The 100 - 150 ton numbers that SpaceX has offered over the years are always referring to the fully-reusable version launching to LEO.  I believe even Falcon 9 (though not Falcon Heavy) has essentially stopped offering expendable flights; the vision for Starship is for them to be flying full-reusable all the time.

That said:

• I forget where I got this impression (Eric Berger reporting, possibly?), but IIRC right now they're not on track to hit their goal numbers; the first reliably-working version of Starship might be limited to more like 50-70 tons, because the ship came in heavier than expected (all those heat tiles!  plus just a lot of steel.) and the Raptor engine, while very impressive, has perhaps not fully achieved the nigh-miraculous targets they set for themselves.
• if you want to take 100 tons, not to LEO, but to Mars (which is the design goal of the system) then you have to use many starships to ferry fuel to refuel other starships, gradually boosting their orbit until you have a fully-fueled ship in a highly elliptical earth orbit, and then you can finally blast off to Mars.  For the moon it's even worse, you need maybe 20 refueling flights to land 1 starship on the moon with enough fuel to come back.

Agreed with you that the heat shield (and reusable upper stage in general) seems like it could easily just never work (or work but only with expensive refurbishment, or only from returning from LEO orbits not anything higher-energy, or etc), perhaps forcing them to give up and have Starship become essentially a big scaled-up Falcon 9.  This would still be cheaper per-kg than Falcon 9 (economies of scale, and the Raptor engines are better than Merlin, etc), but not as transformative.  I think many people are just kind of assuming "eh, SpaceX is full of geniuses, they've done so many astounding things, they'll figure out the heat shield", but this is an infamously hard problem (see Shuttle, Orion, X-33...), so possibly they'll fail!

Some other tidbits:

• Raptor's claimed vacuum ISP is 380; I don't think they're just, like, making this up (they have done lots of tests, flown it many times, etc -- it's not a hypey future projection like "Starship will cost $4m per flight"), but I also don't know where I'd go if I wanted to prove to myself that the number is legit (wikipedia just cites an Elon tweet...).
• Apparently those Starlink mass simulators actually weigh about 2 tons each??  So flight 7, which carried 10 Starlink simulators, actually put 20 tons of payload in orbit.
• The first reliable version of Starship will very likely fall short of its intended 100 ton goal (i mean... unless it takes them a really long time to make Starship reliable, lol).  But they also plan to stretch the rocket, refine the engine, maybe someday make the whole thing wider, etc.  So I expect that they'll eventually hit 100 tons.  (The first version of Falcon 9 could only lift 10.4 tons to LEO; the current version can lift 17.5 tons AND land the first stage on a drone ship for reuse!)  But of course if you make the whole ship bigger, some of your launch costs are gonna go up too.

Personally I'm doubtful that they ever hit the crazy-ambitious $20/kg mark, which (per Thomas Kwa) would require not just a reusable upper stage (very hard!) but also hyper low-cost, airline-like turnaround on every part of the operation.  But $200/kg (1 OOM cheaper from where Falcon 9 is today, using the rumored internal cost of $30m/launch and 17.5 ton capacity) seems pretty doable -- upper stage reuse (even if somewhat ardurous to refurbish) probably cuts your costs by like 4x, and the much greater physical size of Starship might give you another almost 2x.  Cheap materials (steel and methane vs aluminum and RP1) + economies of scale in Raptor manufacturing might take you the rest of the way.

Ex-aerospace engineer here!  (I used to work at Xona Space Systems, who are working on a satellite constellation to provide a kind of next-gen GPS positioning.  I'm also a longtime follower of SpaceX, fan of Kerbal Space Program, etc)  Here is a rambling bunch of increasingly off-topic thoughts:

Yup, SpaceX is a big deal: 

• yup, Spacex is a totally off-the-charts success compared to basically any other aerospace company. (Although maybe historically comparable to the successes of early NASA?)  It's not just that their rockets are good; their Starlink satellites are also very impressive in a variety of ways -- basically no other satellite company can match them on cost-vs-capability, the uniquely efficient flat-pack design, etc.  And they do other stuff well too, like developing their Dragon spacecraft that certainly does a better job than Boeing's Starliner or Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser.
   
• It's correct IMO to pay a lot of special attention to SpaceX when analyzing the aerospace industry and even perhaps the big-picture future of space exploration over the next few decades.  (I presume you are thinking about SpaceX in the context of researching how space exploration might go in various "AI 2030" singularity scenarios?)  Although SpaceX probably isn't a totally unstoppable juggernaut -- it's totally plausible that Starship might continue to see troubles & delays, while Blue Origin's "New Glenn" and RocketLab's "Neutron" and other rockets might manage to beat expectations and scale up quickly, creating a more competitive world rather than a monopolistic Starship-fueled continuation of the famed "SpaceX steamroller".
   
• "SpaceX brought costs down by an OOM already and this unlocked Starlink already" -- yeah, people don't realize that Starlink constitutes 75% of all satellites in orbit (8,800 / 11,700).  This is maybe not a totally fair comparison insofar as Starlink satellites are a little smaller (and in lower-energy orbits) than the big honking GEO satellites of yore, but still -- in a certain sense, Starlink versus all the traditional satellite industries is a little bit like Uber versus the taxi market.  It's not just that SpaceX has captured a large percentage of the preexisting launch market; they've made the market way bigger.

Why are Ariane & other legacy launch companies even still alive, lol:

• To your question of "why are ULA / Ariane still getting business; is this just nepotism / corruption?" -- I think the situation is more accurately described in terms of national security concerns.
  • For Ariane, national governments want to maintain sovereign access to space -- Germany, the UK, etc, don't want to have to hand over  their spy satellites to Russia or America or any other major powers for launch!  But the "European military/intelligence satellite launches" industry isn't big enough to really sustain an entire launch company like Ariane.  So, Europe pressures its own commercial satellite companies (including a lot of the broadcast & communication companies operating GEO satellites, who have always launched on Ariane all through the 1980s / 90s / 00s when Ariane really was the cheapest and best option) to keep buying Ariane contracts so there's enough European launches happening to support a European launch company.  (The pressure / implied threat being that if those GEO satellite operators defect to launching on SpaceX, Europe might cut them off from contracts / subsidies / whatever other kind of industrial-policy support they're currently providing.)
    • One reason why this works alright is that rocket launches are often cheaper (like $100m - $200m) than the satellites they're launching (which can be many hundreds of millions for GEO commsats, or billions for fancy military / science missions).  So the rocket launch is only a minority of the overall cost.
  • In ULA's case, they are mostly propped up by the Pentagon being (reasonably IMO) concerned that they don't want American space launch to become a monopoly because then SpaceX could charge very high prices, so they do stuff like giving 60% of their launches to SpaceX and 40% to ULA according to a big contracting process.  In the future, Blue Origin might surpass ULA and mostly take over their role in the industry.
  • The continued existence of SLS is totally just corruption though, lol... (combined with extreme bureaucratic inertia, unwillingness to do proper decisionmaking under uncertainty / take certain perceived risks, while ignoring the risks like that you might spend tens of billions of dollars just to develop a way-more-expensive-than-the-competition rocket...)
     
• Also, some satellite-constellation companies that think they're "competing with SpaceX" (more like losing to SpaceX, amirite?) refuse to launch on SpaceX vehicles.  Mostly I'm thinking of Amazon's Kuiper satellite internet constellation (which wants to mostly launch on Bezos-owned Blue Origin), and the european-ish OneWeb.  Also, like a more extreme version of the situation with Europe and Ariane, obviously China doesn't let Chinese companies just buy Falcon 9 launches.
   
• Another important factor in "why is anybody still buying these expensive-ass non-SpaceX rockets??" is that the DID prefer buying SpaceX rockets, but then SpaceX raised their prices (from $70m some years ago to about $100m today, IIRC), and then SpaceX got booked solid and ran out of rockets (despite their impressive scaling over the years), so if you're in a big hurry to launch soon, you need to start looking at other more expensive companies (indeed, even many of these companies are booked out for many years, scaling up as fast as they can manage, etc).

Will Starship make a house in space cheaper than a house in SF?  No:

• House-in-Berkeley versus house-in-space is of course a weird comparison, but I very much doubt Starship could singlehandedly make it cheaper to live in space even if we used all Starship capacity for building a giant space station.  An orbital space station needs a lot of complex expensive stuff to make it work (thrusters, momentum wheels, batteries, solar panels, life-support equipment for recycling water and air), plus stuff in space breaks down a lot more quickly than stuff on Earth which would increase the cost through faster depreciation.  (The ISS is made of fancy aluminum pressure vessels and micrometeoroid shielding and stuff, but -- despite the fact that its 7-person crew spends a huge portion of their time doing fixes & maintenance -- it's springing all kinds of weird leaks and is gonna have to be deorbited soon, even though most of the station is less than 25 years old. Contrast this with the house where I live in Colorado, built a whopping 35 years ago, which still basically does fine with just minimal home maintenance, occasional new appliances, etc.)
  • Plus obviously your house will need lots of supplies (food, amazon packages, but also stuff like air and thruster fuel), and transporting these supplies into orbit will be much more expensive than going to the grocery store in Berkeley.
    • Obviously if it was just one little house in space, then it would be SUPER expensive (since you'd need all those subsystems just for your one little house) and there would be no feasible way to do regular (like monthly) deliveries since you don't eat a Starship full of groceries every month.  But what I'm saying is that it would still be expensive even if you wanted to save money by aggregating all the houses together into one giant space station to cut down on subsystem & resupply costs.
  • Perhaps a more interesting point: the reason why Berkeley is expensive is because the land is expensive.  But as launch gets cheaper and cheaper thanks to Starlink, the most valuable orbits will start becoming very crowded, and we'll probably start charging for them.  Right now, spots in orbit are basically given away for free (although before you launch, you've gotta get an FCC license to operate your satellites, which is a paperwork-intensive process, almost like the space version of getting a pharma drug approved by the FDA). But in the future, I suspect we'll probably implement some kind of "space Georgism" to prevent kessler syndrome and properly allocate the most valuable orbital slots.  (Where "we" is ideally some kind of international agreement, but in practice will probably just be, like, the USA's department of commerce, and then China does their own similar thing, and no other country launches enough satellites to be relevant.)  Under such a system, valuable spots in orbit might be auctioned off a la elaborate electromagnetic spectrum auctions.  So, if you want to live in Space-Berkeley (a valuable, crowded orbit like sun-synchronous LEO), most of your cost might soon be space-land (some complicated notion of orbital crowdedness + making credible promises to maneuver around debris and de-orbit your satellite at the end of its scheduled lifetime) instead of just the construction cost.  Unless you want to live in some random radiation-filled MEO orbit not really useful for anything, like Space-Rural-Oklahoma.

Will it really be cheaper to build factories in space??  Probably not pre-ASI, but possibly, idk:

• You're probably right to focus on "high cost-of-kg" operations as things that are most likely to be done in space.  Lots of people talk about this dumb zombie idea of putting solar panels in space, even though it has only become less sensible over time.  People are like "omg, space launch is cheaper now, maybe now it finally makes sense to implement the techno-optimist 1970s dream of solving the oil shock by putting solar panels in orbit!!"  But solar panels have gotten cheaper much faster than space launch has gotten cheaper, so the trend is actually in the other direction -- don't even bother mounting the panels on a basic single-axis tracking system to follow the sun over the course of the day; just drop them directly on the freaking dirt to save on installation + mounting costs.
  • Obviously in an ASI-singularity scenario (or even, just, the long-term trajectory of a non-AI human civilization growing at 2% per year), we are eventually going to use up all the land, and then the natural next thing to do is to start launching lots of solar panels into space.  But it doesn't make much sense to start doing this now.
     
• I doubt that factories is a winning idea either:
  • Factories are usually defined by needing lots of input material and producing lots of output material.  Shipping this stuff to space and back would be expensive, so it only makes sense IMO if either the inputs are coming from space already, or the outputs are destined to stay in space.
  • Working in zero gravity + vacuum tends to make most things more difficult, not easier.  Lots of factory processes designed on Earth will break in space.  So, doing anything with moving parts in space is probably way more of a hassle than doing the same thing on earth, unless there's some amazing special advantage to working in vacuum or zero-gravity.  Some proposed special advantages I've heard mentioned:
    • People used to talk about doing pharma research in space, because proteins crystallize much more easily in zero gravity??  But I think the reason people were so hyped about crystallizing proteins is because we hadn't solved the protein folding problem yet!  (You can work out the folded structure of individual proteins by exhaustively studying protein crystals.)  Now that we have AlphaFold, I think that use-case has sailed...
    • Nowadays people talk about doing semiconductor manufacturing in space, on the grounds that semiconductor manufacturing is extremely afraid of dust (so it might actually help to do in vacuum), and the machines are all so high-precision that they might as well be aerospace-grade anyways.  Maybe there's something to this idea??  But if you need vacuum so much, you could probably just build a vacuum-sealed assembly line, or even build an entire vacuum-sealed wing of the TSMC factory (with employees walking around in pressure suits and everything) for cheaper than building an orbital factory.  (The vacuum quality of low-earth-orbit isn't even especially great compared to what you can get pretty easily on the ground!)  Semiconductor manufacturing is infamously one of the most difficult, complicated things that human civilization does; I'd be surprised if you could just move it all into space without a million little things going wrong.
    • Something about optical fibers, carbon nanotubes, and other advanced materials potentially being easier to manufacture in low gravity??  I don't know much about this -- mostly I'm just remembering the plot of Andy Weir's book "Artemis" and hoping that the optical-fiber McGuffin plot-point was based on plausible background research.  You could imagine an AI angle here too, if we need tons of super-high-quality optical fiber to make the interconnections between our vast datacenters full of TPUs or photonic chips or however we multiply matrices in the year 2040.
    • One entertaining niche application of space manufacturing is to produce "extinct polymorphs" -- chemicals like the HIV drug Ritonavir, which once were easily manufactured on earth but have since become nearly-impossible to create, thanks to a bizarre ice-nine-style process where they get "infected" by misfolded versions of the same molecule!  Varda Space is an aerospace startup which actually produced some Ritonavir in space precisely to make this point.  But I hardly expect "bringing back extinct polymorphs" to become a major portion of GDP in the future; it seems intrinsically niche.  (Barring, perhaps, some mirror-life related catastrophe such that we are only able to grow crops and preserve natural necosystems in pristine space environments, a la the sci-fi stories Interstellar, Silent Running, and Speaker for the Dead.)
    • If you have AGI / ASI, then maybe you can simply have the AI redesign all your manufacturing processes from first-principles to work well in the space environment.  Maybe in some objective sense, space is actually a better place to do most manufacturing!  But in that case you do need the AGI, and you also need some time to bootstrap the entire alternate manufacturing ecosystem.  This might face some of the same pros & cons as Carl Feynman's concept of creating an alternate manufacturing system of self-replicating automated/miniaturized machine shops (see my comments here), although of course I'd expect a true ASI to power through the various troublesome issues of transitioning over to a whole new industrial base pretty quickly.

• Putting datacenters into space is a little more plausible IMO, because you don't have to worry about tons of moving parts and manufacturing processes, and your input is just energy while your output is just heat + information.
  • But you do need energy, which you can either beam up from earth via some kind of microwave laser (but this hasn't been tested IRL, has some pretty serious efficiency losses even just in theory, etc), or manufacture locally with solar panels or nuclear power (but this is gonna drag down your cost-per-kg launching random solar panels).
    • I will say that, compared to the idea of space solar power, space-datacenters is a big improvement because you're increasing the cost-per-kg of what you're launching (all those GPUs), and instead of beaming back lossy microwave radiation energy, you're beaming back information, which seems easier.
    • But I'm doubtful that you could do AI training in space very easily, since you'd have to formation-fly a ton of satellites close together (thus spending a lot of fuel?? unless you want to do something ridiculous and experimental like electrostatic-based formation flying), connect them all with extremely high-bandwidth laser links (dunno how this compares to the bandwidth Starlink already achieves...), etc.  My impression is that if you don't have high-bandwidth interconnects, you're probably limited to AI inference instead of training? (idk that much about AI training though...).  I'd also be worried that both training and inference would require lots of data to be transmitted to and from the ground, except then I remembered that the whole point of Starlink is to put the whole planet's internet infrastructure in space, and it seems to be working fine -- so at least bandwidth won't be a problem!
  • And you do need to get rid of all the heat, which in some ways gets a lot harder in space (there's no air to do convection, nor a ready supply of cheap water), although in some ways it gets easier (space is really cold, so you can cool down by just blocking the sun with a big mylar mirror and radiating in every other direction).
    • I'm not sure, but I'd be worried that radiating heat doesn't scale well (due to square-cube-law) while piping cold water around scales better.  (Until, of course, you cover the entire planet in datacenters and solar panels and fusion reactors, melt the icecaps and boil the oceans, and you're forced to resort to radiative cooling because you've run out of places to convect to!)
  • And this is very different from the berkeley house case, because (at least at the moment) there's still a vast amount of basically dirt-cheap useless desert land on which to build datacenters, power infrastructure, etc.  People complain about regulation and permitting, but:
    • Space will also feature regulation & permitting obstacles, around things like space-debris mitigation, electromagnetic spectrum for beaming vast amounts of information back to earth (unless you can figure out space-to-ground laser comms, perhaps?), and power generation.  Whether you are launching nuclear reactors into space, constructing gigawatt-scale microwave lasers that hostile superpowers will perceive as anti-ballistic-missile defenses, or even just building a mass-catapult on the moon so you can hurl hundreds of tons of lunar-manufactured solar panels towards the Earth, somebody is probably going to want to submit some comments during the 30-day public notice period...
    • My impression is that datacenters could route around much of the most severe permitting issues (such as around transmission lines and energy interconnect queues) if they were willing to go off the grid and build all their own power + battery storage.  Datacenter builders don't want to do this because that's more expensive.  But building datacenters in space also means going off-grid, plus you have to do a ton of other stuff!  (Yes, I get that space-based solar is 4x more effective and cuts down on your need for batteries, but space launch isn't the only thing allowed to reduce in price over time -- batteries and other kinds of energy-storage technology are also getting cheaper all the time.)

So, what are we gonna use all those Starships for, if not in-space manufacturing or datacenters??

• Right now, the biggest and most-valuable use of space is for communications (like Starlink internet, but also military communications, television broadcasts from GEO, specialized connections to airplanes and ships, etc), navigation (like GPS), taking photos of the earth (mostly for military intel, but this also has applications in agriculture, finance, etc), and assorted military applications.  So, in the immediate future, I'd expect us to just keep massively scaling those applications rather than using Starship to do wacky new stuff:
  • You kind of only need one navigation constellation (although it's due for an upgrade, re: Xona's plan), so this won't be a huge number of satellites.
  • With satellite internet, more & bigger satellites = more internet bandwidth, so I'd expect this to grow a lot.  Claude says that Starlink today only represents "perhaps 1–3% of international backbone capacity—and international traffic is itself only a subset of total internet traffic".  Surely it would be profitable to scale this up such that satellites are providing as much internet bandwidth as all existing ground-based infrastructure combined (ie, +100% instead of +2%), and we could still find reasonably productive ways to use that bandwidth?  So that would be like 50x all the Starlink satellites that have been launched so far.  
  • So far there have been over 350 Falcon 9 launches full of Starlinks (and US-military-branded Starshields) -- assume that you want to launch 50x that amount, but also that Starship can launch 5x as much mass (90 tons instead of 17.5 tons).  That comes out to 3,500 Starship launches to achieve that goal.  If you look at the 11 launches they've done so far, pretend they were all successful and all happened this year (they were not and did not), and assume they'll double their number of launches each year (22 in 2026, 44 in 2027...) and launch nothing but Starlinks (NASA will want a word with them about their Artemis lunar mission contract, which involves up to 20 starship launches per moon visit...), it would take them eight years to clear that backlog.
  • Taking photos of the earth probably scales more than navigation but less than internet -- Planet's fleet of cubesats already take 3m-resolution photos of the whole earth every day.  How much more valuable would it be to have 30cm-resolution photos every hour?  Or continuous video??  idk, but maybe once adding more satellite internet capacity hits diminishing returns, this becomes the next most valuable thing to scale up.
    • Earth-observation is also probably the place where it makes the most sense to be putting GPUs in space right away, since the satellites are already very bottlenecked on bandwidth for beaming images down to earth.  If you put a GPU on all your spy satellites, you could do image-classification analysis locally (and immediately!) and only beam down the most interesting stuff.  Plus you could maybe even make dynamic decisions like "oh, that's really interesting, let's take some more photos of that spot" -- usually these kinds of decisions are delayed by the time it takes for a satellite to pass over a ground station, download an image, get the image analyzed, and then for commands to be uploaded later, so it might be a big deal to make these decisions locally & immediately.
  • Military expenses are dictated by adversarial / arms-race logic, so the amount we'll spend on military stuff in space is perhaps kind of a wildcard driven by how intense the overall military competition with China gets, multiplied by how many advantageous military-stuff-in-space ideas we can dream up.
• Are there any huge economic markets (besides already-discussed manufacturing, solar power generation, and datacenters) that might open up besides orbiting satellites beaming down information?
  • At some point, maybe asteroid mining becomes a thing?  This has all the disadvantages of "moving parts in space", plus you're dealing with very messy inputs, but it has the advantage of the fact that certain asteroids have very high concentrations of metals that are rare on earth.
    • My guess is that doing an expensive space mission to bring back very valuable, rare metals (like gold, iridum, etc) is a better business plan than the zombie idea of doing an expensive space mission just to launch solar panels and simply beam back power via lossy microwave laser -- beating dirt-cheap earth-based solar panels sounds impossible, but beating earth-based mining sounds a little less impossible.  The business case for "solar power in space" probably only closes once you have finished covering all of earth's deserts in solar panels.  The business case for asteroid mining probably closes earlier, though I bet you'd still need pretty immense scale (like "over the next decade we're aiming to bring back an amount of gold equivalent to 10% of all gold ever mined in history") to amortize the huge cost of a gigantic deep-space mission and bring the whole project below the cost of earth-based mining.
    • An even better business plan would be if we could manufacture something even more difficult to make on earth (maybe semiconductors, optical fibers, or some other advanced material??), which would probably also have to be very high value-per-kg (to minimize the cost of transporting the inputs and outputs). But who knows if we can actually figure out anything that fits that criteria.  And whatever we figure out might not be scalable to trillions of dollars (like, Ritonavir definitely isn't) in the way that asteroid mining clearly is.
  • You can also mine asteroids to melt ice and make hydrogen + oxygen rocket fuel, but of course this requires some customer who'll buy a lot of rocket-fuel for going beyond low-earth orbit (like colonizing mars?) or who has other reasons to be maneuvering all the time (like military satellites that want to constantly change their orbit to stay unpredictable?).
    • Melting ice is probably a lot easier than processing ore, so probably the first demonstration asteroid-mining missions are about water.  But to scale up, they'd need customers (and customers high above low-earth-orbit, since their product has to be cheaper than just launching extra rocket fuel on Starships!).

Other than satellites, I think space-based industry & exploration is going to be heavily debt-financed in a really big way for a really long time.

• Satellites are profitable and normal; we are obviously gonna blot out the sky with immense numbers of very large, high-powered, super-Starlink satellites (mostly for internet, also for taking photos of the earth).
• But asteroid mining maybe only pays off once you scale up to some preposterous level, like bringing back a trillion dollars' worth of gold.
  • I am recalling all those debates about whether Amazon or Uber were really sustainable businesses -- they're pouring billions of dollars of investors' cash on infrastructure build-out or user subsidies; are they REALLY gonna flip to profitability and turn this all around someday??  Or the current debates about the even vastly-larger sums being invested in datacenters for training AI models.  If asteroid mining for precious metals ever happens, it is gonna be that kind of situation all over again.
• What about using Starship for its intended purpose of settling Mars???  IMO, nobody has thought up any plausible reason to think that a Mars city would ever return significant capital -- settling another planet would be a gigantic money-sink basically forever.  Yet, in some abstract sense it seems obviously likely to be worthwhile (in terms of cultural influence on humanity's future, if not literal investment returns) to be at the forefront of colonizing the solar system!  In this respect it feels similar to some parts of European colonial history -- what was the ROI of Britain starting colonies in North America?  In a certain sense, somewhere between low (you spend decades building it up, finally get a little bit of stamp tax, and then they go and fight a revolution against you) and extremely negative (start a Jamestown or Roanoke, almost everybody dies, then the town straggles on pointlessly for decades, consuming resupply ships but not figuring out anything to export).  But in another sense, extremely high (insofar as Britain got to put their thumbprint on what later became the mighty USA).
  • So this is kind of like the asteroid-mining issue or datacenter-buildout issue, but on steroids -- a venture so vast and so uncertain (a lot of European colonial empires, like Germany's scramble for Africa, were bad ideas that paid off neither literally nor metaphorically!) and requiring so much debt-financing that it leaves the realm of traditional investing, or even the realm of economic booms / bubbles and instead has to be coordinated through the mechanism of national/societal greatness, competition, and prestige.
  • But even though doing Mars settlement is way more expensive and speculative and uncertain than even doing asteroid mining, the perceived expected-value (or perceived cost of missing out) might be higher.  So I think it's actually likely that we choose to do something closer to satellites + mars colonies, rather than satellites + in-space manufacturing/mining.
  • It's also worth noting that Starship has been explicitly designed for settling Mars (the methane fuel, the Space-Shuttle-like upper stage that would be a reusable SSTO on Mars, etc).  Sending many Starships to Mars and back (where they can hope to use aerobraking for landing, and locally-manufactured fuel for launch back to earth) is probably much cheaper than sending the same number to the moon and back!
• And in a similar way, a LOT of potential space activities are more like Mars colonization than satellite internet -- "squatting on areas that might eventually be profitable someday in the future" rather than making actual profit today.
  • As mentioned, asteroid mining is like this -- the first company to develop the tech and visit some of the asteroids might do this in the hope of kinda claiming & squatting the opportunity, far in advance of the opportunity actually becoming profitable.
  • Things like putting datacenters in space or putting solar panels in space also have something like this vibe, insofar as eventually it seems we will want to do them.  But what's the scarce resource being squatted??  With Mars or asteroids, you're hoping to cheaply stake a claim (in the sense of legal rights, precedent, etc) on scarce physical land / ore in the hopes of expensively developing / mining it later.  But launching solar panels & datacenters looks more like "expensively doing something now in the hopes of profiting in the far future".  You should rather aim to be cheaply squatting something now.  Maybe this would be:
    • Space-Berkeley slots in low-earth-orbit?? (but if LEO becomes well-governed via Fully Automated Luxury Space Georgism, this plan is not gonna work out for you...)
    • Being the debt-fueled leader in some industry (like how SpaceX is the leader in launch), where the industry might 100x in size (and actually become profitable) in the future.  Here you'd either be hoarding a technological advantage (doing trial missions to develop your in-space manufacturing processes, but not actually launching a lot since you lose money on each mission), or (more expensively) hoarding an industrial-capacity advantage.
    • If you believe in AGI right around the corner, this makes trying to squat "space-based power generation / datacenters / semiconductor manufacturing" more appealing, since the applications are more concrete and if the singularity is about to happen then you don't actually have to wait very many years paying interest on your debt.
      • But on the other hand, if AGI is right around the corner, surely there are tons of more-profitable things to do here on earth?  Like try to invest in humanoid robots, or do normal AI investments in TSMC / NVDA, or etc?
  • Basically, if you are playing this game of trying to squat the opportunity to do far-future space expansion, then you wanna put yourself in the best possible position to be at the forefront of a grabby-aliens-style expansion into the solar system (from where, presumably, you can steamroll onwards to the galaxy).
    • But it's unclear exactly what bundle of technologies / legal claims / industrial capacity / etc will actually be needed for this.  (Will controlling a small town on Mars be relevant in any possible way if an ASI singularity occurs in 2050??  Probably not!)
    • And in particular I'd be very worried that I'd spend all this time going into debt trying to develop a clever portfolio of space-related industrial / technological capabilities, only to get instantly lapped by ASI right off the starting block.  Such that maybe the only resource really worth scrambling for is simply "access to ASI".  (Plus possibly launch capacity itself, which is a big capital-intensive heavy-industry that seems less amenable to being lapped software-only-singularity style than something more intricate and design-intensive, like space-based manufacturing equipment or satellites.)
    • But most people are less ASI-pilled.  So, probably we start launching colonization rockets to Mars (and funding lots of doomed little "datacenter in space" / "solar power in space" / "bitcoin in space" startups) anyways.

dunno!  some speculation:

• You do have to attach a pretty sizeable antenna to the top of your plane, plus whatever accompanying wiring is necessary... maybe maintenance capacity is the bottleneck?  It's a little hard to imagine that airlines are bottlenecked by this, since it seems pretty minor compared to other kinds of maintenance planes commonly undergo (like swapping out an engine)?  But quotes from this site saying that some airline "hopes to have units installed in at least 25% of their aircraft by the end of 2025", or that another "expects to ramp that number up to 40 installations per month" suggest that maybe this is the reason why airlines like United, Hawaiian, etc (which have started but not completed their rollouts) aren't yet at 100%.
• maybe starlink has some kind of interconnection queue where they can only ramp up so many users at a time??  but I'd expect that stuff like airlines and cruise ships would be relatively high-paying customers at the front of the line, at least compared to ordinary consumers (who can currently order starlink antennas online for next-day shipping).
• probably the airlines themselves are not that motivated to instantly upgrade their fleets, since most people don't choose flights based on who has the fastest wifi? in a similar way, other in-flight amenities -- legroom, seat material, the quality of meals on international flights, how good the little screen for in-flight movies is, etc, are individually not super-important to people; most important is the flight route + flight timing + ticket price.
  • especially when you consider the fact that Starlink has a monopoly, and is probably charging airlines a profit-maximizing price, meaning that airlines which adopt the new service might not actually see any additional revenue on net even if they can charge slightly higher ticket prices once they have fast wifi.  Other airlines are perhaps thinking they should wait until more satellite-internet constellations (like the aforementioned project Kuiper) get off the ground and prices come down?
  • maybe some budget airlines like Frontier or RyanAir calculate that most of their passengers are cheapskates who wouldn't pay for fast wifi (either directly or through higher ticket prices)
• it does kinda seem weird, though, that this list of airlines doing / considering starlink upgrades doesn't even contain some of the US's biggest airlines, like Southwest, Delta, or American.  I'd bet they're maybe waiting for lower prices, but it's always possible they're just asleep at the wheel.

presumably because to improve airplane wifi, you'd need to launch dozens of rockets to deliver a massive new constellation of orbiting satellites in order to deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement over Intelsat or whoever usually provides wifi connections to planes.

The good news is that SpaceX has done this, with their Starlink constellation!  (Others like OneWeb, Baidu, and Amazon's Project Kuiper are also doing similar stuff.)  But not every airline / airplane has upgraded to new Starlink recievers yet.  So, most planes (and cruise ships, and etc) still have slow Intelsat/Globalstar internet, but others have indeed seen huge upgrades in internet speeds.

But this would make it sound too much like AI-related philanthropy is all they do...

"Coefficient Giving sounds bad while OpenPhil sounded cool and snappy." -- OpenPhil just sounds better because it's shorter.  I imagine that instead of saying the full name, Coefficient Giving will soon acquire some similar sort of nickname -- probably people will just say "Coefficient", which sounds kinda cool IMO.  I could also picture people writing "Coeff" as shorthand, although it would be weird to try and say "Coeff" out loud.

This is an inspiring post, so now I'd like to imitate some of the stuff you've done!  I'd love it if you could post some pictures of what the installed RGB strips look like, in particular.  I'm interested in setting up a bunch of smart-home lighting, and these light strips sound pretty cool, but it's hard for me to picture how exactly these are mounted and how they look when installed.

• Do you just, like, double-sided-tape the LED strip to the walls?  Or use clips of some kind?  How do you install a "diffuser" or "make them face the walls" to spread out the light?  How does this all look once installed?  It would be great to have amazon links to everything you use for mounting / diffusing / etc.  I'd love an "here's everything you'll need" list like what's included in several of the classic posts about "Lumenator" design.
• How does it get connected up to power?  Presumably you're running these LED strips along the edges of the ceiling, right?  So the wires probably come down in a corner of the room, where they meet the "24V 200W power supply adapter", which in turn plugs into the wall?  How many strips can you power from one power-supply adapter?
• Maybe there's a particular video tutorial (this guy seems to have a whole channel about installing LED light strips, for example) that you used, which covers all these questions pretty well?

[insert joke about how publishing fresh JVN tokens will accelerate AGI timelines]

Another potential reason to sell sooner rather than later:

• Right now, there are multiple frontier AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepmind, plus frontier-ish groups like Meta, X, etc).
• But in the future, one of these labs, or maybe even some other group (like SSI, DeepSeek, etc) might "run away with it", developing a commanding lead after they stumble onto the next big algorithmic breakthrough / paradigm shift / etc.
• So, you might want to sell your shares now while things are still in a state of uncertainty, rather than gamble that your company will stay in the lead (or nearly-in-the-lead) forever.
• There might even be an important mission-hedging aspect here?  ie, if you think Anthropic is the most responsible AI company, then in worlds where they become #1, your donations are less important since they'll hopefully be trying hard to do the right thing already.  Versus if Meta or Grok or a Chinese company surges ahead, you might end up wishing that you had spent more of your Anthropic money earlier to try and influence AI regulation / international agreements / etc!

I think you are missing out on a key second half to this story, which would make your motivational take at the end ("uh.. feel good about yourself for trying or something?") a lot stronger:

When you go to a ski resort, or a gym, or etc, it's not JUST that you only see the people who ski, work out, etc, while not seeing the 90% who don't do that activity.  You see people WEIGHTED by the AMOUNT OF TIME they spend doing that activity, which skews heavily towards the most intense practitioners.

For example, suppose your local gym has 21 patrons:
- 7 have lapsed in their actual workout habit; they never show up to the gym even though they keep getting auto-charged the monthly fee because they've forgotten to cancel their membership.
- 7 manage to keep up a healthy but not outstanding workout habit -- they each manage to do a one-hour workout once a week
- 7 are total gym bros who get in a one-hour workout every single day, stacking those gainz

On a typical day, who visits the gym?
- zero of the lapsed members
- on average, just one of the once-a-week members (7 * 1/7 = 1)
- all seven of the hardcore gym rats

So, it's not just that you never see the lapsed members (or the people who never signed up in the first place).  It's also that you get an extremely skewed view of who "goes to the gym" -- visiting the gym and looking around makes it seem like the clientele  is 87.5% hardcore gym rats, when the true proportion is actually just 50%.  (Albeit that 87.5% of the "total time spent in the gym" is spent by gym rats.)

You even mention this in some of your anecdotes, like "most of the other riders have been out 90 days just this season".

For me, this fact is heartening.  For something like a gym or a ski resort (or the blog posts in your feed), comparing yourself to the people you see around you is actually setting a really high bar, since the people you see around you are weighted by the time they spend doing the activity (and/or by the number of posts they write).  A gentler, more intermediate basis of comparison is to all the people who do "go skiing", but don't go every day -- the huge shadow mass of people who ski a couple times a year, whose population is probably way higher than the "I have a cabin next to the resort and buy the season pass every winter" contingent, but who are in the minority every day on the mountain.