That's how it already works.

It's not. Full disk access is sticky. When you grant it, the app has it until you go into settings and revoke it. It's not like sudo, it's like running that app as root, with no permission required after the first time. On Linux to get the same effect you have to edit a text file with root permissions and give the program passwordless sudo privileges, which should make any competent Linux users' hair stand on end.

And the next step will be "See, we can't allow full disk access." And then macOS will cease to be usable.

People have been "predicting" this slippery slope thing for ages and it hasn't happened.

These satellites would be in LEO

Sort of. They'd be in probably lowish sun synchronous dawn-dusk orbits, a narrow band following the terminator where the sun always shines.

and fall back to Earth after 5 years anyway.

Yeah. Thus "you generally need to rebuild your entire infrastructure... every five years or so."

The server hardware will be obsolete by then anyway.

The server hardware maybe. Not the power plant, (extensive) cooling hardware, infrastructure. These aren't GPUs floating in space, they're the entire computing, communications, cooling, power etc. infrastructure. The every five years thing would be like building a datacentre and everything supporting it in the middle of the desert and then nuking it every five years and starting over from absolute scratch.

If the cost to orbit is low enough, and there are no land taxes or electricity costs in space, and it solves the locality and latency issues for them, it starts to make more sense.

The cost to orbit, whatever it is, is pretty much money on top of whatever it would cost to build in a remote location on the surface. Taxes are minimal, zero or sometimes effectively negative for remote development on Earth. If you want to build a datacentre in the middle of the Sahara you can probably convince Morocco or someone to give you money. Solar panels are bit more efficient in space, and you get to use the 24 hours a day, but you also have to toss them every five years and buy (and launch) new ones. Along with everything else. And latency is going to be worse, not better. Your servers are whipping around the planet in polar orbits on the terminator. The minimum distance they are from any point on the surface is going to be about 300 km and that's going to occur for a few minutes a couple times a day. Most of the time they're going to be half the planet away.

I watched Scott Manley's video when it came out. He's right, the technical issues everyone seems to focus on aren't great, but they really aren't that bad. The economic and latency issues are the killers.

As far as I can tell nobody really has any consistent idea what "kill switch" is supposed to mean. Eg. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scientificamerican...

OpenAI and Anthropic already have kill switches, from the power cord through to account bans. If they don't want anyone using their model they can do that. Likewise, if the US government is sufficiently motivated to order a service provider to stop providing that service, they can absolutely do that. I get the feeling the actual companies are hoping they can implement something that has lots of buzzwords and does sort of what their "guard rails" do, and everyone will stop bugging them about it.

Naturally the FSF imagines some hypothetical technology that allows the government to reach into your home to shut off the matrix multiplies running on your own computer.

Excellent pedantism sir!

Not everyone shares your personal passtimes.

Technology isn't really the problem. We've got most or all the technology to do what the GP suggested. What we lack are engineering experience, infrastructure and good economic reasons to do it.

Europe had all the technology required to build a casino in the Nevada desert in the 16th century, but it took four hundred years to get around to building the first one in Las Vegas.

There's lots of desert where nobody really cares what you do, and even more ocean. We don't like building in those places because they're far away from where we want to use the services, difficult and expensive to access, and have issues with cooling, power supply, etc.

But all those problems are worse in space, and you generally need to rebuild your entire infrastructure, from power plant to GPU, every five years or so.

There's also nothing about "AI agent" that says "fully autonomous" but that shouldn't get in the way of wild speculation and some good pedantism.

Yeah, "very". They're going to make it like sudo where when you give permission to a program to write protected files once it has it forever after.

No, wait, that isn't how it works, is it?

It will probably be what finally pushes me to a Linux laptop, though.

Yeah, because Linux totally doesn't have any files or folders that you have to give special permission for programs to alter.

Teams crashes reliably whenever I start video on my laptop. I haven't noticed this very valuable feature in any other similar program so they're clearly inferior to Teams.

I will point out that celebrities typically buy coastal houses on bluffs overlooking the ocean

Bluffs aren't a great place. They collapse.

Using celebrity behaviour as a gauge is also not a great idea. They do all sorts of stupid shit. When a celebrity buys a multi-million dollar house on a beach or a bluff they're thinking "this is cool, let's party" not "is this a secure asset I'll be able to pass down to my children."

That's how it normally works. The subprime mortgage thing happened because banks discovered they could make those risky loans and then sell them to other people for a good price by disguising how risky they were by packaging them up and selling them as securities.

Which is kind of ironic considering the OP's comment about banks still providing mortgages for coastal properties. Apparently they're selling them more and more to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation which... packages them up and sells them as mortgage backed securities.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F0...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.insurancebusinessm...

What DRAM fab do you think has unsold capacity?

There isn't really any such thing as a DRAM fab. You can make DRAM at pretty much any of them, including the one in that guy's shed. There are some that specialize in DRAM. They all have unsold capacity, DRAM-specialist or not. The typical lead time is apparently about 18 months. The DRAM manufacturers (including in this story) keep saying they're "virtually" booked up for the next year. So you can call them up and schedule a run in a year, or 18 months, or maybe next week depending on what "virtually" means.

The OP is claiming that memory fabrication is "worse than OPEC" because nobody else can make memory. This is obviously not true. Intel is contemplating it. Many memory manufacturers have started up in the past. Most have gone bankrupt or been acquired. The limitation is that nobody wants to go completely nuts building new fabs that are very likely to be under utilized two, three or five years from now. So they're "only" increasing capacity at 20% per year. For context, world oil production capacity increases by a couple of percent a year and refining capacity, which is capital intensive like chip fabrication, by more like 0.5-1%.