Switzerland has the system closest to the US in my experience, but with universal coverage.
As individual, you buy basic insurance costing roughly $500/month with a $2500 yearly deductible (LAMal/KVG). Applicants must be accepted even with pre-existing conditions. Post-deductible, you pay 10% co-insurance capped at roughly $800/year (no medical bankruptcy). Insurers operate basic plans as non-profit. They make their profit on optional supplemental insurance (private hospital rooms, extra benefits...) The state subsidizes basic premiums for low-income individuals. A doctor's visit is a $150 minimum, similar to the US.
What was most surprising compared to here in the US is employers pay $0 toward premiums. Funding is entirely decoupled from employment. You don't lose coverage or change plans when changing jobs.
On the negative, basic insurance does not have dental, so dental stuff is out-of-pocket and expensive.
In terms of stats, the US spends 18% of GDP on healthcare vs. 12% for Switzerland and the gain is lower stress too. Not perfect but maybe the best of both worlds.
Yup. Premiums change depending on the deductible you choose[1] and your age.
[1]: If you have the CHF2500/year deductible, premiums are cheaper but you have to pay that amount out of picket before the insurance company reimburses your expenses
Isn't this how socialized healthcare works in every country? Whether they realize it or not the principle is generally the same, an amount (usually bundled under "social contributions") goes from people's gross salary to pay for the health insurance.
Thats too much trouble.
In India, there is a new scheme of "ayushman bharat"
500K inr which is quite a lot of money, per family.
No co-pay, you show the card in supported hospitals or government hospitals and you are in.
There are "problems" but overall it has had a net benefit with poor people who could not afford medical treatment just get it.
If you are having an emergency, they just do whatever is needed and you are golden.
I know hundreds of people in my neighbourhood who have had surgeries done on "card" and most could not otherwise afford it.
What I've read about government hospitals in India is that they're extremely overcrowded, with people crowding the hallways and waiting rooms to be seen while bleeding out or dying from illness, without even air conditioning in a lot of places. On the other hand, this was reported by a young Indian doctor that wanted to get to the UK ASAP, so not sure how representative his accounts are.
>A doctor's visit is a $150 minimum, similar to the US.
It's $20 to go to the doctor on similar priced insurance in the US.
Your $500/month is just a tax for healthcare. Your only advantage over the US is that it's not tied to employment. Ours is both a tax and a cudgel to force people to work.
We have the worst of all worlds because ours is a tax and a cudgel, but then we also have to pay tax to the state to fund the healthcare for others who can't or won't work. I wouldn't call yours the best of both worlds. It sounds like you're getting fleeced to a lesser extent, but still not great.
I thought you were going to say out of pocket costs are much much higher than that.
I’ll be lucky if I get a specialist for under 500 until I meet deductible of 3k+ for a family of 3. One emergency room visit and we reach it in one or two days.
If Anthropic announced AGI tomorrow, how much better would that model be than Fable 5? It's looking like the road to AGI is gradual and moat-less. Models seem capable of improving other models, and even without illegal distillations many are nipping at the heels of Anthropic.
Yeah, I think we're learning that we overestimated the relevance of recursive self-improvement in a singularity/intelligence takeoff scenario. We thought that once an AI could start improving itself, it would cause an exponential, self-reinforcing intelligence explosion.
Turns out that scaling up compute is much more important and also limits the upper end of intelligence.
The bigger mistake is assuming it would be better at everything all at once.
Suppose it can do 80% of what the 20th percentile human can do. That's a huge advance and very useful, but it means there are still things it's not very good at. If any of those things is (or becomes) a bottleneck, you're not getting the hockey stick graph.
I'm currently writing a blog post about data centres in orbit, and my current conclusion is that even though they can build one, they definitely can't put 1 million up there and would have better things to do if they could.
AGI? Too loosely defined. They lack a lot of competences which humans recognise when we see them but find it hard to put into words; on the other hand what they can do they already do faster than any human (and have greater breadth than any single human, but this usually doesn't matter because "coder" and "economist" and "translator" gets solved in human teams by hiring three people).
I do not think current ML has the tools to solve for quality. But we know it's possible for a really mediocre intelligence to make human level intelligence, because evolution made us, so for me the question of AGI is more a practical one: is it affordable?
(I also think not at the present time, but that's an "I think" not "I am analyzing it carefully").
Maybe you missed the part where starlink / orbiting datacenters don't really have to even make money as long as they partially fund rocket launch tests.
Or maybe you don't take Elon seriously when he talks about Mars.
> Maybe you missed the part where starlink / orbiting datacenters don't really have to even make money as long as they partially fund rocket launch tests.
I am only dismissing the orbital data centres, I do see a future for Starlink. One with competition, but a future nonetheless.
I'm old enough to remember the dot.com bubble and "we lose money on each unit and make up for it in scale":
If they don't make sense, they don't help. Putting a single one in space, or even a handful, is physically possible! But even optimistic Alphabet researchers (and Alphabet owns more of SpaceX than the entire IPO) say this only makes sense at $200/kg, while early Starship launch costs while they sort out reusability be at best $400/kg and the researchers don't expect $200/kg until the mid-2030s even with a high launch rate:
If the learning rate is sustained—which would require∼180 Starship launches/year—launch prices could fall to <$200/kg by∼2035
At $200/kg, and using the payload estimates elsewhere in the paper (the learning rate is based on mass rather than launch count), they'd need to launch 370,000 tons (4.4 ibid); even at the "good enough" cost, $200/kg, they'd need to spend $200/kg * 3.7e8 kg = $7.4e10. That's a hell of an R&D spend for the next 10 years of a company whose lifetime revenue (not profit) is reportedly $4.6e10.
My current draft has a few thousand words of additional problems, plus a bunch of things which I mention only to say why they are not, and some more where I say the research has yet to be done.
> Or maybe you don't take Elon seriously when he talks about Mars.
Used to, not any more. Has been too slow with Starship even before the fact that iteration with hardware is necessarily slowed down by a 2-year gap between launch windows.
There's not even been any news about demonstration models of either Mars-rated or Starship-rated Sabatier processors, which would be an easy win and also win points for both environmentalism and energy independence viz. Iran/Hormuz.
On the contrary: I've paid a lot of attention, causing me to look at it closely and determine it is a terrible idea worthy of an illustrated 5,000 word blog post explaining exactly how terrible.
If you build the DC satellites as currently specified, you're strictly better off not launching them. That's how bad the idea is.
A new player beating Boeing to the ISS was once a pipe dream.
LEO constellations were once a pipe dream.
Launching thousands of satellites was once a pipe dream.
You should know that a) they are already running "AI" chips on their current sats. and b) they are already producing kW of power on orbit and have ~10k sats on orbit. You can watch Scott Manley's video on it, where he does some rough calculations and explains the overall architecture. There is nothing stopping them to do this, from an engineering perspective. If it makes commercial sense, that's another question, but 5-10-20 years in the future things might change there as well.
Microsoft tried to put datacenters into ocean [1] and then shelved the idea, because even that you have lower amount of failures, you still have failures and somebody has to go there and fix them. Which turns out to be problem.
And in ocean you don't have to solve for radiation nor cooling.
I don't think people's argument is that it's impossible to put data centers into space. The argument is that the downsides (radiation, cooling, maintenance, power) are so severe that it is pointless to do it at scale.
Go back to the megathreads when this came up. Even here on HN. Plenty of people used the argument that it can't be done, for various reasons.
And my point was that at one point or the other there were many "downsides" for all the tech that SpaceX already has. Reusable boosters were seen as "uneconomical" and "pointless unless they can fly 10 times" by industry experts. They're now flying 30+times a booster.
LEO constellations were similarly "full of downsides" plus "all the companies that tried it went bankrupt in the 90s", so "it's pointless". And so on.
Pretty much everything about data centers in space is worse than having them on Earth. Apart from niche use cases, the only reason you'd talk about data centers in space is if you had a company with rocket ships and needed a story to tie your rocket ships to the current AI craze.
These guys aren't aware of all the "impossible" problems Elon already solved. They're too invested in the propaganda about him being a big dumb idiot who accidentally fell backwards into a pile of 1 trillion dollars.
Sure, you can do it. I bet humans could fly to Mars if we invested a massive amount of resources into it. Why, though? That’s the “easy” if you throw sufficient amounts of money at problems over sufficient periods of time you can solve them.
If you don’t care about making any more from it. How exactly would datacenters in space would be more profitable than those on earth?
If just Elon was taking about data centers in space, you could take it with a grain of salt. But there are other serious players talking about it like Google and blue origin that it should be pretty clear it can't just be dismissed with "you didn't think about cooling!"
Yeah, and there's already been tech demonstrators for this. Starcloud-1 launched in '25 (on a F9) and demoed a CotS H100 in a ~60kg bus w/ 1kW of power. They ran inference on a "gemini" model (probably something small) and trained a GPT2 version LLM as a tech demonstrator.
slightly related .. I saw a talk on DCs in space, and it said median Earth orbit had a latency of 500ms .. but back of envelope seems to be : 15,000km above Earth would have around 100ms latency, comparable to internet ping times.
I'm still working on the blog, but as a quickie: it's the lesson of the Datasaurus dozen, that sometimes you need to look at the actual distribution rather than statistics.
There's no (safe) gaps. Plenty of physical space, but the safety margin eats it all up. Nothing else is allowed to use those orbital shells or anything between them.
Also, this is what happens if you put them all in a single orbit at the same altitude:
> slightly related .. I saw a talk on DCs in space, and it said median Earth orbit had a latency of 500ms .. but back of envelope seems to be : 15,000km above Earth would have around 100ms latency, comparable to internet ping times.
500ms means ~150,000 km travel distance; for that distance as round-trip time from origin to destination and back again means the one-way distance is 75,000 km, so if it's via a single satellite bounce then the average distance to the satellite would be 37,500 km: [You]-37.5Mm-[Satellite]-37.5Mm-[Them]-37.5Mm-[Satellite]-37.5Mm-[You].
I think they must be assuming all comms are via geostationary satellites. In some talks, this is what the speaker actually meant, though they may not have been clear about it; other times, there's talks from people who copied the former but perhaps didn't understand.
For DCs in space, even in GEO, it would be half the distance because you're communicating with the satellite itself not with someone else somewhere else on the ground.
People already talk about that, so I wouldn't be adding much new. That said, had already put in a bit about cost of launching.
TL;DR: Alphabet researchers (and Alphabet owns more of SpaceX than the entire IPO so if anything they're biased to optimism), recon it will take SpaceX launching about 370,000 tons to orbit before they've even figured out how to get the costs down to the point it makes sense to put these in orbit.
"In this post, we (a16z) will look at how AI will open new markets previously deemed too “small” to support a large VSaaS company. By increasing LTV (Life Time Value) per customer (through replacing labor with software) and reducing CAC (through leveraging AI-driven sales and marketing tools), we believe AI will open a plethora of new markets. Namely, the long tail of niche industries you were likely not thinking of before this post: chiropractors, dry-cleaning and laundry services, veterinary services, and more."
"The lower-power machine was much cheaper to manufacture and operate, more comfortable and less noisy for patients, and the final images after computational processing were as clear and detailed as those obtained by the high-power devices currently used in the clinical setting."
300-1800W power draw seems impressive! It looks like standard machines are using something on the order of 25kW while scanning, which certainly sounds prohibitive for less developed infrastructure.
Sounds like that's more about using a cryocooler to minimize the helium used-- but presumably that requires keeping the coils in a particularly hard vacuum to adequately insulate them.
There is some research towards operating at liquid hydrogen temperatures -- but hydrogen has its own logistical challenges.
Surprised the exit happens at the relatively low price of $200M [1]. Klout had about 500 million users from what I understand. While monetisation might have been tough with deals, Klout got so much data. So much talk of 'big data' but it does not seem to be worth so much... or was there some founder fatigue at play here after almost 6 years of existence?
As a founder, it appears as if our startup's success or failure depends on us cofounders. This drives me to work insane hours as some sort of ego self rationalization tells me that more work will make it succeed.
In general I have seen the work/result correlation hold true. And yet, we all know how luck plays its role. I personally like to think some events are meant to happen or not. Especially when it goes bad - when my startup lost a client in the early days for example it was extremely tough... but we learned so much that the next bigger one went well. Would working more hours have changed anything, I doubt it, so there is more to it than work.
More than this, working many hours is sometimes just a way to reduce anxiety of success or failure, at least for me. What's tricky is understanding which hours not to do, how to make more of the ones I do, and being confident that cutting the hours won't affect the bigger picture output too much. Easier said than done.
Against big governments, nothing is stronger than the little men and women getting together.
If this is so bad (which I am not technically capable of understanding...), what shall we DO about it?
Signing the petition is probably not enough. Get people to have a minute of 'no internet' across the world? Similar to the Anti-SOPA movement? Suggestions welcome.
A fantastic simple idea. Video interaction is brilliant through gaming add-on. 3 comments:
1) Find a way to MAINTAIN gaming during the video (e.g. live comments adds of people in the room to the images?). That's because right now its fun to vote every 1:30minutes but then kind of boring to watch.. Althrough I stayed 3X more than initially planned ;-) This would allow maintaing people on site too since many people left/stopped voting after 1st video.
2) POINTS need to be prominent & STATUS linked: it's not about the money for me but the challenge & game. Many sites followed this model. When I win, the reward of points would need to incenvize me somehow. Make it big/prominent? What about leveraging STATUS with points too: status changes with results from say commoner to king to rock-star...
3) Consider Consumer Goods ads for site monetization: FMCG would pay to have their ads displayed (what about an ad of 10'' every few where people vote too???). I know that's old model but still there is something in the voting that could be a way for consumer research or brand 'interraction' of sort
You could actually make the voting along the video, before it ends, so there will be no waiting between them and also people can play the whole time.
EDIT: Also, I would add the possibility to recommend a video to be next. It could be better then the automatic youtube recomends (do I think right it uses that?)
1) Yes, this is something I am thinking hard about.
2) Yes, points and gaming like features with player rankings are key here. I would be very happy to hear about more specific thoughts or suggestions.
3) I am not yet thinking too much about monetization, but there are definitely a lot of interesting opportunities. Your idea here is something I will keep in mind!
Google = totally free lets not forget it => you give up some pricacy for service to be free in a way = not invasion of privacy but maybe price of service? Love to complain but if google does not make money, how can all thse cool apps be funded in practice. Advertising can be seen as privacy invasion too by the way. Money money money it's a ...
As individual, you buy basic insurance costing roughly $500/month with a $2500 yearly deductible (LAMal/KVG). Applicants must be accepted even with pre-existing conditions. Post-deductible, you pay 10% co-insurance capped at roughly $800/year (no medical bankruptcy). Insurers operate basic plans as non-profit. They make their profit on optional supplemental insurance (private hospital rooms, extra benefits...) The state subsidizes basic premiums for low-income individuals. A doctor's visit is a $150 minimum, similar to the US.
What was most surprising compared to here in the US is employers pay $0 toward premiums. Funding is entirely decoupled from employment. You don't lose coverage or change plans when changing jobs.
On the negative, basic insurance does not have dental, so dental stuff is out-of-pocket and expensive.
In terms of stats, the US spends 18% of GDP on healthcare vs. 12% for Switzerland and the gain is lower stress too. Not perfect but maybe the best of both worlds.