Also, Westworld? These violent delights have violent ends? Perhaps there's a tinge of Pascal's wager to it, but I prefer to be courteous to the rapidly improving synthetic intelligences.

And preliminary Q2 GDP numbers look very good, it appears the technical recession is most likely over (TBC once the final Q2 release is firmed up at the end of the month). Just two negative growth quarters when your southern neighbour has threatened to annex you by "economic force" is pretty damn good.

Also, are all that many people handling the BF16 weights directly? GLM-5.2's reference deployment is FP8, and many vendors are even serving at NVFP4 which seems to offer negligible degradation over the FP8 reference deployments.

I have an RF engineering background, a nice mmWave vector network analyzer can easily land in that ballpark.

If the business value is there, companies will pay for it.

There's also smolvm which is a nice minimal microvm manager based on libkrun: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm. I vibe coded a little shell utility for building and running OCI images for the Pi harness using it (easy enough to do manually, but the automation just makes it a couple quick commands rather than digging through documentation): https://github.com/neuroblaze/smol-pi

The risk is real. The math isn't complicated, you could stand up a basic debris simulation in a few hours with numpy from first principles. And we also know it's real because it's actually happened multiple times now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision

This is a real thing that satellite operators worry about all the time. Conjunction analysis and risk modeling leading to a go/no-go decision is something that real satellite operations centres do daily.

I don't know if an LVT is the answer, but we do need to figure out some way to make operators consider space sustainability efforts, especially if they are launching systems with such density that they make subsequent operation in those shells significantly riskier.

Collision risk is significantly reduced by having maneuverable spacecraft with good conjunction prediction systems in place. But fundamentally, nothing is perfect and accidents can and do happen - you set a maneuver threshold based on an expected collision probability, but it's an engineering tradeoff: "spend the fuel to maneuver out of the way of everything, no matter how remote, or accept a small collision risk?"

And of course, when you are launching thousands of satellites, you will have a few failures that will become unmaneuverable hazards. Just the way it goes, you can't realistically engineer your way to perfect reliability.

So sorry, I have to reject your claims that it's "utter bullshit." Space debris risk is a well studied field, so much so that satellite insurance companies are starting to fold those calculations into insurance premiums. So yeah, it's real, and it deserves more than a pithy dismissal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision

The ITU has no enforcement power, but fundamentally that doesn't really matter much, since enforcement is handled by the member states. Are there attempts by various member states to skirt around the rules or favour their own national interests? Of course, and sometimes these are successful - but nobody just outright ignores the rules, because they know it very quickly leads to a tragedy of the commons.

Administering an orbital LVT is exactly the kind of thing that could slot cleanly into an expanded ITU mandate. Where the money goes would be up for debate, but I think the cleanest solution would be ITU rebates most of it back to the government of the country that applied for the orbital slot provided that they demonstrate it's going into a space sustainability fund.

Is it perfect? No, but it's based on a rickety-but-mostly-works international model and it doesn't require global government conspiracy theories to come to fruition.