really think about that statement when discussing deliberately avoiding government jurisdiction...

(perhaps also consider that it is not the case that no one can damage a lot of satellites in orbit, but that up until recently no one has had any incentive to build the number of interceptors you would need to do it. But how viable is a space-based datacenter business if you decide to try and pretend you're untouchable, and one of the _many_ governments which operates anti-satellite weapons simply shoots one of your satellites? The debris field from ASAT weapons tests has been of considerable concern everytime they've been used - and given the proximity of useful orbital slots for such a service, the number of intercepts required to render a constellation completely inoperable is going to be _far less_ then the number of satellites).

(in the vein of motivation too: it is well within the power of most well-funded governments to build laser systems would would degrade or destroy orbital satellites, but again, no one has had considerable motivation to do so till recently)

(and of course all of this is - again - competing against the simpler option of simply arresting the people on Earth, or interdicting their ground stations)

But it's also irrelevant: all your infrastructure supporting such a thing, including your ability to fund it, is on Earth, in someone's jurisdiction.

The US government is hardly going to say "well the datacenter is in space, guess there's nothing we can do about the owner who lives in California..."

And absolutely no one, anywhere, ever, has the capability to damage or destroy a satellite...

And here's the thing: all of this is competing with solar+batteries cost on Earth. The power situation is the only advantage here.

Like why not put a datacenter on a barge and run an HVDC line out to it far offshore? That would be expensive...but more expensive then space? It's not even outside of the capability set of SpaceX, who already run drone ships to facilitate Falcon 9 landings.

As a community service you need them to have enough scale that no individual hash or source can be tampered with without being likely to become known as unreliable to everyone else as well ala certificate transparency records.

(You could probably just bootstrap let's encrypt for this - issuing a certificate you use to sign a bunch of data would stamp several minimums on the order anything could have happened).

Signing digital data with hardware secure tokens is a commodity capability in the iPhone many of HNs users are reading this site with.

"The Nazis used a data source to implement an extermination program" is not a statement which proves that your problem was the existence of a data source.

Whereas in reality automotive companies do not organically have rocketry divisions.

During her testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations committee about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland answers a question from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) about whether or not Ukraine has chemical or biological weapons. She replies, "Ukraine has biological research facilities, which, in fact, we are now quite concerned...Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of." She then refutes allegations from Russia that Ukrainians are plotting to use biological weapons, and says that if such an attack happens in Ukraine, "there is no doubt in my mind" it would be caused by Russian forces. --- And yes I also watched the video and it's accurate.

Give me VB6 or whatever for the web.

Then suddenly LLMs happened and it's like the mask is off: no one's reading them still, but also no one is writing them either.

Which is perhaps a drop in the ocean of the insanity which is "we need you to work on the Jira tasks" as basically a job title.

They were interesting but the whole concept just has problems and has for over a decade at this point despite commercialisation efforts.

Same story with iron: it's out there, but the scale on LFP and likely Sodium is going to shoot right past it.

I'd say the case it was making has only become more relevant with the chatbot age.