MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tavavex | 2026-02-02 22:38:09+00:00
Because that brings in the whole distributed computing mess. No matter how instantaneous the actual link is, you still have to deal with the problems of which satellites can see one another, how many simultaneous links can exist per satellite, the max throughput, the need for better error correction and all sorts of other things that will drastically slow the system down in the best case. Unlike something like Starlink, with GPUs you have to be ready that everyone may need to talk to everyone else at the same time while maintaining insane throughput. If you want to send GPUs up one by one, get ready to also equip each satellite with a fixed mass of everything required to transmit and receive so much data, redundant structural/power/compute mass, individual shielding and much more. All the wasted mass you have to launch with individual satellites makes the already nonsensical pricing even worse. It just makes no sense when you can build a warehouse on the ground, fill it with shoulder-to-shoulder servers that communicate in a simple, sane and well-known way and can be repaired on the spot. What's the point?
by stevenjgarner | 2026-02-02 22:38:14+00:00
Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI (x.ai = grok), officially acquired X Corp. (the parent company of the social media platform X or x.com, formerly Twitter/x.com) in an all-stock deal. Both now operate under a unified holding entity, frequently referred to in corporate filings as X.AI Holdings Corp. (or simply xAI). Now SpaceX has moved to acquire or merge with xAI. This effectively brings the social media data from x.com, the AI development of x.ai, and the satellite infrastructure of Starlink/SpaceX under one "super-conglomerate" roof.
by hamdingers | 2026-02-02 22:38:35+00:00
I happen to have the book handy.

> HERE’S WHAT’S DIFFERENT: I was not admitted. This is a very significant difference. No one even thought about admitting me. I was mislabeled but not locked up. Here’s another thing that’s different: every single medical professional was nice to me. Rosenhan and his confederates felt diminished by their diagnoses; I, for whatever reason, was treated with palpable kindness.

Seems she would disagree with your assessment that being prescribed some likely-harmless pills is the same as losing your freedom.

There's also a section earlier where she presents an argument the actual finding of the study is that mental healthcare is not set up to handle adversarial or dishonest patients, which is still a problem and a tough one to solve.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-02 22:39:08+00:00
There's clearly rhetorical hyperbole happening there. But assuming that thermal rejection is good in space, & launch costs continue falling, as earth-based data centers become power/grid-constrained, there is a viable path for space power gen.

The craziest part of those statements is "100 kW per ton." IDK what math he is doing there or future assumptions, but today we can't even sniff at 10 kW per ton. iROSA [1] on the ISS is about 0.150 kW per ton.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll_Out_Solar_Array

edit: iROSA = 33 kW per ton, thanks friends
by wat10000 | 2026-02-02 22:39:18+00:00
No, we just "assume" (i.e. know) that radiation in a vacuum is a really bad way of dissipating heat, to the point that we use vacuum as a very effective insulator on earth.

Yes, you can overcome this with enough radiator area. Which costs money, and adds weight and space, which costs more money.

Nobody is saying the idea of data centers in space is impossible. It's obviously very possible. But it doesn't make even the slightest bit of economic sense. Everything gets way, way harder and there's no upside.
by tfehring | 2026-02-02 22:39:28+00:00
They do, at a much higher rate than the US as a whole, but cars are still dominant. Transit mode share in the city of Chicago is around 21%, down from 28% pre-pandemic, while driving is at 44%. For Chicagoland as a whole, driving is 63%, transit only 9%. The usual source for this data is the American Community Survey; I pulled these numbers from https://api.census.gov, but the same source is also cited in e.g. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...) and Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-22/how-ameri...)
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-02 22:39:38+00:00
I suspect SpaceX will acquire Tesla at some point. It’s the most profitable of these companies. So basically SpaceX employees and shareholders are covering up for the failing Tesla business and the already-failed xAI business.

Let’s not forget, xAI is the parent of Twitter/X (the social network). So now, taxpayers are paying to keep Twitter/X alive. After all, it is taxpayer money going to the contracts the government gives SpaceX for launches. Nice way to subsidize what is effectively a one sided campaign machine for the GOP and far right.
by c1ccccc1 | 2026-02-02 22:39:46+00:00
Radiators can shadow each other, so that puts some kind of limit on the size of the individual satellite (which limits the size of training run it can be used for, but I guess the goal for these is mostly inference anyway). More seriously, heat conduction is an issue: If the radiator is too long, heat won't get from its base to its tip fast enough. Using fluid is possible, but adds another system that can fail. If nothing else, increasing the size of the radiator means more mass that needs to be launched into space.
by beambot | 2026-02-02 22:39:58+00:00
> Elon can't legally financially entangle Tesla to SpaceX

Bill Ackman has proposed taking SpaceX public by merging it with his Pershing Square SPARC Holdings, distributing 0.5 Special Purpose Acquisition Rights (SPARs) to Tesla shareholders for each share held. Each SPAR would be exercisable for two shares of SpaceX, aimed at enabling a 100% common stock capitalization without traditional underwriting fees or dilutive warrants.

With SpaceX IPO set to be one of the biggest of all time, this could have a pretty gnarly financial engineering impact on both companies -- especially if the short interest (direct or through derivatives) remains large.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-02 22:40:00+00:00
> > The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves.

If that's their fear they don't know much how your typical big businesses functions.

You've dealt with a large, consumer bank? Many of them still run on IBM mainframes. The web front end is driven by pushing buttons and screen scraping 3270 terminal emulators. You would think a bank with all it's resources could easily build it's IT infrastructure and then manage all the technology transitions we've gone through over the past few decades. Clearly, they don't and can't. What they actually do is notice they have to adapt to the newfangled IT threat, hired hordes of contractors to do the work, then fire them when done. After it's done they go back to banking and forget all the lessons they've learnt about building and managing IT infrastructure.

If you want to see how banking and computers should be combined, look at the Fintech's, not banks. But for some reason I don't understand traditional banks still out compete Fintech's. Maybe it's getting your head around both banking and running an IT business it too much for one human mind?

That same pattern is repeated everywhere. Why was everyone so scared of Huawei? It wasn't because they built the gear. It's because the phone telco's have devolved into marketing and finance companies who purchase in the gear from companies like Huawei and rent it out. Amazingly they don't know how to run the gear they purchased, instead get the supplier to install it and maintain it. But that meant what some eyes viewed as an organ of the Chinese communist party was running the countries phones with full access to every SMS and voice call. (Interestingly, IBM pulled the same stunt with the banks back in the day: you didn't buy an mainframe, you leased / rented it from IBM, and they maintained it.)

It's the same story everywhere I look. These big firms stick to the knitting. If you want to see total, utter incompetence in IT go work whose core business doesn't revolve around IT for a while. These are the firms that still choose Microsoft, despite the fact they've seen Sony's Microsoft based IT infrastructure torn apart so badly by North Korea they didn't know who their employees were, how much they owed creditors or how much debtors owned them for a while. Why do they choose Microsoft? Look around - who else allows you to outsource the know how about connecting millions of computing devices in 1000's of offices to a redundant cloud infrastructure that allows them to share data while providing a centralised authentication / authorisation infrastructure. There is only one choice, apart from developing it themselves which is out of the question.

If those businesses did start using what passes for AI today to manage and develop their own IT infrastructure, the result would not be pretty. But for all the shit I'm throwing at them here, I'm confident they are smarter than that. They know their limitations, they haven't done it before, and they won't start doing it now.
by tsoukase | 2026-02-02 22:40:02+00:00
EU is a rare coalition in history, carefully implemented but still an expirement. There are three types of members: low (south/east), middle (north/west) and Germany. Basically money is flowing in producing Germany and then back to the consuming lows. The middles are neutral to money flow.

This vital rotation is expected to continue in the future albeit with slower speed. The recent collaborations with South America and India aim to help this flow go on.

The current US policy is making a great favor to Europe as they cause a uniting instinct against a common danger. There is no need for same language and same most common surname 'Smith' to span 5000km.
by alexpotato | 2026-02-02 22:40:20+00:00
So one thing that hasn't changed is that the marginal cost of software is still effectively zero. That's where most of the money was being made b/c if you were a monopoly or oligopoly that each additional unit sold was an absolute increase in revenue and you spread out your fixed costs.

What has changed most dramatically is the "fixed" cost of writing the software to begin with. Given that the costs were being spread out over so many units beforehand, it's not entirely clear to me how that changes a lot of the economics.

For the comments about the "SaaS vs build your own", we can use a home services metaphor. Sure, I can do a lot of what my plumber does. But they do it faster, know all of the issues that go wrong with the work and I can pay them a yearly fee to check my boiler to make sure it doesn't fail etc. The time saved by calling the plumber can then be spent with kids, more work or a combo of the two.
by wtallis | 2026-02-02 22:40:22+00:00
> I get 40 Gbit/s over a single localhost TCP stream on my 10 years old laptop with iperf3.

Do you mean literally just streaming data from one process to another on the same machine, without that data ever actually transiting a real network link? There's so many caveats to that test that it's basically worthless for evaluating what could happen on a real network.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-02 22:40:22+00:00
Note that Mass Effect's world purposely muddles the waters between the two and blurs lines. "Is this a VI or a real AI" is an open question in cases so that the player can explore the idea.

Halo also builds a distinction, with "Smart AI" what we would generally consider AGI and even super AGI, against "Dumb AI" which is purposely limited. Similarly, our current LLMs are similar to "Dumb AI" in shape but not even remotely close in capability.

In both universes, an "AI" or similar system will not hallucinate. If they tell you something wrong, or inaccurate, it's usually because they have been tampered with or because they have "Gone crazy" which is an identifiable state that is not normal and not probabilistic.

Star Trek also makes distinctions. The ships computer for example largely does not make deductions, and doesn't always operate in natural human language but instead requires you use specific phrasing and language. The Star Trek ships computer is basically what using 20 year old text to speech to run Wikipedia and database queries, and that's mostly it. It cannot analyze data itself. Data and the fully conscious Sherlock Holmes are both capable of automatically forming and testing a hypothesis.

It's actually weird how many people don't seem to notice that. The ships computer in star trek is purposely dumb, and command driven. It is not an agent, it does not think, and it does not understand natural human language. We had the star trek ships computer decades ago.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2026-02-02 22:41:55+00:00
This is par for the course for an Elon-associated endeavor but it's been leaking out into the broader tech sector; make ludicrous claims and promises and somehow investors just throw money at you. FSD has been around the corner for over a decade, martian colonization will be here by the end of the decade for the past 20 years and General SuperAI will be here in a few years for the past few years.
by Jacobinski | 2026-02-02 22:42:02+00:00
True. It should however be noted that the most active maintainer of AnkiDroid will be joining the new entity:

> We’re currently talking to David Allison, a long-time core contributor to AnkiDroid, about working together on exactly these questions. His experience with AnkiDroid’s collaborative development is invaluable, and we’re grateful he’s willing to help us get this right. We’re incredibly excited to have him join us full-time to help propel Anki into the future.
by bombcar | 2026-02-02 22:42:08+00:00
This is the root of the issue, which people often want to ignore - it's a class chicken'd egg problem.

The "there is no parking at all" wonderlands can exist (even NOT counting artificial ones like Disneyland) - and the "everything is acres of parking and there's no street parking at all" also.

The question is how you get from one extreme to another - in a way that does NOT require you to redevelop the entire city Simcity style, nor puts onerous costs such that all development is stifled.

Part of it might be that if the parking lots/garages are not heavily used, or not used much, they'll "redevelop themselves" - but that likely requires making transit and other options better which is difficult, expensive, and often politically unsound.
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-02 22:42:26+00:00
It also makes it impossible for Twitter/X to die, as it deserves. It is by far the most toxic mainstream social network. It has an overwhelming amount of far right supremacist content. So bad that it literally resulted in Vivek Ramaswamy, a gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, to quit Twitter/X - nearly 100% of replies to his posts were from far right racists.

Obviously advertisers have not been fans. And it is a dying business. But rather than it dying, Elon has found a clever (and probably illegal) way to make it so that SpaceX, which has national security importance, is going to prop up Twitter/X. Now our taxpayer dollars are paying for this outrageous social network to exist.
by magicalist | 2026-02-02 22:42:33+00:00
> It's not just a converter, it's a gui with the tools needed to facilitate a quick manual conversion.

is this like a meta-joke?

> I have a prime example of this were my company was able to save $250/usr/mo for 3 users by having Claude build a custom tool for updating ancient (80's era) proprietary manufacturing files to modern ones.

The funny thing about examples like this is that they mostly show how dumb and inefficient the market is with many things. This has been possible for a long time with, you know, people, just a little more expensive than a Claude subscription, but would have paid for itself many times over through the years.
by emacdona | 2026-02-02 22:42:34+00:00
>> So, my question is: are the people that are upset with the "ambiguity" people who neither (a) want to buy a license nor (b) be bound by the AGPLv3?

> No and no.

[...]

>> If so, I have no sympathy.

> Your sympathy means nothing to me

Well, regardless... via the rules of logical implication, you have it.
by consumer451 | 2026-02-02 22:42:36+00:00
Here is my main question: Musk is on record as being concerned about runaway "evil AI." I used to write that off as sci-fi thinking. For one thing, just unplug it.

So, let's accept that Musk's concern of evil runaway AI is a real problem. In that case, is there anything more concerning than a distributed orbital platform for AI inference?

Elon Musk appears to be his own nemesis.
by rybosworld | 2026-02-02 22:42:45+00:00
> Do you not understand how satellites work?

Not trying to be rude - but it's you who doesn't understand how satellites work.

The U.S. has 31 GPS satellites in orbit right now. The operational cost of running those is $2 million/day.

Not to mention the scale of these satellites would be on the order of 10x-100x the size of the ISS, which we do send people to perform maintenance.
by jll29 | 2026-02-02 22:42:47+00:00
Currently, all hyperscalers are in an arms race to buy energy, data centers and GPU capacity for the big struggle of "who will win the AI war?" - the Amazons, Googles, Oracles, Metas and Microsofts of this world all want to be the one winner that takes it all.

In this case "it" or rather "they" are the consumer AI market (a la ChatGPT) and the B2B/corporate AI market (for enterprises and their vertical AI applications) - and yet to be built!

The race is run before we get to know who the killer apps are, and whether there will be one (if not: another bubble to burst, much worse this time than in 2001).

Perhaps the XAI/SpaceX integration could be done for the same reason that Amazon fired 30k white collar workers: enormous amounts of cash is needed for the investments in AI infrastructure.

Now XAI alone may struggle to raise that much; with SpaceX integrated, there are government funds to tap into as well, and it's less clear to separate the space travel business from the AI business, which might be intentional. Amazon shedding 30k people means approx. $6 bn in annual savings, capex that can be redeployed (cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sk3qmIQZnI)!

EDIT: Typo fixed
by ElevenLathe | 2026-02-02 22:42:51+00:00
I once had the idea to do something like this, though the intention was to pitch it to gas station operators as a way to keep their prices competitive (i.e. alert them when the station down the street drops their prices so that they can too and not lose business to casual price shoppers or, alternatively, when the station down the street raises their prices, so that you can too and not lose revenue needlessly) and learned that there are a couple entities, at least in the US, that have national data here. I couldn't even figure out how to contact one, and when I called the other I was essentially laughed off the phone by someone with a VERY New York accent -- it seems from context that their data is VERY expensive and used by Wall St. types, so the idea of some nobody from flyover country essentially reselling it to mom & pop gas station operators was funny, and out of the question.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-02 22:43:23+00:00
Original title: "AI and the Quantity and Quality of Creative Products: Have LLMs Boosted Creation of Valuable Books?"

Abstract: "With the diffusion of LLMs between 2022 and 2025, new book releases have tripled, raising a question of AI's impact on book quality. We develop a ratings-based usage measure that is comparable across book release vintages, and we find that the vintages from the AI influx period have lower average quality. Yet, the top 1,000 monthly releases per category - albeit not the top 100 - have higher quality than before; and the effect is larger in categories with faster growth in new titles. Authors entering since the LLM influx produce predominantly low-quality work; and the higher-quality output of pre-LLM authors entrants has risen. A nested logit calibration shows that LLM-enhanced book production could, in steady state, raise the surplus that consumers derive from book markets by a quarter to a half."
by FloorEgg | 2026-02-02 22:43:37+00:00
Setting aside the possibility it's window dressing for a financial bailout, there would be two ways compute in space makes sense:

1) new technology improves vacuum heat radiation efficiency

2) new technology reduces waste heat generation from compute

All the takes I've seen have been focused on #1, but I'm starting to wonder about #2... Specifically spintronics and photonic chips.
by zem | 2026-02-02 22:43:38+00:00
yes that was me! I love that quote (it's by samuel johnson), so it's really moving to hear it made an impression on someone else too. here it is:

What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. "And why should they be denied such sweeteners of their existence (says Johnson)? it is surely very savage to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths."

-- Piozzi: Anecdotes
by 2gremlin181 | 2026-02-02 22:43:41+00:00
Senior Data Scientist with 5+ years of experience building and scaling ML, analytics, and GenAI systems. Expertise in large-scale data analysis, model evaluation, and experimentation. Proficient in Python, SQL, Spark, and statistics, with a Computer Engineering foundation.

Location: San Francisco, CA
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies:
* Programming Languages: Python, SQL (Presto, Postgres, Spark), R, PHP/Hack, Bash
* Frameworks: PyData (Pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn), PyTorch/Lightning, TensorFlow/Keras, PySpark, LangChain, XGBoost
* Tools: AWS, GCP, Spark, Gurobi, Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, Git, Tableau, OpenAI API
Résumé/CV: https://kavi.sh/assets/resume/KavishHukmani_resume.pdf
Email: khukmani at gmail.com
GitHub: https://github.com/DoubleGremlin181
Website: https://kavi.sh/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kavish-hukmani/
by keithnz | 2026-02-02 22:43:44+00:00
Other than smaller SaaS companies who offer things easily replaceable, I don't think many of the bigger ones can be replaced by AI, if anything, it might make them better. For instance I can't see us replacing our ticket management/support software, hosting, manufacturing/sales/stock software, accounting software, etc but it would be great if we could leverage all those tools better via AI (some are already easy to leverage).

The interesting thing I've noticed is software library authors could take a beating though. Quite a few libs in the .NET world have gone down the monetized paths, for all of the ones I've been using, I've just got AI to remove them and implement native solutions. But none of these are large listed companies.
by TSiege | 2026-02-02 22:44:00+00:00
One thing to keep in mind. xAI and SpaceX both have contracts with the DoD. So it makes sense he moved it there rather than Tesla. Not sure I buy the needing AI for doing more in space or if this is to save sinking ship, but if one of his two big companies needed to buy it to keep it afloat it makes sense it was SpaceX and not Tesla.

I'm wondering if SpaceX's going public will be delayed. If not we'll see the first test of the public's appetite for what the AI companies' balance sheets look like