Iran looks like it will get a toll on Strait traffic. This money, plus even a partial lifting of sanctions, will be a windfall.
Any Iranian leadership whose brains are not made of sawdust will use that money to race to a nuclear weapon. Clearly, we are in an era where the only reliable nuclear umbrella is locally sourced and homegrown. Expect a dominant geopolitical theme to be proliferation as every state that feels somewhat threatened boots up a nuclear weapons program. From ~9 states today, we should expect to see ~30 within the next 10-15 years.
Opening the Strait was not a goal of this action; the Strait was open before this war started. They are trying to sell as a win a return to the status quo ante.
US didn't achieve any of the goals it stated during any part of the war. The "goals" it achieved were largely a restoration of the status quo ante, modulo an enormous new revenue stream for Iran.
US spent vast amounts of money on not achieving any meaningful objective, while at the same time granting the opposition items from their long-term wish list (removal of sanctions). That's a loss.
If Iran's leaders' brains are not made of rotten oatmeal, they will massively accelerate their nuclear weapons program with their windfall.
Have run PG, MySQL, and SQLite locally for production sites. Backups are much more straightforward for SQLite. They are running Kamal, which means "just install Postgres" would also likely mean running PG in a container, which has its own idiosyncrasies.
> Backups are much more straightforward for SQLite.
Not sure how? All of them can be backed up with a single command. But if you want live backups (replication) as opposed to daily or hourly, SQLite is the only one that doesn't support that.
> large gap between OpenAI’s $852-billion valuation and Anthropic’s $380 billion
IIRC Anthropic's revenue is either roughly at parity with or larger than OpenAI's, and Anthropic is growing faster[1]. All indicators are that Anthropic should be worth more than OpenAI. Given that, one could reasonably expect the relative valuations to change a great deal. In any case, it's not clear why OpenAI would command such a price premium over Anthropic.
Anthropic's run rate increased from $12B to $19B in the period between February 12 and the end of the month. If the implied growth rates held through March, Anthropic may well be larger than OpenAI now.
- how old are they? If the poster is ~60, likely has savings and may even have Social Security income. If they worked as (say) a police officer for 20 years, they may have pension income. A 47-year-old former military officer could reasonably have kids at home and also pension income from the military.
- Many people inherit houses (most houses are eventually inherited). Most sell them, but it can be a viable choice to just move into an inherited house to zero out housing expense. OR one could inherit a house that is >> valuable than one's own, such that selling the inherited house allows one to pay off one's own house.
- Location. The Discourse typically divides between HCOL and LCOL, but ignores that in both there are also people who spend much less than the average. In NYC the average home price is ~$850k, but there are today listings for 3BR homes in the low $200s (<$1,500/mo).
And of course these are stackable. One could have a military pension and buy a cheaper place and have a buffer from an inheritance. (None of this is uncommon.)
Could you build a data center in space? Yes, absolutely I am sure there are no physical barriers. We have computers in space now, and those computers have telecom links to Earth.
Without even going into the numbers, terrestrial data centers have significant cost advantages. They don't have to spend $$$$$$$ to get to orbit. They can upgrade and/or fix components easily (likely safe to assume a hypothetical orbital DC would plan to never replace anything). They don't have to pay for the full capex of their power generation facilities. Lower-latency Internet. Heat dissipation is a (possibly unsolved?) problem. For every input cost to a data center, moving it to orbit massively increases that cost.
From a pure engineering standpoint: orbital data centers are not optimized to solve any common problem faced by data center operators or users. Permitting can get difficult in parts of the US, but at least permitting is a solved problem.
I think you're understating the permitting problem - it's a major reason for the very large/rapid price hikes on power in the PJM region, and the populist backlash against data center construction, including moratoriums on DC construction. The difficulty in getting new electrical generation interconnected in many parts of the US is one of the major marks in favor of the plan.
I'm not understating it. But I'm not buying the line that suddenly it's impossible to build industrial buildings in the US. I am realizing that there are thousands of jurisdictions in the US with wildly different permitting regimes, and then hundreds of other countries in the world that might be more welcoming.
But let's say they need to stay in the US. Are DC operators offering to buy down utility capex costs so that existing residents don't see a spike in rates? If not, obviously that is going to create opposition as nobody wants their utility bills to rise rapidly. It would probably be cheaper & easier to e.g. write a check to Southern Company to prevent rate hikes directly tied to their DC than to put a DC in space.
The math also barely pencils? IF Starship hits its $100/kg, getting a single rack of servers to orbit will cost ~$100k. A 500MW data center might have ~5k racks, so ~$500m to orbit. SpaceX estimates $100/kg - $300/kg so it could be $1.5B - $2B just to put the racks in orbit, plus the cost of the servers, plus the cost of the actual orbital data center itself, plus the cost of getting the orbital data center to orbit. That's getting into the "hand every resident a check for $100k in exchange for their county approving the permit" territory.
One Vera Rubin rack costs $3-7M and eats something like 600 kw, so you’re probably looking at more like 800 racks for that 500 MW DC. $100k launch costs per rack doesn’t seem too terrible if that’s what it works out to. I’m sure there’s a mountain of solar panels that aren’t included, though?
And it’s not that simple, building out power generation is very constrained, the interconnection queue is years long in many places, and the current backlog for new natural gas turbines is multiple years right now. Fixing the permitting isn’t impossible with some political will, but energy permitting reform is something that’s been bandied around for years in Congress and hasn’t made it across the finish line. EPRA almost made it at the end of last Congress but that session ended before it did. Hopefully it makes it this time, everyone should contact their congresspeople and ask them to support energy permitting reform.
You will have a setup working based on solar energy and battery storage before you get spaceship to not explode anymore and to deliver low price for payload.
And we are talking about AI Datacenters, they are a lot less latency dependend than websites.
Alone the idea that Musk would be able to break through any burocrazy for space stuff and sets up a supply chain for everything space is easier than just setting up some energy and fiber, feels ridicoulys
I don't understand how years spent building an orbital DC is better than years spent permitting. I guess maybe they expect to somehow be able to build these faster? (How?)
Anyway, is it technically possible? Yes. My suspicion is it's at best a wash vs building on the ground. Applying a similar price premium & similar engineering resources to a ground-based system is likely to deliver much more predictable results.
Tech obviously can have success at lobbying. The TikTok ban IIRC got 90 votes in the Senate. I'm sure the total cost of the required astroturf campaign was much less than launching a single orbital DC.
As an adult working in tech in the 90s, Google hit the Internet like a bomb. They were a relatively late entrant, long after most people had their favorite 2-3 they used (I was primarily Altavista). There was word of mouth, but search engines advertised heavily to raise awareness.
Then Google hit. Materially every person who used it stopped using their previous favorite search engine within 1-2 uses. It spread like wildfire. It was fast, accurate, and the results weren't cluttered (aka lightweight, aka friendly for people on dialup). Some competitors at the time were showing display ads on search results pages.
Google did not have to advertise that I can recall. It was like one day, search was like the auto market : lots of makes, types, etc. The next day it was all Google. It happened really fast in my recollection.
And to your point -- as far as I can recall, the big competitors simply did not try to clone Google. They kept their cluttered pages and did not optimize performance. Excite pivoted to home Internet via a merger with @Home.
A couple of close analogs you may have seen up close. AWS for having a lane virtually to themselves for a long time. Azure & Google & IBM etc. didn't really even suit up until AWS was entrenched reminds me of Yahoo! etc. sticking to their portal strategy well past its sell-by. ChatGPT for the speed of adoption. Google was like a combination of these two.
Any Iranian leadership whose brains are not made of sawdust will use that money to race to a nuclear weapon. Clearly, we are in an era where the only reliable nuclear umbrella is locally sourced and homegrown. Expect a dominant geopolitical theme to be proliferation as every state that feels somewhat threatened boots up a nuclear weapons program. From ~9 states today, we should expect to see ~30 within the next 10-15 years.
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