Ba-dum-tss

You don't get to call Moonshot's a "claim" and this political hack's an "announcement." They're the same thing. Treat them the same. Diction designed to favor one of two equal positions is some weak sauce.

If you put any faith in claims made by OpenAI's "Head of Strategic Futures," then it's hard to believe these models are just the result of distillation.

They know it's real effort that's doing this well, not just "copying off someone else's test." It's real and they will react. How is the big question.

SpaceX's launch cost, the internal spend to put one Falcon 9 Starlink payload in orbit, with a return to launch site booster recovery, is about $15M.

If you're going to make such assertions, do the legwork to make sure your numerical claims aren't off by 500%.

I think this could be done at an interesting scale even on Falcon 9 alone. If Starship does even 20% of its early design goals, it'll beat Falcon 9 and we could see orbital servers being demised and replaced every 3 years, maybe even 2, for ones with abnormally high failure rates.

Now, whether or not this will all make money in the end has a lot to do with what's going on down here on terra firma and how long it takes to get useful capacity into orbit.

(It's taken 7 years to get Starlink capacity enough for serving 10M customers. Verizon FiOS did 10M in 5 years. AT&T Fiber took 4-5 years to deploy to 10M. So, space isn't a lot slower than terrestrial.)

Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. (1988–1994) -- Apple lost its ass on this one, entirely frivolous. Every single major claim failed.

Apple Inc. v. HTC Corp. (2010–2012) -- Apple patents wiped out over frivolity

Apple Inc. v. Motorola Mobility, Inc. (2010–2014) -- Mutually destructive patent fight, Apple's loss

Apple Inc. v. Samsung Electronics Co. (2011–2018) -- Pretty suspect. Lawyers still undecided

Apple Inc. v. Qualcomm Inc. (2017–2019) -- Apple settled, needed QC modems more than a win

Apple Inc. v. Epic Games, Inc. (2020–present) -- Apple was ordered to stop anti-steering rules, won little

Look, Apple sued Samsung over the corner radius on piece of hardware. It's currently suing a YouTuber for publishing renders of pre-release iOS.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg for Apple suits, many pretty unconvincing. Here are a few more.

Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. (1982–1983) Apple Computer, Inc. v. Apple Corps Ltd. (1978–2007) Apple Inc. v. Psystar Corporation (2008–2011) Apple Inc. v. Corellium, LLC (2019–2023) Apple Inc. v. NSO Group Technologies Ltd. (2021–present) Apple Inc. v. Rivos Inc. (2022–2025) Apple Inc. v. Andrew Aude (2024–2025)

So don't tell us Apple doesn't abuse the legal system for business gain. It's obvious to anyone with eyes that it regularly does so.

The lawyers told us ahead of time we'd be getting the letters. They told us what we needed to preserve and what we could comfortably trash. There was never any follow-up or specific requests for what I had on my machines. That was that.

The idea that getting a legal request is scary is silly. We were employees getting employee guidance from our employer on what to do at every step of the way. We weren't individuals fending for ourselves, wondering about getting something wrong, being taken in for questioning. We were doing what we always do, work hard and listen to the company lawyers if they have something to say.

But they're not. Meta, SpaceX, Microsoft, Amazon, they're all leasing out capacity to others. If they were truly constrained, we wouldn't see that happening.

Having said that, we also expect adults to make all kinds of bad decisions so they too are prohibited from many things, like shooting smack or freebasing meth.

I think there's a good case to be made not for banning kids from social media, but for banning everyone. In that case, it'd be easier to do it from the supply side than the demand side.

Banning anything is always bad. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.