So has he been right often enough to do well for himself? Clearly, yes. But that does not mean he has an infallible sense of where the world is headed.
Outside of the coding world, AI adoption seems to be functionally complete. When it came out, literally years ago now, people explored it, defined where it would be useful, implemented it, and moved on with their lives. They have what they want from it, and are creeped out by the idea of taking it farther.
It is only in the coding/tech silos where people are still pushing to take it farther and farther. I simply don't see the market desire for it in other areas of life.
I wish they had said more about the technical architecture because I am not understanding what it is about their architecture that requires that much power for a dev instance. For production, sure, absolutely, gotta have resources to scale. But for dev? Is there truly no scaled-down config that can run on a local system? Nor a way to load only a slice of the product, not the full architecture?
Even back 8-10 years ago when having gobs of microservices each in their own container was the rage, every place I worked had various ways to run specific services locally, while leaving the rest in the cloud. Or is that exactly what they have now done?
Either way, the lack of technical info makes it difficult to tell how interesting this really is.
"Running specific services locally while leaving the rest in the cloud" is exactly it, but it's not as simple as you make it sound. At monday's scale you have large DB state and too many microservices to run any meaningful subset locally, and replicating the environment per-dev in the cloud is what the post describes them moving away from (long setup, high cloud cost).
That leaves running local services against a shared cloud environment, which at this scale needs:
- Features like traffic filtering, DB branching, queue splitting, so many devs can share the same environment without stepping on each other
Are you saying that you are using LLMs to give yourself a filtered UX on the people and topics you want to respond to, but then still doing your own comments and voting independently from LLMs?
If so, that seems fine. There are plenty of alternative UX tools to get to HN info in different ways. You made another one for yourself, which is A-OK.
But if you are using LLMs to draft comments for you or tell you what you should be up/down voting, that would cross a bad line.
I guess that depends on how old you are. The internet itself is a strong contender for being a bigger innovation. And the web. The personal computer. Smart phones, and even cell phones in general. Oh, I almost forgot GPS. And that is all just in the arena of personal computing/devices. Get outside of tech and bring in science, and we're in a completely different world.
I mean, yes, LLMs are an innovation. But outside of the tech industry, they are not having anywhere near the impact on people's lives as many other inventions.
Yet. The Internet was not impactful for the average person for many years. It took a long time for even half the population to get Internet access, and it took a long time for the Web to be developed
This is missing the non-exiting, but completely viable path:
Accept it. Do your work. Collect your paycheck. Go home and live your life. Save and invest. Build wealth from your 20s through your 40s, still be wealthy and independent in your 50s.
The idea that "a plateau is a bad thing" is rooted in ambition for its own sake. Not everyone needs that to be happy and satisfied with their life. No shade intended if you are one of the people who do want more, but for those of us who don't, acceptance of our reality is a really solid response to a plateau.
I feel seen. What happened to contentedness as a life goal? I feel as though I'm treated like a bafoon for not wanting to be a billionaire at the expense of my enjoyment, my pride and common decency. I have never been able to separate ambition from greed.
IPOs solve two problems: They help the investors/owners increase their personal wealth, and they give the companies a large inflow of both cash and and new structure for their stock. The question becomes what are the companies going to do with their new pile of resources? Cash can be put into operations, growth, research etc. Stock can be used as leverage for M&A activities. It changes the runway, the options for compensation and incentives to the staff, and the options for large expensive projects.
Whether or not this is the peak depends entirely on what they do after the IPO. If they just use their money as an extended runway to keep doing the same stuff they are doing today, they will probably sink. If they use it to take their research and products to new heights, they will probably rise. And if they do M&A and scoop up a lot of small companies, then it depends on how good they are at integrating acquisitions. There is also the question of "Is money a bottleneck for innovation and growth?" If money is not the bottleneck, then the IPO becomes far more about the investors cashing out than the company being empowered by new capital.
So "is the peak?" is going to be answered by a more strategic question of "Does the leadership of this company have the skills to effectively use the incoming resources?"
To bounce a draft of something off an LLM and get a critique? Frequently. But I include in my prompt to never re-write or suggest improvements, and to solely offer critique. I do my own fixes.
Compared to what? US average fatal accident rate for construction is 9.2 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers per year. In oil and gas extraction it's 13.8. In agriculture it's 20.9. In manufacturing it's 2.4. What's Starbase's rate?
Fatality rate is hard to compare because of the low divisor problem.
Injury rate is 4.27 per 100. Which is under half the average value for active construction sites and 3x the average value for aerospace manufacturing facilities. Choose your comparator based on whether you want to praise or bash SpaceX.
Remember, this is reportable injuries. not LTIs, not fatalities.
As an aside, as someone who works on major engineering construction projects, 4.27 per 100 people is huge. I'm used to sub-1.0, and something like 4.x would be stop-the-project-safety-intervention significant.
Yes. Starbase is an active construction site right now, so that's why I chose that as a point of comparison. But obviously there's also a lot of aerospace manufacturing happening at the same time, so it makes sense the number would be somewhere between those two industries.
Those are very, very high numbers, no? I think France is one of the worst offender in the western world (or at least worst in Europe by far) and we have slightly inferior rates (3 times the eurozone average), and it's a big issue. Not politically, almost no one cares about blue collar workers, especially not the current government, but in companies (at least in mine), reducing death became a focus point for three years.
I'm surprised mining is so low. As an outsider, it seems like similar work to construction but with the danger turned up to 11. I can think of multiple potential explanations, but I have no intuitive sense of which, if any, is likely right.
I work in mining and mining-adjacent. Safety is taken seriously and process is rigorous. lock-out-tag-out, etc. is all huge in it.
These metrics are reported on both internally and externally and make up major components of incentive payments. I'm completely used to management having 70+% of the incentive being tied to company performance, which is in turn strongly influenced by safety performance metrics.
I'm used to targets well under sub-1.0 TRIR at class 1 operators. Something like 4 would pause the project.
That article's lede says that Starbase is more dangerous than other SpaceX facilities, not that SpaceX is dangerous per se? Also there's a sample size problem with numbers like that. Is SpaceX more dangerous than heavy industry in general, or some more related subset like aviation manufacturing?
As to your second line, I submit that commenting on HN that "Starbase is notorious for high accident rates" carries with it an implicit offer to provide said notes and not just punt to Google when challenged.
Alternatively, here's some of the big players in various engineering, construction, mining, etc. heavy industries, taken directly from their websites/sustainability reports:
What a inane comment. They gave you a link that literally spoonfeeds the data and you complain because you can not be bothered to read until what is literally the second sentence in the article before accusing them of making statements in bad faith without supporting data.
> Starbase, a sprawling launch-and-manufacturing site that recently incorporated as its own Texas city, logged injury rates that were almost 6x higher than the average for comparable space vehicle-manufacturing outfits and nearly 3x higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024, according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data released in May.
Literally the second sentence which answers all of the questions you just posed and invalidates your accusations in the second paragraph. Geez.
So has he been right often enough to do well for himself? Clearly, yes. But that does not mean he has an infallible sense of where the world is headed.
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