Hey guys, I learned electronics from a nobel laureate!
Throughout my physics career including PhD, analog electronics was the most difficult but probably also the most rewarding class to me. I fondly remember staying until 2am in broida at ucsb trying to get a filter to work, getting a few hours sleep, then being back in the lab before sunrise. Of course, this was mostly the result of procrastination, but damn were those good times.
One thing that really bothered me then was the idea of a current source. I was perfectly happy with a voltage source, perhaps naively(1). But a current source seemed magical. I was asking Martinis about this and he seemed dumbfounded that I didn't understand. Of course, the answer is feedback. And, of course, good voltage sources also require feedback. But he was so familiar with feedback control he didn't even consider saying that's whats happening, while I never even heard of controls.
Long story short, sometime later I asked to join his lab as an undergrad researcher. He said no, and to this day I think it's because I didn't understand current sources. Or maybe I was too late, or maybe the A- (see the aforementioned procrastination). That led me to asking a biophysicist, and therefore I became a biophysicist instead of condensed matter/QI/QC. In hindsight, I think this was fortunate. I would've never considered biophysics, which has been one of the loves of my life since then. Who knows, maybe I would've been just as happy with quantum stuff. I'm working through Mike and ike now and find it fascinating.
Funny enough, after my PhD, I co-founded a startup in industrial control & automation. Now I understand feedback quite well, and thus current sources, albeit many years too late.
(1) Of course, good voltage sources vary their resistance just like good current sources vary their voltage. My best guess as to the reason I was more bothered by the current sources is that I was so familiar with voltage sources with confidently claimed constant voltages (batteries). Not a very good reason, I should've questioned it more. In practice, it's much easier to make a near ideal voltage source (very high resistance) than a near ideal current source (0 resistance).
There are two different ways to produce a voltage source. The first is to put a variable resistor in series with the power source, which you can adjust to control the voltage. This works, but dissipates a lot of heat. The second is to put a switch in series with the power source and a capacitor in parallel with the load, then switch the power source on and off very rapidly and use the duty cycle to control the voltage. This is how modern switching power supplies work. In actual practice, there are also inductors in the circuit which cause resonance, and allow the switching to happen when there is no current flowing through the switch. This is how modern switching power supplies can be so efficient.
Ok, thanks. But I was calling attention to a point in the previous comment that makes it difficult to see a kind of "dualism" between idealized current sources to idealized voltage sources. Idealized current or voltage sources don't necessarily have any series resistance, and it doesn't matter how they're realized.
I'm certainly no electrical engineer, and I see how the nice duality was lost in my description.
Yes, I was thinking about the ones I'd actually worked with, where the resistance was the control knob. I haven't done much electronics since, so my recollection isn't perfect. I have recently been doing some esp-32 control projects where I just used some power supply I bought. I should look into how it works!
Edit- I just looked up switching power supplies and remembered that I did actually know about those!
It's best not to assume the motives behind a rejection unless they align with things you already see as shortcomings. Doing so might cause you to over-correct on things that weren't problems. Being incorrect in a discussion or getting an A- in a class doesn't seem like things that would completely turn a professor off from accepting you.
This is pretty much what we do to apply small bias currents to our superconducting circuits. The signals are small (<1 uA), and the power is dissipated outside of the cryostat, so this method is very simple and effective. The voltage and resistors don’t even need to be that huge, ~10 MOhm or below, and correspondingly, <10 V.
It works. In most applications it would be wasteful of electrical power (and money). You have to generate this very large voltage that (it turns out) you don't really need.
On the other hand that circuit is very easy to understand and build and test.
FYI, I think the time limit for editing is 1hr. It might change if someone replies? I'm not sure that these rules are written down anywhere.
@Dang, if you see this can we add to the FAQ?
There's also a delay setting in your profile that delays the message but has a max of 10 minutes. There's also the noprocrast setting to help reduce procrastination. The default values let you in for 20 minutes at a time and don't allow you back in for 180 minutes.
Well, I'd say it certainly helps. Better headline with less clicks would be "mapping ... ALONE doesn't explain in it's function. Has anyone said connectome = function? Quick google I guess maybe Sebastian Seung could be accused of it.
It provides constraints, limits, ideas. Suppose the first collection of neurons we fully understand will be the nematode. I have little doubt that having a map of its components and their connectivity is a prerequisite to understand function. Function != Structure, but function = f(structure, weights, history, all sorts of chemical processes, neurotransmitters, ion channels...)
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but it's still made of its parts.
Similarly, a lot of what Trump (and Loomer and MTG) say are jokes and/or ragebait. But Trump keeps it intentionally ambiguous and is serious about some things, and more importantly is in office, so it’s not the same for him. However, for people on Twitter with no political office, there’s no clear line between their “jokes” and the jokes of Goodall and others on the left.
The general sentiment used to such be that political violence was so obviously wrong, calling for it in an absurd way (like “launching my enemies into space”) would be interpreted by almost everyone as a “joke”. Kind of like, for some friendships, saying “I’ll hit you for that!” to your best friend after they pull a light-hearted prank. Nowadays, I still think most people agree that political violence is wrong, but they’re unsure of what others think, and there are prominent figures who don’t. So I think, while Jane had good intentions and the impact on her reputation is practically nil, such jokes are (and were in March) no longer appropriate. Kind of like saying “I’ll hit you for that!” to your best friend who previously suffered domestic violence.
actually, more like, if you think there is a better place off this planet for you, agreed. now go there, please.
“There are people I don’t like, and I would like to put them on one of Musk’s spaceships and send them all off to the planet he’s sure he’s going to discover,” Goodall tells interviewer Brad Falchuk during the revelatory 55-minute special discussing her life, work and legacy.
There are so many others with that many decades of wisdom who would not be so generous.
The first thing that comes to mind is kind of a comic-book ending.
One where everybody wins in ways that just can't happen in real life.
Where you have Musk and his passengers as cartoon versions looking out the portholes of a "portly" 1950's rocketship, as it hurtles on its curved trajectory away from Earth in the background. Celebrating with Champagne that they will be able to colonize an unspoiled new planet without consideration for the poor undesirables who were not allowed on the bus.
And all the Who's down in Whoville breathed a sigh of relief,
They would have no more leaders that were either liar nor theif.
No, it's a lie. Consumers paying more because of data centers raising demand could be true, but that's not equivalent to them paying for the data centers' usage. The data centers also have to pay an increased rate when prices go up.
Data centers get commercial or maybe even industrial rates depending on their grid hookup and utilities love predictable loads. Those are lower than residential rates. If you're dishonest and don't understand the cost of operating a grid, you could say that's users paying for data centers. But then you'd need to apply it to every commercial/industrial user.
If the regular users were paying for data centers usage, why are so many of them going off-grid with turbines or at least partially on-prem generation?
Don't forget people are benefitting from starlink every day. Internet is a modern necessity, and more people have it/have more reliable version of it because of starlink. But maybe it doesn't count because it's Musk.
0.018% of the worlds population have starlink subscriptions.
Yet 100% put up with the atmospheric pollution of a lot of mass being plasmified on the way back to earth, the light pollution, the lack of other services delivered with that spectrum, etc.
One might ask how the 99.982% of us will be compensated.
Could we say the same about flights to Hawaii? Small number of people take lavish vacations, everyone else gets the pollution.
It's good to look at the costs vs. benefits of everything, but satellite networks are way far down on my list of concern (and I do some astrophotography).
We should. A global pollution tax would shake out a lot of problems.
A strong and trustworthy global democracy to enforce it, and to provide for the general welfare of everyone currently trapped in car-based cities... Is left as a simple exercise to the reader
Personally, I've never suffered from satellite plasma or light pollution from satellites, or spectrum allocation. I suspect most of the 100% are like me.
Scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution and that advancement is a driving force behind your modern life. So you have (or will) suffer indirectly over time.
> Scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution
Has it?
Destroying the Amazon destroys information. Light pollution simply raises the cost of our accessing it. I suppose one could model this out to some effect on deep-space astronomy's productivity. But if that effect is real--and I've seen zero evidence it is--the solution is a tax on satellite launches to fund more observatories.
OP said "scientific advancement has suffered from the light pollution," past tense. Your source explores a "potentially large rise in global sky brightness," and an "expected...rapid rise in night sky brightness."
These are not risks to be ignored. But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options. (Which could be physical, e.g. lowering satellite reflectivity. Or geographic, putting more observatories are higher latitudes. Or even statistical, by launching space-based calibration telescopes, or building more array-based observatories.)
This paper shows how in 2023 scientists were already annoyed by this, that they had to accommodate this into their observations, and adjust their measurements accordingly. Suffered (past tense) may be hyperbolic, but it isn’t untrue either.
This 2023 paper is also issuing a warning, that if this continues without mitigation, ground based astronomy will be affected. They have the calculations to prove that. What they are particularly concerned about is detecting faint objects inside the radio wave spectrum will be impossible because it will be lost in noise.
Now 2 years have passed since this paper was published, and we still don’t have mitigations for ground based radio astronomy. I seriously doubt we will ever have one. And that the predictions of worse astronomy will become true, externalized into a type of internet you could have gotten with traditional cable, fiber optics, or a 5G radio tower.
EDIT:
> But we haven't even observed or quantified them, which is the first step to weighing mitigation options.
The paper I cited does that. In the abstract they say:
> We present calculations of the potentially large rise in global sky brightness from space objects in low Earth orbit, including qualitative and quantitative assessments of how professional astronomy may be affected.
and inside the paper they devote a whole chapter (chapter 5) to possible mitigations which is titled:
They have calculations that show this is how our models play out.
> What they are particularly concerned about is detecting faint objects inside the radio wave spectrum will be impossible because it will be lost in noise
Could become. They're not talking about mitigation because we haven't observed the problem yet.
> Now 2 years have passed since this paper was published, and we still don’t have mitigations for ground based radio astronomy
Again, where is the "scientific advancement" that "has suffered"?
You wanted to see the computations, I provided you with them and instead of admitting that you were wrong, you responded by casting doubt on their models. This doesn’t strike me as arguing in good faith. But very well, 5th on my list of the same search term gave me this:
Vera C. Rubin Observatory – Impact of Satellite Constellations
The Vera Rubin Observatory came online only this June, but they were complaining about Starlink already last year, and provided preliminary observation how they affected their observations, and how they plan on mitigating it.
Both the 2023 paper and the Vera Rubin Observatory statement call for a set of policies to mitigate the effect of these satellites. However policymakers have not enacted any of these other then some NSF science grants to study potential solution (I don‘t know whether or not they were defunded by DOGE; although if they were, that would seem like a criminal conflict of interest). And I have my reservations about the willingness of governments in the world to come together and set the universal regulatory framework required to enforce these proposed mitigations.
Note that increased exposure time required because of these satellites will affect the number of available operations, which in turn will decrease the amount of astronomy done with this telescope. I want to note especially the conclusion:
> Overall, large numbers of bright satellites — and the necessary steps to avoid, identify, and otherwise mitigate them — will impact the ability of LSST to discover the unexpected.
When you are disputing this you are disputing top engineers and scientists in astronomy. You better have a good reason for that (other then protecting the wealth of billionaires).
> You wanted to see the computations, I provided you with them
No, you didn’t. I asked for evidence this had happened. I read the ‘23 paper two years ago. It’s neat. But it’s a model. We don’t have great model parameters for high-atmosphere nanoparticles. We also have great surveillance of the ozone layer, and aren’t seeing damage.
> other then some NSF science grants to study potential solution
Yeah, I agree with this. (It may have been DOGE’d.)
We need to know what we’re up against. We need to know if it’s a problem that call for a pause, or a mandate that aluminum structures to transitioned to steel and carbon, or if the problem goes away as satellites get bigger and burn up less.
> When you are disputing this you are disputing top engineers and scientists in astronomy
I really am not. I’m taking them at their word that this is a potential problem. Again, if you have evidence this is currently a problem, the language I originally objected to, I’d love to see it.
The scientists and engineers are raising the alarm that this will become an issue if nothing is done, we should not simply ignore them until they are proven right, like we are doing to climate scientists. So much damage can be prevented.
A single terminal could serve an entire African village. It's also serving use cases in the Ukraine war, ships at sea, Antarctic research stations, numerous aerospace and military use cases, and so on. DTC is provide texting and emergency services to countless people who might need it in an emergancy, like we saw in North Carolina.
Last and most importantly, Starlink exists is to create revenue for SpaceX and to fund the Starship program. The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
I'm quite confident if it was anyone besides Elon behind spacex, we'd be hailing starship(cross fingers it works out) as one of the most exciting things we've ever done. And we should be, because it is.
It's something for humanity to be excited about and root for. What happened to wanting to achieve things? Having things to look forward to, build toward and be proud of is healthy for society. Must we aspire to and dream of nothing because there's suffering on earth, is that what it is? Why can't we take it as the objective good it is that we're trying to push technological boundaries that will unlock more advancements in science? In what world does HN not want that?
> Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless.
A single astronaut with a shovel could do more science in a couple days than all the probes combined in the last 54 years (Which have barely scratched the surface). For all we know there are literal fossils a few meters below the surface but none of our technology had the ability to even start looking.
> Starship to orbit sounds useful, but Starship to Mars is near useless.
I strongly disagree.
If "Starship to Mars" is a possibility, then so is "Starship to the asteroid belt". It's very close to "Starship to the asteroid belt, capture asteroid, return to Earth orbit" - and that's very close to orbital mining of metals that are rare and valuable on Earth.
> It's very close to "Starship to the asteroid belt, capture asteroid, return to Earth orbit"
To put this into perspective, an Earth-Mars round trip costs about 15 km/s; Earth-main Belt about 13 km/s.
You'd need to add Δv for returning the mass of the asteroid. But you get your reaction mass for "free."
(To be clear, we are hundreds of billions of dollars of capex and decades away from asteroid mining. But the work to get there is decently in line with the work we would need to establish a logistical chain to Mars and back.)
You're discounting the fact that building Starship, if successful, has a non-zero chance of taking Musk away from Earth forever. That's a huge potential positive.
> The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly.
> If humanity agreed with this statement, humanity would fund the program directly through investment, donations or taxes, the same way we fund roads and schools which we also value highly
...Starlink and SpaceX are funded through investments and taxes. When they launch a non-profit's satellite I guess, indirectly, through donations, too.
Also, what? Why is the funding source a measure of value?
>The value to humanity of Starship succeeding at its goals is extremely high.
This does not benefit "humanity" at all, even if they do succeed. If a human colony on Mars is established, and all of humanity is wiped out on Earth, does it really benefit "humanity" or only the 0.000000001% of "humanity" located on Mars?
And life on Mars is going to be difficult, it isn't habitable, and is in fact quite hostile to life. I seriously doubt any colony on Mars would be viable long-term. If life on Earth is wiped out, the colony on Mars will very likely wither and die soon after without continued support from Earth.
Any colony on Mars is going to be so exponentially more fragile and fraught with problems for sustaining life, that the suggestion that it's somehow going to save humanity is ridiculous.
How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now? Not that much, I think, but maybe you have some inside scoop that the rest of us don't know about.
No, it isn't. Starlink's entire commercial value is in being able to perform high-mass / low-latency launch to LEO. There is some fun stuff on the Moon. And a long-term pitch on Mars. But the commercial branding has always been about LEO.
> How does "getting mass to orbit" benefit all of humanity more than what we have now?
Better Earth observation. Better space observation. Communications outside our ecology versus based on wires strung through it.
Let's reverse the question. For the environmental impact of space launch, what else do we do that's more-agreeably useless?
Bullshit. Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony. I've never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites. They even made movies about it:
>"Yes, SpaceX's Starship is being developed with the explicit goal of transporting humans and cargo to Mars, with Elon Musk aiming for the first uncrewed test missions to send robotic Tesla bots by 2026 and crewed missions potentially beginning around 2029 or 2031. The Starship system is designed to be fully reusable and is the world's most powerful launch vehicle, intended to eventually establish a self-sustaining city on the planet."
It's pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments.
Of course spacex probably wants to rebrand starship now that Mars is looking like the very stupid plan that it was.
There are better things humanity could be doing with the time and money spent blowing up "starship" after "starship". And really, why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why. It's a rebrand. Just call it "LEOship" if it's just going to be launching satellites.
It's yet one more case of Musk over-promising and under-delivering.
> Every story I've ever heard about "Starship" is how it is going to Mars to take humans there to build a colony
Could this reflect your media diet?
> never once heard that "Starship" will be used to launch even more starlink satellites
That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis.
> pretty wasteful to blow up starship after starship after starship when they could have spent that money launching normal rockets for their satellite deployments
V3 doesn't fit on smaller rockets. And Starship's launch costs promise to be much lower than the Falcons.
> why name it "starship" if it's just meant for LEO? Because it wasn't intended for LEO, that's why
It could reflect SpaceX's bad PR. I read plenty of news sources, and the most that makes it out there is how the latest Starship blew up, yet again. Not great PR. And beyond that, the scope of the thing is to go to Mars. It's up to SpaceX to get the PR out there, not for me to seek out niche news sources. But thanks for trying to make this about me failing instead of SpaceX failing at PR.
>That's kind of wild. I understand getting the PR stuff first, but every newspaper I read mentions Starlink whenever SpaceX comes up, unless it's about a launch explosion or Artemis.
Not wild at all. And let's be real, I seriously doubt you read "newspapers".
I did a Google search for "SpaceX Starship" and nowhere in 8 pages of results did I see anything mentioning Starlink. In fact, one of the results was for the SpaceX Careers page, which says:
>"Work on the Starship program developing the vehicles that will enable large groups of people to travel to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Life at SpaceX. At ..."
So even SpaceX is selling it as going to Mars, and not about launching Starlink satelites.
But this entire conversion is completely pointless, so I won't be responding to this thread anymore with anything but a canned lame response. You've been warned.
Umm, a lot. Do you know how many cubesats falcon has launched? Did the space station help humanity? Now imagine a bigger one(s) faster. Bigger satellites- do you know how much of James Webb design and difficulty was around packing into tight space? Bigger satellites, big enough for new wavelengths. Big interferometer setups. Microgravity for bio and pharma crap. Better for particles far enough away to be unaffected by earth magnetic field.
Do you agree science is good for humanity? Do you like James Webb? The other things mentioned above? I'd guess yes to all based on your username. How is getting more mass into space of questionable benefit?
If starship works, which everyone on earth should be hopeful and excited about, we get more mass for cheaper into space. It's the equivalent of new funding(falcon has brought down launch costs sooo much) while also unlocking previously inconceivable experiments/instruments. Who doesn't like more science funding? Who doesn't like new experiments and instruments?
I would like to see stats how many people got new connections via traditional infrastructure. I bet that number is much higher, probably even an order of magnitude higher.
This is HN, so I should probably look for the data my self...
EDIT:
In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 billion. Starlink grew by only a 1/100 of that in absolute terms, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period, majority of users in the USA already had access to the internet via traditional infrastructure.
I tried to find how many StarLink users got internet access (or even high speed internet access) that didn’t have one before, but I couldn’t find the numbers. Somebody could correct me, but I very much doubt that number is high enough to consider StarLink to make even a blimp in providing internet to new users.
EDIT EDIT: I was off by a factor of 100 in initial EDIT, see child post.
> In 2024 global internet usage grew from 5.3 billion users to 5.5 Starlink grew by a similar absolute amount, from 2 million users to 4 million over the same time period,
Is this some AI answer or did you foobar this math by a factor of 100?
StarLink got 2 million new subscribers in 2024. Meanwhile the internet got 200 million new users. So even if every new StarLink subscriber would be a new internet user (which is obviously not true) they would still only account for 1% of new internet users. The real number is off course much much much lower.
This is definitely a small number. But I don't think it tells the whole story. Not every n+1 is the same. New satellite hookups in rural places, especially poor rural areas, combat zones, emergency situations etc. are more impactful than a new wired hookup in a city where there's already wifi in the library, for example.
> It's interesting how if it's anti-elon, it's ok to complain about how the poor are causing the privileged some difficulties.
Now it is up to you to show that this has outsized influence on impoverished communities.
According to ITU[1] the number one factor for lack of internet access is economical. The price of internet access can be reduced with traditional infrastructure, but governments are often unable or unwilling to invest in the infrastructure needed to bring faster and cheaper internet connectivity to underserved areas. StarLink should in theory fit perfectly here, but in reality very few people from underserved communities, especially in impoverished areas, can afford StarLink, and keep being underserved. What makes this even worse is that in the rich countries (like the USA and Australia) underserved communities that had been promised infrastructure to bring the broadband internet are facing delays and cancellations because politicians believe the community can get StarLink instead (when in fact they cannot afford it). This is known as the Uber effect (from when politicians used Uber as an excuse to cancel public transit projects).
If the community can't afford Starlink, surely they can run Fiber and buy equipment from Ciena and Nokia (Huawei outside the US) to light it up themselves since it's more affordable than Starlink in your view.
That is not the point. These communities depend on their state for their infrastructure, the state was (hopefully) able to provide them with garbage disposal, sewage, electricity, running and clean drinking water. The state should also provide them with quality telecommunication infrastructure.
You've mentioned the uber effect about 100 times now, I get it. I honestly don't know just how mad (I'd wager not very) the average city resident is that they have uber now instead of maybe some shitty transit system with two routes out of 20 promised in 15 years 500% over budget. I do VERY MUCH wish we built solid, modern, useful public transit on budget in a reasonable amount of time. But it's honestly wishful thinking at this point.(3)
Similar story for deploying broadband, especially last mile. The government hasn't been very good at that from everything I've seen (1, including starlink's failure).
As for starlinks deployments, I can't find good numbers, so perhaps I was overconfident. I wish I could find more examples, it seems like they could be doing much more than they are, but they are a for-profit company. Given that it can serve rural, poor, otherwise disconnected communities, would you be for or against using starlink to serve them through some government-backed/subsidized efforts?(2)
(1)
---The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF)
RDOF is one of the most recent and troubled examples. It was a $20.4 billion initiative to bring high-speed broadband to millions of unserved homes and businesses.
Massive Defaults and Questionable Winners: In the first phase, the FCC awarded $9.2 billion to over 300 companies. However, major problems quickly emerged.
LTD Broadband: The single largest winner, provisionally awarded $1.3 billion, was ultimately denied the funds by the FCC in 2022. The FCC determined that the company, a small fixed-wireless provider, failed to demonstrate it had the technical and financial capability to deliver the promised fiber-to-the-home service to nearly 600,000 locations.
Starlink (SpaceX): The fourth-largest winner, provisionally awarded $886 million, also had its award rejected by the FCC. The agency cited that the satellite technology was "still developing" and questioned its ability to meet the program's long-term speed and latency requirements.
Widespread Defaults: By 2023, bidders had defaulted on their commitments for over 23% of the locations they had won in the auction, leaving millions of Americans in limbo and forcing the FCC to try and reclaim those areas for future funding.
---The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) - 2009
This program, part of the 2009 Recovery Act, was a grant-based system rather than a reverse auction, but it provides a clear example of budget and delivery failures.
"The Road to Nowhere": One of the most infamous examples was in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Telephone Authority was awarded a $36.7 million grant to build a fiber network. Years later, a report from the Department of Commerce's Inspector General found that after spending $28 million, the project had connected only 70 customers, was nowhere near completion, and was plagued by mismanagement.
"200 Terminals for Amazon Communities: In Brazil, Starlink has provided at least 200 terminals to schools and healthcare centers in remote Amazonian communities, providing a vital link for education and telehealth."
(3) Of course, I predict one possible retort that it's these very same "oligarchs" that are tearing down the government and rendering it unable to build public infrastructure, thus lining Musk's and friends' pockets. To that I'd say, look at very blue california's high speed rail. Yes, trump did just take away some their funding, but it's been like 20 years now? And they're about 300% over budget, and their timeline doesn't even including full completion, but we can safely say 15+ years behind schedule. I'm not blaming democrats, I'm saying there's a systemic problem with state capacity. It is, very sadly, just not reasonable to expect much from the government when it comes to building public infrastructure.
I’ve seen you post about the “last mile” problem before on this thread, and I think you may be misunderstanding the problem and the solutions to it. The last mile is a problem in public transit where people who live in sparsely populated area and commute to higher density areas, where high quality or high capacity public transit opportunities exist for every leg of the journey except the last mile to their home (think Edgewood WA. to the Sounder train station in Puyallup). In case of transit the infrastructure exists for most of the way, but it is costly to provide transit options to connect with the infrastructure, the last mile in that case can be a rideshares, park-and-ride, ride hail, dockless scooters, etc.
In telecommunication the last mile is when a high capacity wire extends to a nearby (sub)urban center, but not to your house because you live 10 miles away from there (I know about the issue in the USA of having a wire across the street and have to pay ridiculous sums to connect it to your house; but that is a different issue). If you solve it by bypassing the wire altogether and opt for satellite instead, that is not really the last mile is it. A last mile would be to put up a 4G tower (or a few 5G towers).
An analogy in the transit space would be that because of the last mile issue, you opt instead to drive the whole way.
The last mile problem is a generic concept in any networked system with certain common, naturally arising topology. I do not misunderstand it in the least. You're right that that putting up towers would be a (recent) solution in many places. Satellite is also a solution that applies anywhere (maybe not the poles?) and which requires less built infrastructure, which, again, we're not good at (in the US). But given the assumption that I don't understand what I'm talking about, I don't see this conversation going anywhere productive so I'm stopping here.
If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities (this is exactly the ReConnect program is). Starlink is not that, it is a classic case of privatizing profits by socializing hidden externalities, in this case to the entire world. Externalities in the form of pollution that will cost us all more than fiber in the long run. Funny story though, Starlink was awarded a $900M subsidy to provide rural USA internet access. In the end, that money was not given because the FCC found that Starlink "failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service.". So no, it is not about screwing rural people, it's about not getting taken advantage of by fat cats and grifters like Elon.
> If we wanted to subsidize internet for rural and low-income communities responsibly, we could invest in fiber and other solutions, and control the externalities
Running cables across out land is less impactful than lofting satellites?
Per the article, Starlink runs 8k satellites with an average life of 5 years. They launch in payloads of 20-40 satellites. That's 50+ launches per year if everything goes perfectly. About a million pounds of kerosene per launch. Plus everything else that goes into the rockets and satellites. Then the pollution impact from the launches and reentries. Then the eventual need to clean up LOE to avoid Kessler Syndrome. So yeah, well understood ground tech may be cheaper over the lifecycle. At a minimum, it should be a reasoned choice, not environmental debt pawned off by the richest man in the world.
...but sure, for the sake of argument, maybe it's only a quarter million lbs of kerosene 50 times a year, upper atmospheric pollution, and LEO crowding that gets solved by HN comments. ...instead of a dumb cable that doesn't come with a side of funding a billionaire neo-nazi. My bad.
The last mile problem is difficult and expensive. I think satellites are a good solution to it. As for SpaceX fucking up that contract, that sucks and is no good.
Also worth considering is the Uber effect of public infrastructure. Meaning that politicians may use the existence of StarLink as an excuse to delay or cancel public projects which would otherwise have delivered broadband internet to under-served areas via traditional infrastructure.
This is similar to how the existence of Uber has caused delays or cancellation of public transit projects because politicians were able to say the people were better served with Uber than public transit.
Traditional infrastructure is a proven method of bringing both the availability to uderserved areas, as well as bringing the costs down for those already served.
StarLink provides a great oportunity for politicians to delay or cancel projects which would otherwise have given broadband connection to underserved areas. In urban planning this is known as the Uber effect.
Take this argument to it's conclusion. Take any point in history and freeze infrastructure. The only option we give ourselves is building more of that same type and maintaining it? So, more riders and more horses to carry messages, but no telegraph? Or maybe more accurately, keeping the medium the same, never using planes or trucks to deliver mail?
I don‘t follow how that is the conclusion, nor do I understand your analogy.
Broadband internet via cables, fiber optics, and radio towers is state of the art in telecommunication infrastructure. Satellite is both slower, more limited, and more prone to various disruptions. The capabilities of the wires and the radio towers is also improving. 5 years ago we didn’t have 5G towers, and 20 years ago fiber optics seemed a distant dream. The only thing freezing traditional telecommunication infrastructure in place are dreams of low earth orbit satellites which will never materialize.
If I understand your analogy correctly (which I‘m not sure I do) this is like looking at the new technology of pneumatic tubes and stipulating that all postal delivery will be done using this new technology in the future, and we may as well stop funding the national postal service, remove mail-rooms from our ships and trains, because somebody will build a pneumatic tube that will deliver mail door to door between New York and Chicago.
I actually don‘t believe this. But some politicians do, and that does real damage when they take funding away from actual infrastructure projects which would have otherwise benefited under-served communities with high speed internet.
When I say LEO satellite internet won‘t materialize, I mean that it won‘t serve everybody. It will always be an expensive option which in best case will be subsidized for only a portion of the people that actually need it. LEO satellite is not the future of telecommunication infrastructure, it is lacking in almost every way next to traditional infrastructure. The only thing it is better at is a) marketing and b) providing internet to rich people in their yachts or in their mansions 10 miles out of the suburb.
I am advocating for state funded infrastructure. So no, never will I be extolling this technology, especially not if it changes hands from the worst billionaire on the planet to the second worst billionaire on the planet.
In some ways, where we're used to seeing borders of countries, the new borders of opportunity largely are performant and accessible internet access.
Depending on the area of the world, wireless and other options that exist that are likely sub par. It is on every continent including North America.
Some regions of the world have aggressively invested in fibre in rural areas.
We can see in parts of the world where there is a lot of investment (and interactions with govt for permits, etc) in physical infrastructure, whether its coax for cable tv and internet, copper for phone lines (and ADSL), wireless doesn't always have a nice way in.
There are places in the world that didn't get as much wired infrastructure put in and were able to jump up to much better wireless.
Satellite based internet as a category provides an additional coverage where "traditional" infrastructure hasn't made it yet. This can be wires or other wireless.
Musk and his right-wing propaganda platform plays a big part in the destruction of Western democracy. He deserves the hate he is receiving. Providing internet to an insignificant fraction of the global population does not even begin to offset that.
I'll be the "this time it's different" guy. 1) the bubble burst hit telecom spend, which was overbuilt relative to the use. 2) the dot com companies were mostly not profitable with small revenues, while the big players here are either profitable (google, Facebook), backed by big players, and/or have massive revenues and user bases. And growing. 3) people actually use LLMs, a lot. 4) even if the data centers are overbuilt because the big guys get diminishing returns, they're still useful, with immediate demand. Search, ads, content are all going to use some sort of LLM crap, and thus need GPUs.
So I don't think there will be as big of a fallout. My bet is there will/should be a healthy winnowing, but not a crash (at least not one due solely to AI hype).
> 2) the dot com companies were mostly not profitable with small revenues, while the big players here are either profitable (google, Facebook), backed by big players, and/or have massive revenues and user bases. And growing. 3)
OpenAI is losing 4x its income from operating expenses.
Facebook is pouring tens of billions into it
Google, fuck knows.
These are all loss leaders, looking to make the others fold, rather than say a geared company that is profitable but geared to expand.
better AI costs much much more to make and run, and there isn't much brand loyalty.
Maybe not tanks, but certainly drones, no? We need some sort of manufacturing. If not for war itself, as a deterrent? Plus there will still be troops no matter what, so certainly we'll still need to make APCs.
"Car are made using components from all around the world..." That's part of the problem. Building more here may bring some of the components closer, at least to friendlier countries.
Subsidies are part of the reason. Definitely not the whole reason, but part of it The Chinese provinces pump a bunch of money in to try to make their region's car manufacturers succeed. And every province is doing it. So you have a bunch of carmakers competing for market while being kept alive, so they do the most rational thing possible to gain share: lower prices.
Of course, they're also just good at building things since they do so much of it. And cheaper labor. Much better supply chain.
Do you have any figures on the degree of subsidy? The impression I’ve gotten over the last year or so is that China has been phasing out their subsidies, which also went to companies like Tesla and Stellantis, and the main shift recently was the Make Smog Great Again bill over the summer setting the US back a generation which isn’t really a criticism of Chinese industrial policy.
What do you mean by illegal? According to who? Like WTO or something? Genuinely asking, I don't know. I don't see how what they're doing is more illegal than paying corn farmers to make dumbass biofuel. But I don't know international trade law, hence the question.
the international legal standard for subsidies is based on the WTO's Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM) Agreement and related anti-dumping regulation under GATT 1994.
In the US, it's implemented thru 19 U.S.C § 3571. The EU's foreign subsidies are regulated by Regulation (EU) 2016/1037 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 8 June 2016 based on the same WTO SCM Agreement.
While the WTO's regulations don't preclude local subsidy regulation, they must be consistent with the WTO's Agreement. In other word, any gov't subsidy favoring a "specific" company(ies) over domestic, foreign competitors, or distort market competition is an "actionable" offense and can be litigated before the WTO -- agriculture (quota based) and national security are however exempted. Others, such as export subsidies or local content requirement are prohibited under Article 3, "Prohibition" of the SCM.
Yeah, those evil corn subsidies. It's well to remember however that there is no international law against your gov't pissing away your tax payers hard-earned money -- so long as the product remains domestic and doesn't cause injuries to other trading partners.
Throughout my physics career including PhD, analog electronics was the most difficult but probably also the most rewarding class to me. I fondly remember staying until 2am in broida at ucsb trying to get a filter to work, getting a few hours sleep, then being back in the lab before sunrise. Of course, this was mostly the result of procrastination, but damn were those good times.
One thing that really bothered me then was the idea of a current source. I was perfectly happy with a voltage source, perhaps naively(1). But a current source seemed magical. I was asking Martinis about this and he seemed dumbfounded that I didn't understand. Of course, the answer is feedback. And, of course, good voltage sources also require feedback. But he was so familiar with feedback control he didn't even consider saying that's whats happening, while I never even heard of controls.
Long story short, sometime later I asked to join his lab as an undergrad researcher. He said no, and to this day I think it's because I didn't understand current sources. Or maybe I was too late, or maybe the A- (see the aforementioned procrastination). That led me to asking a biophysicist, and therefore I became a biophysicist instead of condensed matter/QI/QC. In hindsight, I think this was fortunate. I would've never considered biophysics, which has been one of the loves of my life since then. Who knows, maybe I would've been just as happy with quantum stuff. I'm working through Mike and ike now and find it fascinating.
Funny enough, after my PhD, I co-founded a startup in industrial control & automation. Now I understand feedback quite well, and thus current sources, albeit many years too late.
(1) Of course, good voltage sources vary their resistance just like good current sources vary their voltage. My best guess as to the reason I was more bothered by the current sources is that I was so familiar with voltage sources with confidently claimed constant voltages (batteries). Not a very good reason, I should've questioned it more. In practice, it's much easier to make a near ideal voltage source (very high resistance) than a near ideal current source (0 resistance).
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