You saw this in WoW and other MMOs. People would DDoS a rival during their raid night to cause havok, or if they were going for a world/guild record. People would also DDoS the server if a streamer was on that server. People are weird.
Kind of like how people maintained that LLMs were trash well past the point where it was obvious that that wasn't true anymore, I often wonder how many people who talk confidently about Tesla FSD have actually used a recent version. Because when we tried a recent FSD and Waymo, we found FSD to be excellent in handling pretty complex scenarios, including one of the worst, a busy airport loop, and we found Waymo to behave a bit weirdly (but still good). But FSD clearly isn't the dumpster fire that people try to make it out to be. v12 was a bit sketchy, and I was too nervous to use it past the first couple of times I tried it, but v14 is great.
Sure, people mostly call out private equity when you see a group trying to cobble together local monopoly power over some necessity of life just to extract more from everyone, or trying to financially optimize something by that was never financial before. There are of course many more benign examples that no one pays attention to. But the fact remains that there are PE firms doing massively harmful things to extract wealth.
For those in the US, I'd add lobbying your congresspeople to support the revival of the Energy Permitting Reform Act. It's something that didn't make it across the line before the end of the last congress, but basically, making it easier to bring new generation capacity on the electrical grid disproportionately benefits renewables, because they make up the vast majority of wattage waiting in the queue. As we've seen by the explosion of deployment in less regulated grids (Texas, and most of the world), the economics now favor solar+storage and wind, we just have to let people build as much of it as they want to.
I think the disconnect is that with starship they’re targeting >200 tons/200,000 kg and $2m-$10m/launch, so the very optimistic case is more like $10/kg. Also, the production of a panel in sun sync orbit is many times one on the ground, doesn’t suffer seasonality/weather, and doesn’t require battery storage for smoothing/time shifting, so you’d need to deploy many times the number of panels on earth. Our home array in North America over the course of the year generates something like 1/7th of its theoretical capacity, overproduces in the summer, and underproduces in the winter.
No idea how quickly they wear out in space with 24x7 irradiance and space temps, but on the earth, they’re at something like 80% capacity after 25 years. So seems like you could control how long they have via overpanelling?
Because GPUs are expensive, much more expensive than launch costs if they get starship to the low end of the range they’re aiming for, and you want your expensive equipment running as much as possible to amortize the cost down?
But the GPUs on the ground will be a lot cheaper to manufacture as they don't have to deal with space conditions.
It seems a real stretch to me to assume that costs for putting GPUs into space can ever come within a factor of 2-3 of putting them on the ground, even neglecting launch costs.
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