I was talking to someone about this the other day. I was part of a team at NASA that developed a cooling system for the ISS and this whole premise makes no sense to me.
1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive
2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat generated away from source.
5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are lost.
Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
1. Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
2. Ingress/egress aren't at all bottlenecks for inferencing. The bytes you get before you max out a context window are trivial, especially after compression. If you're thinking about latency, chat latencies are already quite high and there's going to be plenty of non-latency sensitive workloads in future (think coding agents left running for hours on their own inside sandboxes).
3. This could be an issue, but inferencing can be tolerant to errors as it's already non-deterministic and models can 'recover' from bad tokens if there aren't too many of them. If you do immersion cooling then the coolant will protect the chips from radiation as well.
4. There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
5. What mass manufacture? Energy production for AI datacenters is currently bottlenecked on Siemens and others refusing to ramp up production of combined cycle gas turbines. They're converting old jet engines into power plants to work around this bottleneck. Ground solar is simply not being considered by anyone in the industry because even at AI spending levels they can't store enough power in batteries to ride out the night or low power cloudy days. That's not an issue in space where the huge amount of Chinese PV overproduction can be used 24/7.
> There is probably plenty of scope to optimize space radiators. It was never a priority until now and is "just" an engineering problem.
It's a physics problem, as others pointed out, but even if we take it as another "just an engineering problem", have a look at the Hyperloop. Which is similarly just a long vacuum tube, and inside is like an air hockey table, not that big a deal, right?...
That bit reminded me of someone who wanted us to design a patch the size of a small postage stamp, at most 0.2mm thick, so you could stick on products. It was to deliver power for two years of operation, run an LTE modem, a GNSS receiver, an MCU, temperature and humidity sensor and would cost $0.10. And it would send back telemetry twice per day.
The conversation went something like this (from memory):
- We can't do that
- Why not?
- Well, physics for one.
- What do you mean?
- Well, at the very least we need to be able to emit enough RF-energy for a mobile base station to be able to detect it and allow itself to be convinced it is seeing valid signaling.
- Yes?
- The battery technology that fits within your constraints doesn't exist. Nevermind the electronics or antenna.
- Can't you do something creative? We heard you were clever.
I distinctly remember that last line. But I can't remember what my response was. It was probably something along the lines of "if I were that clever I'd be at home polishing my Nobel medal in physics".
Even the sales guy who dragged me into this meeting couldn't keep it together. He spent the whole one hour drive back to the office muttering "can't you do something creative" and then laughing hysterically.
I think the solution they went for was irreversible freeze and moisture indication stickers. Which was what I suggested they go for in the first 5 minutes of the meeting since that a) solved their problem, and b) is on the market, and c) can be had for the price point in bulk.
That's so hilarious. I've had a couple that went in that direction but nothing to come close.
To be fair though, there is a lot of tech that to me seems like complete magic and yet it exists. SDR for instance, still has me baffled. Who ever thought you'd simply digitize the antenna signal and call it a day, hardware wise, the rest is just math, after all.
When you get used to enough miracles like that without actually understanding any of it and suddenly the impossible might just sound reasonable.
> Can't you do something creative? We heard you were clever.
The purely digital neighborhood of the SDRs is much easier to explain than the analog rat droppings between the DAC/ADC and the antenna. That part belongs to dark wizards with costly instruments that draw unsettling polar plots, and whose only consistent output is a request for even pricier gear from companies whose names sound an awful lot like European folk duos.
The digital end of SDRs are simple. Sample it, then once you have trapped the signal in digital form beat the signal into submission with the stick labeled "linear algebra".
(Nevermind that the math may be demanding. Math books are nowhere near as scary as the Sacred Texts Of The Dark Wizards)
"Rohde & Schwarz — live at the VNA, 96 dB dynamic range, one night only."
> whose names sound an awful lot like European folk duos.
That had me laughing out loud, you should have left the name out to make it more of a puzzler :)
I apparently have been drawn to the occult for a long time and feel more comfortable with coils, capacitors and transmission lines than I do with the math behind them. Of course it's great to be able to just say 'ridiculously steep bandpass filter here' and expect it to work but I know that building that same thing out of discrete components - even if the same math describes it - would run into various very real limitations soon.
And here I am on a budget SDR speccing a 10 Hz bandfilter and it just works. I know there must be some downside to this but for the life of me I can't find it.
I like your sales guy. Might have punched them after a while but that's right up there with the time someone tried to tell me there was no iron in steel because it wasn't in the ingredients list. And this someone sold stamped steel parts!
(reference to a character in the Expiditionary Force series by Craig Alanson
Only a very small portion of his physical presence is in local spacetime, with the rest in higher spacetime. He can expand his physical presence from the size of an oil drum or shrink to the size of a lipstick tube. He can’t maintain that for long without risking catastrophic effects. If he did, he would lose containment, fully materialize in local spacetime and occupy local space equal to one quarter the size of Paradise. The resulting explosion would eventually be seen in the Andromeda Galaxy.)
What makes you so sure? SpaceX already has thousands of 6 kW networking racks flying around in LEO and they dissipate their heat just fine, and are plenty cost-effective. You think they can't do any better than that with a new design specifically optimized for computing rather than networking?
Probably, but they likely can't do better than we can do on Earth. Networking in space offers specific advantages that are not easy to replicate on Earth. Data centers in space don't have clear advantages beyond easily debunked ideas about cooling and power.
I'm not talking about the whole idea, just the heat dissipation part. So many people in this thread seem so sure this is impossible because you can't radiate heat in space, completely ignorant to the fact that SpaceX is already dissipating over 20 MW of solar power in LEO in a reasonably cost-effective manner.
The advantage of 24/7 solar power is clear, obvious, and undeniable, it's just a question of whether that's outweighed by the other disadvantages.
The solar panels on the newest satellites can deliver 6kW but the power that satellite actually uses is less. The satellite is only using 300W[1] during the dark phase of it's orbit when it can use it's entire mass to cool down. Is that limit because of the battery or is it because the satellite needs to radiate all the heat it acquired from the other half of the time in the sun?
Looks like that's a purely speculative assumption the blog author made, not a fact. I'm not sure why he made that assumption given that Starlink doesn't actually stop working at night.
Fair point that in SSO you'd need 2-3x the radiator area (and half the solar panels, and minimal/no batteries). I don't think that invalidates my point though.
If the satellite requires ~3,000 W to work in the light phase (based on solar panel size), then reducing that to 300 W during the dark phase would most definitely require it to "stop working".
The battery math is based on purely speculative assumptions the author made about cycle lifetimes. It's not grounded in any real, concrete information like the solar panel power calculations are.
3. There are WAY more things to get corrupted on a computer system than tokens. And non-determinism does NOT mean it’s tolerant to faults. Random values are intentionally introduced at the right moment for LLMs.
Sounds a bit like that Dilbert where the marketing guy has sold a new invisible computer and is telling the engineers to now do their job and actually make it.
Not at all. It literally is just an engineering problem. Space radiators exist for decades. You can build one big enough for any heat load, it's purely a matter of cost - there are no unknown problems there.
You can argue that the current costs are too high and you need new physics or new inventions to bring it down to something more reasonable, yes. But the basic science of radiating heat in space is known. There are proposals for alternative designs that might work better. The question is how much can you build them for and what's the resulting cost profile. Which is an engineering question.
The question isn't "can you mitigate the problems to some extent?", it's "can you see a path to making satellite data centers more appealing than terrestrial?"
The answer is a flat out "no," and none of your statements contradict this.
Terrestrial will always be better:
1. Reducing the cost of launches is great, but it will never be as cheap as zero launches.
2. Radio transmissions have equally high bandwidth from Earth, but fiber is a better network backbone in almost every way.
3. Radiation events don't only cause unpredictable data errors, they can also cause circuit latch-ups and cascade into system failure. Error-free operation is still better in any case. Earth's magenetosphere and atmosphere give you radiation shielding for free, rad-hard chips will always cost more than standard (do they even exist for this application?), and extra shielding will always cost more than no shielding.
4. On Earth you can use conduction, convection, AND radiation for cooling. Space only gets you marginally more effective radiation.
5. Solar is cheaper on the ground than in space. The increase in solar collection capability per unit area in space doesn't offset the cost of launch: you can get 20kW of terrestrial solar collection for around the price of a single 1U satellite launch, and that solar production can be used on upgraded equipment in the future. Any solar you put on a satellite gets decommissioned when the inference hardware is obsolete.
And this ignores other issues like hardware upgrades, troubleshooting, repairs, and recycling that are essentially impossible in space, but are trivial on the ground.
(5) Is there a reason why we don't investigate using a cable to pull down energy to earth? That seems to be a far more valuable and tractable problem to solve.
I have no expertise is this area, so I'm not getting into whether or not this idea makes sense.
That being said, this statement strikes me as missing the point:
> Solving cost of launching mass has been the entire premise of SpaceX since day one and they have the track record.
As I understand it, SpaceX has a good track record of putting things into space more cost effectively than other organisations that put things into space.
That is not the benchmark here.
It doesn't matter if Musk can run thousands of data centres in space more cost effectively than (for example) NASA could. It matters whether he can do it more cost effectively than running them on earth.
I don’t think that statement was missing the point. As you point out, what matters is the total cost of ownership of the system. The cost of launching mass into space today isn’t the only reason terrestrial data centers are more cost effective today, but it’s the main one. If you make it cheap enough to send giant solar arrays and radiators to space, the other costs of operating in space may start to look like a small price to pay to eliminate the need for inputs like land and batteries.
There is no "solving cost of launch" even if it was 10x cheaper, for 10x lighter data centers that's still hundreds of flights and billions just to get the raw materials to GSO for the performance of a single data center, with no gain.
Keep in mind there has only been ~600 falcon 9 launches in total. What makes you believe SpaceX can ramp rocket flights up faster than we could just build nuclear here on earth? Where there is, you know, construction infrastructure?
I agree it's hard to get things into orbit. The question is if it's harder than solving the DC capacity problems here on Earth.
In the 1950s everyone thought we were entering the atomic age, an era when electricity would be too cheap to meter. That didn't happen: making nuclear simultaneously safe and cheap turned out to be much harder than anyone anticipated. Eventually people gave up on the Age Of Atoms and started saying that solar and wind were better. Go back in time and try to sell that in the 1950s and everyone would have thought you were insane. Huge land consumption and it only works intermittently? Why would that ever be easier than building a quick reactor?
And so here we are in 2026. The track record of SpaceX making things quickly and cheaply is vastly better than the modern nuclear industry. That's not necessarily the industries fault, but the over-regulation issue is real. If datacenters have the same problem Musk can still win despite the huge starting handicap. And everyone I know with experience of datacenter construction has similar stories. 90% of it is about dealing with governments and electricity suppliers (but that's mostly the grid, which is the government again).
> Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
Elon musk has a history of making improbable-sounding promises (buy a tesla now, by 2018 it will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep, humanoid robots, hyperloops).
The majority of these promises have sounded cool enough to enough people that the stock associated with him (TSLA) has made people literal millionaires just by holding onto the stock, and more and more people have bought in and thus have a financial interest in Musk's ventures being seen in a good light (since TSLA stock does not go up or down based on tesla's performance, it goes up or down based on the vibes of elon musk. It is not a car company stock, it is an elon vibes check).
The thing he's saying now pattern matches to be pretty similar, and so given Musk's goal is to gain money, and he gains money by TSLA and SpaceX stock going up, this makes perfect sense as a thing to say and even make minor motions towards in order to make him richer.
People will support it too since it pattern matches with the thing prior TSLA holders got rich off of, and so people will want to keep the musk vibes high so that their own $tsla holdings go to the moon.
The story here is even simpler. SpaceX is going public this year. Elon made a monumentally shitty investment in Twitter and then poured a stupid amount of money into xAI at the peak of the cycle. By having SpaceX buy xAI, he gets to swap worthless shares in that company for more SpaceX liquidity. Simple as that.
Exactly, and there needs to be some economic justification for a giant rocket. There is no money to be made by going to Mars, and AI data centers in space could attract investors (who are just riding the data center hype).
> I data centers in space could attract investors (who are just riding the data center hype).
I find this to be the most obvious game plan here. Makes total sense from financial engineering point of view.
You _might_ get to develop nice tech/IP to enable other space based businesses at the same time. "we sold them on X but delivered Y". So it's a bit of a hail mary, but makes total sense to me if you want to have a large budget for inventing the future.
Once you can demonstrate even a fraction of this capability of operations ... I think you can sell a "space dominance" offering to Pentagon for example and just keep pedaling.
"We are going to build the perfect weapon" does not necessarily entice as large engineer population as "we are going to Star Trek".
Another thing - if Moon is going to be a thing, then _properties on Moon_ are going to be a thing.
In theories of value in post-ai societies scarce assets like land are going to become more valuable. So it's a long term plan that makes sense if you believe Moon will be a realestate market.
Ah, this old fallacy. There are myriad examples of the rich striving to be richer and the powerful fighting to gain even more power. Why would it be any different with Musk? If anything I suspect (this is absolutely an unverifiable opinion; I am not stating it as fact) that Musk's driving force is to become the first trillionaire.
Billionaire money is not like money for the normal person. It is a placeholder for how much influence you have on the economy - and even the state.
It is not just a number, as it is for people who just save a few dollars, for whom it really is just a number until they withdraw money to use it. The billionaire's money is not "money", it is actual working assets, and the abstraction of turning this into a number does a terrible job, the result now misunderstood by many. Assets being companies doing stuff mostly (holding non-control-giving paper assets is different and not what being a top capitalist is about, only used as an additional tool below the actual goal). Which they fully control (the small investor does not even have any control worth mentioning when they own shares of a public company).
They don't just play with money, they play with real things! And they want to play with ever bigger real things. They don't just want to improve some minor product. They want to control the fate of civilization.
OT:
I hate this money view with a passion, this is what too many people discussing wealth inequality issues get wrong. This is not Scrooge McDuck and his money pile. Money is an abstraction, and it is misused terribly, hiding what is actually going on for too many observers who then go on to discuss "numbers".
That is also why the idea to "just redistribute the money of the rich" is a failure. It isn't money! It is actual real complex organizations. And you can't just make everything into a public company, and also, even when they are, for better or worse owners don't lead like managers. Doing the socialism thing (I grew up in the GDR) where everybody owns a tiny bit of everything just does not work the same.
We will have to look at what those super-rich are actually doing, case by individual case of ownership, not just look at some abstract numbers. Sometimes concentrated control over a lot of assets is a good thing, and other times it is not. Ignoring the objection of "who would control that?", because right now they control themselves so it's never nobody.
I think you have read the "redistrubute the money" people wrong. They definitely, absolutely want to reduce the power the tiny minority hold over the many. That's the whole point. The money is a tool to get the work done.
What exactly has Elon done that's "impossible"? Like the Boring Company where he promised 1,000x faster boring? It turned into a mile or two of a poorly routed hole with some Teslas tossed down into it. He and his shills hand waved away the problem, confident their brilliance would allow them to dig 1,000x faster than modern commercial boring. It never happened.
The only impossible thing Elon has done is make fantasy claims and real people fall for it.
I will definitely credit Elon with building a company that made reusable self-landing rockets seem routine and boring. That was definitely "impossible".
Pretty much everything else though is just vapourware.
I guess everything is relative and I'm well informed on everything but no, "first new car company in America in a long time" doesn't leap out as a wildly difficult challenge in a time of great innovation. It was followed a couple of years later by Rivian.
First popular electric car...maybe hindsight helps, but it was kind of a matter of time with battery technology improving, although certainly they did a very good job.
Both difficult, for sure, but not quite as mind-blowingly impossible sounding as reusing a rocket dozens of times. To me.
It was impossible in the sense that nobody else did it before. It was not impossible as in you need to violate basic laws of Physics or elementary Economics.
Before reusable rockets, the idea made sense. Building a rocket is expensive; if we reuse we don’t have to keep spending that money. Fundamentally, rockets are rockets. It’s not like they invented anti-gravity or anything.
It’s like climbing the Everest. Before it was done, it was still something people could plan and prepare for. But you’re not going to climb all the way to the moon, even with oxygen bottles. It’s a completely different problem to solve.
The most difficult point to argue against for people who want to defend Musk’s delusions is simple economics: at the end of the day, when you’ve solved
- the energy source problem (difficult but probably doable);
- the radiation-resistant chips issue (we know we can do it, but the resulting chip is not going be anywhere near as fast as normal GPUs on Earth);
- the head dissipation problem (physically implausible, to be charitable, with current GPUs, but considering that a space-GPU would have a fraction of the power, it would just be very difficult);
- the satellite-to-satellite communication issue, because you cannot put the equivalent of a rack on a satellite, so you’d need communication to be more useful than a couple of GeForces (sure, lasers, but then that’s additional moving parts, it’s probably doable but still a bit of work);
- the logistics to send 1 million satellites (LOL is all I can say, that’s a fair number of orders of magnitude larger than what we can do, and a hell of a lot of energy to do it);
- and all the other tiny details, such as materials and logistics just to build the thing.
Then, you still end up with something which is orders of magnitude worse and orders of magnitude more expensive than what we can already do today on Earth. There is no upside.
Yeah, but landing a rocket backwards also sounded very improbable to me, yet it looks pretty cool now.
Also people made fun of tesla that it will never be able to compete with the big carmakers. Now I would rather have some stocks in tesla than holding on to volkswagen.
I wouldn’t be so sure about Tesla stock. Tesla has only weathered 1 market downturn cycle and that was when it was a very different company. The company has thus far had access to plentiful capital since the Model S started being delivered.
Famous investors like to repeat the quote that “when the tide goes out, that’s when we find out who’s wearing no pants.” When Tesla actually weathers its first market downturn is when we find out how much investors interest is maintained When investment dollars are scarce.
Think Elon: A swarm of advanced AIs working from space, untouchable for most, steering execution of his power fantasy on earth. And if not he has military goons to sell it to.
The technical discussions here are distractions to the avoid dealing with the glaring dissonance that for the vast majority none of this will improve life on earth.
Regarding 3, they're almost certainly thinking of putting these in SSO where the radiation environment isn't too much worse than you see on the ISS. If they were going to go outside the Van Allen belts it would be a different story.
The whole AI bubble makes way more sense if you model it not as rational economic activity, but rather as the actions of a rogue AI slowly taking over our institutions and redirecting them towards its goals. Data centers in space make no sense economically, but think of how survivable the rogue AI will be once we build those orbiting data centers! (I am joking about this, but it's weird that my logic makes sense.)
for the chips to both be radiation hardened and as powerful as our current chips they'd need to be massive. There's a reason the mars rover uses a PowerPC G3
>Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
Free space optics are much faster than data to/from the ground. If the training workloads only require high bandwidth between sats, this isn’t a real issue.
> Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
They don't do RAD hardening on chips these days, they just accept error and use redundant CPUs.
There are apparently rad-hard DDR4 chips these days so this is patently false. SpaceX used to talk a lot about substituting rad-hard components with triple redundant regular x86 years ago, that's true.
I think I've also seen someone mention that the cost and power benefit of substituting rad-hard chips with garden variety wean off fast once the level of redundancy goes up, and also it can't handle deep space radiations that just kill Earthbound chips rather than partially glitching them.
You are confidently incorrect. Even Starlink uses rad-hardened CPUs. Redundant error correction is only really an option on launch hardware that only spends minutes in space.
Note that on modern hardware cosmic rays permanently disable circuits, not mere bitflips.
No, he's not. Dragon is using CotS, non rad-hardened CPUs. And it's rated to carry humans to space.
> AWST: So, NASA does not require SpaceX to use radiation-hardened computer systems on the Dragon?
John Muratore: No, as a matter of fact NASA doesn't require it on their own systems, either. I spent 30 years at NASA and in the Air Force doing this kind of work. My last job was chief engineer of the shuttle program at NASA, and before that as shuttle flight director. I managed flight programs and built the mission control center that we use there today.
On the space station, some areas are using rad-hardened parts and other parts use COTS parts. Most of the control of the space station occurs through laptop computers which are not radiation hardened.
> Q: So, these flight computers on Dragon – there are three on board, and that's for redundancy?
A: There are actually six computers. They operate in pairs, so there are three computer units, each of which have two computers checking on each other. The reason we have three is when operating in proximity of ISS, we have to always have two computer strings voting on something on critical actions. We have three so we can tolerate a failure and still have two voting on each other. And that has nothing to do with radiation, that has to do with ensuring that we're safe when we're flying our vehicle in the proximity of the space station.
I went into the lab earlier today, and we have 18 different processing units with computers in them. We have three main computers, but 18 units that have a computer of some kind, and all of them are triple computers – everything is three processors. So we have like 54 processors on the spacecraft. It's a highly distributed design and very fault-tolerant and very robust.
> Dragon is using CotS, non rad-hardened CPUs. And it's rated to carry humans to space.
Those are not independent facts. They put the hardware inside, behind the radiation shielding they use to keep the astronauts safe. It's why regular old IBM laptops work on the Space Station too. That kind of shielding is going to blow your mass budget if you use it on these satellites.
SpaceX, which prefers COTS components when it can use them, still went with AMD Versal chips for Starlink. Because that kind of high performance, small process node hardware doesn't last long in space otherwise (phone SoC-based cubesats in LEO never lasted more than a year, and often only a month or so).
Which is exactly how you'd do a hypothetical dc in space. Come on, you're arguing for the sake of arguing. CotS works. This is not an issue.
> That kind of shielding is going to blow your mass budget
SpX is already leading in upmass by a large margin. Starship improves mass to orbit. Again, this is a "solved" issue.
There are other problems in building space DCs. Rad hardening is not one of them. AI training is so fault tolerant already that this was never an issue.
None of the discussed designs include radiation shielding like that. Nobody is considering doing it that way, because the math really really doesn’t work out (instead of unshielded, where it just doesn’t work out).
A cosmic ray striking a chip doesn’t cause a bitflip - it blows out the whole compute unit and permanently disables it. It is more like a hand grenade going off.
Between fp nondeterminism, fp arithmetic, async gradient updates, cuda nondeterminism, random network issues, random nodes failing and so on, bitflip is the last of your concerns. SGD is very robust on noise. That's why it works with such noisy data, pipelines, compute and so on. Come on! This thread is having people find the most weird hills to die on, while being completely off base.
Dragon spends 6mo+ in orbit regularly. I have no idea what's happening in this thread, but it seems everyone is going insane. People don't even know what they're talking about, but they keep on bringing bad arguments. I'm out.
... hooked up to the ISS, with humans in attendance to fix anything that goes wrong... not doing very much.
It's akin to the difference between a boat moored up in a port, and an autonomous drone in the middle of the Pacific. Aside from that, satellites have to maneuver in orbit (to stay in the correct orbit, and increasingly to avoid other satellites). Hefting around additional kgs of shielding makes that more difficult, and costly in terms of propellant, which is very important for the lifetime of a satellite.
When they talk about "space" they are, right now, talking about the moon. Which has some gravity. They are putting the data centers on the moon. And the satellites are lunar satellites not earth-orbit satellites. Lonestar physical data center payload landed on the moon in Feb 2025 and Sidus space developing the lunar satellites.
Yeah, the cost of doing it on the moon would be even more astronomical. Then there also is the three second of round-trip latency to consider (ca. 2.6 s just the signal, but processing adds a bit more).
Have a friend high up at one of the “Big 3” in this space.
The entire business model is predicated on injecting themselves as the last click for attribution even when they weren’t remotely responsible for the conversion. Cool business, but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on.
I remember when this was called cookie stuffing, and eBay even sent a guy to jail for doing it with their affiliate program. That’s the same eBay that owned PayPal, which now owns Honey…
It's totally different you see. This time the fraud was done by a faceless corporation maximizing shareholder returns so this is just an exercise in free speech by an immortal, in the same vein as running an unlicensed lottery.
if the computer belongs to the company, and you're using it as an employee, you should be told that such spyware is installed and your usage of said machines are monitored. Then there's no qualms about this at all.
It's only an invasion of privacy if the monitoring is done in secret.
|It's only an invasion of privacy if the monitoring is done in secret.
Uhhh... that seems very incorrect. If someone pokes their head into your shower session, it's an invasion of privacy - whether or not they let you know they're peepin on ya.
The equivalent here is if it's a company shower, and your supposed to be cleaning an office appliance, not yourself. In that context someone poking their head on to see how it's going is fine.
Aside, but NBC’s website is way better executed than I was expecting.
Perhaps it changed recently, or I just never noticed? I was expecting 100MB with back button abuse and retention dark patterns. Instead, it loads fast, has minimal guff, and the footer scrolled into view ending the page within sight of the end of the actual article.
Perhaps this is a reward response to not having to / be able to doom scroll?
To be fair Paypal got spun out in 2015, far before they bought Honey, so there actually isn't any point in time where eBay was engaged in cookie stuffing.
Now what I'd love is an extension that would inject a person of my choosing as the last click.
Amazon et al don't allow you to offer this as an affiliate program partner, not without a special and custom agreement at least, but if the extension was partner-agnostic and released by a party unaffiliated with Amazon in any way, there's nothing they could realistically do about it.
It'd be one way to bring Amazon Smile back, and on many more sites than just Amazon.
I always found Amazon Smile weird. Why not just donate, why have people jump through hoops just to prove that you should donate? So you look good but dont spend much money to do it due to user laziness. Ah… got it :)
Well, it's no less weird that store running a promotion saying 'If you buy item X today, we will donate one dollar of the proceeds to charity Y.'
Also not more weird than the British charity thing of "I'm shaving off all my hair, and that's why you should donate to charity Y." (I suspect Brits need an excuse before they are mentally allowed to do something silly. But any excuse will do.)
I've always been baffled by the British charity thing: You want to ride your tricycle from John O'Groats to Ffestiniog? Fine, do it. You want me to donate to this charity? OK, maybe I'll do it. I just don't see the connection between the two. Please explain the connection to me. You don't actually want to ride your tricycle? But if I donate to some third party, you're going to do something you hate? So you're saying I want you to suffer? I'd rather donate if it doesn't cause unnecessary suffering.
It's something we've been raised to do from a young age.
I've never thought about it before, but I suppose it's a way for you to provide some commitment from yourself as a condition for those you're crowdsourcing donations from.
If you don't deliver on your part, they don't have to pay.
When I was in high-school we did everything from shaving our heads, to having your legs waxed in front of the whole (boys) school.
I raised thousands of £ for charity this way, more than I could ever raise by myself at that age.
I'm sure I've seen dunk tanks (throw a baseball, hit the target, person falls in) in plenty of US movies though no idea how common that is in reality.
Regardless, one of the nice things about the practice is does mean people are at least somewhat committed to a cause they are raising funds for before they go soliciting. It also deals with the irrational part of the human psyche and moves the action conceptually from the person begging to the person trading which can have an impact on how people perceive it.
The charity you’re raising for sets up the infrastructure to do the activity. Charities, for example, have spots in marathons which are hard to get other wise.
So if you see a friend is trying to do some personal achievement, and you think the charity is a worthwhile one to donate to; why not combine the two and help your friend achieve their goal whilst also raising money for a good cause.
Shame so many creators took the Honey paycheck, even while Honey was taking money out of their pocket by stealing affiliate links. I guess few really vet their sponsors. Not even LTT or MrBeast!
LTT did eventually vet what was going on and spot the problem, but didn't have the morals to let anyone else know about the scam. And has since played the victim card (“Mommy, they are saying a nasty thing about us!” and “Other people had the same lack of morals too, why are you picking on us?”) having been called out for not warning others out there that they were being scammed.
BetterHelp is arguably worse. Everything I've heard about them sounds terrible, but they're all over YouTube and presumably they're getting a lot of vulnerable customers who will never receive the support they need.
The YouTubers that peddle this shit have no morals.
I'd take that as an indictment on those podcasts. All the stuff I listened to / watched that used them in the past has dropped them for more than a year by now.
I think Johnny Harris may still run adverts for them? But I watch him mostly because he's such a suspicious character to begin with.
When I first heard all this about honey I was shocked, remembering seeing Linus plug them. Of all the people to have the potential ability to see through it. The way I see it is that anyone who sponsors things like YouTube videos as widely as they do is generally a piece of s** company. Normally up to something, that makes it worth their while to spaff money on such things. 80 quid razors, AI driven news classifiers, VPNs, meh...
My more general rule is that anything being advertised to me must be way overpriced or a scam, in order to pay for the expensive advertisements. I won’t buy nearly anything I see advertised. I don’t run into many ads anyway, but some always get through!
Well he brought down his entire storage system. Twice.
I believe one time he had to bring in Wendell Wilson from Wendell Wilson Consulting, but more likely know to the Internet-at-large as the primary figure on Level1Techs YouTube channel.
I have no desire, nor inclination to dig through the thousands of videos LMG has produced on YouTube, but it's still up to my knowledge, and watching him fumble about with absolutely no clue is not only painful, but pathetic. Linus suffers from the same affliction many of my Ph.D.-holding friends have, which is that he believes because he knows a lot about putting together computers and electronics that he could handle building a large-scale data storage system.
These systems are complex, and to be well-built and maintained, they require domain-specific knowledge - no different than an OS programmer needs deep knowledge of C and C++, and increasing now, Rust.
It's a series of videos of someone way in over his head who should have brought in an actual expert - like Wendell from Level1Techs, or Patrick from ServeTheHome, from the get-go, instead of trying to do it himself.
Here I have to chime in and say that a certain YouTube razor is one of my favourite purchases ever. But I guess it's rather niche, being a double edged safety razor.
Marketers monitor the conversion rates very closely. Chances are some people caught on to the shenanigans within 24 hours, but couldn't figure out which part of the lead generation ecosystem was cheating.
What Honey did robbed content publishers of ad revenue, advertisers lead valuations, and end consumer confidence (bait-and-switch.)
I wouldn't want to be in the blast radius of that legal mess... Popcorn ready for when the judge defines the scope of who is liable =3
It was very similar to the classic banner substitution malware/adware from the early internet.
Most media people have gone back to unique affiliate discount-coupon-codes instead of clickable URL parameters to track lead referrals.
Unfortunately, this also leads to sampling bias, and campaigns spelunking spam statistics. I'd guess on YT irritating people drives engagement in some twisted way. lol =3
but you are also missing the fact that the great part of the industry works in the same way: using open source stuff, in a super parasitic way, to track and control millions of users.
Apathy? Communications spin? Lack of technical understanding?
I suspect some people installed it on a whim based on the recommendation of someone and then forgot about it.
Well, what do the end users care. So long as they get there honey $$. Yes, sucks for the real referer, and youtube creators doing the promoting (though they probably got paid more directly from Honey to do the ad then they would've gotten from there affil links).
Though, like what was exposed, Honey does a poor job for the end user too. There are other cashback sites out there doing what Honey claims/does, but passes on more to the end user. Though they're all taking the referral $$ from the real referer, if there was one.
Scam culture thrives on apathy and ignorance, just count this as yet another win for the bad guys who profit immensely off our increasing societal stupidity
I had this idea before Honey. When we spoke to our attorney, he instantly told us "that won't fly; you'll get popped for cookie stuffing."
The adware world had been doing similar things forever - injecting fake results into Google, taking over default home pages to show Google look-alikes.
When Honey launched on Reddit and got their first user bump, I started building our prototype. While digging deeper, you discover Honey injects JavaScript from their API, which violates extension store TOS, yet somehow this flies.
Fast forward, they hire the CEO of Commission Junction (CJ) as their CFO and everything becomes gravy.
Try to get offers via CJ, you won't get a response. All affiliate networks (CJ, Rakuten/LinkShare, etc.) have "stand down" policies in their contracts. You're supposed to detect when someone takes action like clicking a coupon site link and "stand down." Honey never did this. We had to demonstrate it was happening, but bring it up to CJ and they won't care.
It's regulatory capture of a borderline illegal business.
All cited studies came from RetailMeNot (since taken down). They claim customers abandon carts for coupons. Sure, some do, but those people will probably convert anyway.
Today, coupons are dying. We're in the world of personalized offers. Most coupon codes don't exist anymore - they're offer links. These systems try to "find you a coupon" which isn't real.
You're not supposed to share personalized coupons. These systems capture your coupons and add them to their list, but they almost never work.
I'd never try this business again. It's dishonest and terrible.
Fun fact: Much of this goes back to adware/search XML feeds from parking pages. IAC had a division called Mindspark Interactive Network (recently closed) - their adware division generating insane profit through Pay-Per-Download scam browser extensions tricking your grandfather, hijacking affiliate link clicks, same playbook.
The affiliate networks don't care as long as referrers look like they match approved pages.
Near the end he mentions the typoRules.js, rules.json, urlfixer stuff and Yieldkit. Apparently, whenever you’ve mis-typed a URL to e.g. amazon, it auto-corrected it and added their own affiliate id (which was then valid for 30 days). And the feature only needed very few changes to get applied even to correct links.
The closest software analogy I’ve heard is like passing around a callable/function with a standard interface. An LLM can call the callable and work with the returned data without needing to go back and forth between your application logic.
Do you think SpaceX or similar would be attacking this problem space if there was a business to be had here? Seems like a fun pet project that will lose money indefinitely, but love seeing small teams do big things!
I haven't looked into Boom's business plan but I assume they wouldn't have gotten this amount of money for this long without a plan to make money that at least looks plausible to investors.
Products or technologies that launch new markets often look like 'bad ideas' until someone figures out a way to make it work profitably. Otherwise we'd already be doing them. Paul Graham wrote a good essay on this, saying basically a startup entrepreneur's job isn't just finding a good idea that hasn't been done, because anything that looks like a good idea is probably already being done. It's finding something that looks like a bad idea (so isn't being done) and figuring out it's not bad if you just do it a different way or add a certain innovation. Of course, most things which look like bad ideas are actually bad ideas but searching the edges for exceptions is the valuable thing entrepreneurs do (along with creating new jobs).
Also, you might be surprised there are several companies selling high-end transcontinental private jets. One of the newer features of the latest generation is that they can fly at .9 to .95 mach instead of .8 to .85 mach. That shaves more than an hour off a flight. It's a relatively small market but this new generation has a waiting list of those lining up to pay ~$20M more to save a few hours per round-trip. Sure, it's a small market but it's profitable. Note: I have no idea if Boost's plan involves that market but paying more to go faster, and especially having the fastest option, is usually of interest to someone.
Nearly 10 years ago, I was at a Spotify recruiting event and they told us how they did embeddings at the time.
They took all user generated playlists and projected the songs into vectors where songs that appear together on playlists are closer and songs that appear less often are farther.
It’s likely changed a lot since then, but it seemed like a pretty straightforward clustering system at the time.
co-occurrence. It's the real backbone of almost all recommender systems.
This is the same way YT/TikTok does it btw. Co-occurrence is king in recommender systems in production. It's extremely cheap to calculate and by far the most effective method.
That's just bais collaborative filtering. Drdaeman is talking about using the actual content of the songs in your vector embeddings.
This is not really important if you have a lot of user behavior data and/or playlists for each song. But if you have a niche song that few people of listened to, collaborative filtering based recommendations aren't going to be good.
Real semantic embeddings (which can then be part of the input to the recommendation model) can be trained using self-supervision, e.g. an auto encoder or a seperate "next audio token" predicting transformer.
A recommendation from a person you know takes into account not just their knowledge of your preferences, but also how much and in what way they like/care about you, and conversely, your taking of the recommendation is colored by your rapport with the recommender. All that is something a recommender system has no access to.
Or, more bluntly: you aren't going to mate with a For You page, so it doesn't have the same evolutionary cheat code to your preferences as other people have.
Complicated, or worryingly straightforward and effective? It really does seem that over time, this would compress the space of peoples' preferences - and since listening stats also feed into production and promotion - the space of music produced.
$1,000/mo in a low income area of Dallas is a lot of money. Going from a $700/mo to a $1,700/mo apartment in Dallas is luxury. Not sure you're seeing this one clearly....
I was working on my first "startup" (if you want to call it that) and wasn't getting traction. The owner of a software consulting firm found me on Hacker News and brought me in as his first employee on a massive contract. We grew the team substantially, made great money and that lead to doing a real startup after. And then another. All from a post I made on a hiring thread.
Man, that's amazing. Glad it worked out. Sometimes I miss the old days of the internet where everyone was helping each other, so it's great to hear stories of it still happening on HN.
1. Getting things to space is incredibly expensive
2. Ingress/egress are almost always a major bottleneck - how is bandwidth cheaper in space?
3. Chips must be “Rad-hard” - that is do more error correcting from ionizing radiation - there were entire teams at NASA dedicated to special hardware for this.
4. Gravity and atmospheric pressure actually do wonders for easy cooling. Heat is not dissipated in space like we are all used to and you must burn additional energy trying to move the heat generated away from source.
5. Energy production will be cheaper from earth due to mass manufacturing of necessary components in energy systems - space energy systems need novel technology where economies of scale are lost.
Would love for someone to make the case for why it actually makes total sense, because it’s really hard to see for me!
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