ivanjovanovic

Stock price is a heavy swallow here, especially if someone had a bad timing and not much patience, but stock price is a tool to get funding which AST has successfully done, a year ago with very bad conditions, a week ago with excellent conditions. Not sure what that tells, but to me it tells that at least someone has trusted them with a 1B in cash, and some others with billions in spectrum to achieve their idea which would be transformational.

What is fact is that where Starlink has gotten approval from FCC to test only text messages, AST has gotten approval to test full 5G broadband in Europe, Turkey and USA for now. Not sure how can I interpret it differently then that they have technical advantage and that they might be first to really provide useful commercial service, which they will start providing very soon.

So, there are several untrue things here.

Fact that AST is deSPAC has nothing to do with this. AST has gone out of that phase stellarly.

Second, technological advantages are very verified, by AST doing 20 Mbps download and 5G calls and extremely good spectral efficiency.

Definitely both architectures have pros and cons, but for the fixed-earth cells the bent-pipe is way more optimal then constant switching of the cell position which Starlink has.

ASTS has missed some deadlines, but they are not centering divs, they really do innovation from the first principles and that takes some time. Check TSLA which is 10 years into "we are getting FSD next year out"

Rakuten didn't hit them with the fine, but they exercised a contractual right to get 10 million dollar back if they don't deliver something, but same Rakuten is officially promoting the 2026 as start of the commercial coverage for Japan, if we are taking them as authority.

SpaceX is definitely not the only one on whom they depend for delivery since they use ISRO from India for the first satellite, Falcon9 for the next 8 and New Glen for the rest. And given that they have enough money, they can as well go back to more SpaceX if needed since they have agreement with them.

It is interesting that company without research team has so many patents on this technology and partners with Google, AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Rakuten, American Tower and that none of them is seeing how hoax they are. Maybe they will come here and get actually enlightened.

You can check on Starlink test, and what people are reporting here https://x.com/CatSE___ApeX___/status/1884304059110470050

I see you don't understand the technological advantage AST has in comparison with Starlink Direct-To-Cell connection. They are some years ahead in this game.

AST is already testing full broadband 5G technology fully integrated into the terrestrial networks without interference with Vodafone and AT&T and will get Verizon beta testing approval very soon.

What Starlink D2C currently has is a spotty text service with such a low signal strength that is useless for anything more. That is what they got approval for from FCC because any stronger signal is causing unacceptable interference with the current terrestrial networks and the terrestrial providers didn't agree to allow them more than that. It will take a year or two at least for Starlink to get to provide more than text and that is actually stated as well in the T-Mobile press release about this.

Other thing is difference in AST and Starlink architecture which makes Starlink not easy to properly integrate in the terrestrial networks since they have gNodeB modules on the satellite, where AST is integrating with the gNodeB modules on the ground.

There are many details that make AST leading in the game of direct-to-cell communication in comparison to other solutions. They just got 1B in cash from investors to expand and speed up deployment of their network, so calling them vaporware might not age well when in couple weeks they start releasing the testing results.

Monad means a function composition where you can program what happens when inner function gives its result as argument to the outer function.

One reasonable way to deal with that would be to subscribe to several sources which lean in different directions and then explore the situation from various angles.

It sure depends. The way I think is that it starts with an idea, ability to preserve the idea, develop it and maintain its essence through iterations with others. Still it is the idea that is making the difference at the start and working around that idea that makes difference at the end.

I was developer, and I was middle manager and I understand the sentiment fully. There are many aspects of reality that higher level management has to deal with which are not usually what they want reality to be but in practice you can not change it.

I overall agree with your sentiment.

I would though not agree fully about where you assume value is created. Usually, developers / middle managers do not create value. Mostly they are implementing ideas of others and in these ideas is most of value concentrated. I would say they deliver value but don't create most of it.

I am curious if sickness increase is caused by mental aspects of sharing the office or the transmittable diseases factor. Authors didn't get into these details the from what I see by briefly looking at the whole paper.

Thanks for the comment! This really reflects the way I started thinking about it lately. Sorry for the investigative tone of the following question: Was there anything in particular that enlightened you towards changing your attitude or was it just through reflection and incremental adjustment of the behaviour?

I guess it is "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours". I went through it and can tell that it is really a nice introduction to basic and some of the more advanced Haskell concepts.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_...

I would explain this concept as two kinds of life philosophy and ways to approach the future.

1) "exponential" - which gets everybody happy at the beginning and then crushing them with hard reality after things start getting more and more complex. There are a lot of real life examples of doing this and I can rarely find the one which has brought the value at the end. In software development experience I have found this very wrong.

2) "logarithmic" - when you do a lot of investments into solving the hard structural/strategic problems at beginning and then riding much more far on the benefits they provide. This approach works pretty good in real life as well like investment into fundamental understanding, saving early so accumulated benefits get higher.

The way I see it:

1. TypeScript is an answer to the poor state of JavaScript development today and an attempt to get more structure into it. There are other answers as well, and it can be discussed on properties of each of them, but they are competing in the same domain.

2. Since state of JavaScript is as it is, it is obvious that there is a lot of potential benefit in being a leader of the technology in that domain. Regarding that, it is kind of answer to forces that are trying to ensure domination in that domain for the future.

I was thinking about this a lot of times. There are many companies that still have more traditional approach to software development where software development process is considered as "second order citizen" in the process of bringing value to the users. Business oriented people in such companies are completely not aware how abilities of software enable or disable some value to be brought to the users and especially not aware how to optimize environment for better production of software in order to bring this value most efficiently.

Deciding deliberately not to learn to code (or at least to develop good understanding of software development process) in environment where software is expected to be the crucial part of the business is deciding to stay blind for the (most) important part of your business. From my point of view that is doomed to fail unless you are aware of that and deliberately take measures to prevent failure.

Someone would say that the most important is to bring the value to the users, which is not false at the end. What I saw is that business people too often underestimate how much software that brings value is part of the value itself and how it as well puts constraints on how value is brought to users.

Motivated by discussions with my peers regarding this topic I wrote small blog post on that some weeks ago. http://ivanjovanovic.com/2012/02/11/nobody-cares-about-your-...

I'm currently doing self education beside my full time job. Did not take time off for self study, but I'd like to if I get chance.