ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6hr ago
On the flip side, properly engineered, there would be few moving parts, and low risk of environmental damage. Something like 99.8% of Starlink satellites are operational with a median age of a little over 5 years, so it doesn't seem implausible on first impression that AI satellites would experience similarly low rates of failure.
I dunno, man. Space Routers sounds a lot more simple than Space Datacenters...
Does the Colas Group count?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
What I want to know about space datacenters is what's the plan for repairs and maintenance. Or is the idea: "YOLO, just deorbit it, and launch a new one"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
Zero serious engineering organizations were involved in any of the various "solar freakin roadways" proposals.
What do you mean by "serious engineering organizations"? There were several of those built in Europe (Germany, France, and the Netherlands, off the top of my head), and they were, predictably, all boondoggles, but I assume they were built by "serious engineering organizations". Now, it was all most likely corrupt political deal-making, but someone "serious" put their name on it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
Not really. The gap between a small scale demo that can be hand-debugged if issues come up, and a finished product, ready for prime-time, to be deployed at scale, is often bigger than the gap between "0" and the small scale demo.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7hr ago
all your bets are essentially bets about timing, which is contingent on uninteresting factors
The reason the bets are timed is that I wanted them to be resolvable within a reasonable timeline. I made the original bets 3 years ago, and 2 of the 3 users I made them with no longer seem to be posting here, so I think it's fair concern. I agree that it's possible for me to win them due to uninteresting factors, which is what I called a "technical" win in the top level post.
Have you elucidated your logic anywhere?
Closest I got was here. It's not a specific prediction about Starship, it's a general prediction based on the hype-cycle of his products / companies, and it boils down to:
If he actually delivered on any of this stuff, I'd probably be more cautious about criticizing the company, it wouldn't even have to live up to the hype, but it looks like the cycle for the company and it's supporters is "cusome product, get excited for new product", with the "consume product" bit crossed out.
This was about Tesla, but I get the feeling that Starship is SpaceX Roadster/Semi/Optimus, where Elon bit off more than he can chew. It's mostly based on instinct though, but in my defense, I've made a few long-shot predictions on my instinct, on this very forum, that turned out to be true.
Your specific arguments for why Starship can work all sound reasonable to me, but they don't sound different to me from arguments for why Cybertruck could be a good truck, why FSD could drive safer than human drivers, why optimus could be a great humanoid robot, etc. I'm not arguing for physical impossibility, I'm arguing against the "make insane marketing promises, and let the techies figure it out" management style.
I'm afraid you have a case of Musk Derangement Syndrome. I see it a lot on X.
Maybe. I know exactly the type of people you're talking about, and I admit I was influenced by them. On the other hand, my "I don't have MDS" argument is that I don't actually want to win these bets. I want to lose them, and lose spectacularly. A world where I get btfo'd is by far better than the one where I win, and the reason I'm betting the way I'm betting is because it sounds too good to be true.
I have seen enough of his empty promises, but it does feel qualitatively different, an unexpected closing of the gap. He's still got it.
Didn't he buy Cursor, and these guys were the ones who figured it out? It certainly shows a lot of political / business acumen, but I didn't get the impression that that's the sort of "it" he's supposed to have.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
8hr ago
Yes, but how fast? Money can be spent to reduce failure probability (even if just by taking more iterations to fix failures), but it can't always be spent to reduce time to success.
Yes, this is why I said I would only technically be winning my bet, as, if SpaceX achieves all that was promised, just a few years later, the letter of my predictions would pan out, but not the spirit. Conversely, if with the new cash injection they will actually beat my deadline for going to orbit, but crash and burn because they threw all their money at the AI trend, I said I would be losing only technically.
I have to agree with your chances now, but do note I said "sending an unmanned (save for Optimus androids) one-way ship or two in the 2029 launch window, albeit probably to crash on arrival", which is not quite the same as "make it to Mars".
I mean, again, technically... No worries, my assumption was they won't make an attempt. The most expansive scenario where I'd claim a win, was if they suffered a major failure outside Mars' gravity well, and even then you could talk me into accepting it as a tie or a win for you,
It wouldn't be too crazy for them to make such an attempt, in the admittedly-unlikely event that the rest of their timelines are going perfectly at that point.
Yeah, but what would be the point? I don't think they have a contract for going to Mars, and there's not much they can do to make money from this. Well... I suppose there's the hype factor I keep bringing up.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Didn't get a lot of work done this week. I mostly fell into the optimization rabbit hole after I noticed that the bespoke background texture copy system, that I set up to enable infinite scrolling, does get a bit choppy in terms of performance.
Splitting the background into more textures of a smaller size should speed it up enough, and another option I put in the backlog is to lower the color depth by packing the texture into 16 bits instead of 32 (less data, less time necessary to copy it between the GPU and CPU, which was the bottleneck). I don't want to spend too much time on that as the original Alien Phobia games had a screen-sized arena, with no scrolling, and that's what I'm reproducing as a first step.
I did learn something interesting though. It turns out when you read back data from the GPU you have to wait for all scheduled work to finish, so if you do so after you dispatch the compute shaders, instead of before, you incur a penalty. In the end I could shave off an entire millisecond of each physics frame just by changing where the GPU reads are called from.
How have you been doing @Southkraut?
The immolation of the Democratic Party and the rise of Zohran Mamdani Thought would be a development not necessarily in Elon's favor.
I don't know about that. I don't think these south Asian "socialists" are not quite what they portray themselves as, and people like Elon might end up getting along just fine with them. See also: Trump.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Autonomous Tesla robo taxis started operating unsupervised in Austin last December, and in like 3 more cities this year
Yeah, all 39 of them. Is that what's supposed to carry the company?
I also wouldn't categorize prototypes as "absolutely nowhere"
Absolutely nowhere in terms of generating profits for the company, and being able to justify it's valuation in a rational way, seems accurate to me.
but at the very least the phrase "lalaland sci-fi prediction" should not be used to describe literal, physical things that I look out my car window and see driving past, don't you think?
The things Elon predicted / promised can't actually be seen. The Cybertruck is not an indestructible post-apocaliptic tank, and he didn't produce millions of them as he was telling his investors. His autonomous cars aren't safer than human drivers. The Semi can't economically beat diesel, let alone rail.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Any regulatory action will be stayed by a friendly Texas circuit judge and then blocked by SCOTUS as it would be (a) trivially obviously politically motivated
Why? Even under Trump Starship is grounded (don't know if this is still valid, but didn't see any news calling it off). A hostile administration could launch these sort of investigations more often, and slow-walk them, how would that be blocked and overturned as unconstitutional?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
This makes it likely that once they are confident that uncontrolled re-entry is a mitigated risk orbital starship launches will go from "never" to "always".
Any guesses as to when?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
They could try to use the SEC
How about the FAA or the EPA? I'm pretty sure someone creative could fish out a few other letters out of the soup to screw him over with.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
The democrats are going to get back in office at some point, and they are almost certainly going to try to permanently remove Musk's access to anything resembling wealth or power when they do so
Yeah, I hate this. If this is how it pans out I will not claim credit for any of the predictions.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Come on, make an argument.
I think "it's not scaleable" is an argument. It might be wrong, but it's an argument.
Do you disagree that continuous satellite imagery and communications servers (already proven technologies) represent huge industries?
I haven't a clue.
Why does an email from five years ago give you the impression that Elon thinks it's all going to collapse?
Because he said they need to launch an enhanced version of Starlink, and that the Falcon 9 is unable to do it, and because they have not been launching these enhanced Starlinks with Starship, or in any other way (to my knowledge).
My bet is that SpaceX is undervalued and its stock will rise. Tell me where you think it will be in ~2 years.
You zeroed in on exactly the kind of bet I don't want to make. Stonk prices are irrational. Tesla is worth more than all other auto makers combined, and has delivered nothing that would justify that valuation, why would it be different for SpaceX? If I thought I could predict stock price movements, I wouldn't be making bets with internet people, I would be speculating on the stock market.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
I didn't elect him.
Americans did. And even if they're not your kind of Americans, I think someone should think long and hard about how they got to become the kind of Americans that can elect a mayor of New York.
You (the rootless affluent liberals who sneer at normie Americans)
Tiresome. You mention old-world bigotries in the other comment, but your bigotry is so advanced that not only do you have a reflexive hostility to a particular group you disagree with, you think anyone who disagrees with you must be a part of that group.
Yes the current focus is on illegal immigrants, but we can discuss expanding the effort to include Communists and Salafists once the border is secure.
Well, that's music to my ears! You're the first Creedal Nation enjoyer I've talked to that's even willing to entertain the idea. Everyone else was either squirming and trying to wriggle out of the conversation, or was rejecting the idea outright.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Did you click the old reddit link, and then removed the prefix? That won't work, reddit does some stupid redirect pointing you to that deleted post. If you don't want to change your settings, try copying the link url from the comment, removing the old. prefix, and only then going that cursed site.
What's the bear case?
That what he has doesn't scale, and what he has is currently maintained by investors / borrowed cash. That Starship isn't "unimaginable giga-tech", it's necessary for the whole thing to not collapse (this certainly seems to be the impression Elon himself has).
I don't know man, I don't know how to have a conversation with someone so high on hype. Make a specific prediction within a reasonable time frame, as in the past, I'll be happy to put my name on the other side of it. That's the only way I found I can have a productive conversation on the topic.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Your link is broken
It's not. The site has an old .reddit.com redirect in it's settings, that's broken. Just switch it to reddit.com (without old.) and it will work.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
The general tendency of SpaceX is that Elon wildly overpromises impossible deadlines that he fails to meet, and he still ends up years ahead of what everyone else in the industry thought was even remotely possible
People were saying that about Tesla, and he was doing well for a while, and then he started promising goofy stuff like autonomous cars, robo taxis, electric trucks of various sizes, and humanoid robots, got absolutely nowhere with either of these things, and then got overtaken by the competition. xAI can't even keep up with it's competition from the start, and is a giant money pit that can plausibly sink SpaceX all on it's own. The only company that remotely fits your description is SpaceX itself because of how much more they launch than other providers, and I'll just repeat " $41.3 billion in accumulated losses" as a response.
I just remembered that I considered adding a "lessons learned" section where I also mention a few things that happened, which made me think that I was originally too harsh on Elon, but when I read stuff like this I figure I need to double down on negative coverage to compensate for the lalaland sci-fi predictions.
Starship bet update
A few years ago I made a series of bets about Starship making it to orbit with other posters, last rounded up here:
- I won my bet with @slothlikesamwise, in July 2025
- There was a series of predictions at various confidence intervals made by @self_made_human, and we have just passed the final 90% one.
- Since last year I have added a bet with @roystgnr, that SpaceX will make it to Mars by 2029. That one will obviously take a while to resolve, but since SpaceX has officially deprioritized Mars in favor of the Moon, it looks like my chances are looking good. In fairness that's a low-condifence bet where I offered 3:1 odds.
- Finally my bet with @TheDag which will be resolved by end of the year.
The last one is a real nail-biter. When I heard about the SpaceX IPO I first thought it's time to call it a day. My model for my predictions about Elon was that he has a hype-compulsion, making wilder and wilder promises to get money out of investors, and as it becomes clear he won't be able to reach the hyped up goal, at some point they will get fed up with him. So when the news of the $85.7 billion came out, I figured that even if I do win, it will be on a technicality - maybe they won't pull it off by end of this year, but this sort of money will surely be enough to get them over whatever humps they run into on the road.... Then again maybe not! It also turned out that they have $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since their founding, and have burned $4.3 billion on AI in Q1 2026 alone, so maybe I will lose on a technicality instead, where they will indeed get to orbit by end of year, but will be dragged down by the unprofitable parts of the company.
I now believe that such a "loss on a technicality" is a pretty likely outcome, precisely because of the IPO. Like I said last year, if my bet was with Elon, he probably could have ordered the damn rocket to be put in orbit, just to prove a point, and while I'm lucky enough to have made my bet with internet randos instead, the IPO changes the dynamics such that he will be very tempted to do such things just to prove a point. Currently 95% of SpaceX stock held by insiders is locked up and it will be gradually released over the course of the year. Stonks are largely guided by hype, hype is generated with media articles (such as "SpaceX makes history with Starship orbital launch!!!11"), so while a frivolous orbital launch would make little sense before, it could make a lot of sense now. There's already talk of Starship 14 being orbital, and I fully expect them to schedule it just before one of these unlock dates.
That said, it's not over until it's over! Just because they might want to do it, doesn't mean they'll pull it off. This whole bet is starting to feel like an episode of Wacky Races.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Well, the joke was that the original quote says "...the worst..."
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Personally, I still hold “democracy is the best government except for the others”.
Truer words have never been said.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
Its not what I want vs what you want, its what seems to work best with the constraints we have.
Since when? The Covid response had very little to do with what works. Transgender medicine has very little to do with what works. "Racism is a public health crisis" had very little to do with what works. Why should I believe that another politically charged topic has something to do with what works?
Yeah, but I can hook up my router and let it accumulate dust until approximately forever (I never had one break), my desktops were also quite reliable, but I sometimes had to get a new part. The SysAdmin guys taking care of the servers at the companies I worked for, OTOH, were always running around and tinkering with shit. Pointless busywork? Upgrades that aren't going to be a part of equation here (but if so, isn't that a pretty big downside for putting these things in space?)?
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