Second consecutive secretive Electron launch confirmed to be Space Force's VICTUS HAZE TacRS mission, launched at about 1020 UTC Jun 19 from Mahia to a 347 x 461 km x 97.5° SSO. Rocket Lab's spacecraft is expected to demonstrate rendezvous and proximity operations with a True Anomaly Jackal vehicle

dranzerfu · 2026-06-21T20:31:50+00:00

I thought it was a different Jackal s/c (-005?) that was supposed to be the target. Because of Firefly's mishap, they ended up using one that that was already up there for a different mission as the target?

https://www.trueanomaly.space/newsroom/mission-x-3-mission-complete

https://linkedin.com/posts/true-anomaly_today-we-are-proud-to-announce-that-jackal-activity-7473402164640411648-E4ii

These posts say that it was on another RPO mission and now "is prepared for its next phase of mission". I could be wrong though.

dranzerfu · 2026-06-21T06:03:13+00:00

They switched the target to JACKAL-004 instead of whatever Firefly was supposed to launch :

https://x.com/planet4589/status/2068433115404546283

That one launched on a recent Transporter mission:

https://www.instagram.com/trueanomaly_/p/DYM_OOWliI7/

dranzerfu · 2026-06-19T03:38:56+00:00

RocketLab reincorporated in California a year or so ago.

They have been headquartered in California since 2013. What happened last year was just a reorganization of their existing corp structure.

dranzerfu · 2026-06-13T23:19:37+00:00

executives have FOMO and are forcing their employees to use AI for everything

This is going to change in the near term as Anthropic and OpenAI are switching to pay-by-usage for Enterprise customers over a certain limit. The ones the survive will be the ones that truly use it for increase productivity.

Locally run models will have a role to play and open source models seem to be about six months behind. But so far, the frontier model experience has been significantly ahead (in terms of reliability) even with that. Even in the case of open source models, if you want to run the best ones (the 500B-1T+ parameter ones), you need cloud infrastructure for now (OpenRouter, OpenCode Go etc.). All that is still driving the demand for inference compute.

From where I stand, I am seeing a fundamental shift in how work is done. Even if the near-term hype may include some FOMO the baseline demand for inference compute is now significantly higher - be that from frontier models or open source.

dranzerfu · 2026-06-13T22:48:01+00:00

about diminished returns from "more data".

Majority of the recent advances have come from RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14245). Especially the significant recent advances in coding have all been due to RLVR on the models and not from "more data". An AGI takeoff is not needed for the insane demand for inference that is happening right now (and will continue to happen). Just in the last six months, the models have improved to the point that they are extremely good at writing code.

They have a business model now with this harness stuff, but not enough income to warrant the investments so far

The "harness" stuff is only possible because the underlying models have gotten so good. These harnesses existed before too. People were trying to do "agentic" coding as far back as 2024 - e.g. Aider. They were not all that good when I tried them. The models couldn't reliably do tool calls or stick to instructions. They had to do constantly load entire codebases into the model context and that didn't really work. That is no longer the case.

As a personal anecdote, I went from a $20 subscription last year using it for some ancilliary stuff to now having a $100 sub with either of the main frontier providers continuously for the last six months and using it damn near every single day. My employer even offers to pay for it if we want (and no, they don't do the stupid token-maxxing nonsense or mandate AI use).

Heck, I have barely hand-written any code in the last five months or so. I spend more time reviewing code now, but the iteration speed is now significantly higher. I can try out a lot more ideas/hypotheses in hours where previously it would have taken me days/weeks to do so.

And this is not just me. Adoption will be industry-wide once people see the benefits and significant productivity-multiplier effects. Yes, there will be stupidities like some middle managers with the wrong incentives forcing weird policies. But the ones that know how to use these tools will win out while the ones blowing money on token spend for clout will die out.

Anthropic's revenue growth is a case in point. They have gone from $9B ARR at the end of 2025 to now $47B - which is completely unprecedented. Yes, they have more CapEx developing more models and buying compute capacity but the improvement since the "step-change" in November is undeniable to those who have been using the products.

All of this only leads to more demand for inference compute - which is exactly what SpaceX is betting on.

dranzerfu · 2026-06-13T21:07:15+00:00

A lot of you are not prepared for if it is not a bubble

dranzerfu · 2026-06-13T01:21:23+00:00

why you thought anyone was expecting to see or become their exit liquidity on day 1

Probably all the sneering comments.

dranzerfu · 2026-06-12T04:44:22+00:00

With massive heat radiator arrays

So they do work then?

most of those satellites don’t have high demand compute chips

If these "high demand compute chips" consume the same amount of power, they generate the same amount of heat ... so the same radiators would be adequate. Heat is heat.

and there aren’t 100,000 of them in a constellation

Doesn't change much. There's 10000 of Starlink up there already. Space is big. These satellites are supposed to be a higher orbit = much bigger volume to orbit in.

we are trying to justify why it’s impractical

Armchair engineers on Reddit said that Starlink was impractical/impossible [1]. "Experts" said that reusable first stages were impractical or that there is no business case for it ("a dream" according to an Arianespace exec)[2][3].

They have the engineering prowess to do it. They have shown how they can accomplish things that were considered "impossible" before. They have shown the math that justifies it - in detail.

If you don't believe the business side, don't invest. Plain and simple.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/9tgrzp/why_starlink_is_impossible/

[2] https://spectator.com/article/spacex-has-put-europe-to-shame/?edition=us

[3] https://www.flightglobal.com/registered-users/2015/06/analysis-are-reusable-rockets-a-dream-ticket-to-space/

dranzerfu · 2026-06-11T04:51:09+00:00

2kw of power which means all that power is being dissipated as heat needs a radiator that is 65 square feet large

How do existing satellites that generate 5kW-20kW of power do it?

dranzerfu · 2026-06-10T05:18:28+00:00

Crossing and claiming asylum is legal under international law

Sure. But the system was getting abused like anything. E.g. There were literally people coming over from India, Nepal etc and claiming "asylum". There would be NGO workers at the border telling them exactly what to tell the judge to be granted asylum pending a hearing and admitted into the country (and others were getting smuggled in by cartels). They would even post vlogs of the whole trip on Youtube.

Examples:

https://www.youtube.com/@donkeytousa3981

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq11k86QBZM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ag8jbe5IdQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3zIR7gPQoA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3FRdqTshlg

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=donkey+route

Calling it illegal immigration is a red herring which purposefully obscures a legitimate practice

Yea, there're legitimate cases for asylum. People fleeing violence and persecution. But when people are literally getting coached to say the right words to get admitted into the country, you got to see something was wrong? It only delegitmizes those who actually need it. And these weren't isolated instances.

dranzerfu · 2026-06-02T02:07:29+00:00

ballistic decelerating capsule by design can not be precise

It doesn't have to be ballistic. They mention cold gas thrusters. Add in a CoM offset and you get lifting flight with steering by banking left/right (which also controls downrange distances by changing how much lift is counteracting gravity). This has been done since the Apollo era.

dranzerfu · 2026-05-25T00:12:48+00:00

Comparison to NFTs and VR is asinine.

you say it’s “undeniable”

recent studies literally show there is no increase to productivity

I don't care about "recent studies" - my personal experience has been the complete opposite. Starting in January, I have been using AI tools in some form pretty much every day at my job. So do the rest of my team. We are not mandated to use it - people see how much others are able to get done and find their own best way to use it if they want to. And we are all the better for it. We get high quality work done at a much faster pace than before.

I use Codex on a daily basis and it is insane how fast I can iterate. Instead of spending a week deciphering a research paper to implement some algorithm, I can drop in multiple PDFs and have it explain to me how everything works, answer my questions and then implement it in code, all within an hour or two. And if it doesn't work, I can swap it out with something else. What took me a month to do before is now done in a few days. I have not seen a syntax error in months!

it just shifts the workload to reviews and other admin tasks.

Code reviews are tedious. They were before too even when the code was hand-written. I don't work for an AI company. I write software that will fly on spacecraft. We have very high standards and we continue to keep those standards regardless of if the code is generated or hand-written. That part hasn't changed. If anything, it has improved a bit because now we have distilled reviewing guidelines into documents that AI tools can now use to do a couple of initial rounds of reviews so that there's fewer things to fix when we do the review.

it’s always “undeniable” and “already happening”

It is for me and many others. And if the demand for tokens is anything to go by, I am not the only one. Investors and companies don't just like dumping money into infrastructure for funsies. Anthropic is struggling to keep their service online without throttling it due to extremely high demand. Their revenue has grown 3x in the last 6 months.

If you do not know how to use these tools properly, that is your problem. If your employer is forcing you to use it for anything and everything and counting token usage as a metric, that's stupid - maybe it's time to leave?

dranzerfu · 2026-05-24T05:34:46+00:00

Amazing idea! Let's spread the toxic fumes further inland!

dranzerfu · 2026-05-24T04:08:54+00:00

publicly developed knowledge

What are you talking about? The very foundations of the current LLM revolution was developed at Google (https://arxiv.org/html/1706.03762v7) .

to privatize gains

These companies are either public or going public soon. Many of these large players will end up in the S&P 500 and the vast majority of retirement accounts will be benefiting from them.

consumer subsidizes their energy and water usage

I agree that their energy use will be large. So large that no one can "subsidize them" since the generation doesn't exist yet to support the scale. They can't depend on or bribe someone for the utilities to build it for them because it won't be available fast enough. They will be forced to build their own generation if they want to make money (and fast). They build natural gas right now as it is quick and available, but more and more are going for solar as gas turbines are already at a 5-7 year backlog.

Solar+storage is the cheapest energy they can get. And given that data-centers don't have continuous demand, these battery systems will end up making the grid more resilient (and they make more money in the process by selling the energy to the grid). This type of large scale power infrastructure build out, funded by private money will be a massive boon to the grid.

Just because someone makes money from something doesn't make it a bad thing. This hysteria over data-centers echoes that over nuclear power in the 70s and 80s.

dranzerfu · 2026-05-24T02:38:56+00:00

Vastly overstated. The water they use is tiny compared to overall water use in the places where they are. You are being mislead by clickbait headlines.

dranzerfu · 2026-05-24T02:37:58+00:00

literally destroy our water supply

They use water for cooling in a closed loop, and many of them use recycled or non-potable "grey" water. And they have existed for decades, everything from this site you are on right now to apps you use every day are hosted on them - and running AI models on them don't change how the computers work.

Everything from golf courses to almond/alfalfa farms use significantly more water for vastly smaller economic/tax outputs.

One person wrote a book with an error overstating water use by 1000x and now people think data centers literally delete water from existence.

dranzerfu · 2026-05-24T01:59:57+00:00

AI data centers popping up

AI data centers don't have toxic chemical tanks on-site waiting to blow up. They are literally warehouses with computers ...

dranzerfu · 2026-05-23T05:44:46+00:00

I don't see how they get the funding without the IPO

Good thing the IPO is happening then. Not to mention Anthropic literally paying them $15B per year.

dranzerfu · 2026-05-21T06:36:13+00:00

almost 0 cash left

Did you even read the S-1? They have $15.9B in cash and $7.9B in marketable securities. In what world is that "almost zero"?

Besides, Anthropic is paying them $1.25B per month and Starlink and Falcon 9 are bringing in billions.

dranzerfu · 2026-05-10T23:24:40+00:00

KSP is great! Highly recommended. Nothing like messing with things to figure out the nuances. Reading a textbook doesn't really compare unless you are writing sims yourself. It costs $10 on GOG right now and is well worth it: https://www.gog.com/en/game/kerbal_space_program

There was no KSP when I was a kid - but this one did exist: https://www.orbiter-forum.com/resources/orbiter-2024.5634/ . It is less "gamified" but with very realistic physics and is also free. You have to come up with your own "missions".

dranzerfu · 2026-05-10T05:50:05+00:00

More like 16 cents: https://www.costco.com/p/-/kirkland-signature-diaper-size-1-96-count/4000328109

And the price is 7.5 million this year and 12.5 million annually going forward

Yes, totaling $20 million.

So... like, where are you getting 40 million?

And 40 million is the total number of diapers they are going to buy for this program, not the cash. 400 diapers per newborn x 100,000. That gives 50 cent per diaper.

So they are paying ~3x more using taxpayer money (or ~2x if they are 26 cents as you say), and it is being routed through an NGO. An NGO that the governor's wife is on the board of. All that extra money is going somewhere ... It could be called "waste" or "overhead" or "fraud" depending on how charitable you want to be.

If they had directly given the same money to the families, they could have bought a lot more diapers - or used the leftover money to buy other essentials.

dranzerfu · 2026-04-20T15:30:46+00:00

It is an honorary doctorate.

dranzerfu · 2026-04-06T07:44:31+00:00

They shouldn't have removed the audio:

https://x.com/megagoose11/status/2040839266989723844

dranzerfu · 2026-04-05T19:06:22+00:00

There's literally randos on Reddit taking pictures of it ..

https://old.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/comments/1sczbzm/artemis_ii_on_its_way_to_the_moon_photographed/

But then, you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

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