mere capability is insufficient here. If capability alone were the standard any library that also has a photocopier / scanner would be in violation.

To prove distribution of copyrighted materials it would have to be practical and actually used in the wild by people to circumvent copyright and generate copies of those works. Again, I can't prove a negative, but that isn't the standard, and nobody has shown a practical exploit here.

That is a false statement. Gaining commercial advantage means selling pirated copies which Anthropic absolutely did not do, so none of your following statements are correct either.

1/4 resolution, but still 100% of the movie. There's not really an equivalent for a book.

A model absolutely could be trained to engage in malicious behavior like that, but it seems impractical for an actual attack. What you want as an attacker is to insert a backdoor exactly where you want it an not where you don't because every backdoor increases your chance of getting caught. A malicious model inserts backdoors and exfiltrates data everywhere and you care about maybe 0.01% of it. The other 99.99% is negative value to you. In practice this malicious model would be caught almost instantly.

A hosted model is different because you could prompt inject specific customers, but I assume from this question you mean a malicious open source model being hosted by an honest provider.

Biased sample, but basically everyone I know on either side of politics agrees with that.

Well you'll need to keep waiting because I never made such a claim and therefore I have no need to justify it.

Residential electricity rates don't get "bid up" like that. Increases typically must be approved by the government and have to be justified by expenses rather than market prices. Ashburn VA, which has more data centers than anywhere else, actually pays below US average rates.

All of the above are false, except for 3 which has actually happened in a few cases, though is definitely the outlier as I have been near data centers and couldn't hear a thing. And they provide a lot more jobs than the 0 jobs that were provided by the undeveloped land they are built on.

I think you have made up a strawman here. Nobody actually thinks people just decide one day "I want to be homeless." The conservative position is they are homeless due to their own bad choices, which is absolutely true in a lot of cases. Their error comes from assuming that they can just reverse the situation by not making those bad choices anymore, but in reality it can be a one way door.

If you want dumb conservative positions on homelessness I would suggest "just lock them all up", "just make them get jobs", "just get them out of MY neighborhood."

A v2 Starlink satellite costs $800K and on average 25 are launched at once. Launch cost for a reusable Falcon 9 is $15 million. So that's $1.4 million per satellite to orbit lasting 5 years that's $280K / sat / y, or $2.8 billion / y to maintain a constellation of 10,000. And SpaceX is not known for complacency. The unit cost will continue to drop.

On the other hand there are currently $63 billion (22.5 years of Starlink cost) of rural broadband subsidies active in the US and it hasn't come close to running all that fiber. So $63 billion to not even finish the US vs $2.8b / y to provide service to the entire world. I think it's safe to conclude that the satellite option is in fact much cheaper.

I suspect what is going on is just a matter of relative density. I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "central EU," but just guessing from a map I get Romania as the least population dense country that I would think of as Central Europe at 83 / km3. That is more than double the US pop density and if it were a US state only 15 out of 50 would be more dense. So then taking the least population dense region of the least dense country I get Tulcea with 23 / km3. That's 66% of the density of the US (37) which would come in at 34 / 50 if it were a US state.

So the most sparsely populated region of the most sparsely populated country in Central Europe is just a bit below average for the US. Our least dense state is Alaska at 0.5 / km3 or almost 50x less dense than that. But that's almost cheating. So lets take mainland only and that's Wyoming, with 2.3, so 10x less densely populated than the outlier in Central Europe.

So basically the US is just really damn empty to the point there just isn't any comparison in Central Europe and that's why it's so hard to get internet access out there.

Correct, but it goes deeper than just the building components. In the US you have to go through an entire military procurement process within each iteration loop. So you design a weapon, then try to sell it to the military, but just the process of demonstrating it and selling it to the military takes a long time and costs money. If you fail you can go back to the drawing board, but each iteration loop is probably a year minimum. And if you are successful now you have to set up and scale production. Get ready for years of environmental reviews and lawsuits.

In Ukraine the military will take any drone they can get their hands on, so all you have to do is build a drone, give a bunch of them to the army to try out on the Russians, and within a week they will tell you if it works or not. So your design iteration loop is probably weeks. If you are successful, the time between hearing the general say "give me 1 million" and when the bulldozers start clearing the factory site is probably measured in days.

And yet the regulation actually will result in more dead soldiers or else it wouldn't be the first thing that goes out the window in a war.

Should be a separate [stupid] flag, though.