Falcon nine is the best rocket for accessing Earth orbit and sometimes beyond. Getting a rocket that wasn't designed for it to land the booster is an amazing accomplishment.
But Starship is questionable. It's supposed to be big and cheap. It sure is big. Choosing a direct path to upper stage reusability is risky. The risk is compounded by the fact that starship isn't leaving Earth or orbit without refueling. And the refueling job is massive. If any of: payload, reusability, launch cadence, in orbit refueling, fall short, none of it works except being a ridiculously large rocket for earth orbit missions.
They haven't said it explicitly. But the reason that Waymo can add five cities this year is very likely they are at least at break even on opex. They likely reached that point sometime last year and it seems to have held up.
So I wouldn't call robotaxi service unproven. But I would call the idea that you can claim to be running a robo taxi service without depots, cleaners, CSRs, and remote monitoring that can handle difficult situations in a more sophisticated way than each car having a human monitor it, naïve.
This seems to be a major strategic decision of Alphabet pretty much across the board. I have only recently noticed the stark contrast to the constant hype trope you see in their competitors.
I read that as meaning even the scaled robotaxi service (Waymo) does not throw off enough cash to offset the loss of Tesla's vehicle sales unit. (The putative Tesla buyer they are dissuading from purchase would have to take a whole lot of robotaxi trips to generate the same amount of profit for Tesla. Assuming Tesla can get robotaxis working.)
In the 2000s publishing pivot to the Internet, this was known as "trading physical dollars for digital pennies."
Vehicle design also plays a role: passenger cars have to meet pedestrian collision standards. Trucks don't. The silly butch grilles on SUVs and pickups are deadly. This is more of an argument for not seeing transportation as a fashion or lifestyle statement. Those truck designs are about vanity and gender affirming care. It's easier to make rational choices when it's a business that's worried about liability making those choices.
Waymo is different. Waymo evolved over a period of 15 years into a mature and deployable robotaxi service. Waymo has a hardware strategy, enormous data infrastructure, real time data from 2 billion Maps and Navigation users, a support infrastructure that makes opex sense, which makes an ambitious expansion program possible. In other words it's got what it takes to be a real product and it is a real product. Possibly uniquely since the three Chinese Robo taxi services operates smaller fleets. Probably due to support requirements and a large number of interventions.
If I understand Salt Typhoon correctly it's a masterpiece. The descriptions I've seen indicate that they penetrated lawful intercept. Lawful intercept operates outside network operators network management systems because it was designed not to trust the network operators. I am skeptical of claims that Salt Typhoon has been eliminated from US networks. Any such implicitly claim to detect lawful intercept traffic and ensure it isn't nefarious, which traffic that system is designed to hide.
Flying out of HK after visiting SZ, I was quietly and quickly surrounded by men with guns after my bag was xrayed. I like nice clothes, especially neatly laundered and pressed shirts. I had an Altoids tin with a few brass collar stays for those shirts. Brass. With a pointy end.
When I was kid long before TSA was even a thing my family flew up to visit the grandparents. My mom had us pack our own bags with some of our favorite toys. My brother decided to bring his Megatron, but sadly left it out of Robot mode. It was quite a scene at the X-Ray when every single agent in the area came running with guns drawn at once.
If you have access to nitric acid you don't need any obscure lore. 3 ounces of a simple concoction a high school chemistry student could make is enough to blow a hole in an airplane. You also stand a good chance of blowing yourself up on the way to the airport.
I've seen a few drug-addled people. None of them thought ending apartheid was a bad idea. Even back when it was a new idea. But in 2026? Who the hell would think that and then say it out loud?
The typical mature technology company in the US earns half their revenue from outside the US. Makes it harder to understand even tacitly supporting white supremacy and ignorant isolationism.
A core tenet of the "dark enlightenment" mind-virus that has taken hold of the valley is the idea that civilizational decline/collapse is not only inevitable but imminent, so they don't really mind getting a bigger slice of a smaller cake, as long as they are in charge[1].
However, they also are getting citizenships from other countries or buying pacific island bunkers: just in case.
1. The collapse inevitabilitism absolves them of any guilt when their actions make the world worse, since "it was going to happen anyway"
It's also pervasive. The weirdest thing in the world is watching someone I know who works for a big tech company and moved to the States suddenly wanting to get a New Zealand citizenship "just in case".
They supported it because they saw an opportunity to remove limitations on them, both domestically (see FCC, restrictions on state level AI laws, etc) as well as internationally (regulations, digital taxes, etc in the EU and Canada, for example).
I don't think accelerationists would mind - even if they believe that what's happening is wrong, going further in is the backbone of the whole ideology, so why would they be having second thoughts?
I think the real group behind this is people who are capable of sensing that this is wrong at least on some deeper level, but who are so complacent that they just want not to think about it too much. Maybe it's because they're in too deep, maybe they make too much money off of it to care, maybe their heels are too dug in on social issues for them to ever try to reconsider. Possibly a combination of any of the three.
Every thread about US politics has this comment, and the same response: this is not the right outlet, and some people feel like this content does not fit the topic of the website.
If you are not American, it’s rather tiring to have every website and news outlet talk about it ad nauseum, and have it take over every subreddit and conversation. Americans get all uppity when you tell them that you don’t want that, as if their news are so important that they transcend categorisation.
I care. It’s important. It’s just not the right website.
You will be affected by the (hypothetical) fall of American hegemony, whether it’s increased aggression in spheres of influence (Russia, China, India), market failures, or even a fracturing or collapse of digital services (Azure, AWS).
I don’t understand the insistence that this isn’t on topic. Hard not to paint it as anything but willfully ignorant.
I'm not ignorant. I just don't want it in my morning cereal when it's also everywhere else.
Awareness of your country's politics definitely isn't the issue here. I am keenly aware of the US presidents' threats to invade my country.
The issue is the insistence that it has to be discussed in every community, all the time, and that the importance transcends categorisation. Every website just becomes another dumping ground for US politics, and when you bring that up, Americans get indignant.
It's Hacker News. I am here for news for hackers. The guidelines are pretty explicit: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic".
Okay so you didn’t really argue against it being on-topic, just that it bothers you / puts you in a bad mood.
IMO it sounds like you’d be better off reading Linux mailing lists and open source READMEs if you want to avoid politics. Just so happens that right now politics is uncomfortable, but it wasn’t 10 years ago when the interest rate was effectively 0% and the US gov and SV had still some semblance of separation.
To be fair, “guidelines” and “rules” are two different things. There’s no strict prohibition on politics in the guidelines. If you read the whole thing in context, it’s trying to discourage topics that are mundane, frivolous, or vacuous — not to prohibit all politics.
“MOST stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.”
One can see flagged stories and the vast majority including the flagged aren't political in nature. Yet people like yourself single out the minority that are, regardless of how civil the discussion is, and flag them anyway.
So the visibility of these stories isn't the issue, and the quality of discussion isn't the issue, since neither matter.
I wonder what is it that people actually object to?
Guidelines are for comments and post. If I don't comment nor post it's not my job to care about that. If it drains all the curiosity off the site (which I doubt), then I migrate.
I'll make sire not to male the park dirty and maybe pick up a litter or two. But I'm not a ranger.
Yes, the internet is a loud place. Adding to the noise never helps. People who really care about this should male a quieter space for themselves, or start really pushing on mods and admins. Arguing among the rabble is the slowest method to achieve change.
Despite the name, this isn't a community for only "hacker" articles. It's overall to promote curiosity and engage those curiosities. There is no hard "no politics" policy here. The spirit of the rule is to not turn this into a 24 hour real time report of the state of the world.
But this article isnt that. If you don't find any of the last years of happening this year curious at the bare minimum, I wonder how deeply aware someone really is of it.
>If you are not American, it’s rather tiring to have every website and news outlet talk about it ad nauseum
I'm sure greenland sees it as tiring too. But of there wasn't such a huge pushback, "tiring" would be the least of their concerns. Why can't we then have a deeper discussion after that to analyze how it came to this (and how to prevent it)? We sure can't have that discussion on Twitter.
Also, I'm pretty fundamentalist when it comes to posting on social media: if I don't like it, I don't click in. If I clicked into every AI buzzword post, I'd go insane. But others want it, who am I To judge? Certainly not a moderator. If you want me to moderate, we can discuss pay.
But Starship is questionable. It's supposed to be big and cheap. It sure is big. Choosing a direct path to upper stage reusability is risky. The risk is compounded by the fact that starship isn't leaving Earth or orbit without refueling. And the refueling job is massive. If any of: payload, reusability, launch cadence, in orbit refueling, fall short, none of it works except being a ridiculously large rocket for earth orbit missions.
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