sawyers

What embedded fitness fuctions are you thinking of?

Right. The joke with shakespeares monkeys or borjes library is that you just do that and then filter out the books that match shakespeares works.

If you already know what you want in an infinite library, it is there. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for to the letter, you might not be able to find it.

People often think of tech/business as bottleneck issues ie whats my limiting factor. That's relevant to pre-ai business as humans are relatively self organizing.

The issue with AI is it has no real memory, context, long term reasoning, etc. These are a lot of what we use to determine how well we're doing something as well as why.

The "bottleneck" so to speak with ai is that it will just circularly build junk forever, expand scope infinitely, and just continue building.

At its best it will autobuild your unicorn saas. But on average it's a cancer cluster of ever expanding code with no plan.

The issue with unsupervised AI is that when you increase the throughput you decrease the amount of human supervision. So you have to have some way to deal with that.

If I'm going to give AI a gigantic task that's really complicated and it will probably mess it up 100s of times, how will I compensate for that without constantly looking over it's shoulder?

It shouldn't be prohibitively expensive because the more you break the work into smaller parts, theoretically the smaller a model can be that completes it.

Therefore your agent swarms don't have to be cutting edge API calls, they can be hosted on clusters of tiny cheap computers with small CPU GPU. For orgs you could basically invest in a local server that has 100s of small computers.

You can use engineers and frontier models to plan and do task subdivision. And then shit that out to the local cluster that's basically handling each small task without knowing what it's supposed to do.

The real issue is the middle. Testing, verifying interconnectivity of mid level abstractions, building that amount of tech debt at such a high rate and actually being aware in any way what it is that you've built.

I think for most MBAs, considering the US and a significant amount of global markets only care about short term market upside, and AI is still in the middle of the hype cycle, that's not a serious issue for anyone who is profit oriented.

It's only a real issue for the losers like you and me who care about sustainability and infrastructure that survives longer than one market hurricane season.

What do you mean by tyranny of the specific?

Agreed. Land coverage from space is going to have a larger line of site.

I'm wondering more about unit economics. 10k units for global coverage with ongoing maintenance cost. Or earth bound construction that costs significantly less than a rocket launch.

You could realistically prefab and ship microwave links or base stations. It would be extremely cheap compared to space.

What I'm thinking though is that there's no real estate in space. So you don't have to do any surveying, leasing, etc. You just launch a rocket. Which means if you fund anything in space, you can grow it to scale as long as you have the capital.

You should be able to do the same thing by pointing dishes at each other long distance and having local nodes broadcast 5g. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than rocket launches and most telecom companies already do it.

It seems like starlink got the jump on infrastructure build out via subsidized government contracts. But a fair amount of telecom companies could slowly expand their reach at a less breakneck pace much cheaper until they catch up and the remaining market cap that starlink doesn't have to fight for would probably be smaller than maybe the cost of a handful of launches per year. It's hard to upkeep a global network with 5 satellites.

The only reason I could see starlink staying up is because it's currently a way for the US government to have a company that provides global internet that they can potentially wrap into PRISM surveillance. The US has spent more on less. But as far as an actual company? I wonder how much longer it will be competetive.

SpaceX cost per launch might be around $100m. Some napkin math if a telecom charges around $50/mo/household. That's $600/y/household. That's roughly 166,667 households/y/launch. You can always tweak the numbers but $50 is competitive.

They're losing about 250-450 satellites per 6 months to a year, which means they might need to launch on average 350 satellites per year lets say?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-sees-big-drop-in-number-of...

So that's around 58,333,334 households per year in maintenance.

According to this article they just hit 12m subcribers in 2026 June via SEC filing, and their network is 10k+ satellites.

https://axis-intelligence.com/starlink-statistics/

This is all just launch cost, which I guess is subsidized by creative accounting via spacex.

When people say house of cards, like imagine telling Verizon to drop $1T over 10-20 years to net 12M subscribers.

Elon usually has some crazy long game like going to Mars to die. There just isn't one on starlink? Sure you could say, everyone in the world will now use Starlink for everything telecom and broadband related, but it's a gigantic security issue that almost no government would sign on to. You'd have to convince a ton of governments to stop building out local infrastructure and pay Elon to keep everything running. It's a crazy proposition, and not the fun kind.

The thing with satellites is you can't really maintain them, at least not with current technology. It's more common practice to let them burn out and then launch a new one. It's also hard to repurpose them for other things because they're launched with specific hardware. You can add new software via a remote connection but it would be so impossible to just convert the current 10k+ satellite infrastructure into something else.

What would make more sense honestly would be to coordinate with governments to piggyback starlink modules onto their standard satellites and share the launch and maintenance, but that is a bureaucratic nightmare that's worse than how telecom companies rent out different sections of the same telephone pole.

I just don't see it. As a ponzi scheme that temporarily benefits a lot of people, sure. But as a long term functional business that runs without a constant subsidy? No way. The company value is probably less tied to the product and revenue and more to the level of subsidy it receives each year.

Am I crazy?

They were bought out by a unilever subsidiary. Most of their ingredients were replaced with cheaper, less healthy, less flavorful additives. It's funny to say the ice cream got less healthy, but it's true.

Any interesting reading on the second paragraph?