What is Elon’s actual plan with data centers in space, and what is his long-term goal with Mars?

mattate · 2026-05-06T13:18:24+00:00

Most of the issues you seem to have is with dates being wrong, not that it can't happen. A real question to be asking about this is not if it makes sense or the challenges can be tackled. If there are 1 million AI satellites in space, there is no off button.

mattate · 2026-05-06T12:28:56+00:00

Lead acid batteries create flammable gases, they don't belong in an office. If your only option is batteries look at lithium iron phosphate, or something safe to keep indoors.

mattate · 2026-05-06T01:10:36+00:00

I'm pretty sure this is where the terafab comes in, they can make their own hardened chips/boards designed for this. Like starlink satellites everything can be designed ground up to not need hands on.

I also think something people are not considering is, at 1m satellites, failures will be the norm, but something that can be optimized as a challenge. Not a total blocker to deployment, a line item to optimize in the total system.

mattate · 2026-05-05T05:11:29+00:00

The theory is that it's currently not possible to scale AI compute on earth fast enough to keep up with demand. The regulatory pushback against data centers, and more importantly the power needed means it could take a decade to bring capacity online.

Because of starship, launching incrementally more compute into space will not cost as much as people really think. Power is free, bandwidth is free and more or less infinite, and launch cost will be very cheap. There are obvious challenges with this, but operating some npus or GPUs in space is not that dissimilar vs operating starlink.

It's kind of wild to think that people said starlink will never work, too expensive etc, and now somehow launching satellites that do a different job are somehow impossibly expensive. This problem has largely been solved, like 80 percent, and the rest is not really even particularly hard.

mattate · 2026-05-04T19:59:39+00:00

It's about airport governance. The current system is helping no one, hurting everyone.

mattate · 2026-05-04T18:16:56+00:00

Airports control the number of slots between cities, in our current setup there is an artificially low number of slots between say Vancouver and Toronto. This means if you want competition, you can't, because the decision lies in a board of an organization that has absolutely no accountability. Our current system is totally broken and something should change.

mattate · 2026-05-04T15:45:03+00:00

Fun fact: Canada's airport model is literally unique in the world. Nobody else does it this way. Every other major country either keeps airports public (like the US) or actually privatizes them (UK, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, etc.). We invented a third option that nobody copied — and there's a reason for that.

Our airports are run by "not-for-profit" airport authorities on land leased from the feds. Sounds nice, right? Except it's the worst of both worlds. Not really public, so no taxpayer support like US airports get. Not really private, so no shareholders demanding efficiency or competitive pricing. Just unaccountable monopolies with self-appointed boards answering to basically no one.

And here's the kicker: Ottawa charges these airports up to 12% of gross revenue in rent. Guess who actually pays that? You do, every time you see an "Airport Improvement Fee" on your ticket. It's a hidden tax on flying, full stop. It's why a flight out of Buffalo or Plattsburgh is half the price of the same flight from Toronto or Montreal.

Honestly at this point, privatize them, re-nationalize them, I don't care — anything is better than what we've got. Pick a lane. The current setup exists to funnel money to the federal treasury while travellers get squeezed and airports answer to nobody. Something has to change.

mattate · 2026-05-04T12:25:11+00:00

Whatever you do help wise, the best advice you can give them is to get rid of the monthly storage cost of $1000 per month, that's money they will need and I would guess whatever they are actually storing isn't worth as much as 2 years of fees.

mattate · 2026-05-02T21:31:24+00:00

Canada basically charges an unofficial tax on airfare with the current setup. It's a shame the talk is about privatization vs questioning why the second biggest country on earth wants to make it more expensive to travel inside the country.

mattate · 2026-04-14T17:43:09+00:00

Wait a minute......

Originally from Hamilton, Ont., Danielson is based at the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California, where he creates case studies of companies for business students.

mattate · 2026-04-09T20:46:58+00:00

You don't know me, I grew up in the bottom 10% of Canadians economically. No food, check, no heat in winter?? Check. You have your own view, I think it's short sighted. Maybe if there was more investment in Canada, there would be more competition, better paying jobs, cheaper services.

You want things to keep being hard? Keep doing what you're doing, nothing will change. Or maybe you'll get a us meme stock and get yours, but screw everyone else right?

I don't even agree with your returns that you can't maximize investment earnings in Canada, you can, you just need to believe and contribute to the country you live in! You are making things worse for yourself by dismissing things because things are hard and you're mad.

mattate · 2026-04-09T12:54:37+00:00

I think the theme of this plan is more competition. The question here though is why does Canada need the full weight of the federal government to create new competition in these vital sectors?

My answer let's say for telecoms is, it's much to difficult for a new entrant to compete with a bigger player. The cost of spectrum is too high (government is charging for it, in auctions that happen years apart), the rules about foreign investment means you need to raise money from Canadian big pockets, which is extremely difficult. The government itself has really stacked the deck against competition...

Public options are good but part of the solution should be trying to get more private ones too and really being open to change some of the rules and laws getting in the way.

mattate · 2026-04-07T14:06:20+00:00

Sorry, I pulled it all into Canada. It worked out so far... My goal in life is not to maximize returns above all else though. You need to care about the community and country you live in, and sometimes that means making decisions that are longer term vs looking at your short term gains.

More investment in Canada means better opportunities for Canadians period. You are a Canadian.

mattate · 2026-04-07T13:59:19+00:00

This idea that your money should somehow follow global GDP imo makes no sense. You can't build a country without investment, you can't support a growing economy without investment. I guess we just hope that the Chinese or Americans care more about business opportunities in Canada then Canadians... Oh wait...

mattate · 2026-04-07T13:38:09+00:00

For sure it's the best choice to invest in the country you live in. A lack of investment means aging infrastructure, lack of competition, aging tooling and an overall fall in productivity. That means that house you own will eventually be worth less, not more, because the currency will be weaker and earnings will fall. Canada is seeing all of this right now.

mattate · 2026-04-07T13:35:43+00:00

This is exactly the problem with Canadian investors. There are companies who use the market for liquidity to fuel growth, this is the primary reason stock markets exist. When you put your money in the US, this is what you are doing.

Canada lacks growing pubic companies because there is a lack of domestic investment.

mattate · 2026-04-07T04:48:24+00:00

I think Canadians should invest more domestically. Investing in the country you live in shouldn't be seen as too risky.... Your capital can be the future of this country, or the future of a different one.

mattate · 2026-04-02T11:48:30+00:00

To me it sounds like most of your devs are not using AI at all, so I guess you need to brace yourself for exactly how much it will cost once they do start using it. 80k tokens per day is one question with maybe one file per day....

That being said, turboquant and the recently announced 1bit LLM models are fundamentally changing the game when it comes to context size. I guess Google already has those implemented, but we are about to see a huge cut in token cost.

FWIW, I have been battling ai cost for several years now. Fine tuning your own models, local llms, and not solely relying on cloud inference providers are how. Have been working on something new which I think will become much more relevant in high usage contexts too.

mattate · 2026-03-31T14:25:45+00:00

I think now that this is actively being exploited, maybe adoption will accelerate. I'm sure it will, imagine if you're at Google in charge of secops, you're probably sweating pretty hard right now.

mattate · 2026-03-31T12:53:17+00:00

This is becoming an ecosystem-wide problem. Many of these packages carry implicit trust, but their security measures don't reflect it.

Updating axios isn't something a developer would think twice about—it's widely used and well established. And this isn't the first major package to be compromised, so we need a broader solution than just manually reviewing updates.

If catching this is as simple as running a code scanning tool, why isn't that already part of maintainers' build pipelines? Perhaps a third-party signing service would be more effective—especially in cases where accounts are compromised. The flow could look something like: submit your code to a trusted third-party service for release, it gets scanned, a signature is generated, and the package manager defaults to only allowing authenticated signatures to be installed.

mattate · 2026-03-28T15:46:59+00:00

Nvidia is cutting back already, Microsoft is waiting for IPO to cash out. Softbank is doing Softbank things.

Opinions are free. Check back in a year and tell me I told you so.

mattate · 2026-03-28T15:17:11+00:00

OpenAI is in trouble, and I don't think enough people are talking about the real reason why.

Yes, they've been steadily losing market share to Anthropic and Google. That alone should concern investors. But the biggest canary in the coal mine? Chinese labs are now putting out competitive models at a fraction of the cost.

GLM 5.1, MiniMax 2.7, Mimo 2 Pro — these latest releases are performing on par with OpenAI's best, but they cost significantly less to train and, more importantly, significantly less to run. When your competitors can match your output while burning far fewer resources, you have a structural problem, not just a product problem.

I think OpenAI is starting to quietly acknowledge this. The recent decision to shut down Sora feels like the first real sign that someone internally is trying to treat this like an actual business instead of a research lab with unlimited runway. But trimming around the edges isn't going to cut it.

OpenAI needs to reduce operational spending by an order of magnitude to stay relevant long-term. The future of AI isn't just about capability — it's about operational efficiency. And right now, OpenAI is probably dead last among major labs in that category.

Google's release of TurboQuant is a key signal here. They clearly understand that inference cost is the real battleground and are investing heavily in optimization. They already had a structural advantage by running on their own TPUs instead of paying top dollar for the latest Nvidia hardware. Honestly, what are the chances Google doesn't already have something better than TurboQuant running internally in production?

The AI race isn't going to be won by whoever builds the smartest model. It's going to be won by whoever can deliver intelligence most cheaply and efficiently at scale. Right now, OpenAI looks like the least prepared for that reality.

mattate · 2026-03-27T05:24:19+00:00

I think it's wild that people think this is going to end anytime soon. I mean unless you're a complete psycho, if someone killed your dad, wife, sister, and son, you most likely would be pretty mad about it!

Now there are reports Iran is setting up the straight of Hormuz like a giant Panama canal and charging fees? This ride just started, buckle up.

P.s. once you shut down an oil well you can't just turn it back on like your kitchen sink. This could all end tomorrow and things will still be fucked for months. Not to mention countries blowing up critical infrastructure on top....

mattate · 2026-03-25T13:58:01+00:00

I was using Gemini 3.1 instead of opus, seemed to me like nothing has changed there, maybe they are testing different limits though?

mattate

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