StarLink is a bad investment too in my opinion. It is fundamentally a US company that must charge US prices but in the US there are relatively few people who need that tech. Only in more rural areas that are sparsely populated do you not have access to fiber or cable which give better speeds and latency.
The majority of their revenue is overseas. But there they can’t reasonably charge $99/month. And there labor and land are cheap such that you can get fiber laid cheaply and quickly.
StarLink is the only thing about SpaceX that makes a profit. But that's only possible because no one else has a network up there hence it can ask for any price it want. Let's not forget that before StarLink there was Iridium and it got ousted because there was a better offer and I wouldn't be surprised if some other company will eventually go up with a better offer.
They aren't in the black at all, let alone "insanely" so. Maybe if they just did commercial launches on falcon 9, but instead they've been shoveling those "huge margins" straight back into r&d on starship etc.
The Falcon launch business is profitable on its own, which may be what GP meant. Once you include the ~$3 billion in Starship yearly R&D the space segment goes into the red.
It is what I meant. SpaceX has strong division between its operational and R&D arms, and Falcon launch has been insanely profitable from the first F9, even before reuse dropped their costs like a rock. They just invest those operating profits back into the company.
Starlink guided drones are tipping the scales for Ukraine right now. That's what enables the range required to successfully hit trains and fuel trucks supplying Crimea through the "land bridge" made from conquered lands in South Ukraine.
That plus satellite comms. Both Russia and Ukraine were very fond of how it improves communication.
Edit: meant to say that in the time of global instability, weapons tech is going to be valuable.
Not so much Ukraine using drones that use starlink, more the sheer number of starlink sats up and planned, the numbers in the proposed other constellations going up and planned, and the ongoing propensity of Chinese rockets to fragment after use rather than safely de orbit.
For interest:
An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions (2025)
Our calculations show the CRASH Clock is currently 5.5 days, which suggests there is limited time to recover from a wide-spread disruptive event, such as a solar storm. This is in stark contrast to the pre-megaconstellation era: in 2018, the CRASH Clock was 164 days.
> labor and land are cheap such that you can get fiber laid cheaply and quickly.
Which is why all of sub-saharan Africa is crisscrossed in fiber, and every hut in those villages has an ONT zip-tied to the straw walls where they get their symmetrical gigabit service.
Yep, it feels like forever a niche market. As soon as you think about it like fundamental infrastructure (which as I understand it is what we’re supposed to think about) it quickly becomes obvious that cables are better suited. Wealthy enclaves, digital nomads etc will pay for it, but that’s not going to get the revenue they’re hoping for.
You mention that cables are better suited... but that is the whole point of Starlink. Getting cables everywhere is either not feasible or expensive. The rural properties are already mentioned as a very big source of usage right now around the world. But you also have everyone who is using it for some mobile purpose. Whether that be planes, boats, RV's, cars, military, etc... I've even seen people live streaming things using Starlink due to cell towers not giving good enough connections where they are.
While they may not be ideal or people living in Urban areas, they also aren't limited to selling to people who are physically connected by cable like a regular ISP would be.
I think you're underestimating the market here. Especially on the enterprise side when you start thinking of things like airliners, cruise ships, etc...
Agreed, starlink is obviously advantageous from the global (and extra-global) perspective. Running cables is expensive. But so is launching satellites, and it’s hard to see how you reach a tipping point where satellites gets cheaper than the standard boring cable networking that supports the terrestrial internet
Starship is trying to get launch cost down to $10 per kilogram to low earth orbit. At that cost it is not clear to me that cables are better except for short distance point to point backbones. One other issue with cables is regulation or monopoly.
There are two different questions. Are cables cheaper and is Starlink profitable in the long term?
Launching a starlink satellite costs $1.5-2M per satellite for the current design. Each satellite lasts around 5 years and they need 42k of them.
Do the math and you get $13B to $17B per year ignoring inflation and ignoring the massive ground infrastructure that is also needed (costing billions more per year).
Residential plans range from $55-175/month and will make up almost all subscriptions. Most people will get the $85 middle plan, but we'll round up to $100/mo or $1200/yr.
Breaking even with no profit requires 10-15 million subscribers.
As starlink claims to have around 12k subscribers and just 10.5k satellites, I'd guess the system is profitable.
The cable question is still compelling though. Rural fiber costs around $25k per mile. This means that an average $15B/yr buys 600,000 miles of installed fiber every single year.
My conclusion is that the ideal solution would be Starlink keeping total satellites closer to the current 10k number ($4-5B per year) and spending the other $10B/yr running fiber to new areas.
Their subscriber base would drop as new fiber got installed in rural areas overlooked as "not profitable enough", but stabilize at still profitable enough from travelers and truly inaccessible places.
How many people actually live in areas that do not have some sort of broadband? That’s the whole point: this is a product designed for relatively few people.
I think there's a strong chance this is a case of it creating a whole new market though.
There are people whose current behaviour/situations will happen to benefit from this, and that may be a niche, but seems like there's a really solid chance many more people actually will change their behaviour in response to this being available. That's how disruption happens.
To be honest I can easily see the default changing if the service is good enough. I mean it seems like you basically get most of what is good about wired plus a whole load of extra previously totally unavailable benefits. For a price, to be sure, but that'll come down.
There is a huge market even just in the US for Starlink. The worldwide market for people who need internet access in remote places is positively gigantic.
Additionally, Starlink could be hugely profitable if they exclusively sold access to ships and aircraft. You'll never be able to run fiber to those.
They can indeed reasonably charge $99/month to many many millions worldwide who don't have any options for low latency, high speed internet access. You vastly underestimate the need for the service.
On the one hand you have a technology product that’s only relevant to rural consumers. Nine out of ten people have cable already.
On the other hand your margins are amazing because all you do is fly little boxes over everyone’s heads launched with government subsidized rockets. No linemen or plant-hire or contractors to sap your profits.
The biggest threat would be commoditized terrestrial wifi / 5G. The more cell service competition there is, the smaller the market for satellite, until it’s only applicable to 1% of the population (and the poorest 1% at that.)
Just throwing it out there, Im a Verizon customer in the Tri-State Area and I frequently lose service on the train or bus on my way to the city. It's more than just a 'rural issue'. I looked into getting a StarLink plan for my commute until I realized logistically, at best, I'm a freak sitting next to the window with a satellite dish on the train.
More like 8.2 out of ten. Either way the remainder is still a pretty decent market. And that's just talking about people in the USA. About 75% of Starlink subscribers are outside the USA.
> and the poorest 1% at that
Not by a lot. People who live in remote areas in the USA tend to have much less money overall, but they tend to spend much less money overall, leading to a similar amount of buying power. Someone who lives remote is more likely to own their home outright or have a relatively small mortgage. Their socio-economic status can appear numerically depressed because the numbers generally don't account for non-monetary consumption. (You got paid a salary and bought salmon from the supermarket. Remote dude fishes for salmon in a local stream. You both traded your time for salmon, but remote dude's salmon is invisible to GDP statistics.)
And furthermore, for them, Starlink would be budgeted for like an essential service rather than a luxury convenience.
> Starlink would be budgeted for like an essential service
As someone who has lived and worked remotely for the bulk of time since 1960 or so, it's not essential ipso facto; myself and most of the people I know have somehow managed to survive sans this supposedly essential service for 60 odd years (since 1935 in my fathers case, he's not dead yet).
Its more compelling use case is a relatively cheap way to integrate vehicle GIS data across four to ten thousand hectares or so (ten thousand to twenty five thousand acres) for farming, mining, exploration, etc.
Globally, its not especially attractive for non civil applications (military use, etc) as it creates a reliance that can have a plug pulled at the worst moments.
You are correct that it's not something any military can/should rely on for any future conflicts.
That doesn't make it useless though. Ukraine certainly finds Starlink attractive for military use. Despite all the misleading headlines and de-contextualised quotes, SpaceX has been reliably on Ukraine's side of the conflict and has been an essential communications fabric for both military and civilian.
Yeah i'm no fan of Elon but starlink is actually quite useful. It solves a real problem - I need network access anywhere on the globe, for any reason, at any time. they can easily charge what they wish for that (military, air travel, desert tourists etc.)
Most of the areas without good internet barely take home $100/m and a lot of them take home less than that.
If you hooked up every single cargo ship on the planet to starlink, you'd only add around 100k connections and average wages on most of those vessels is $5-8/hr (very few US/EU sailors these days) for a handful of people which tells you how much businesses actually care about their workers who do dangerous jobs.
Since I am not familiar with the law, can you expand on the mechanism by which the US government could making downloading openly licensed files illegal? How would the government avoid denying people their first amendment rights by doing this?
There's a few different levers they can pull, most of them economic & commerce. IEEPA and OFAC sanctions primarily.
They don't have to criminalize the act of downloading open weight models to effectively block access (to foreign open weight models, they have less levers to pull for US based models).
With sanctions and commerce rules though, they can unilaterally prevent all US based businesses from hosting & using them. They will need to be pulled off huggingface, github, gitlab, etc. ISPs could be put on the hook for folks torrenting them as well because technically that could be considered providing serivces to a sanctioned entity. There doesn't need to be monetary exchange.
Likewise, they can use export controls & sanctions to prohibit US companies and individuals from contributing to foreign open source projects as well.
If it went to court, the DOJ would argue that model weights are not speech because it is machine-readable parameters, and not used as a medium of human communication like source code.
Lastly, first amendment rights are unfortunately not absolute since the PATRIOT act. US Gov just has to declare a national security threat and all your rights go out the window.
I mean my state has been making it illegal to download 3d models of pieces that could be used to make guns in a 3d printer
It’s a very broad law and likely not legal, but it’s going to take a long time to be fought through the courts, and in the meanwhile people will probably be arrested for creating or sharing a file for something that may be able to become a gun part.
You’re correct that it shouldn’t be a thing but unfortunately American society is not in a good place right now
I don’t see a way to succeed at this game. The issue is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to meet the first 5 year plan and it’s all downhill from there.
But this really points to a deeper problem: in a game like this you have to pick one of two philosophies. Either the idea is to find the one algorithm that makes it work because the game is doing the same thing every time, or the game has an RNG that makes some games winnable and some not. The in between path is difficult to balance. You could for example dynamically adjust the difficulty such that if the player gets hit with a bad string of choices generated by the RNG then the difficulty is temporarily dialed down and when the player is having good luck the difficulty is raised. But I think for this kind of turn based idle game it is more about discovering the player algorithm that works and I see no algorithm that could work here.
I do however absolutely love the vibe of the game. I think with a little more attention it could be absolutely amazing.
> I don’t see a way to succeed at this game. The issue is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to meet the first 5 year plan and it’s all downhill from there.
Yeah, some other folks have pointed this out so need to tweak the win conditions/balances.
> But this really points to a deeper problem: in a game like this you have to pick one of two philosophies.
You really hit the nail right on the head here. I haven't built many games before but this has taught me that it's really a rock/paper/scissor balance that is tough to get right.
> I do however absolutely love the vibe of the game. I think with a little more attention it could be absolutely amazing.
THANK YOU! I was totally going for a Soviet vibe and glad people like that part.
This is something that is incredibly useful. I built a system like this a while back that also adds versioning to each time period. The use case is this: let’s say you are tracking your state’s sales tax rate. You do not control this and data entry is manual so it is error prone. The rate is updated typically annually but sometimes more frequently.
Let’s say for 2026 you have it at 7.25% and you entered that into the system ahead of time (say December 2025). Today, June 12 you learn that it should have been 7.35%. It would be incorrect to say that the rate changed today: it was 7.35% since January 1. But you also don’t want to lose the fact that all your invoices have been generated using the wrong rate because if you go to recalculate them you will get a different answer.
In this case what you do is create version 2 of the rate in your database with the same time period but the correct rate. This would allow your other database objects to reference either version 1 or 2 and to even recalculate all the objects that reference version 1 to now reference version 2 such that you can get line item corrections and figure out what to do about them.
It is cumbersome to use but for the specific use case of modeling real world laws that are not available as machine-readable info it is the best option I came up with.
Yeah, I think folks that under appreciate this new functionality look at the approaches that existed and say "That works, we could just sorta, wrap that in a function" but when you start getting into useful and entangled data the overhead of implementing proper bounds checking on ranges when you're more focused on the preservation of the linkages to existing data - it gets complicated quickly. This feature doesn't make anything building a system like you've described trivial but it moves us towards a higher level of expression - when building such a system you'd be focused on the complex logic of preserving the invoice integrity and reconciling it with the actual enforced tax rate rather than needing to step down to the lower level code and fiddling with date range boundaries. Much like moving from assembly to C a higher level of expression allows clearer focus on the actual problems the software is solving rather than getting tripped up in the procedural rules of implementation.
Exactly. This is non-trivial and the API for something like this is unusual in how you work with this data.
My hope is that Postgres making this kind of thing a first class citizen feature will mean that ORMs and other tooling incorporate it in a standard way so that developers can internalize using it. I am sure it will take time but this is a big step. Doing all this has been possible but having standardized tooling and frameworks would be nice.
Another alternative I have used is basically having a current state table and a migrations table that get applied at a specific time. The migrations table act as both a history and a set of scheduled updates. The trick is that you have to apply the migrations and so you don’t have perfect atomic changes without some sort of locking system and timing might be off. But it is a decent system that also works.
Is Homebrew still tied to GitHub or has there been any move to provide redundancy across multiple providers?
Also coming from what I consider traditional package managers such as apt, rpm, emerge, pkg, etc. I am still confused on cans, taps, kegs, formulas, etc. Does anyone have a good and concise guide to what all these features are?
The issue with GoPro was that they did not know what business they were actually in. They created a new camera hardware segment and became experts at it. Then they decided that they had to pivot to a media platform. That was a dumb move that destroyed shareholder value. They also failed to differentiate from smartphones and cheaper cameras by innovating and/or moving upmarket.
This is also a lesson in failed leadership. Woodman is a CEO who founded the company. He has a controlling share and has never had to answer to a real board in his tenure. The company lost 99% of its value from its peak under him. The brand might still have value but his legacy is basically a Greek tragedy.
I wonder if AI could be detected via copyright. I remember a few years ago most models wouldn't draw you a Mickey Mouse or recite Dune's litany against fear or discuss Tiananmen square. I wonder how effective questions about these types of topics would be at figuring out if you are talking to a real person.
As a crude joke that is only tangentially related, I saw a skit video a while ago with two guys saying goodbye and one says "send me a dick pic when you get home" and then explains that an AI won't simulate it so this is a sure way to know that it's his friend confirming his safe arrival.
You should see what metaAI (the Ai that sits inside all your private WhatsApp conversations) does. It has severe thought police installed but it types the offensive stuff first and then quickly edits when it reads what it wrote.
I think this is exactly right. Basically when I am coding, having an agent that roughly matches my intelligence is a feature, not a bug. Having one that is 10x as smart would actively slow me down because I would have to spend the time understanding what it is doing or hand over all architecture to it and just vibe code everything, hoping that it doesn’t do the PhD version of fizzbuzz instead of the maintainable one.
But for some classes of problems I think a model that is 10-100x smarter than the smartest expert is a huge boon. These would be problems that are very hard to solve but easy to verify that the solution is correct. Protein folding, sudoku, etc. Because of this I see the really smart models going to biomedical and pharma first and maybe a few high profit verticals rather than being widely deployed. I am sure Pfizer would be happy to pay for a 100x smarter than the smartest researcher model. But I am not certain that this kind of market fit would justify trillion dollar valuations in the long run. And in the meantime normal “human companion” models will go from Sonnet to some open weight model running on a Dell tower in your closet to maybe even on your phone in the next few years.
Maybe. I can’t imagine what kind of solutions a software engineer who is 10x smarter than any human who has ever lived would be like by definition. All I know is that there is a possibility it says that the most optimal way to solve a problem is too clever for me to understand and as long as I must verify its work I must be able to understand fully the code it writes.
Of course perhaps at that point I really do become more of a spec and prompt engineer and don’t actually look at the code any more than I look at the assembly code produced from my programs now. But still my gut says using hyperintelligence to do common tasks is all positive.
4.8 is demonstrating simplicity, hence its smarter?? It just refactored my 4.6 generated code (4.8 is very slow on difficult tasks - urgh! - without burning tokens - yey!) but the output was wow! Simple, elegant and exactly what i wanted to see.
> Corporate leaders are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns.
This is act one the AI bear market. Yes I know everyone screams “bubble”. Let me explain the scenario I have in mind.
1. AI booms because the technology seems to actually have promise of revolutionizing how work gets done. It can do your taxes! It can drive Excel! It can act as a CEO! It can code up full apps and SaaS products! It can replace this vendor or that! You know the drill.
2. Every company must in corporate AI or be seen as obsolete. Having a bad quarter? Announce that you are “seeking to explore opportunities to develop an AI integration plan framework” for your plumbing business. Massive AI compute buying happens. While two of the three major AI houses are not publicly traded proxies like Nvidia and RAM manufacturers are so the market rips higher and higher. Nvidia trades as if it is already 10+ years from now, every company out there has adopted AI perfectly, and it is delivering huge profits to them.
3. Reality checks start pouring in. Turns out that not only is AI expensive (a problem that presumably will be taken care of with time and development), but that the technology itself just isn’t suitable for everything. (IMHO it’s great at augmenting a power user but it is terrible at interacting directly with customers). We start seeing individual companies change tone on investment. They can’t stop it due to momentum but they are starting to shift the narrative to warn of what comes next. This is where we are.
4. Numbers come in. Earnings show what the actual ROI is. Some companies do benefit, but crucially we see examples of where investing in AI destroys value. I think this happens when replace crucial parts of their workforce with agents and find that they lost in-house expertise, when customers left due to worse products, or simply when AI was roughly as expensive as human labor without being significantly more productive.
5. The market stumbles. What do you mean AI won’t take over every corporate America?! Surely that can’t be right! Nvidia and other proxies flag.
6. In a late to the game rush Anthropic and OpenAI IPO fearing that the market has noticed that the emperor has no clothes. Their internal numbers turn out to be scary: very high revenue but no path to insane profitability. They quickly get included in QQQ and maybe even S&P500 but as their IPO price is the highest they trade they drag the broad market indexes down. This is leveraged by the Nvidia proxy status.
7. Infrastructure course correction. Hyperscalers who started huge datacenter buildouts cannot justify it. They pay contract penalties and get out of some of the projects, writing down losses. The market fully melts.
—-
I think there is a competing market downturn fueled by the affordability squeeze. Basically while AI spend is corporate driven, the biggest investors are consumer companies. Of the hyperscalers you can maybe argue that Microsoft is not a B2C fully but it is close. If consumers don’t have money to spend, hyperscalers take a hit, investment slows from there, and AI is hit directly by it.
I think either scenario is likely, it’s just which happens first. But right now the market is sprinting down a tight rope and trading like that tight rope has no end and that the sprinter never makes a mistake regardless of wind changes. Everything has to go right for a very long time to justify valuations. One stumble can stop it all.
8. The credit market tied to the data center buildout implodes. The contagion spreads similar to 2008.
It is ironic that people got laid off due to capitol allocation for compute capacity and people will get laid off when there isn't much ROI and things crash.
I worked on an embedded project a few years ago using a tiny 128x64 display and wanted to use a pixel font but none of the ones I found made me particularly happy so I made my own. Turns out it is very easy to do. Font Forge is fantastic and very easy to use and once you get going by nailing down a few letters at the size you want you can quickly make something that is cohesive, pleasant, and easy to read. I highly recommend this as an exercise.
As a bonus I added a bunch of open source icons as font glyphs for my project and it was really fun to figure out how small I can make them while still being distinctive.
What's the experience with Font Forge for creating pixel fonts? I have never used it but I always assumed that a font creation tool made for arbitrary style "vector" fonts is probably unwieldy if all you want is square pixels, to be rendered pixel-perfect, etc.
It's pretty much MS Paint type experience. You get a grid and color pixels black or white. But you can move up/down grid sizes automatically and then you get to fix it at different grid sizes.
The majority of their revenue is overseas. But there they can’t reasonably charge $99/month. And there labor and land are cheap such that you can get fiber laid cheaply and quickly.
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