Now how about procuring half a gigawatt when nearby residents are annoyed about their heating bills doubling, and are highly motivated to block you? This is already happening in some areas.
Anticompetitive with themselves? It’s not like Claude / Anthropic have any kind of monopoly, and services companies are allowed to charge different rates for different kind of access to said service?
The anticompetitive move would be not running their software if ‘which codex’ evaluated to showing a binary and then not allow you to use it due to its presence. Companies are allowed to set pricing and not let you borrow the jet to fly to a not approved destination. This distortion is just wrong as a premise. They are being competitive by making a superior tool and their business model is “no one else sells Claude” and they are pretty right to do this IMO.
Anticompetitive behavior has been normalized in our industry, doesn't make it not anticompetitive. It's a restriction that's meant to make it harder to compete with other parts of their offering. The non-anticompetitive approach would be to offer their subscription plans with a certain number of tokens every month, and then make Claude Code the most efficient with the tokens, to let it compete on its own merits.
Yeah, soft costs like permitting and inspections are supposedly the main reason US residential solar costs $3/watt while Australian residential solar costs $1/watt. It was definitely the worst and least efficient part of our solar install, everything else was pretty straightforward. Also, running a pretty sizable array at our house, the seasonal variation is huge, and seasonal battery storage isn’t really a thing.
Besides making PV much more consistent, the main thing this seems to avoid is just the red tape around developing at huge scale, and basically being totally sovereign, which seems like it might be more important as tensions around this stuff ramp up. There’s clearly a backlash brewing against terrestrial data centers driving up utility bills, at least on the East Coast of the US.
The more I think about it, the more this seems like maybe not a terrible idea.
So far most of the datacenters are built in very convenient places and people will start to build them in inconvenient places like Sahara or Mongolia way before they will building them in space
Maybe. But for SpaceX, it’s more aligned with what they’re trying to do to just learn to manufacture them at scale and lob them into space. And one of the benefits there is the uniformity of it - they can treat them all the same, rather than dealing with a bunch in different geographies with different power issues, governmental issues, etc. That’s been one of the major issues with rolling out solar. In the US, there are >20,000 AHJs, each with different rules and processes. A huge constellation of satellites seems easier to reason about and build systems to maintain en masse, because it’s more uniform.
I’m not saying this is a good idea. I’ve got a lot of SpaceX stock, and I wasn’t really happy to hear the news, this is mostly me trying to understand why they might think this is a good idea, and brainstorming out loud, with a dash of coping. Seems most here think that it’s just stupid, but then, most commenters thought Starlink was stupid, iirc, and that turned out to be wildly wrong. But it might also just be stupid this time.
Do you imagine there'd be less red tape involved in launching multiple rockets per day carrying heavy payloads?
Like this argument just gets absurd: you're claiming building a data center on earth will be harder from a permitting perspective than FAA flight approval for multiple heavy lift rocket launch and landing cycles.
Mining companies routinely open and close enormous surface area mines all over the world and manage permitting for that just fine.
There's plenty of land no one will care if your build anything on, and being remote with maybe poor access roads is still going to be enormously cheaper then launching a state of the art heavy lift rocket which doesn't actually exist yet.
> Ok, why are so many being built in Northern Virginia, rather than in the middle of nowhere where there will be no backlash?
Right? So if that's the case why would putting them in Space, far less accessible in every conceivable way, with numerous additional expenses and engineering constraints, be cheaper?
Yeah, I don't know if it wins on cheaper, even with $2M fully reusable starship launches. Maybe rollout speed vs piecing together BD deals with a bunch of different infra providers? The expansion of the grid is going to be hamstrung until congress finally passes energy permitting reform, which they've tried and failed at repeatedly. But they could do non-interconnected microgrids in the desert like Redwood Materials has been trying.
Maybe there's a concentration in VA because there's a set of deals/procedures in place with infra providers there that make it easy to scale up, similar to how DE has well developed corporate infrastructure, so everyone incorporates there. But that stops when the area hits its limit in power provision (which seems to be happening right now). In which case, being able to do this yourself end to end by putting this stuff in space with your own power generation makes it the ultimate scale-up opportunity - no real limits on space or power availability, so once you get that method down, you can mass-scale and get great economies of scale. Maintenance isn't a thing, these will be disposable.
I think that's it, money's not the limiting factor if they can pitch this successfully, which I think they will. They want massive scale without the constraints you hit when doing it on earth. I think he's aiming for scale that we haven't seen in DCs on earth.
>why would putting them in Space, far less accessible in every conceivable way, with numerous additional expenses and engineering constraints, be cheaper?
Because mostly AI is power hungry, and in space you need 1/5th the solar panels, almost no solar panel support structure, and almost no daily load shifting batteries.
As it turns out, this matters more than launch costs or cooling radiators or radiation bit flips. This is why you need to do the math instead of assuming you know what the solution looks like.
Just based on weight, looks like a Block 4 starship should be able to bring up ~150 30 panel pallets of 550W panels, about 2 MW. They're trying to get a starship launch down to $2M with full reuse. GPU DCs are frequently in the neighborhood of 500GW, so maybe 250 launches for just the power generation, or $500M? And then there's radiators, so let's say $1B for launch of power and heat dissipation. For comparison, 500MW of H100 machines retails for >$10B, and the launch cost for those shouldn't be too bad compared to the power, since they're more value dense. And then there's land and ongoing power and cooling spending for the terrestrial version, which you don't have for the space version. So actually, doesn't seem terrible economically? This is obviously very back-of-the-envelope, and predicated on the optimistic scenario for starship launch cost.
You cannot just block out the mass of stuff and declare it'll cost exactly the launch cost, nor can you take the cost of current datacenter servers and go "they'll definitely cost the same to put in space".
A regular set of servers will straight up be destroyed if put on a rocket and launched into space: the motherboards and PCBs aren't mounted or rated to survive the vibration. The connectors and wiring isn't rated for that vibration. Sure, some probably make it, but you will lose machines from just launching them alone. Any electrolytic capacitors in there? If your system exposes them to vacuum or even just low pressure, then those likely die too. Solar panels? We can launch them obviously, there's a reason people send up expensive solar panels: because you're doing a lot of work making sure they'll physically survive the launch.
So of course, now you have to build a space-rated server frame, PCBs and GPUs. You ain't going to buying bulk H100's from Nvidia. And you have to package and mount it to get it both survive the launch and physically fit into the payload bay. Then you have to add a deployment system for it, sensors etc. And then you have to add an assembly system, because if it doesn't fit in one launch (you're proposing 250+ launches for power alone) then all of these systems need to be assembled in orbit. How are they going to be assembled? How are they going to be maneuvered? Even if you could rendezvous accurately with the construction orbit, we're talking months of drift from every little thing knocking stuff around, putting it into a spin, etc.
So either each of these is now a fully contained satellite, complete with manoeuvering system and power, or you're also needing to develop a robotic assembly system - with power and manoeuevering in order to manage and assemble all this.
And let's not forget mission control: every single one of these steps is incurring a bunch of labor costs to have people manage it. And not cheap labor costs: you're going from "guys who roll racks in and plug stuff in and can be trained up easily" to "space mission control operators".
Is this doable? Probably. Is this going to be in anyway cheaper then Earth? Not in the slightest, and it's not going to be close.
Heh relax, it’s back of the envelope to try and see if it’s anywhere in the ballpark, and if they get launch to be cheap enough, it seems like it might be. You don’t assemble one massive thing in space, it’s a bunch of disposable individual sats with laser interconnects, like Starlink.
We’re quickly entering a new era of energy abundance, without needing to constantly dig up, process, and cart around enormous amounts of oil. And solar has recently gotten cheap enough that people in poorer countries around the world are deploying huge amounts of it. That’s pretty amazing!
It sounds like the point you're making is that manufacturers taking liability will make all of this unaffordable for normal people, similar to how medicine has become unaffordable?
I don't think that's actually your point, but it sort of sounds like it.
There are probably elements of that but my read of the post I replied to was "why on earth would you expect manufacturers of equipment to accept liability for misuse?" (I actually agree about misuse, but malfunction is not the same.)
And "in the context of something that is designed to save lives"... well, absolutely, many manufacturers do and will and even "have to".
Like everything else, it depends. In the extreme case, if you eat beef every day but use a bicycle for transportation, live in a mild climate with little need for heating and cooling, and rarely fly in an airplane, your diet could be a significant part of your carbon footprint in percentage terms.
Eh, it's just that the entire supply chain that keeps them alive means that their per-capita carbon footprint is almost certainly not dominated by their diet, let alone by beef alone (it's an outsized fraction, but it's just not that significant compared to other stuff). But yeah, hard to talk accurately in broad strokes about a very varied audience.
In this case, they said they live in Rome. Concrete, heavy machinery to make it livable, trash movement, maintaining their public transit, household goods, electricity via nat gas, etc. Sounds like they're making a good effort, though, and in terms of just the discretionary part, they might be right.
That says 14-18% of global GHG emissions is due to cattle, the person I was responding to said "the biggest impact you can have is by eating way less meat, cattle in particular". That doesn't seem like the biggest impact possible. For Americans, their entire diet is attributable to about "5.14 kg CO 2 eq. per person per day" https://habitsofwaste.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2020-CS... (UMich Center for Sustainable Systems). For a family of 2.5, that equates to about 4.5 tons CO2e/year. The average American family footprint is about 48 tons CO2e/year. So slightly less than 10% for their entire diet. Of that, maybe a bit more than half is attributable to cattle, or 5% total.
By comparison, driving a pair of gasoline cars their average of 10k miles/yr is something like 16% of the average American family's yearly emissions, or 3x the beef.
Switching from heating with natural gas to a heat pump would also make a bigger dent for the average American family, let alone if they're living somewhere that gets properly cold, like New England. Or just spending $2,000 on air sealing and a layer of fiberglass, for those living in a leaky house - more impactful than not eating beef.
Looking into it a bit for Italian families, it looks like cattle might a larger proportion, partly because their overall carbon footprint is lower. But it's still a relatively small proportion (<15%).
Pretty sure if landowners weren't raising cattle, the alternative isn't going to be letting it return to nature and lowering the value of their land, without big government programs that essentially pay them to do that, so that whole thing seems kind of moot.
EVs still are less than half the utility of normal cars. Until charging becomes as standard as filling your car (i.e don't have to go find a charger, every gas station has one, and so on), no matter what the advantage they give you it won't overcome that fact.
value/dollar in terms of what you can use a car for (transportation, carrying stuff, time spent driving versus time spend filling up)
Cheapest EV is 30k right now - nissan leaf.
For that much, you can get a Prius Prime , which can be driven like an EV to work and back, charge at home, and when you go on a long trip, you don't have to worry about finding charging stations
You can also get a hybrid Ford Maverick. While you can't charge it at home, It gets 500 miles tank of gas, a full bed for carrying stuff, outlets in the bed for tools or camping, and offroad capability, and again, can fill it up at any gas station.
If Nissan leaf was like 100 mile range, basic vehicle for $10k, then it would be a different story. But right now, paying the same for way less capability doesn't make sense.
So you don't have a quantitative measure of utility of which you can precisely determine a "half", you have a vague idea of "value" on which you want to place a veneer of quantitative analysis that will last exactly until someone calls you on it. That's not specific.
Lets say utility is time that you can spend driving the car versus it sitting still, multiplied by amount of weight you can carry, divided by cost of vehicle.
Let's say that every unit of time spent driving a vehicle is of equal utility for every person, and that the utility scales linearly with the absolute length of a given stretch of driving or time between. Let's say everyone uses their car to go basically the same distances to the same kinds of places carrying the same cargo and passengers, with basically the same costs for needing an alternative. Let's also say that cows are frictonless spheres in a vacuum.
Or we could just not pretend that "utility" is a concept that can be applied uniformly across all car-shaper objects.
I haven't had to find a charger or think about them in over a year. I just plug it in when I get home and I'm done.
I did a ~10000km road trip around western Europe and while I started with ABRP, I switched to just driving normally and stopping at an EV charger when I was below around 20% and happened to see a sign.
I'm not saying this is the case everywhere, I opted for an ICE engine when I visited Australia for example. "Half the utility of normal cars" is utter nonsense in my experience though.
The thing is, if you just plug in when you get home, you likely drive very few miles. Id be for a $10k brand new EV with 100 miles of realistic range (i.e not having to keep speed below x). These don't exist. You pay for higher range in even cheapest EV, so you are paying for utility that you don't use most of the time.
There aren’t any new gas cars for sale at that price point…
And if it’s sitting at home for 14 hours per day, a normal 120V outlet will get you 70 miles of charge. That’s fine for most commutes, but if you actually need more than that, you can use a dryer outlet that gets you like 4x that charging rate (280 miles of range over that 14 hour charge). Or installing a proper wall charger will get you twice that again, but it’s really not necessary.
>There aren’t any new gas cars for sale at that price point
Yes, because a modern gas engine that makes a measly 112 hp is still a very complex piece of machinery that requires a lot of precision manufacturing and assembly.
An EV is dead simple by comparison. To make a 100 mile range ev, you don't need fancy motors. Industrial AC motors will work.
And as for charging, this requires you to be at your house every few days. If thats your average use case, you don't need high mileage EVs.
I guess, what's the general breakdown of cost between engine and the rest of the car, and the amortized R&D?
Most commuters use it mostly for commuting, but also day trips, and 100 miles is really cutting it close for day trip round trips in a lot of US metro areas.
I don’t think this is accurate, Chinese firms are increasingly moving up the quality chain. You might want to look at some of the reviews of Xiaomi’s recently launched car. Also, Tesla Shanghai is one of their best factories, much better quality scores than Fremont iirc.
Having a totally local, integrated supply chain pays dividends in a lot of ways, as does leading in production volume. Tim Cook also gave that interview where he was just talking about the incredibly deep bench of industrial talent that you just can’t find outside China at this point - that labor cost wasn’t why they produced there.
The issue is not actual quality, it’s perceived quality. Chinese companies will fight decades of history and negative perception to reach top of the market consumers, a segment obsessed with perception.
- Japanese consumer goods were perceived as junk until the tipping point was reached, and then they were perceived as high-quality, easily equalling or surpassing Western goods. That took ~30 years (1950 to 1980, say). Older readers will recall the controversy over Akio Morita's (Morita-san being the founder of Sony) statements in the book "The Japan that can Say No" (edit: see [0]), which seems strangely prescient in the sense that it ignited a lot of (US) debate around dependence on foreign semiconductors.
- Then there was Taiwan, again, a 30 year cycle from about 1970 to 2000. Taiwan used to be known for cheap textiles, consumer dross, and suchlike. Not now...
My point is that the way to get better at products is to make them and make them and make them, and eventually an export-led country reaches a tipping point where the consumers flip over, and their perception changes.
Exactly, I grew up during the beginning if the Japanese auto boom in the US. My grandfather was one of the first people in his group to buy one of the Japanese cars when they became highly reliable and his friend heckled him about it for awhile. Until that is he wasn't constantly repairing the thing. It got much better gas mileage. Wasn't getting ate up by rust. And it ran well over 150k miles, when US cars typically fell apart before 100k miles.
Rinse and repeat for Korean cars. And now China are deep into their cycle too. They're already producing high quality, at half the price, and I've noticed that the quality narrative is changing.
Regardless of where they are perception wise, the long term lesson is clear - local manufacturers may ride the "quality" bandwagon for a while, but ultimately it's a losing strategy.
ICE cars, and manufacturers who don't gave an EV strategy are already inside their Kodak moment. It's fairly obvious that at some point "all" cars will be EV, just like "all" cameras are digital. Those who remain ICE only will fade into obscurity.
Unfortunately the politicians in the US right now are driving a narrative away from EVs (and Tesla has become semi-toxic). Which in turn affects local manufacturers planning near term sales. By the time the mood swings it may be hard to catch up.
Or maybe not. Maybe they come late to the party simply skipping a bunch of iterations, going straight to great, cheap, reliable. Time will tell I guess.
My last few cars have been Hyundai's. Unfortunately my driving habits don't allow full EV driving, but I did go with one of their (non-plugin) hybrids.
And almost all of my family has moved to Hyundai over time. The pure US car companies have been dumping out total crap for the longest time, it's an easy sale for almost anything else.
Where are you based that you hold this impression? Because globally BYD is perceived as having much better build quality than Tesla, rightly or wrongly.
Yeah I still don't understand this argument. The only cars I ever hear of (in Europe) with issues are German or French cars (not all brands). (Don't see many American brands here).
it took Japan about 25 years of very directed industrial strategy to take the "made in Japan" label from indicating junk to the average American, to indicating a premium/reliable product. China might get there in even less than 25 years but you'll probably still find people holding onto old "chinesium" beliefs long after they should
A key for Japan is also that for various product categories, they don't export (or maybe manufacture at all - I'm just not really familiar with their non-export goods) low-quality goods - I assume because it isn't economical to compete at the low end of the market.
Even though China can compete at the top of many markets, they still also compete at the bottom, which taints their reputation.
Japan never was a threat during that time to countries around it. China is very much a threat to other countries around it and I would feel pretty bad about materially financing yet another war.
I'm beginning to feel this way about the US. Much more comfortable with Chinese foreign policy at this point. At this point, going on the past 50 years or so, it would take something quite extraordinary on China's part to convince me they are going to abuse their power as much as the US has so far. Hopefully I'm not simply being naive.
You need to pay better attention. I hate what Trump is doing to US foriegn policy - but it is still better than China, and there is hope that things will change in the future as elections continue. China doesn't even have that hope.
China is clearly supporting Russia in Ukraine. China is clearly making plans to invade Tiawas (that alone makes them just as bad as the US, even if it hasn't happened yet).
Unless you start a denazification project and start shooting MAGA cultists en-masse, the US is not recovering. This is a rot that goes beyond one man and one party.
Your empire is decaying and it's going to keep lashing out up until it's completely gone.
If we add up "damage to countries around it" in the previous hundred years, I think Japan doesn't look so great.
China conducted one several-week war against Vietnam and annexed Tibet, both over 50 years ago. Other than the longstanding dispute with Taiwan, who are they threatening? Some quibbles over a few Himalayan mountains with India?
They seem quite intent on inching their border closer to the Philippines mainland by building military bases on some shoals that belong to the Philippines.
One War. In 1962, i.e. 64 years ago. In meanwhile, US supported genocidal regime of Pakistan killing Hindus and many more in what is now Bangladesh. Sent billions more to Pakistan which are then used to fund terrorist activities in India. and some more recently under Covfefe.
"The Defence Ministry of India reported: 88 killed and 163 wounded on the Indian side, while 340 killed and 450 wounded on the Chinese side, during the two incidents.[6][7]
According to Chinese claims, the number of soldiers killed was 32 on the Chinese side and 65 on the Indian side in Nathu La incident; and 36 Indian soldiers and an 'unknown' number of Chinese were killed in the Cho La incident.[8] "
War might be overstating it a bit, "incident" might be more appropriate, but we can round up in the spirit of comity.
So adding it all up, the Chinese had 1-2 small foreign wars per decade in the 50s-70s, zero since 1979. It still doesn't justify the phrasing "threatening all their neighbors" in 2025, aside from Taiwan specifically.
In the case of the line of control with India, it's reached the point where they're having ritualized fistfights at high altitude for pride, that's just comical. It's not threatening.
Haha that little 'during that time' is doing some heavy lifting there. You don't think there might have been some slight lingering resentment and fear that the slouching monster that Japan was during WWII would come back? I think Japan's neighbors might have felt 'pretty bad' too, but it didn't matter. In the end the money wins.
From what I've heard, the quality is pretty good. The problem is when something breaks, you can be waiting for (sometimes very expensive) parts for months while not being able to use your car.
Maybe I got lucky, but I drove a 2011 model Ford from 2013-2025, and the worst part delay I experienced in that time was when they had to get next-day parts from a nearby city.
It's worth pointing out that the F150 has been the best selling truck for 40 years and the best selling consumer vehicle for most of them as well. There's bound to be plenty of parts for them sitting around.
I've got one from 2011 that I'm still driving myself, and aside from one minor thing, I've not had a single problem with it, despite putting it through its paces.
Ford is definitely of the better manufacturers for this. Ubiquitous parts, most models are quite reliable, and a robust service network that's been embedded for decades. Toyota is another counter-example, and a lot of the incumbents are going to do better than newer brands.
Like, can we all take a step back and marvel that freaking wasm can do things that 10 years ago were firmly in the realm of sci-fi?
I hope they’ll extend that sort of thing to help filter out the parts of the dom that represent attention grabbing stuff that isn’t quite an ad, but is still off topic/not useful for what I’m working on at the moment (and still keep the relevant links).
Thanks for sharing. I’m really looking forward to a Cambrian explosion of weird little movies like Kung Fury as the costs of VFX shrink. I’m sure that there will be a ton of garbage, but that also means more gems that would’ve never been made if they had to raise money from bean counters.
Did you see the "trailer" for the sequel? [1] It looks so good! It's a shame that legal shenanigans are all that are holding it up [2].
You're absolutely right about this. We're going to see so many different kinds of small-studio films. Everything from Yorgos Lanthimos to Charlie Kaufman to Denis Villeneuve and back.
I expect lots of things we've never even seen before.
lol that was amazing and absurd, don’t know how I missed that, thanks! Sad to hear it’s stuck in legal limbo, though, that is a shame - it looks like they poured a ton of passion into it.
