They already recovered a ship from that one time they accidentally landed one in the ocean. SpaceX got to have a lot of heatshield endurance data by now.
Unironically a gift. On your own home network, the one most likely to MITM you is yourself. And eMudhra's fuckup allows for a nice attack on a few devices you'd otherwise have to disassemble to pwn.
Yeah, I have a couple cheap Tuya devices you can't necessarily re-assemble easily once disassembled (IoT light bulbs, outlets that are plastic welded/glued). Pretty sure they use mqtt over tls
The fact that made up issues like water use or waste heat, complete with faked research papers, are being used to push the issue? It does make one suspicious.
There is a lot of the broader anti-AI sentiment, so it's possible that the entire thing is just "people want to hear AI bad, so there's market in saying AI bad" - with media and politicians both recognizing the opportunity. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if some of it turned out to be coordinated influence campaigns.
thats what it kinda feels like to me. My intuition tells me the average non tech person has a very worried view of the future due to AI-- I mean, what industry out there says their industry has a non zero chance of ending life as we know it! So that in mind, people look for reasons to shore up their concerns. Datacenters = AI, therefore they are bad for all these reasons-- Reasons which could be applied to many industries.
I agree with all your points. As with the rest of the anti-AI movement, I think the key is in the likely consequences. Slowing down the buildout and regulating AI in the West won't affect it elsewhere. At best it's tilting at windmills, so I think it's reasonable to suspect the worst.
Him taking the stance of "we should be allowed to sell all the GPUs to China" was bad enough in itself.
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
China was already "developing a fully domestic stack" either way.
So the only thing selling to them accomplishes is give Nvidia more margins. At the cost of boosting the Chinese AI sector - possibly to the point of parity.
China at the moment has the capability to do infrastructural rollouts far faster than US or Europe, but doesn't have the chips to stuff new datacenters with. So it's easy to see why China would want the chips. But it's not like Nvidia is having trouble selling their AI accelerators outside China - and they can't ramp up accelerator production on demand. More demand for accelerators would push the prices even higher, and that would reflect in the margins, but the benefits for Nvidia weren't even that large.
So it was a questionable push all around - even before the spy scandal.
China also used to posture with "we don't need Nvidia chips" in Q1 this year. But now, schemes to ship those chips anyway are being uncovered - in the wake of Jensen's ousting and in general. Some involve direct shipments, and others involve offshored datacenters being established by Chinese companies to supply compute to China. So we know this "we don't need" was always fake. Chinese government was saying "we don't need them chips" with one hand and devising ways of keeping the supply going with the other.
Nvidia eventually had a spat with just about any corporation it has ever worked with. Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
> Their only partnership that stood the test of time is probably Nintendo.
But even then, the original Switch 1 homebrew relied on an oversight in NVIDIA's Tegra chip that blew open the whole platform due to the ability to execute unsigned code. The Switch 1 was actually pretty locked down. Nintendo worked hard on securing it properly, only for it to all be for naught due to their SoC vendor making a massive blunder.
I wish I could have seen what was said in the meetings between the two companies when the first Switch exploit was released, considering it was fully on NVIDIA.
Not a great comparison because people lose and break charging cables all the time, so there's a much better profit angle there.
I suppose it's possible to lose Switch Docks, and some must break, but it's such a rare thing to happen that it doesn't really justify the razor-and-blades model.
Usually the docks outlast the tablet itself (this has happened to me once, so I actually have a spare Switch 1 dock)
re "profit angle"... our Switch 1 stopped working last week, I assumed a charging port failure. No amount of trying to hard reset or leave on charge for days could nudge the little red battery off empty. I have to assume it's 5 years old at this point. So we sent it back to Nintendo to find out if it's salvageable at all. They told us today that it's the main board, and they'll replace it under warranty (what warranty?!) and we'll have it back Monday.
They don't seem to be one of those companies that's trying to squeeze maximal money out of their customers at every opportunity.
Every USB cable that can carry more than 3A, or that can signal above the baseline 480mbps, must have the e-marker. That isn't weird in any way. It's how USB works.
GP is talking about a proprietary Apple thing that just marked that the manufacturer paid the MFi royalty, not the thing that standard USB uses for legitimate reasons.
> Apple used to e-mark every single charging cable, and even ban unauthorized ones
Do you have information on what “ban unauthorized ones” means? Are you talking about the pre-USB-C days with lightning or something? I’m not aware of any restriction besides perhaps max charge speed on their USB-C implementation if you used a mediocre cable.
you seem new to the game, then. for years, and years, iPhone software (firmware) upgrades would kill 3rd party lightning cables. obviously not USB-C. Third party iPod cables were very hit and miss, too.
I would appreciate it if you don't assume I'm "new". We're talking in the context of USB-C hence the question. I'm well aware of the history with Lightning and 30-pin cables.
> Third party iPod cables were very hit and miss, too.
That was probably because the cables were crap, not because Apple was doing anything to disable them. As far as I'm aware, the iPod 30-pin connector never did any sort of handshaking.
Yep. His affairs cast a long shadow over his push for "restricting AI accelerators is bad, we should just sell all the GPUs we want to China".
Was it driven by this, as opposed to what everyone thought at the time: pure shortsighted profit-seeking? We don't know. But no one likes that it's even a thing to be concerned about.
Unless I’m misunderstanding something OP is saying that the only reason Starlink is profitable is because they don’t pay for the rocket launches. But the rocket launches still cost money, it’s just that SpaceX pays for it. But given they’re part of the same overall organization it just seems like an accounting trick.
This is correct. I’m not an accountant so not qualified to say the degree to which it’s tricky, but it does add an addendum to “Starlink is profitable [if you completely exclude the primary source of variable cost by burying it into a different business segment].”
The entire "space launch" segment in the red by $1.1bn. Primary driver being the $3.2bn spent on Starship R&D.
How are they "burying it into a different business segment", pray tell me?
If you remove Starship, Falcon launches and Starlink are both independently profitable. And Starship wasn't even used for Starlink until the one test launch this year.
I account for the ingredients as depreciating assets over a 100 year lifespan
It now costs me $5 in labor and $0.20 in ingredients
My margin is now ~75%
For SpaceX, we know they are accounting for Starlink launch as depreciation. We do not know the numerator (the $20) or the depreciation period (the 100 years). Accordingly neither of us know whether Starlink is a viable business.
You are inventing more and more elaborate ways for "this is how Starlink is secretly unprofitable" while we knew it was printing money since 2024.
You can drop SpaceX's launch revenue to zero, fund all of it with Starlink revenue, and the sum is still profitable.
We know "whether Starlink is a viable business": it is. End of story. You better start pivoting towards "but what if future competition" or "the revenue growth is uncertain", because your attempts to wiggle your way out of admitting that Starlink is a money printer now are weak at best.
I have literally been describing the exact same mechanism, which is the actual mechanism that you can actually read about in their financial statements, since this conversation started.
And what is that "mechanism", pray tell? I don't think you have one. Or ever had one, for that matter.
You can't just say "they're hiding the launch costs" and expect it to magically make Starlink unprofitable. Starlink has been bearing launch costs for its entire existence, and if anything, the advent of Starship is likely to make them lower, not higher.
Are you serious? Good lord. Take this article. Go take SpaceX's filings. Ask an LLM to explain how Starlink is accounted for and what the effects of that accounting method are.
It's the "we've got a bunch of rockets lying around... sometimes other folks in the company use them when they're not working for space lift clients..." view.
The fuel would have to be expensed, but generally speaking its impossible to say how unprofitable Starlink is because they don't account for it that way or break those costs out.
When they swallow Tesla it'll be more of the same, and thats the point. Musk is trying to obfuscate the (poor) performance of his businesses so he can maintain delusional market valuations based of vague promises.
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