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US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

reuters.com

771–773 of 773 posts

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do we know this? Some life experience + common sense? > In theory you could get from the status quo to actually working in a short period of time, In theory we could build a rocket that would fly a person to the moon in 6 months. > if you're sufficiently smart If that's the case, you wouldn't be making such bold claims (or rather actually believing in them yourself) > LLMs and image generation were the sort of…

> Some life experience + common sense? If you asked people with "life experience + common sense" if generative AI would soon be possible six months before it actually was, they'd have said no and been wrong. > In theory we could build a rocket that would fly a person to the moon in 6 months. Kennedy said it would be done by the end of the decade, people called him crazy, and then it happened. The people saying it cou…

> the AI would soon be possible six months before it actually was, they'd have said no and been wrong.

GPT 3.5 / 4 were an iteration of previous models, their performance wasn't that exceptionally surprising if you were working in the field.

Also, these are fundamentally different problems. Self-driving requires massive amounts of real-world testing and then you have all the regulatory and safety/legal stuff to do. That's simply infeasible in 6 months no matter what. Generative AI has no such constraints.

> Kennedy said it would be done by the end of the decade, people called him crazy, and then it happened. The people saying it couldn't be done were still saying it right up until the day it happened.

So? I don't see any link to what we're discussing. Kennedy didn't really have that much direct involvement in the moon program.

What we're discussing is an equivalent of the head of NASA, in ~1966 or so publicly declaring that they'll send a crewed mission to the moon in 6 months (even though everyone knew that wasn't possible no matter how hard everyone worked).

> He's giving the optimistic end of the range,

He's just saying random unsubstantiated stuff because that's just what he does all the time (or because he wants to sell more cars IDK).

> Yeah, it did. Nobody knew it would work until it actually worked.

I'm pretty sure that was an iterative process, so they knew quite a while before it actually "worked" (could be released to the public).

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#772

When applying for RDOF you say what service tier you are targeting and instead of shooting for the minimum 25/3, Starlink applied for 100/20. When they didn't reach those speeds[1], they were ineligible but not just because they didn't hit the required speeds on their existing network. There are more details here[2] but the jist is that Starlink bid to supply 100/20 internet to over half a million subscribers and the…

I find it impressive that the government is actually punishing a project for running late and underdelivering. They should expand this to all parts of the government. Can you imagine if the F-35 was cancelled the first time it fell behind schedule? The Space Launch System? The Littoral Combat System? The USS JFK? So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start pr…

There's going to be future rounds

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#773
post #7

Well at least it can now be confidently state that Starlink was developed entirely with private funding. I do hope that the companies that do get it are providing proper fiber service though rather than the many many years of companies who were way slower than Starlink getting it.

That can't be further from the truth, spacex gets boatloads of government funding, just look at starshild

Starshield is not "boatloads" of government funding. It's a rather small contract. And none of that money has even been delivered yet. Starlink was developed without it.
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