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.

What? Presumably are what? No one can hear you over your cowardice.

If you can recognize that, then you should be able to do the math and figure out why it won't work. A quick napkin-based computation is sufficient. If I can do it, you can do it.

If we had reasonable regulations then a data center could go anywhere and not be a problem, but since we don't, they can only go into unpopulated places with lots of water and power without causing harm. Normal DCs can just go into ordinary commercial zones because they use, while elevated, not completely obscene amounts of power and therefore water. And to return to the topic, this illustrates why AI DCs don't make sense in space, because cooling is harder in space than it is here.

That sounds like malarkey. What people love to do more is dump on other people, and what they can't help doing is trying to rationalize. They also on average don't spend much time thinking. So if you give them some missing blanks, they will fill them in whichever way makes them feel good.

Simple experiment. Put a garage sale sign out when the forecast shows some rain. The largest group of people think haha fucking idiot. Followed by people think maybe it's just in case or things might look better on Sunday. Then you have people thinking it's all just to fuck with them personally. In the last and smallest bucket you have the correct answer, the forecast was not even looked at; they were too busy planning a garage sale.

The reason dumb things like Hanlon's Razor and Buy Low Sell High work and need to be repeated is because of human nature. It's not because they're particularly brilliant axioms.

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

This seems essentially sane if they have money to burn...

They read too much sci-fi, not enough science fact, or both.

Well, you know, D-K... they don't know what survivor bias is.

They are sure they are smart because they got money, and don't understand that even if they did make an intelligent investment, there was a luck component.

PPIN seems to mostly be a server feature. I don't feel like going into BIOS right now but I found this about a PPIN option on a Lenovo server. It shows an AMD processor so it's highly relevant. On my system I don't have /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/topology/ppin and there's nothing about ppin in dmesg, but I don't know if that's because the feature's not enabled, or compiled in, or what.

NIMBYs aren't people who don't want things to be made. They're people who want them made somewhere else. But only the wealthy are clamoring for all of us to be replaced with computers, so that's not apt.

Finding a single place willing to put up with a datacenter is as much success as deploying thousands of these hypothetical space datacenters.

For the cost of a *single* SpaceX launch, they could basically bribe an entire small town's population to be happy with them. $50K a person and they'll *probably* pass public comment.

LLMs don't have children.