Where I live in New Zealand the only good internet provider is Starlink, so all my internet is through Starlink. The latency is about 20ms, so while yes you are technically correct that is 10x slower then 2ms, it isn't a major deal breaker.

You are probably thinking about light and fast API calls, where latency is more noticeable. But if you are doing an inference or LLM job that is going to take several seconds of token generation before the full response is available then the difference between 3.002s and 3.020s is negligible.

> build some data centers underground in deep fortified bunkers if you want.

This is the defensive build. The US has a tendency to optimize for offense.

Let's roll forward another few decades, and imagine a classic dystopia scenario: pervasive worldwide surveillance systems, armed drones and robots everywhere, etc. Where does the data from those surveillance systems get crunched, and where do the drones and robots get controlled from? Probably not from one central system in one place. That would ironically be too high latency. These systems would most likely end up as generic shells with minimal on board smarts, controlled by AI "brains" up in LEO, 20ms away via radio. The AI observes from overhead via it's surveillance systems, and it acts via it's robot bodies down on Earth.

It sounds like sci-fi, but you have to remember the world is full of megalomaniac nerds. They love this type of stuff, and if they think someone might be able to build it, then they want to be the one to build it.

1. The recent Iran drone attacks on AWS data centers

2. Growing anti-AI and anti data center sentiment at home, plus Larry Fink (ceo of Blackrock) in a recent interview being terrified of dissident groups using consumer drones to attack data centers.

3. Anthropic, Grok, and other AI vendors becoming more and more integrated into defense and military, plus increasingly reliance on AI for other national surveillance systems

Data centers are and will be targets, both for national military attacks as well as home grown dissident attacks, so they are proposing to move some of the critical workloads to somewhere that the only group that can attack the data center hosting the workload is a nation state with space launch capabilities. That significantly reduces the number of actors that can attack the data center. And if the US wants to they can probably bomb all the other space rocket launch facilities worldwide in less than 24 hours, leaving extremely limited capability to attack a space hosted DC.

Is it insane? Probably, but the US has done insane things with military budget before, and will continue to do so for a long time. If you are Elon, its a great time to milk that US defense budget for some more R&D, and even if the main project doesn't work out, he's still going to be able to keep some innovations within the company and apply them to Starlink and other more realistic endeavors.

While I was living in NYC I saw collisions of that nature all the time. People put a "bumper buddy" on their car because the street parallel parking is so tight and folks "bump" the car behind them while trying to get out.

My guess is that at least 3 of those "collisions" are things that would never be reported with a human driver.

People are acting like a space data centre would be running a traditional workload. No, it's probably running a military one, some sort of AI powered modern version of Dead Hand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand). Autonomous warfare could get real dark, real fast.

If you assume that these people aren't completely stupid, then there is some reason why they want this workload running at great physical distance from all the people down on Earth. It's probably not to protect people on Earth. After all they'll happily deorbit satellites and other junk from orbit and let it rain down on us. And they will happily destroy the environment with all those rocket launches too. Therefore it must be to protect the workload from us.

What is a workload that is something that people would probably want to destroy, and which would also provide enough value to offset the expense to launch and run in space? The only thing that might make sense is a military AI platform. Think something that observes Earth, launches missiles, and controls terrestrial drone armies remotely, with relatively low latency.

It gets built and launched thanks to endless military budget, and once it is up there, running such an AI from space means that effectively the only people who can take it out are nation state level foes who can launch rockets into low earth orbit. And this thing is a satellite, probably part of a network that is watching the Earth all the time. Start building something that looks like a rocket launch site, and the AI will see, then you get hit by a missile or taken out by a drone first before you get a chance to attack the platform.

It sounds like sci-fi, but in the future, if we let it happen, there could absolutely be nearly invulnerable autonomous AI platforms in space overseeing everything, and making decisions, and issuing commands. Of course there could still be a massive solar flare event, or a Kessler syndrome event that releases us all from AI enforced servitude. Anyway, it's a not so fun thought experiment, and let's hope this stays sci-fi, so we can just enjoy a fun Hollywood film about this rather than experiencing it firsthand.

If you don't see the irony, let me point it out: this is a real time demonstration that your following statement is not an inevitable thing:

> eventually converges on the same thing in the end: a place to dump out ugly things

When a community has the tools for self governance, then it can resist influences that it does not appreciate. In the case of Bluesky in specific, you may not be familiar with how easy it is to subscribe to labelers and blocklists. This decentralized self governance model allows anyone to curate their Bluesky experience, and it allows sub communities to collectively govern in ways that filter the cesspool and remove the ugly things.

In short, the fact that you are complaining about downvotes while simultaneously saying that it is inevitable for communities to devolve into places to dump ugly things is highly ironic. One thing that you are complaining about, is the solution to the other thing that you are complaining about.

When social communities allow the type of tone you are using, that is precisely how they end up worse over time.

Hacker News downvoting comments like yours is how it has maintained quite high quality over the last 16 years I've been on this website.

This is a real issue. If a robot is fully AI powered and doing what it does fully autonomously, then it has a very different risk profile compared to a teleoperated robot.

For example, you can be fairly certain that given the current state of AI tech, an AI powered robot has no innate desire to creep on your kids, while a teleoperated robot could very well be operated remotely by a pedophile who is watching your kids through the robot cameras, or attempting to interact with them in some way using the robot itself.

If you are allowing this robot device to exist in your home, around your valuables, and around the people you care for, then whether these robots operate fully autonomously, or whether a human operator is connecting via the robot is an extremely significant difference, that has very large safety consequences.

Maybe... the economy isn't actually as solid as he thinks?

Most chocolate / cocoa products are processed in a way that destroys 80%-90% of the flavanols. You either have to buy specialized high flavanol cocoa powder (what the study used), or you would have to be consuming multiple cups of matcha tea, or squares of dark chocolate ever day. You'd likely also want to add high flavanol foods like blueberries, blackberries, and cherries to your daily diet.

As someone who spends a lot of time sitting, and also has a family history of heart issues, it sounds promising. I'm planning to give it a try.

Basically you pay an insurance company premium so that if you have a health emergency the insurance company will take on the cost of your emergency.

Insurance companies pay Swiss Re, so that if the insurance company faces a financial squeeze from unforeseen mass disaster, then Swiss Re takes on the cost.

Swiss Re is basically warning their clients (insurance companies) that Swiss Re is seeing an ongoing trend of excess deaths post Covid, though they expect it to trail off by 2033. They highly recommend their clients factor that in when they calculate what premium they need to charge to be profitable.

A farm is just such a system that you can spend a lifetime working on and optimizing. The life you are supporting is "automated", but the process of farming involves an incredible amount of system level thinking. I get tremendous amounts of satisfaction from the technical process of composting, and improving the soil, and optimizing plant layouts and lifecycles to make the perfect syntropic farming setup. That's not even getting into the scientific aspects of balancing soil mixtures and moisture, and acidity, and nutrient levels, and cross pollinating, and seed collecting to find stronger variants with improved yields, etc. Of course the physical labor sucks, but I need the exercise. It's better than sitting at a desk all day long.

Anyway, maybe the farmers and shepherds also want to become software engineers. I just know I'm already well on the way to becoming a farmer (with a homelab setup as an added nerdy SWE bonus).

That said... I don't necessarily hate what AI is doing to us. If anything, AI is the ultimate expression of humanity.

Throughout history humans have continually searched for another intelligence. We study the apes and other animals, we pray to Gods, we look to the stars and listen to them to see if there are any radio signals from aliens, etc. We keep trying to find something else that understands what it is to be alive.

I would propose that maybe humans innately crave to be known by something other than ourselves. The search for that "other" is so fundamentally human, that building AI and interacting with it is just a natural progression of a quest we've already been on for thousands of years.

I would argue that both Tesla self driving (on the highway only), and ChatGPT (for professional use by healthy people) has been more good than bad.

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/mental-illness

Most people don't understand just how mentally unwell the US population is. Of course there are one million talking to ChatGPT about suicide weekly. This is not a surprising stat at all. It's just a question of what to do about it.

At least OpenAI is trying to do something about it.

I think this is one of the main reasons why Raspberry Pi has such a strong representation in homelabs, including my own.

The replenishment of these hard drives is baked into the cost of S3. If there is a major disruption of hard drive supply then S3 prices will definitely rise, and enterprises that currently store lots of garbage that they don't need, will be priced out of storing this data on hard drives, into Glacier or at worst full deletion of old junk data. That's not necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion.

There is lots of junk data in S3 that should probably be in cold storage rather than spinning metal, if merely for environmental reasons.

There is a reason these models are still operating on old knowledge cutoff dates

Acquisition and retention of good talent is absolutely a major issue for AWS. Don't get me wrong, I still like AWS a lot, even all it's frequently chaotic mess, but I'll probably wait until Amazon starts its Satya era before I'd consider reapplying to work there.