That's a yes and no. Venture funded companies like Anthropic have a history of low follow through with peripheral projects (like Bun is for them). Of course they do - their responsibility is ultimately primarily to their investors - not to Bun. So the risk now is that Anthropic will can Bun whenever they just lose interest or feel it's just a drain that's not contributing directly to their bottom line.
Node.js itself did have trouble finding a corporate home that was interested in providing good support for the project, and that's how we got the oi.js fork of Node, which luckily led to Node being transitioned to a foundation and the projects merged. This whole history is what made me so surprised that Ryan of all people would attempt another js runtime (Deno) project as a corporate project.
And it's the reason I'm staying away from both Bun and Node. I can't afford platform risk like this. I need my startup to be built on a project that has a more reliable future trajectory, which is what you get with a proper open source project (emphasis on project) that you get with Node. Node is stable and still getting features, but most importantly it's not going away.
The existence of starlink proves that this is false. Look at most current pitches, they don’t talk about GW-class monsters anymore. There’s absolutely nothing stopping a 20-30kW satellite bus the size of starlink (or I guess up to 100kW? once starship is available - it’s all about payload fairing diameter) from hosting ~1 rack of compute and antennas. The economics may or may not make sense, we’ll have to see.
There’s very little research work needed to make this happen; it’s all about engineering some satellite buses and having them fly in close formation to get a “data center”. And this group of satellites in sun-synchronous orbit would relay to a comms constellation e.g. starlink itself) and operate as a global scale data center. The heat management and orbital mechanics are all straight forward really.
I've heard this before. A datacenter and a starlink sattelite are not in the same ballpark of power usage and heat dissipation needs. The are orders of magnitude off from each other.
The point is that you don’t need to put a whole datacenter into a single satellite. You can put a single rack per satellite and have different racks communicate via antennas, laser links, or perhaps even wires since they’ll be launched in groups of 10-50 anyway. You could also dock them to each other, but that’s not necessarily needed.
I don't understand what makes these "datacenters" if they're distributed across satellites with WAN-esque interconnect.
Are we overloading the term "datacenter"? Or is it not overloaded but somehow able to achieve datacenter-like speeds / (tail) latency even when distributed across satellites?
It's worth noting that GPUs have a much higher failure rate than traditional CPUs. Over 10x the failure rate due thermal stress. The amount of heat generated is very different. You can't really replace a GPU in a satellite (at least today?) which would place most of these satellites as space debris in a ~5 year horizon.
The current bottleneck is silicon. Every chip that is manufactured gets housed and powered. (It makes sense: the cost of compute is dominated by capex, the power costs are irrelevant, so they're ok paying a premium for power).
The space data center hypothesis relies on compute supply growing faster than power supply. (Both are bottlenecked on parts of the supply chain that will take ages to scale.)
Even if you believe that's the case, the point at which orbital data centers start making sense is incredibly sensitive to the exact growth rates.
The current bottleneck is not silicon. There is plenty of silicon locked up in previous gen GPUs that are no longer efficient enough to run relative to newer models. The bottleneck is the economics of owning the older GPU models - which is why all the GPU neoclouds are gonna go bust unless they can get customers to continue renting old GPUs.
The economics are vastly different when opex is near zero for these things
H100 rental prices are still as high as when the cards were brand new. The prices vastly exceed the power costs.
In a world where power or DC permits are the current bottleneck those H100s would be getting retired in favor of Blackwells. But they aren't. They are instead being locked in for years long contracts.
Because you'd need to trash the old GPUs in order to make room for new GPUs. Right now new GPUs get online mostly in new DCs. TSMC fab capacity is much more limiting than DC building and it will likely keep being the case. It's much easier to build a DC than a fab.
If silicon were relatively abundant and power/DC space scarce, you'd get an order of magnitude more bang for the Watt by replacing the H100s with newer GPUs.
But nobody is doing that. Blackwells are being installed as additional capacity, not Hopper replacements.
So it is pretty clear that silicon is the primary bottleneck.
"Space datacenter" -> overpriced starlink with some shitty edge compute -> "look guys, we built a space datacenter; earnings results to follow" -> number go up.
Pretty much everything has been "very dumb because of economics, logistics, serviceability and more". What kind of hacker are you to be on this site lol
SpaceX have presented on this and it's fairly straightforward and they already do it with starlink satellites, just at a larger scale. Sound like you are the uniformed one (or an EDS victim)
Starlink satellites don't generate the sort of heat a datacenter full of GPUs does. The ISS has enormous radiators, and it's only in space because it's a space station. Putting datacenters there is just goofy given the amount of available space on the ground.
All of that has been repeatedly addressed in anything that discusses it, if you care to try to understand. It has ~nothing to do with available space, the US grid can’t handle the current rate of expansion. It’s bad enough that apparently Span, the smart electrical panel company, is pitching a box full of Blackwells that’ll sit outside new construction homes and use all the headroom on residential 200A circuits. Space is starting to look reasonable.
Related, US readers should call their reps and ask them to support a successor to EPRA, the Energy Permitting Reform Act, the vast majority of the generation that’s waiting for approval is from clean energy sources. It nearly got over the line before the last Congress ended, and it’s one of the most impactful things we can do to combat climate change, combined with electrifying various carbon intensive activities.
Not quite, I'm rooting for the solar/battery microgrids down here, one of the startups I've invested in is working on those, but you don't really even need batteries for panels in a dawn-dusk sun synchronous orbit, which is a pretty huge advantage. Also, there aren't weeks where you have 1/4 the output because it's just cloudy all week, and your output isn't crushed during winter.
And the hardest part of my home solar install, by far, was the counterparties (inspectors, power company, and subcontractors). My understanding is that it's much worse when you're trying to get a grid scale install online, the interconnection queue is currently years long. This avoids most counterparties except the ones they're already routinely dealing with.
I've heard this before and these are not comparable at all. Starlink is missing a few digits in it's power usage and heat dissipation needs compared to a datacenter.
Scott Manley, I’d say one of the top pop space youtubers say otherwise. If anything it’s easier in space. On earth most complexity in datacenter is cooling. In space you just radiate it away.
And SpaceX already proven they can launch sort of datacenters 10k times by launching Starlink (up to 20KW of solar each IIRC).
FWIW Musk should support Bernie Sanders more. Putting moratoriums on datacenters would make space based ones far more economical.
He just mentions and walks through idea of having some amount of compute up there and what the heat rejection calculations roughly look like. He doesn't actually explore the economics of doing such a thing or discuss if it's actually worth doing.
It's not that you can't put a server in space, but the costs to do it almost assuredly don't make any sense. Because, if you can do it in space you can do it easier on the ground and save yourself millions in launch cost and extra complexity. Your cooling challenges are way cheaper and simpler in an atmosphere.
There's nothing much being in space really gets you, other than it makes it harder for a government to take your computers away. Not impossible, just harder.
Especially with everyone clamoring to have datacenters built in their backyards. There's absolutely no way there can be an advantage to figuring out compute outside Earth's magnetosphere, especially since none of the engineers as SpaceX would ever think of any long-term benefits of that.
It also has a DNF. So it has a high ceiling but also unfortunately a low floor. So using Kimi means accepting high variability of the output.
Personally what I've found that has made coding agents more and more useful over the last year is that they have gotten a higher and higher floor, not that they have gotten a higher and higher ceiling. They were already plenty smart a year ago, it was just that they failed so often and so spectacularly that it made them a liability. Now they have become much more reliable, which is the key thing that has transitioned them into being actually useful. For the most part I don't use them to work on really intellectually difficult tasks. I mostly use them to work on very boring and labor intensive tasks. Most commercial software development work is just boring drudgery like this. Certainly the bulk of what I need them for is. I need them to just not crap their pants all the time while they're at it.
So I'm kinda wary seeing the poor reliability of Kimi.
I'm as happy to see cheap open weight models any anyone is, and I'm in Europe and certainly not cheering the US on, but that's a bunch of unfounded hyperbole you just said.
>> DeepSeek and other Chinese model makers are massively accelerating progress in AI... They're the only ones who still come up with real technical innovations.
> that's a bunch of unfounded hyperbole you just said.
Calling the quote on top "unfounded hyperbole" betrays lack of knowledge and awareness about the subject. Keep in mind that when we talk about real technical innovations, we have in mind published research - not closed or hidden models, some of which we know only from hype but cannot even test. A cursory look at said research reveals more Chinese names than I can count.
Deepseek did introduce real technical innovations, they're in their papers, and there was plenty of talk about another "Sputnik moment" when their first model appeared. If you don't know what that means - it's the moment when the industry mobilizes to "accelerate progress" due to the unexpected appearance of strong competition.
There's a lot more to be said, but it wouldn't do much good to a person who's not following the trends.
You should read the research papers that come out with Deepseek releases. There is a reason why the first Deepseek release briefly caused existential panic.
I did not and am not inclined to invest the time to do so.
But I did read some second hand reports that what was new and exciting was that they found some really good performance optimizations. The thing about deekseek publishing this is that now everyone has this.
from the "DeepSeek is a ploy to undermine usamerican models' duopoly" theory's perspective, "now everyone has this" helps them achieve this goal more efficiently.
especially if it's something that the major companies had already stumbled upon (something equivalent to) and regarded as a trade secret.
The dissolvable tablets completely fix a runny nose for me. Much better than any nose spray, which tend to irritate the nose and lead to chronic runny nose if taken for too long.
Codex is not a replacement for an IDE. Yes I still need an IDE.
When coding agents work they're great. When they don't I still need the IDE. They usually don't work that great when I'm working on something novel or brownfield. Which happens quite regularly.
But I definitely still want ai autocomplete. I'm not a Vim user. Coding isn't about typing for me, it's about solving problems. So a tool that does lots of the typing for me is a godsend.
So do I go for VS Code + Copilot? Because it was bad when I tried it again for a few days in November. Slow to respond and gave poor results. Cursor is snappy and gives useful results most of the time.
How's the ai autocomplete? It was unusable in November when I tried it last and went back to Cursor. Slow and when it finally did something it was just not good. Cursor is super fast and actually gives useful results. I just don't want to give my money to Elon, so I might cancel anyways.
Seriously this is such a common response and it is such an annoying response. Yes I need an IDE. Yes I still find ai autocomplete to be useful. That's why I asked about alternatives for Cursor autocomplete.
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