Veedrac

I think the most straightforward illustration of Neuralink's demonstrated capabilities is Webgrid. Noland, the first participant who has had Neuralink for a while (though has reduced signal because of thread retractions) scored 9.51 BPS. Try it and see how well you do!

https://neuralink.com/webgrid/

Not qualitatively. Most places in space have direct view of the sun, and radiators work fine. The problem of scale is the same either way, and it's probably cheaper to scale the radiators than to scale the solar panels and add batteries.

There is literally a header in the pdf titled ‘Maintenance’ that answers these questions.

> you should not go like "cooling in space is free",

It is baffling me how much I'm defending this proposal because I don't actually think it's a sensible company but they really really do not do this.

This is literally covered multiple times in the pdf.

From the paper,

> As conduction and convection to the environment are not available in space, this means the data center will require radiators capable of radiatively dissipating gigawatts of thermal load. [...] This component represents the most significant technical challenge required to realize hyperscale space data centers.

and

> A 5 GW data center would require a solar array with dimensions of approximately 4 km by 4 km

> [...]

> A 1m x 1m black plate kept at 20°C can radiate about 850 watts to deep space, which is roughly three times the electricity generated per square meter by solar panels. As a result, these radiators need to be about one-third the size of the solar arrays, depending on the radiator configuration.

Seriously, what more of an acknowledgement do you want? The paper covers everything you are complaining about in pretty plain and frank language.

Weird to call it fraud for not having mentioned or calculated what's literally the first most visible thing you see on their front page.

https://www.lumenorbit.com/

I'm not claiming $5m launch will happen. I claimed it could happen. It is in fact a coherent possibility. Heck, self-driving also, I took a Waymo just a few days ago. There's a big difference between doubting a specific company can do a thing and doubting the thing is plausible in principle.

I'm not claiming this is a good idea today, nor claiming Starship looks to hit its cost goals any time soon, but I would note that COTS hardware works fine in LEO. SpaceX's Dragon is all COTS, using radiation tolerance rather than hardening.

Starship launches are not currently any price.

The stated long run goal was $2-3m, per Elon Musk, and if you put aside practicalities like limits on how big the market is, and then not having a robust heatshield design yet, it's fundamentally coherent, because of full reuse.

If you're looking for more practical medium term numbers, Gwynne Shotwell suggested around the $50m mark would be an early price goal.

Starship is aiming for a low-single-digit-millions launch cost.

It's one of those ‘Is a space elevator a good idea?’ vibe questions. In theory, sure, inevitably civilization does this in passing if it continues on pace for another hundred or so years, because at minimum at some point you've already tiled the Earth and automation has brought cost of remote handling down to zero.

But it's also, the proposal is to build a 4km x 4km array in space, and the main reason to do this now rather than say a data center in the Sahara is permitting, skipping storage, and solar utilization. The last two are rather silly reasons when the cost of solar panels is taking a nosedive and cheap energy enables dumb storage solutions, and permitting, well, let's just take as given that it's right and permitting really is that hard. That still only gives you an advantage after you scale to the point your permits would be denied, and whereas a Falcon 1 didn't really have competition so could get away with cost inefficiency, a mini compute cluster in space is competing against a terrestrial server rack.

None of the arguments seem physically implausible. Launch can get to <$5m/Starship. You can build 20km² of solar and radiation. You can hook up 5 GW of compute with remote space vehicles. It's just really shockingly hard in an Apollo sort of way. Somehow I doubt the permitting will be easy either.

But this only matters if SpaceX had any chance of a reversed decision from that court, which to my eyes they simply didn't. X is not going less deep in the hole by posting a bunch of confidential court orders.

SpaceX's Starlink assets were frozen before X was banned.

This didn't seem possible to me? SpaceX's assets weren't frozen because SpaceX did anything wrong, they were frozen to penalize the majority stakeholder. Said stakeholder has at this point approximately zero chance of an amicable resolution in Brazilian courts, so SpaceX acting at distance wouldn't get them their assets back.

What motive does SpaceX have to block X though Starlink? Their assets are frozen, they're operating in Brazil for free.

Nothing excites and excuses a journalist with opinions more than a volatile stock. Doesn't matter what your opinion is, there's always a change that proves it. Even better: any rapidly changing stock value has to be volatile, so if something is in the news it's probably supporting your position! When you see these claims, ask yourself: How many times has the stock changed in this manner over the last year? How is its current static valuation relative to its long run history? Is the stock in a period of rapid change where higher volatility is expected? Those won't tell you where the stock is headed but they should at least help remind you not to trust horoscopes.

2019 was half a decade ago.

You can tell solar+storage is cheaper than anything else except conditionally wind at least in the US because people have stopped building new generation capacity for anything else.

Yes, I agreed already. Putting aside all the important differences it's the same thing.

This feels like a month later repeat of https://www.economist.com/business/2024/06/17/chinas-giant-s..., which I first learnt about through a response in Asia Times, https://asiatimes.com/2024/07/chinas-subsidies-create-not-de....

Traditional surface roads in cities:

* Take surface space that can be better used for walkable densification, or are already taken by roads.

* Produce significant atmospheric and noise pollution, even from EVs.

* Conflict at cross-traffic, especially so for dense road networks like grids.

* Have to navigate around building geography, so for example can't support high speed turns.

* Conflict with pedestrians so are limited in speed and have to support frequent stopping points.

* Have no central routing and control for journeys so suffer unbounded traffic, even where additional vehicles lower capacity.

* Are hard to add to existing developments that need additional capacity.

* Don't have out-of-line stations for on- and off-boarding.

Add to this the differences you've already mentioned, like uniform taxies rather than mixed private cars, a comparative ease of automation, and being additive to existing network capacity rather than conflicting with it.

Except for all the significant differences, yes.

I said the fire safety comparisons were reasonable and don't think, nor did I state, that the article was actively bad there. My pushback here was to the HN comment claiming the risk was much worse than the historic comparisons, which the article didn't do.

I agree the article was fun and had charm. My criticisms were more narrow than that.

Thanks. I haven't found better information, I think it's likely all the best details would be buried in formal filings that are more effortful to dig up and dig through. I wouldn't expect detailed breakdowns though, Boring Company is private and isn't likely to want to reveal more of their private finances than contracting requires of them.

Loop has smaller but more numerous stations, because it can have smaller and more numerous stations. With trains every station along a route adds considerable delay for every passenger, exacerbated by the slow stopping speeds of rail. This is not so for pod-based transport where the stations are split off the main line. Stations are also cheaper because they can scale down to only a small subset of the though-traffic.

As far as I'm aware LVCC cost $53m, which includes tunnels and stations. Where did you get $106m?

Yes I mentioned spacing them out, it doesn't change the point.

And why would you ever stack them like a fence? Go ~2 deep, ~2 wide, and cover ~7x as many routes. Depth is more for avoiding intersections between cross-traffic than for lack of space.

Why would every level have easy and uniform connections to every other level? They are transport connections, not destinations. And 26 levels? Why would you ever need that much capacity?

Note that 2350m is 6 minute headway at a 17mph average subway speed, which isn't at all crazy for a subway.

A single-tunnel Boring Loop isn't competing against the 10th busiest subway, though. Even if Boring Loop were competing against New York City Subway, at $2.5B/mi you could build something like 50 parallel lanes at the same cost, and 2350m/50 is only ~50m. Space them out a bit so it's actually driveable and you're probably still ahead with Boring Loop, even assuming the trains are running full (which is not default).

Now, if you did invest enough for 50 parallel lanes you clearly wouldn't want to do 50 parallel lanes; they pack awkwardly, don't make sense to centralize that much if you design doesn't force you to, and you go from having a regulatory advantage of being able to build under city roads to a regulatory nightmare of asking to build 50 parallel lanes underground. It makes much more sense to build point-to-point connections out like a road network, and bring in more traditional mass transit where you have particularly busy connections that can't be handled with a reasonable number of lanes.