Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair FSD is the hardest software problem that man has ever attempted.
I dunno, AGI seems like a hard problem too.
We will know that AGI is more likely to be solved when FSD is easily solved.
US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
461–470 of 773 posts
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#462My parents in rural Northeast Texas use Starlink as their primary connection (they have a WISP as failover). Since Sept. 2022, I've been running automated speed tests four times a day (1 and 7, AM and PM). Speeds vary a lot throughout the day, but average about 100 Mbps down by 10 Mbps up. https://gist.github.com/LukeLambert/dd722e49bc773bcb27e859d9...
Before starlink my only option was 3MB DSL from Verizon, it was literally life changing as a WFH person to get the 100-200Mbps downloads that Starlink gave me (for $99/month).
Fast forward and now I have 1GB symmetrical fiber-to-the-home.
Really nice to have that, but the leap from DSL to Starlink was life changing, the leap from Starlink to fiber was merely a minor improvment.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
FSD is a substantial subset of AGI: driving is full of edge cases where you need to be able to reason about unusual conditions or behavior by other drivers, understand what someone like a flagger or police officer is saying, etc.
It is not obvious that even level 5 FSD will require either self-awareness or a theory of mind: adequate modeling of the possible behaviors of nearby actors in the immediate future may be "all" it takes, and current systems are struggling with that. Of course, if one were to define FSD in terms of being so capable that it could also likely pass the Turing test (or whatever better replacement we come up with as a meas…
I said “substantial subset” precisely to avoid this kind of tangent. My point was simply that there are a lot of edge cases we have no clear path to solving which are masked at the current level by punting the problem to the human driver. We are a very long time from being able to build cars without manual controls even if we might hit the point where a majority of driving miles are automated long before then.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's one of the (many) frustrating things with Musk: he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Even if that underdelivering is better than what you can get elsewhere, it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
> he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Can we please just call it what it really is? Lying. He's a pathological liar.
How many startups start by telling investors, employees and customers, "We're going to fail"? They know the odds are that's going to happen. Are they pathological liars?
No one can predict the future. Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident. That's part of the profile. That doesn't make him or any of them liars.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's one of the (many) frustrating things with Musk: he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Even if that underdelivering is better than what you can get elsewhere, it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
> it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths It definitely does, although I don't understand why. One thing making bold forecasts does is motivate your people. JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts. Would we have got there as soon if he had said we'd get to the moon eventually ? To the other responder: JFK also had no tangible justification to say we'd get there so soon, and the mo…
You don’t think there was any consultation between JFK and NASA before he gave that speech?
A simple search for more information provides this. Kennedy asked Johnson to consult with NASA.
Johnson consulted with officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its new administrator, James E. Webb, told him that there was no chance of beating the Russians to launching a space station, and he was not certain that NASA could orbit a man around the Moon first, so the best option would be to attempt to land a man on the Moon. This would also be the most expensive option; Webb believed it would require $22 billion (equivalent to $166 billion in 2022) to achieve it by 1970. Johnson also consulted with Wernher von Braun; military leaders, including Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever; and three business executives: Frank Stanton from CBS, Donald C. Cook from American Electric Power, and George R. Brown from Brown & Root.
JFK was stating an experts opinion in a speech not spitballing random estimates that were changing yearly in order to make him and the US seem awesome.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#466This is consistent with the original decision. LTD Broadband, another big 2020 recipient is no longer eligible. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-rejects-ltd-broadband-starl...
This is precisely why anyone trying to tie this to Twitter is a political dunce.
Right, I am sure it is a complete coincidence that almost all of Musk's companies are suddenly being investigated by multiple federal departments...
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#467I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money, and also that accepting the grant automatically granted you the appropriate right of way via imminent domain. It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places (they have little portable boring machines, so you don’t even have to trench), and independent ISPs have…
>>It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places
How to tell us you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber, without actually saying you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Starlink claimed 150Mbps back in 2020 and that speeds would double to 300Mbps by the end of 2021.[1] Instead, speeds have halved.[2] At this point, T-Mobile is likely serving more rural high speed internet customers with greater speeds (T-Mobile has 4.2M home internet customers and Ookla's stats show 34% to be rural for 1.4M;…
> T-Mobile is likely serving more rural high speed internet customers with greater speeds I live exactly 13 miles away from T-Mobile HQ (one city over) and their service was unusable. I know, I know, anecdotal. But funny!
When I was living in Seattle I found the service to be shockingly bad. I "upgraded" to 5G and my service got substantially worse. I'd often have "full signal 5G" and barely be able to watch videos in Capitol Hill. I worked in SoDo and I found multiple dead zones between the train station and my work (just a few blocks).
For a while I was tweeting at them regularly with screenshots, but got bored of the "DM us so we can resolve this right away" bots and realized I was screaming into the void. I ultimately wound up switching to Verizon.
Interestingly, T-Mobile service was far better in the 3 other major cities I lived in, but it's still pretty embarrassing that their service is so bad right in their own backyard.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think moves like this, where the government acts in an adversarial capacity to successful businesses that it previously supported, will do a lot to attract new capital or technologists. If anything, I’d worry such capriciousness discourages investment in the area. If Musk can’t make it work, what odds do the rest of us face. At least that would be my concern, about how this is received by the wider tech commu…
It is beyond parody to refer to "not giving money that was not earned" as acting in an "adversarial capacity". Your argument is completely detached from reality, and devoid of logic.
My argument is that perceptions matter more than reality. Disagreeing on the grounds that my argument is not reality is not a dismissal, but I certainly understand that you do not perceive things as such. You are only one anecdote out of many.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#470Isn't the DoD one of Starlink's top customers? The FCC can certainly pull their funds, but if the DoD has many - too many? - eggs in the Starlink basket - and no legit viable alternatives - and this funding pull-back compromises Starlink on a broader scale, isn't it likely the DoD steps in, in the name of national defense?