There is no alternative now, and there won't be an alternative for years.

Globalstar is far too low bandwidth for Ukraine's needs. Amazon doesn't have the ambition or nerve to risk building anything that approaches Starlink in the kind of time frame that is relevant to the Ukraine conflict, and they don't have the vertically integrated launch platform with the airline-like capacity and reliability of SpaceX to make such ambitions affordable, and they don't have the ambition or nerve to build that either.

Love him or hate him, for better or worse, Musk has the ambition and nerve to do these things. That fact is everything: the essential, exclusive ingredient. And Bezos et al. don't have it. You may wish they did, and regret they do not, but don't kid yourself.

The valuation is what mystifies me. Maybe, before Starlink, a constellation of 25 communication satellites was worth a few billion. Maybe $10 billion with IP, lucrative contracts and whatever spectrum they hold. After Starlink?

No. Just no.

Globalstar equity holders have played this one well.

It's supposed to be a benefit: better competitors that aren't governed by shiny-object leadership are supposed to take advantage and punish such clowns. That's the real cost of centralization, IP law and regulatory balkanization: the clowns rely on these to insulate themselves from the wolves that would otherwise end them.

Makes me think of the "bad faith" trope we see with some frequency from certain folks.

Recently some blowhard Reddit mod(s) went ham on AI in open source, and essentially outlawed discussion of any open source projects that are not purely organic from their little Reddit sandbox. When it was pointed out that this is pretty unworkable since significant open source projects, including Linux, Mesa and others are allowing AI generated code, they backed up. And that's all fine I suppose, except they characterized the response to their stupidity as deliberate "bad faith" misunderstanding of their original announcement. It wasn't that at all; it was exactly what you should expect when get all chesty with the world and can't handle the blowback, but they've adopted the cop-out of calling these self-inflicted episodes as some sort of "bad faith."

I see this often enough now that anytime I see someone claiming "bad faith" I assume I'm dealing with another nasty little shit-bird trying to cry-bully their way.

Indeed they are. It seems that, for the purposes of social justice, regular drivers licenses and CDLs, complete with "Real ID" markers, are now mere formalities that can be had in several of our most just states, without even providing a name. I suppose that to the degree this facilitates hijacking freight, this is only yet more social justice. Win-win for everyone.

It gave me the numbers for the various trials. I don't have them handy and I didn't run them manually - so the AI could totally have made it all up. I did not keep the numbers so I have nothing to share.

Sure - it's just a hypothesis.

The analogy is fine. The cited arguments against washing machines had nothing to do with water use.

Your luxury belief system wasn't a factor back in the day.

I do not recall the details! But I did watch as the damn AI did repeat wall clock and sample tests to see where the time was going and try 2-4 different approaches and clocked each one in detail. I felt embarrassed because I *could* do all that and certainly had done it in the past - but it would have taken me a *long* time to set up each tests and analyze the results and try over and over and track the results for each.
As you imply - none of this is particularly tricky - it's mostly just labor intensive and time consuming. And those are both things that AI has no trouble with.

Related - when I tell an agent to optimize for performance - especially if the request is well targeted - it does an *amazing* job. Doing performance work is so well defined and described that it can follow the patterns and do all the checks and get it really right. To do a good job it's really repetitive and there are often a lot of angles to check and .. it just does it really well.

Independent analysis based on Starlink IPv6 traffic estimates there are 4.7 million US Starlink residential subscribers, and that about 2 million came on line in the last year.

I suspect my understanding of the situation is dead on correct; Starlink is filling the vast hole, whatever your "semi-rural" anecdote has you thinking. At an average of 2.53 person's per household in the US, this means Starlink is now the provider of 3.5% of all per capita broadband in the US, and likely to 5% or more inside another year.

Where Comcast is available. Sure. I suspect you're missing some critical information about Comcast availability in rural areas.

No, it isn't. What's outrageously expensive is quasi-government monopolies that are really massive healthcare/retirement benefits companies.

Fiber itself is cheap, as are the electronics on either end of the cable. Trenching can be expensive, but it doesn't have to be. Trenching gets expensive when it involves legal battles and navigating permitting thickets controlled by local utilities and governments. The actual act of laying fiber in trenches isn't very costly, and doesn't take much time.

Go look at the FCC National Broadband Map, which is really great, btw. Filter the whole country by Fiber and look at the coverage. Note how N.D. and S.D have extremely high coverage. Also note how these are highly rural areas, with properties separated by great distances. Yet you can get FTTH there. Given the excuse that's been offered for decades; that the US is big and low population density makes broadband too expensive, this shouldn't be possible.

Yet there it is. Why? Because those states are conservative, and they don't turn every feature of life into another balkanized quasi-government mess, complete with public-sector unions, bought and paid for union politicians with crazy union contracts that turn every public institution and utility into another retirement benefits operation that also happens to provide electricty/water/internet/whatever.

That's why.

Imagine having last mile right-of-way into the largest market of wealthy homes on Earth, and squandering that affordance so badly that you find yourself saying these things. Between Musk solving the rural internet problem, and aggressive fiber and wireless operators dealing with urban areas, Comcast's old and busted coax system is going the way of copper pair telephone service.

Ok. Therefore what?

What is the UK government supposed to do on behalf of nice weather/climate?

The celebrity greenpeace so-and-so has demanded action. The media has broadcast that demand into the echo chamber. So what shall be done to "stop the doom-loop?"

I note that this optimally brown and heavily tattooed spokes-something appears to be be big jewelry fan, and spends a lot of time collecting glamour shots around the planet, espousing its sexual preferences and flashing its cleavage. I imagine all that metal is recycled and was walked/sailed to all those sites, where the images where hand painted, and not shot with the products of high energy electronics fabrication processes in various Asian hellholes that are exempt of the UK's regulatory regime.

Or maybe not, a Maja is just another hysteria grifter that has found its niche at titillating you with regular doses of fear and loathing.

I am not the least bit confused. The same technique that might be used to remove "harmful" behavior can be used to alter any behavior. That's self-evident to anyone with even passing concept of how models work.

False. The depth depends on the effort made to analyze the model and test behavior. There is no limit here: abliteration can be as shallow or as deep as one has time and money to spend.