infinitewars

That covers 1 of the 10 points in the second link.

The bigger investors know the dual-use story for SpaceX, so that is what will be used to justify valuations.

https://ioc.exchange/@muskfiles/116333241408716236

That article claiming $8b profit is indeed mislabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA removes any recurring replenishment costs, the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing and returns, all ground infrastructure build and replacement, all employee stock compensation (not counted!), no advertising costs (and they've actually had to do a lot of that lately to scrounge customers that are remote enough that their network isn't too congested to serve), no taxes are counted (though they get out of that because they have no profit!). Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.

*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!

That article claiming $8b profit is mislabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA removes any recurring replenishment costs, the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing and returns, all ground infrastructure build and replacement, all employee stock compensation (not counted!), no advertising costs (and they've actually had to do a lot of that lately to scrounge customers that are remote enough that their network isn't too congested to serve), no taxes are counted (though they get out of that because they have no profit!). Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.

*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!

Peter Thiel's way of getting liquidity for his inside information with Palantir and J.D. Vance.

A genuine Mars program requires a dozen thing SpaceX only builds CGI renders of or totally overlooked. Instead, they focused on reusable launch and building a low-Earth-orbit mega-constellation. This dates back to the 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Michael D. Griffin architected Brilliant Pebbles, a concept for thousands of LEO missile interceptors that died because launch costs were too high. The Pentagon attempted to solve the launch-cost problem in the 1990s with the DC-X reusable rocket program, but it was canceled.

The architectural dream survived through "New Space" advocacy. In 2001, this very same Griffin shared a Mars Society stage with Elon Musk, then flew with him to Russia in 2002 to buy ICBMs. SpaceX was conceived on the flight home. Musk later told the former DC-X program manager, Jess Sponable, that SpaceX was "just continuing the great work of the DC-X project."

While Musk built rockets, Griffin ran In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm. Then as NASA Administrator, Griffin used his In-Q-Tel playbook to award the commercial cargo contracts that saved SpaceX from bankruptcy.

SpaceX masking began to slip when Gwynne Shotwell publicly confirmed the company's willingness to launch offensive weapons in 2018. That same year, Griffin returned to the Pentagon to establish the Space Development Agency, mandated to build a proliferated LEO constellation for hypersonic missile tracking. In 2019, U.S. General Terrence O'Shaughnessy pitched the Senate on "SHIELD"-a layered orbital missile defense system. Shortly after, O'Shaughnessy retired from the military and joined SpaceX to lead their discreet new division: Starshield.

Three decades later, Brilliant Pebbles is finally materializing as Golden Dome. As Reuters reported, Musk's Starshield is the frontrunner to build this classified SDI successor, pitching the Pentagon on a Golden Dome architecture involving thousands of weapon satellites. Starshield is already deploying these military satellites alongside standard Starlink satellites.

Mars was the necessary myth to recruit talent, capture public imagination, and secure capital. But the capabilities SpaceX actually delivered...cheap mass-to-orbit and rapid satellite replenishment...are the exact prerequisites of Golden Dome.

Is this happening in part due to the sheer volume of pull-requests with AI generated code.. things are slipping through?

J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel's Palantir is reportedly getting the software contract for control of Golden Dome, an orbital weapon system built by Elon Musk.

A weapon system capable of targeting any person on Earth controlled by a mass surveillance company. Wonderful.

It doesn't have to work, when the military industrial complex benefits either way.

The U.S. is on a path to spending trillions of dollars to putting missile defense (and offense) systems in space with the Golden Dome.

Everyone is going to the moon.. wonder why.. https://www.defensenews.com/space/2026/02/19/spacex-and-blue...

Can't help but notice that Musk uses all of the techniques.

I'm pretty sure the amount of data isn't the problem here. Maybe it's the number of corner cases? You would still want some human-in-the loop with quality UI for ATC.

> more than 1 plane every minute

Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.

The writer is retired and probably in his 70s now, so keep that in mind

The labcoat is a kind of L1 data cache.

I think it makes sense, notebooks are hard to sterilize.

Did you write on them because a notebook could cross contaminate while the coats are sterilized safely? Did you wash the markers?

I wonder how people handle this now? With IP68 tablets, you can probably just dunk the whole thing in alcohol.

(Also thanks for sharing such an interesting anecdote)

Percents of percents always felt kludgey.

Log probabilities (like decibans) unify this to say there is a -0.86 dB risk reduction for everybody.

https://rationalnumbers.james-kay.com/?p=306

It makes the math of combining risks easier and works the same even if we're operating near 99.999% or 0.0001%

Right, most of the orthodontics websites say 70% of people need them. I understand wanting to justify a total market size but if people actually believe that, it's getting out of hand.

Thanks, and 100% agree. We have never had to pull a wisdom tooth either and carrots were always the go-to roadtrip snack growing up.

If you look at places in the world where there are no dentists... their teeth are excellent.

Anecdotally, our three boys all were told they MUST have braces (each for different reasons). We did this for exactly none of them. And their teeth came out perfect by adulthood.

Most teeth align themselves as kids age. This is almost never necessary.

Maybe open show some fraction of your data on your website with a nationwide map or something, so such prospective customers can see exactly what you can provide. Then charge for the full dataset

By the no-free-lunch theorem, and the fact this 30k random branch pattern is so atypical in the real world, it would imply the loser here (Intel) is more likely to be the best branch predictor in actual benchmarks.

At least that's my prediction.

The first "paper" I looked at was utter nonsense... https://github.com/P2P-OpenClaw/papers/blob/main/2026-03-19_...

Their proposed topological_toric_code() function is entirely trivial. It initializes qubits as an array of zeros. It then runs a loop applying expm(-1j * np.pi * 0). Mathematically, the exponential of zero is simply 1. It contains absolutely none of the actual mechanics required for a toric code. There is no lattice definition, no Pauli X and Z stabilizer operators, no syndrome measurement, no decoding algorithm.

It is just a trivial statement of 1 = exp(0). And then it adds a bunch of nonsense about it being a novel toric code.

EDIT: looked at a few more. They're so bad it's hard to even believe AI wrote them. Must be a pretty crappy model.

That math doesn't need to mask sense, it's always been about Golden Dome.

I agree the LEO internet economics are brutal. China is forced to compete because Golden Dome would lock them out of launches in the future.

This is widely reported and documented, including by Reuters,

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/musks-spa...

Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.

If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.

This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite because everyone shares the same spot beam spectrum.

But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.