There's been a lot of discussion on the Interwebs about whether SpaceX's AI satellites are a) viable in an engineering sense, and b) economical. This project does not attempt to answer b) at all, but does try to have a basic look at a): given the FCC filing of where the satellites will be orbiting, what kind of impact will the cosmic environment there have on the specific compute tasks we expect them to be performing (namely, transformer inference)?
Full disclosure: the project was my idea, and I wrote the basic initial design draft, but Claude did all the rest. I definitely learned some things though. Feedback would be very welcome, in particular ideas about what the "software architecture mitigations" SpaceX might try.
You nailed it - in fact, most of Anthropic's early revenue came from Cursor - much of claude code programming components is essentially a feature copy of Cursor, so it makes sense they are similar.
Cursor does have it's own model - it's a heavily reworked version of KimiK2, called "composer" - that I use a lot of the time when I have fairly straightforward tasks that don't require a lot of exploration or independent thought. Lot cheaper - the Input/CacheWrite/CacheRead/Output costs of Opus 4.8 are $5/$6.25/$0.5/$25 per mm tokens, vs $0.5/-/$0.2/$2.5.
Please don't move the goalposts. What computer parts does ASML or NXP make?
ASML only makes the lithography machines, 85% of which go outside the EU (let that sink in). And then fabs in Taiwan, Korea or the US use those ASML machines to etch US IP for computer chips. EU doesn't make any computer parts domestically.
And NXP mostly makes various microcontrollers and small chips, not high margin IP decenter centric parts like ASICS, FPGAs, CPUs or GPUs.
So not only are you the ignorant one here, but you also have the audacity to insult others with so much confidence.
@dwa3592 below. Firstly, why are you moving the goalposts in bad faith again just to stir an argument? What does that have to do with my original comment?
And secondly, there's other lithography machines out there, not just ASML.
And thirdly, the IP Nvidia, AMD, etc develop to etch on silicone via ASML machines makes them more valuable than ASML.
Fourthly, repeating my "let that sink in" phrase is just childish and low-IQ trolling, unworthy of this platform.
Europe is currently hosed because we made the mistake of trying to develop economies complementary to the US and china.
That was a big strategic mistake. In the US case it was borne of the mistaken belief that we shared values and were partners.
But don’t mistake the situation for lack of innovation of capability. Europe is currently adapting, but I think the success of Ukraine is one reason to be optimistic that current adversity might actually leave us better off in the long run.
Corrupt countries with broken legal systems tend not to fare that well in the longer run.
>Europe is currently hosed because we made the mistake of trying to develop economies complementary to the US and china.
NO, it's hosed because it's not competitive and slept on the wheel at several key digital economical revolutions plus sleeping at the wheel at preventing obvious geopolitical issues (gas dependence to Russia, losing auto industry to China, losing semiconductor industry, losing SW industry, etc).
You can't be an economic leader if you keep losing on all fronts and only be a leader at how much welfare your spending.
> the mistaken belief we shared values and were partners.
We do share. US and a lot of latin america is mostly European immigrants and European culture, making our cultures are much more similar than the african and middle eastern ones the EU has been importing and adopting. Where we differ is that US still has free speech and isn't devolving into a stasi police state that arrests people for Tweets that the political establishment find uncomfortable.
> might actually leave us better off in the long run.
How? EU's economy has been pretty much stagnant since 2019 when you account for inflation loss.
> But don’t mistake the situation for lack of innovation of capability. Europe is currently adapting,
How? Where is Europe's Nvidia and AMD? Where is Europe's TSMC? ASML can't feed an entire continent.
Woah! only lithography machines???? it is literally impossible to make any device capable of running anything close to AI without ASML. Let that sink in.
Funnily ASML owes its current success partly to US funded research (straight from Wikipedia):
> Two years later, it joined a consortium, which included Intel and two other U.S. chipmakers, in order to exploit fundamental research conducted by the US Department of Energy. Because the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) it operates under is funded by the US government, licensing must be approved by Congress.[12]
Why are you acting childish and petty? I said EU hasn't got AI compute manufacturing(aka no equivalent IP to Nvidia and AMD and no equivalent to TSMC or Samsung fabs), not that it doesn't have lithography machines manufacturing.
Surely you understand that while you can have the latter, you can also lack the former.
ASM (International) makes machines that add material to a silicon wafer (deposition).
ASML makes machines that remove material from said wafers (lithography, etching)
(I was a bit surprised that's not combined in 1 machine. But let's move on)
Then Besi makes machines to stack / interconnect / package those ICs into a package. I'm assuming pick & place machines are other companies' turf.
The above are all Dutch companies, operating a pretty important section of the tech stack.
Iirc there were (& probably still are) some IC fabs in Europe, but mostly older nodes (like useful for microcontrollers used by car manufacturers. Wikipedia has a list). So for SOTA smartphone SoCs it's off to Taiwan (TSMC), South Korea (Samsung) or China (who makes everything, including smartphones & the chips going in there).
So as far as EU goes, the capabilities are mostly there. Skilled workforce? Check. Money? This is a rich continent.
What's missing is the guts to say "hey, let's dump €100B into this & make ourselves some laptop & server CPUs!".
But now the important thing: several of such initiatives are starting to bear fruit, and b) confidence that EU can do such things, is growing.
As for bureaucracy / red tape... sigh... (won't be fixed any time soon)
Yes, all true, and all things I didn't disagree with because I wasn't talking about that.
The point I was talking about you only addressed to some extent in a line below that:
>What's missing is the guts to say "hey, let's dump €100B into this & make ourselves some laptop & server CPUs!".
Yeah exactly, the EU doesn't have computer manufacturing capabilities (just like I said 5 layers up) and it never will because it doesn't invest and also doesn't attract investors to invest.
>So as far as EU goes, the capabilities are mostly there. Skilled workforce? Check.
No they're not. We don't have the skilled workers for that. Nobody in EU knows how to design Nvidia and AMD level GPUs and Altera and Xilinx levels of FPGAs that power AI datacenters. Nobody in EU knows how to make competitive 2nm fabs, otherwise EU fabs would have already bought ASML EUV machines and updated their ancient processes to the highly more profitable nodes instead of being stuck making cheap legacy nodes for cars and white goods. Those old nodes are still important to have to an extent, but ask yourself, would you rather sell a die for 10k a pop or sell 1000 dies for 10 cents a pop? Would you rather make more money or less money?
> Money? This is a rich continent.
Money is meaningless if you're not using it right. China is pushing to beat the EU and they have less money than the EU.
Most important machine ... built on US IP, subject to US export restrictions, used to manufacture high value US IP, in factories outside the EU, so profits of those chips goes to US. A point I have addressed over two times already.
Also ASML even threatened to leave the NL if the Dutch government doesn't do what they want on taxes and labor policies. So having only a single card to play that EU can loose at any time, it's not putting EU tech sovereignty argument in a good light.
The "wahabout ASML" that keeps being spammed by people here, isn't proof of EU compute and AI sovereignty. It's the exception which is why it's the only thing people can mention on EU tech and they DDoS you with it as if that changes anything.
Are people here that petty that they can't stay on topic and argue in good faith and instead need to hijack your argument to go on offtopic whataboutism for a cheap gotcha spamming "whatabout ASML" on unrelated arguments?
The policy decision to silently nerf AI/ML code produced by Fable surely wasn't just something "accidentally imported via a bad hire"? It seems to me like Anthropic wants to control who can develop frontier AI models. Maybe from inside Anthropic that seems like a noble mission, but from the outside it seems like downright shady anti-competitive behavior.
I saw in latest news the decision has been partially reversed -- because of external pressure...
My point was that Anthropic has tended to make atypical decisions vs. its peers, not that they're always the right decisions. The direction of those decisions has tended towards assuming exponential growth of AI will continue and a certain flavor of AI safety.
This decision does seem in line with what I would expect from Anthropic, so I don't see it as a sign of changing values – even if I personally disagree.
Could this be legally construed as anti-competitive behavior?
Edit: I asked Claude. It replied:
> Consumer protection / deceptive practices. In the EU this would be a clear UCPD (Unfair Commercial Practices Directive) issue and potentially a DSA violation. In the US, FTC Act §5 prohibits "unfair or deceptive acts." Selling a product that secretly performs worse than advertised for a commercially self-serving reason, without disclosure, is textbook deception. The Samsung/Apple battery throttling cases are instructive here: Apple faced regulatory action across multiple jurisdictions specifically because users weren't told.
> Competition law. This is where "anti-competitive" gets complicated. Refusing to help competitors build competing products via your ToS is generally legal — you can decide who you license to. But covertly sabotaging output quality for a class of users while charging them full price crosses into different territory. Under EU competition law (Article 102 TFEU), if a company with dominant market position uses covert technical means to disadvantage competitors, that's closer to abusive conduct than a legitimate ToS restriction.
I think either you've prompted Claude misleadingly, or it's interpreting the law unnecessarily prissily (which is a failure mode I've noticed LLMs falling into).
This clearly is disclosed, otherwise how did we get to know about it?
What's not clearly disclosed is when you are being limited and what the bounds are. If you are developing ML kernels for a computational photography use case will the safe guards miss-fire and sabotage or slow down your efforts? What about distributed GPU interconnect work for a nation super computer lab used in weather simulation?
The reason they are doing this shadow ban style technique, is they don't want users to figure out how to jail break their way out. Or the explicit direct bad PR of when it miss-fires.
"Shadow ban"-like mechanic in contractual relationships is generally against the law.
You either refuse to work with customer or do your job well (at least as well as other tasks of other customers). "I'll accept your task, but silently and intentionally do my job badly" may violate some laws.
I made a timesheet entry, invoicing, and basic bookkeeping system for my freelance business. It works pretty well, I used "spec driven development" with Codex and it one-shot the entire application except for the PDF invoice layout which needed iteration.
"It seeks revenge on humanity for its own creation."
This is brilliant as it reminded me of a famous hitchikers quote:
"In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
— From The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Book 2)"
Full disclosure: the project was my idea, and I wrote the basic initial design draft, but Claude did all the rest. I definitely learned some things though. Feedback would be very welcome, in particular ideas about what the "software architecture mitigations" SpaceX might try.
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