What we really should have is an aligned discovery protocol and a generic globally used sdk which handles negotiation.
You have a client, the client uses the SDK, talks to endpoint x. Endpoint x tells it very efficient that they are now talking protobuf and rpc over quick or http15 and thats it.
His Scifi ideas are probably a min of 100 years too early.
And while he doesn't even need his own compute (renting out colossus 1 and 2), he thinks we will send server racks full of expensive hardware into space in no time.
Why?
Because his Space-X Trillion evaluation doesn't make sense if he doens't has payload for Starship.
So how much payload do we send to space? Actually not that much, starlink itself is the biggest change by far. So he builds Starship which he needs for starlink v3 but what then? Yeah Datacenter in space...
I doubt it'll be traditional server racks. This will be a paradigm shift, for sure. I think he's probably ahead of his time here, but that's usually how it goes.
Just to be very clear about Starship: We have a very limited amount of payload we are sending up in space every year.
The biggest jump in payload is starlink itself. Starlink though doesn't scale very well. V2 can only handle a certain amount of customers and has only a lifetime of 5 years.
Space-X has to build Starship to even being able to send v3 up to increase the margin of this setup. But even then, every 5 years that thing has to be replaced and new build.
Every mobile tower, fiber cable etc. underground has a lot higher lifetime than that.
Starlink also has the issue of latency handover. Every few minutes you have to do a handover which leads to package loss. I can't do a Teams Call through Starlink fyi.
And Starlink already exists and is relativly affordable despite that, they only have 9-10 Million customers and they had to increase the price.
And while all of this 'magic no one gets' is happening, Starship hasn't profen non leo orbit with proper payload AND reusability. Without reusability, they will not get the costs down that much anymore. Its already relativly cheap.
And in parallel all of this 'trillion dollar future margin magic' gets opposition by other companies like eutelsat and Amazon.
Ah yes the world changing product of starlink mobile. Which doesn't get booked in the USA, is slow and needs a lot of energy. Whatever you think this is, 500km mobile range is 500km and this on a planet were normal people already have a very very well working mobile setup for at least 10 years by now.
Is space-x some kind of business gap? yes sure. Will they make billions with this? Depending on other companes, yeah sure. Is it a trillion dollar business? No
Yes yes i'm fully unaware of this.
Btw. Musk def sells you the story of Mars and dyson sphere and stuff to keep the magic but while he does all of this, he rents out colossus 1 and 2 to his competitors because he is unable to sell his OWN AI product.
Europe is still a democracy and while its apparently not relevant in the US America, Elon Musk as the richest person on the planet directly tried to involve him in europe elections.
In a liberal society governed by laws, increased scrutiny must follow evidence of wrongdoing, not mere association. If European countries have problems with Musk’s conduct (lord knows I do) they should either pass legislation targeting behavior he has engaged in that is not already illegal, or charge him with a crime/bring a civil suit against him if he has violated existing law.
To be clear, this has already happened to some degree. See Paris prosecutors investigating him for the distribution of child pornography. But targeting companies he is affiliated with for his personal behavior violates the principle of the generality of law.
We can discuss if a society should have a certain amount of GDP invested into defense and i'm not necessarily against it.
I would think educating people properly is good, I also think the swizz model is good in sense of everyone learns to handle a gun and can have it at home (as long as high security standards are set and its taken very serious).
It could be used as a tool to strengthen societies responsibility, communication and combined with what the THW is doing (technical help org).
But my statment is still true:
We do not have to catch up. We are absolutly capable of defending ourselfs against the current biggest threat which is Russia.
While I support the individual right to keep and bear arms, it's ludicrous to think that a few assault rifles in private hands could ever be effective against drones. There has been a revolution in military affairs in just the last few years. The game has fundamentally changed.
I think that's less true than the media would have you believe.
We're undergoing a lot of propaganda about how effective Ukraine is against Russia, but that's despite most European countries practically immolating their own stockpiles of defence capability, and they're doing so somewhat unoformily (while Russia does everything they can to weaken the European homogeneity; see their funding into brexit and anti-EU seniment spreading bot farms on social media).
It's definitely not a given that we can stand up to Russia with our current capability, and it's also the case that we'd be throwing human capital at the problem because we failed to adequately invest.
I spoke to one person from Ukraine who was enlisted, he mentioned he was waiting for something from the UK, I asked how long does it normally take.. he told me that he doesn't measure time in weeks, but how many of his friends he he will lose.
.. that hit me hard, and it made me consider who incredibly naive and coddled I was to believe that investing in military or weapons things is a "right wing" or "bad" thing.
War always seems so far away until it's on your door.
Its not propaganda when you can see it. We know what Putin showes in his Military parade and we know the stockpile of tanks they have and had due to satelite images.
My statement still stands, we do not need to increase defence spending to beat russia.
You said something different though: "We need to increase defence spending to have as little as human risk as possible".
I wouldn't call it naive, more optimistic. And even before Ukraine, we do have military. EU has high tec military.
Even before Ukraine, the EU spend more in military than Russia.
And regarding resources for Ukraine: We do fight a proxy war. We are not fighting Russia directly. This means some people don't want to spend money and resources on this, we are nog aligned across europe and it is always very unclear how and how much we help. This would look differently if russia would declare war against the EU.
In nominal terms "we outspend them" is true, but it misses the forest for the trees.
Nominal spend is the wrong yardstick when one side builds at home for a fraction of the cost; Russian labour, steel and energy are far cheaper at the point of use, which is why PPP estimates put their real military output roughly level with the whole of Europe combined.
And spend isn't the binding constraint anyway: it's production. A budget line is not a full magazine, and we've spent years throwing our stockpiles into Ukraine while letting our shell and propellant lines wither instead of refilling them.
"We don't need to catch up" assumes the money on the page is already steel in the field. It isn't.
Russia is 3x poorer than germany and has half of our GDP.
Russia has power because of their nuclear arsenal which is unclear how well it is maintained.
But no we can fill up and build faster and better than russia.
And the war against ukraine is hurting russia now for over 1000 days. Russia even has to go so far to reduce mobile and internet. This alone hurts Russia as a whole.
"We don't need to spend more" isn't an observation, it's a bet. And you're betting with other people's lives.
We’ve already ran this experiment. After Crimea we set ourselves a 2% floor; three countries hit it in 2014, SEVEN by 2022, and we only all cleared it in 2025. A bar we set for ourselves, missed for eleven years. And the moment we finally hit it, what did we do? we admitted it was never going to be enough and moved the target to 3.5%. So spare me "we're already doing enough" by our own standards we've been in deficit for a decade.
that decade isn't free, someone always pays for it. It's why in 2024 ukraine was firing two shells for every ten russia sent back, and dying in the gap, while we sat in rooms talking about "factory capacity". "russia's poorer per capita" means precisely nothing to a man being outgunned five to one by an economy that actually decided to build consistently over decades.
Where we draw the line, fine, ok, that's a hard question and I'll happily argue it all day. From my comfortable computer chair, far away from seeing my home, my family and my friends being gunned down because an expansionist regime decided that they thought we’d be weak enough.
The NATO 2% goal is quite a bit older than the Russian invasion of Crimea, dating back to at least the NATO summit in Riga in 2006. In any case ramping up our production of artillery shells and other munitions needed by Ukraine would definitely be beneficial to us in the rest of Europe. Both in order to end the war faster and get going rebuilding Ukraine, but also to stimulate the somewhat struggling EU economy.
It's not so much a matter of spending levels but what you get for that spending. Since the end of the Cold War, most European countries have treated their militaries as essentially government jobs programs. The money was thrown away to hold down unemployment, and any combat effectiveness was incidental. The current crisis is finally forcing a change in that mentality but it will take years to turn the situation around.
Thats not true. We don't know if we would be able to be were we at.
There is also no value in this. If we owuldn't known about progress through oil and gas, who would say that we would be unable to get to the same point just a 100 years later?
No own would be hurt if we would have achieved this 100 years later but healthier.
It was also ignored on purpose. Oil companies knew very well, researchers knew. Apparently there were big demonstrations here in germany in the 70ties so our parents knew too.
Life came inbetween apparently.
And from a pure calculation point of view: Its actually very easy to switch over to renewable. As of today, we do have everything we need.
How would we do the whole industrial revolution thing on whale oil and lumber? Whales would most certainly be extinct by now, thats for sure.
100 years later is an immense amount of extra human suffering, not to say that reaching current level would most certainly take much much longer than 100 extra years.
Im sorry but this whole tirade is just delusional. Its cheaper and better to replace all use of fossil fuels with renewables? Why are we not doing it? Waiting to here your grand conspiracy as of why people are not "doing it".
Why did china build over 50(78GW) new large scale coal plants last year when they could get so much cheaper renewable?
Would you say the same thing about human suffering if the bronze age was 100 years later? And what about all the suffering and deaths from the pollution? Or the massive global wars fossil fuels enabled? Because without massive oil and gas reserves both WWI and WWII would have been far harder to sustain or commit to in the first place.
With such a massive shift in politics and technology with a lack of fossil fuels I think it is near impossible to compare the modern world to a world without those.
Because people didn't care that oil and gas is breaking our planet 100 years ago. Or didn't knew and capitalism made the people in power very very rich very fast.
At that time we still lived and heated normally. For sure the brits destroyed a lot of their trees but you know? They could.
What do you think would have happened if we had a small population collaps at that time and HAD to consume sustainable? We would be less people for sure, but we wouldn't have killed the missing people, they would have not been created in the first place.
We created the first solar panel 1883. The first EV in 1884.
China is still using coal because they are in the same dilemma as we all are: we ignored the impact and keep the status quo. But China build a lot of coal plants for renewing aging ones and they are massivle building out solar.
So why are my neighbours not doing it? Man i talked to sooooo many people about this, are you ready? Because people don't care. Or they don't like new things. Or they don't understand why it would be better.
Yes thats the conspiricy. People can't do the math, don't care about climate change or just don't want something to change.
Everyone i know who has solar panels on the roof, a small battery and heat pump literlay saving money and would never switch back. Every single one of them.
The Industrial Revolution started in 1760-1800 and was driven by coal, completely replacing wood as the primary industrial fuel. We almost exterminated whales and deforested the entirety of Europe before discovering fossil fuels, which both bounced back after.
The first EV an the first solar panel are second order effects and only possible because of the industrial revolution driving massive human innovation and growth. Good luck reaching the levels of industrialization and tech required to mass produce solar panels by using wood. Producing 1 ton of charcoal from wood, requires 4-7 tons of wood. To smelt a single ton of iron you then again need multiple tons of coal. Good luck industrializing without turning the whole planet into woodchopping and wood planting farm. It was all made possible by fossil coal, oil and gas.
Everything is essentially downstream of industrialization enabled by coal and subsequently the superior oil and gas.
And saying that oil and gas was breaking our planet doesn't make sense, if anything these are great replacements of coal.
You are also diminishing the brutal life of pre-industrialization times. Staggering high child-mortality rates, low life expectancy, and an high amounts of deaths caused by starvation and extreme weather events, like droughts and floods.
Solar plus battery takes many years to be paid back. If this setup is actually cheaper, industrial scale solar+battery would be huge. Solar on its own is a great cheap pairing with stable energy sources like hydro, gas and coal, which is partly why china is doing this.
People do actually adopt green tech when it makes financially sense, just look at the huge boom of adoption of AC and heatpumps around the world. Because it massively reduces electricity cost of heating and cooling.
The revolution could still have happened differently and slower.
I didn't say it would have been possible without ANY coal but you do understand that the amount of co2 we put into our atmosphere is not from 1760? All of that big huge co2 output happend in the last 100 year...
Solar plus batterie is currently winning. In germany the problem again is NOT the economy, its literaly the energy provider companies being slow as hell. This critisim is circling the media now for the last few years.
China is doing hydro, gas and coal because China is gigantic and they don't mind that coal still exists and we do not know yet at all how their end energy mix will look like but they are pushing very hard for renewable.
No as i told you, a lot of people around me literlaly don't want to do reneable for the reasons i told you. A L'ot of people DO NOT CARE about climate change.
Germany is trying to push for heatpumps in the old government, the new/current one is paddling back, AGAIN. This is happening under our noses. The discussion of the new heating law (from the prev government) created A LOT of controversy.
The main reason why the renewable energy transformation is happening at the current speed and not in the possible speed, is people not math. not economy.
We have protests against wind mills because they 'look ugly'. My neighbours hate my solar panel on the balcony but can't say something against it because the old government created a law for this.
Work collegues of mine hate EVs and don't want to switch over but my company only allows EVs since this year. Multily of them complained that an EV is not usable as a daily car while i own an EV for 4.5 years now and it is usable as a daily driver.
The transition in China is significanlty faster than in Europe.
The first coal powered steam machines were very inefficient. They only made sense at all being sited in an actual coal mine where coal was being extracted for thermal heating, so the fuel was abundant and cheap. Yet they were still barely worth it. From that they were iterated on, but it still took time for them to be made efficiently enough to work economically outside of the mine the fuel came from.
This points to the industrial revolution not being clear progress but requiring specific starting conditions. Steam machines had been around as a curiosity for a long time. And there's no guarantee there would have been slower progress to similar electrical technology without coal/steam because those things also accelerated the development of metallurgy and precision manufacturing specifically. Coal powered machines got efficiency with better precision made iron and steel, coincidentally things that required coal to make.
So I doubt we'd be where we are without coal, it might go further as without coal and the specific circumstances of coal access and necessity on the home island of a nation that has become an economic powerhouse by conquest.
But we can't run the world again. Hopefully we can bounce up to the next level and drop the majority of fossil fuel dependence. We've been pretty dumb about it imo in that we know there are potentially massive downsides too continuing to use it like we are, and we know there are areas like air transport that might have no alternative, so smart would be to transition everything as fast as possible to preserve the niche uses.
The oil companies pull out oil from the ground, a non sustainable resource which also creates direct damage to our own planet due to it being consumed/burned.
This is a subsidie.
Wind and solar are cheaper than fossil fuels this is absolutly true. Plenty of people around me have solar panels on the roof, a heatpump and energy storage. They are independent of any oil company like shell (who earned great thanks to the oil shortage?!).
Your argument regarding cost was borderline a few years ago and it might still be borderline in countries were oil is very cheap and we still ignore any ecological impact and responsiblity but overall no oil is more expensive.
Btw. just that you are aware of: A Heatpump can make out of 1 energy unit gas more energy. A EV engine has an efficency ov 95-99%.
So everyone who just burns gas directly (ICE or heating at home) is wasting energy.
It would be more efficient if you would make that oil/gas into energy, use the process heat of it for remote heating and use the elictricty directly in an EV or for a heatpump.
