unusualmonkey

Starlink is useful, but people often confuse coverage with capacity density.

The rough hierarchy is: fixed fiber/cable > Wi-Fi > cellular > LEO satellite > traditional GEO satellite. Starlink is a huge improvement over old satellite internet, but it is still fundamentally a satellite system, not dense terrestrial infrastructure.

As a rough illustration, suppose one Starlink beam covers about 63 square miles and has 6 Gbps of usable downlink. At New York City density, that footprint contains about 1.85 million people. That works out to roughly 3 kbps per person. For comparison, network planners typically budget on the order of Mbps per person to comfortably support peak demand in dense urban environments.

You can improve that with more satellites, more beams, more spectrum, and better hardware. But even a 100x improvement only gets you to about 300 kbps/person. Additionally, this all adds cost... that isn't needed for the vast majority of time or space that the sattelites will be over. If the sattelites orbiting over New York also orbit over the Sahara Desert - every $ spent improving NY capacity is also improving the Sahara... but with no return.

The reason fiber, cable, Wi-Fi, and cellular work so well in cities is spatial reuse. Capacity can be reused block by block, building by building, apartment by apartment, tower by tower, and access point by access point. A beam from hundreds of kilometers overhead covers a much larger area.

So Starlink is excellent for rural areas, ships, aircraft, remote sites, disaster recovery, and backup connectivity. But it is not a replacement for terrestrial broadband in dense cities. It solves coverage much better than it solves urban capacity.

I agree that there may be a lot of variation between models that leads to different use cases, at least today. But I’m not sure the car analogy works.

An X5 is not simply “inferior” to a CR-V, or vice versa. A Camry is not “inferior” to an F-150, or vice versa. They are optimized for different buyers, budgets, constraints, and use cases.

That may actually be the better analogy for AI models: there probably is not one universal “best” model. There are models that are better or worse for particular tasks, price points, latency requirements, deployment constraints, privacy needs, etc.

Sorry that's no realistic. People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital.

Assuming token costs will be prohibitive assumes:

A) tokens will be really expensive and B) you need to fund tokens before you have revenue.

Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.

a brain can innovate, and as of this moment, an LLM cannot because it relies on previously available information.

Source needed RE brain.

Define innovate, in a way that a LLM can't and we definitively can prove a human can.

Just wait until after launch. You get a refined experience and often much lower prices.

I pointed out the claim is both irrelevant and factually wrong.

That should be sufficient rebuttal.

Humans are not deterministic.

Ironically AI models are iirc.

Come up with a real argument.

Not spending all the wealth you before you die would be irrational if your children won't inherit it.

Sure, but that's only one small aspect of the economy.

Maybe younger generations would earn more with all the spending and save more knowing there is no inheritance coming.

You only look at one aspect, claim you know what would happen, and the proclaim yourself right.

You've not established that your suggestions are core principles of modern economics or derived from them.

For example, you are asserting there would be 'no reason to own property beyond a certain age'... which isn't supported, and then jumping to the conclusion that that would lower savigns rates.

None of this is clearly true, just supposition.

If no sources exist, then you must accept making claims such as this would 'lower savings rates' are simply not backed up. Maybe it will... maybe it won't.

So what if there is no reason to own property beyond a certain age? Even if we take this claim as true... that doesn't explain if this is a good or bad thing.

I'd need a source to back up those claims, as you note it's not trivial to understand how economy would react.

I also don't see why buying a house would be much riskier? If you buy a house for your family it's because you either prefer the lifestyle or think it provides economic advantages over renting. Given you only need housing when your alive, I think what happens after you pass is not as major a concern as presented.

Why is spending everything before you die a perverse incentive?

Except that if rendering was magically free... why not just pathtrace everything?

DLSS might not be as good as pure unlimited pathtracing, but for a given budget it might be better than rasterization alone.

Rasterizing results in better graphics quality than DLSS if compute is not a limiting factor.

Sure, but compute is a limiting factor.

In part because it's an odd compromise. With the exception of LLM's which are a decent development... there wasn't a lot of need to high memory, but moderate GPU compute parts. You'd either have a lot of memory and a CPU, or a lot of memory and a beefy GPU.

Remember that AMD has been making x86 SoC's with unified memory for quite some time.

Sure, but the same likely applies to Oil as well right? Fossil Fuels don't magically extract and refine themselves.

What analysis do you point to that suggests fossil fuels have a smaller impact than, say, wind?

One oil well can produce an amount of free energy (24/7) that a 100 acre wind farm can only produce sporadically, assuming the well is a reasonably high volume producer. It depends on the specific well/geology.

Except it can't, a 100 acre wind farm can produce energy indefinitely while a oil well will eventually run dry.

The idea that fossil fuels are more ecologically favorable because it's 'dense' needs to address not only external factors, but that fossil fuels are non-renewable.

The energy density of fossil fuels means that those side-effects would be worse with other sources of energy.

Can you expand on this? How does the density of fossil fuel make them a better source of energy than say wind?

Lol, adding a hue is usually a crutch for a too small screen with lifted blacks... which doesn't paint the pro in a very positive light!

Ironically by adding a gue to a nomral screen, you're effectively 'adding' pixels to the display... unlike the pro which wastes pixels on the 'hue' because many of them are not in the ideal viewing angle.

If you're implementing you're idea's... who is marketing them? Who is handling customer support? What about sales, legal, finance, hr etc?

Writing code is not building a business.

You can do the same thing with any screen by holding it the appropriate distance.

Keep in mind that all that unwatchable area is pixels that aren't being used to improve the movie image.

"The movies that play in virtual screens are native to the films’ aspect ratios, which can vary movie to movie, eliminating the black bars of “letterboxing” and “pillarboxing” you typically have on iPads, iPhones, or MacBooks."

Then proceeds to show screenshots where more than 50% of the screen is background. Just because you decided to show cloud instead of black doesn't mean it's not letterboxing.

So the first business has no competition... but also no defensibility?

The second business should be able to be much bigger AND easier, but you aren't focussing all your efforts on it because you're splitting your time with the first, non-defensible business?

It's good to be optimistic, but balance that with realism. It's easy to build a billion dollar business on paper, much harder in reality.

What's missing here is what value the writer is bringing to the table.

Let's look at the trade:

"I’m looking for a technical cofounder who is ready to commit in the next 2-3 months and work in-person in San Francisco. I’m looking for them to do Product, Design, and Engineering."

This requires a lead level engineer, say $200k to $500k/year salary in SF. Given that this is a 2~3 month engagement, we'd double that for contractor rate and pro rata. I'd estimate this is $100k to $250k of time.

"I’m committed to healthtech and have a few ideas, but willing to work on other ideas in healthtech."

Great, this is worth about $0.

This doesn't seem like a fair trade.

What's worse is that "Rob Balian" is a CTO with product manager background. Instead of looking for a co-founder to complement his skillset, he's duplicating the skill set.

If you spend 9 months learning to code, you get a junior engineer (at best).

If you sepnd 9 months getting a technical co-founder, you likely get a seasoned engineer + thought partner for all decisions going forward.

One is vastly more valuable than the other.

The skillset to find a cofounder is similar to the skillset needed to raise money. Additionally, founders who try to hire for skillsets they have no experiance in, often find their money wasted.

And if it introduces a bug that causes downtime that could cost millions.

Setting up a offshore office takes time and focus that could be spent on other initiatives etc.

It's not forever, in another comment they're reworking their entire internal comms protocol.

My 2c:

1) Is this worthwhile? Looks like ~500 CPU cores were saved (are these real cores, or does this include hyperthread cores?). I don't know cloudflare's costs, but this seems like single digit servers and probably savings only in the $XX,XXX range. Not nothing, but do you expect a positive ROI on engineering?

2) If you do want to go to this detail, did you consider in putting the filter at the deserialization step, preventing the headers from being created in the first place?