767 karma · joined March 6, 2012
I don't see how this follows, if the trades are settled faster? Wouldn't you have to keep less capital on hand at any given time if you're settling trades faster? I'm clearly missing something, not sure what.
If this land was used for timber, it would reduce biodiversity in Georgia. That would unquestionably be a bad outcome for the environment. Deforestation and a reduction in biodiversity is a major problem the world faces, and it impacts much more than just the trees and plants - much of wildlife like animals, insects, and fish are losing their natural habitat and being driven extinct as a result of this practice.
You can hype up timber forestry tactics all you want, but what Ikea has done is a good thing for the world, no matter how disingenuous they might be due to their products consuming large amounts of timber for furniture.
Inherently, the idea that you're talking about boils down to having a way to characterize the nature of the request flows in such a manner that they can be evenly distributed. The ideal way to characterize them then, would be to know this information beforehand such that it does not require any computation at all to normalize the costs. As such, the best strategy would be to actually segregate traffic flows such that they're forwarded to "dumb" load balancers that use one of the strategies from TFA like weighted round robin.
Of course, there are many such optimizations available, but TFA seems to be targeting a beginner level introduction to a rather complex topic. As you describe, load balancing and scheduling algorithms have a pretty high overlap in terms of their theoretical foundations, and these concepts manifest themselves throughout any large scale system.
Now that I think about it though, the Starlink user terminals likely won't be able to survive the harsh winters at the poles. -30 deg C and low tolerance for high winds means this would be tough unless some type of non-obstructive sheltering could be provided.
As the sister comment implies though, Starlink sats are in low Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) so they experience non-zero drag from the atmosphere. This slows them down, causing them to gradually fall back to Earth, creating a natural expected service lifetime for each satellite in orbit.
So the expectation is that SpaceX will have to continually put up more and more replacements indefinitely as older sats decay and burn up in the atmosphere. These 10 laser sats are just the latest among a string of sats that are yet to come online with newer and better capabilities.
Then there's the issue of signal attenuation at distances like these, along with the power budget from the solar panels to ensure that you aren't burning all your power just on laser comms.
I can't imagine these links would be anything more than 1:1 at any given time, at least not at first. Maybe later they might be able to handle simultaneous laser links from 1:3 or something like it, but I highly doubt that's their current capability.
Even some of the best latest ground-to-sat laser comms links are on the order of ~7 gigabits per second. [1] I imagine those are far larger sats than Starlink, and their entire power and thermal budget is likely spent on comms. And the ground stations can be orders of magnitude larger and power hungry in relation to a Starlink sat. Note also that this is from GEO, so you aren't likely having to handle substantial relative movement either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_communication_in_space#2...
Accurate orbital information might not be necessary or possible, if you can perform broad scanning that can quickly lock in your given target, but it certainly doesn't hurt. The issue is that even having an orbital track, because of the sats being so low in LEO, atmospheric drag will change your orbit rapidly enough that this information can get out of date quite fast.
Convenient and reliable fallbacks I feel are largely a solved problem for SpaceX. They've built their Starlink bus by reusing a lot of the software from the Falcon 9, Dragon, and Starship programs that already had to handle even greater levels of reliability.
Routing and retransmits are indeed quite a novel area for this kind of service. But the laser link will only be locked on one other peer satellite at any given time, and I don't think they plan on reorienting the sats in order to establish laser comms because of the effect it would have on drag as well as albedo. The former impacts service life per sat, and the latter has been a big rallying cry for Starlink opposition due to the impact it has on astronomy and the visible sky.
So if you likely can't reorient to retransmit, your only options are the peer laser link or the ground transit exit node, either or both of which might not exist, but I feel like you would just ack the packets on each hop to your peer and leave it at that.
The value that sat-to-sat laser links provide is that they create a low latency, high bandwidth path that stays within the Starlink satellite network. Before these 10 satellites, each Starlink satellite has only been capable of communicating directly to ground terminals (either consumer, transit, or SpaceX control). For traffic that is intended to move large geographic distances (think transcontinental), this can require several hops back and forth between ground and space, or the traffic from the user terminal is exited at a node that is geared for transiting traffic and most of the data transits along existing ground Internet links.
By performing this type of transit directly in space, and exiting at a transit node nearest the destination for the data, you greatly reduce latency. Bandwidth still might not be great, but what this does is unlocks a very financially lucrative consumer use case: low latency finance traffic and critical communications. There are many use cases around the world where shaving even 10-20 milliseconds of latency on a data path can unlock finance and emergency capabilities, and this is a long fought battle throughout the history of these industries. As an example, if you got a piece of news about a company in Australia, and wanted to trade on it as quickly as possible in USA, if you can beat your competitors by 10-20 milliseconds, that can mean a lot of money.
Laser comms for Starlink sats have long been planned, but have historically proven to be quite hard to get working. They also depend on a sufficient critical mass of satellites so that a given sat actually does have another sat within lock to send the traffic towards.
But that's a long way from alleging that they've doctored their videos, or that Tesla itself has censored them. There are many many instances of footage showing almost crashes that were only avoided because the driver intervened. If you were the censor, would you allow those?
Compare that to Waymo or Cruise or anyone else. They are obviously heavily censoring and have no independent owners recording footage, nor sharing it like this. It's a huge step up in much needed transparency.
I feels there's a broad misconception across many of these types of discussions, where people assume that just because Tesla has not chosen to widely deploy LIDAR across their vehicle fleet, that they do not understand it's benefits nor value them. This is entirely false. For several years now, Tesla has driven test vehicles with very high end Lidar units to basically generate "ground truth" understanding of the world that can be then used to test and improve their camera-only FSD inference. They heavily relied upon it to build ML models to generate depth maps across frames, and that capability is already widely deployed via Autopilot (poor man's FSD). That it works in itself is somewhat shocking to me.
Lastly, if there's any indication of a mea culpa coming from Musk on this front, those ideas should be easily put to rest. Recent FSD footage shows rapid and drastic improvements to the capabilities of the FSD-beta system, and Musk himself is still repeatedly bellowing about how his personal vehicle with the latest software is able to handle more and more challenging scenarios. If anything, Tesla is doubling down, and expects to win. Given their history, if I was a competitor, I would be troubled at least.
After the market for on-demand autonomous taxis is oversaturated, Tesla's plan is actually to stop selling vehicles altogether, or reduce it drastically. Musk has said that FSD vehicles will likely not be for sale after this point, so the "consumer-operated robotaxi" is inherently an intermediate solution.
Vehicle ownership will drastically change in nature after the advent of AVs. Tesla isn't going to be unique to having to adapt to this.
Edit: It seemed to handle that intersection just fine, but a couple of turns down it ends up on the wrong side of the road, which is quite bad. That said, what proof do you have that Waymo/Cruise would be any better at this?
It's rather cheap to take trivial shots at Tesla (no matter how bad their product might be) while comparing it to 23 year old understanding of human-machine automation in an entirely different context such as aviation.
Quite unfortunate you're downvoted, but literally asking people to watch some videos of real world usage [1] to make up their minds appears to be too much.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tesla+fsd+beta&...
It does remain to be seen how well Tesla will trust the general public with this level of improved autonomy. As you get closer and closer to the uncanny valley where things just appear to work, you get into the more tricky situations that truly befuddle humans and machines alike.
NHTSA scrutinizes crashes that involve anything close to Autopilot and FSD quite heavily. Aside from one or two incidents they've had complaints about, none of them have risen to the point where they had to put their foot down. Admittedly, Tesla were a big bunch of jerks about how they handled the situation, but still, these were isolated incidents with clear misuse from the driver's part.
I agree with you, in that Musk is overly optimistic (no shit, he's been saying this would be ready in 2018, and it's unclear if it will be in 2021). But he's also quite well informed of the facts on the ground, and is clearly aiming for the moonshot-winner-take-all prize by skipping Lidar and high-precision mapping. That might be a gamble, but need not be an inherently dangerous one, depending on how Tesla handles the super-grey areas around the uncanny valley, where the system appears to work, but really isn't worth risking your life upon. To some, it's already there, as you can see from idiots sleeping in their Teslas while on Autopilot. But again, outside of a couple of incidents over years and millions and miles, the rate of catastrophic failure (accidents) has been surprisingly low.
If what you care about is to have your population be as productive as possible, you want to produce just enough of these entertainment avenues domestically as would be sustainable and not leading to large scale distraction, while still mainly exporting the product that has no such restraints.
I think that's actually the challenge at hand for China, and it's not unique to the country. Korea, Japan, and many others face the same issues while having different tools to deal with the phenomenon.
There's clearly a bigger play here that other large players in entertainment aren't valuing the same way. What is it?
That means the US government directly controls which projects live and die, simply because they control the purse. Most space endeavors don't require this scale of money, and even a small token of innovation incentives can often result in outsized societal benefits. Even for SpaceX to just think about the Starship program, they literally had to corner the global orbital launch market for nearly a decade to come.
While I do agree that Boeing is a money-pit due to their involvement with SLS, I still wouldn't put Virgin or Blue Origin in anywhere close to that bucket. While these two might not be as incredibly innovative and capital efficient as SpaceX, they're still orders of magnitude better than anything like the SLS, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and others that are considered "old space".
China is pouring an absurd amount of its own money through thinly guised military development arms, and they're excelling at it. It's truly a shame that the US cut them off from the ISS, and its even more detrimental that the rest of the world has not paid close enough attention to their efforts. They're about the only player that's even close to competing with anything like SpaceX.
I wouldn't put India in the same club as China either. India has done extremely well at making cheap reliable orbital class launch vehicles by cost cutting and incremental improvements. Once SpaceX comes to the scene, they will be obsolete. They do not have the public appetite to invest the scale of money required to build programs the likes of US & China can build.
Russia meanwhile seems obsessed with trampolines.
Then there's a genuine question of what this enormous expenditure truly buys us. NASA's budget has been strangled for decades now, and robotic probes and missions to other planets have been perennially delayed due to cost, while their scientific ROI would truly be much greater than for ISS experiments in many cases. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the ISS and manned spaceflight in general, but this kind of money does require serious explanation to Congress to justify the costs. Oh, and there's the entire money pit that is Artemis/SLS that stays on NASA books.
Also, why now? The private space industry is at what seems to be the beginning of an inflection point with heavy launch capabilities (SpaceX Starship) looking likely to drive down costs by over an order of magnitude. A single Starship might provide 800 cubic meters of volume, and the whole ISS is 1,000 cubic meters. Why not wait for that to come online and then launch many many ISS' worth of volume to several labs?
Lastly, the privatization of launch vehicles in particular has a lot of people questioning if private industry might be better able to step up to this challenge of manned orbiting labs. It has a potential to expand the range of solutions, massively decrease costs, and provide efficiencies that NASA might not be able to provide. When you don't have to manufacture space parts scattered all across the globe, it's easy to see why this could be cheaper and more efficient.
Political leaders in the US are not really all that beholden to their voters, and very frequently strive to push self-serving agendas ($) over the needs of the public.
As dystopian as it sounds, we're already well on our way toward the Balkanization of the internet. Russia and China have their own firewalls bearing down on global network access. Many other authoritarian countries are following suit. It's going to be hard to stop that train regardless of if/how Facebook or Google are regulated.
We shouldn't confuse a throttled Internet with a fractured, balkanized one.
There's the physical security aspect of this, which is as you say, hard to take down when it's decentralized. However, as power generation gets more distributed, we'll naturally start seeing more (if not most) of these pieces of equipment be controlled over networks (private or public), and securing distributed infrastructure from a software standpoint is still a hard problem.
Just look at the state of IoT security today. It's quite bad, and that's not even realistically including nation state attackers in the threat model. I don't expect this to go well with a decentralized grid, at least not for a while initially.