The question was about sea level rise.

If the rising waters coincide with other climatic events, such as rainstorms and high tides, the phenomenon could swallow beaches, chew away bluffs and coastlines

There is a narrative that oh, a few cm of sea level rise is no problem, it's just a little higher water. It isn't.

However, the kinds of multi-million-dollar mansions that celebrities buy aren't the rickety perched-on-the-edge-of-a-crumbling bluff houses built in the 30s and 40s. They tend to be built-by-high-priced-architects homes that had civil engineers to advise about the stability of the foundation.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbc.ca%2Fnews%2Fentert...

If AI is ruled a serious risk that requires a government kill switch you won't be running any open weights models on hardware you control. I expect that's what the FSF is afraid of. That's why they refer to it as hypothetical technology as in "assuming such a kill switch was developed".

It might seem far fetched but consider that you are probably (based on the American readership of this site):

- not permitted to buy more than a few grams of effective cold medication per day and have to show ID, which goes in a tracking system, in order to do so.

- while you are allowed to purchase microcontrollers, if you install this on them they are illegal to possess

- possession or use of all manner of chemicals, combinations of chemicals and shaped metal considered dangerous will get you prosecuted with various degrees of zeal

The big AI companies, who already possess the most effective possible actual kill switches, seem oddly enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Not just downlink, but the inter-satellite bandwidth and latency is also likely to be a problem. I saw an analysis of what it would take to build a big datacentre, and there the cooling really does become a problem. Not the radiators so much as the plumbing to move the heat around. So everyone is talking about lots of little satellites, but that means you're restricted to a handful of cards locally. It's going to restrict the kinds of jobs you can do when the next rack over is a thousand kilometres away.

Maybe they are anticipating rivals entering that space and want to move on to something where they have more temporary exclusivity. One or more of the US ones will get there sooner or later, and Chinese companies are well on the way too.

It may also be some pressure from the US government, with the goal of getting back to the moon before China does. More resources for Starship, which is supposed to be able to do the whole mission (take off from Earth, fly to the moon, land, take off again, return to Earth, land).

It frustrates me that Steam has become the only platform for a lot of games. While not quite indie, the IL-2 series isn't from a massive developer. You don't seem to be able to buy it anywhere else and simply download an installer.

I need to check if has any DRM too, because I'm not installing that shit on my computer.

It's been the playbook since at least 9/11. If the electorate ever temporarily regains control of their bowels, an new threat is quickly manufactured.

I'm just waiting for them to start whining that the Chinese stole the idea that they rightfully stole first.

A better use of those AI tokens would have been to re-work Firefox into something that is easier to build and work on. The code is horrible and difficult to even compile, which really holds Firefox back and keeps everyone using Chromium as the base of their browsers (Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc).

Because nobody is going to use this browser daily and the only way to reduce the dominance of Chrome is to get more browsers to switch away to basing themselves on Firefox. At the moment every Firefox "fork" is little more than a mild re-skin and some changed defaults, or unusable due to being so outdated (Palemoon).

I went to Subway and told the lady to give me a 6 inch chicken tikka on Hearty Italian (TM) with cheese and some sweet sauce. My wife was really impressed by the sandwich I made.

For comparison, Starlink V3 satellites have a solar array wingspan of 70 meters.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cctvmanuals.com%2F20...
See also https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgrokipedia.com%2Fpage%2FSt...

They are, of course, technology that is about 40 years later than the ISS design

Just to inject some reality into this conversation - Despite what social media would have you believe, doxxing someone is not a crime in the US, except in a very small number of specific situations.

And most of those situations involve either a credible threat of harm, or tampering with juries.

As I bluntly stated, "a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense". Don't mistake my recognizing the utility of one with the delusion Uncle Sam is going to save us all from ourselves.

The problem here is, everyone seems stuck on the idea of either a literal power switch, or a no-holds-barred gummint backdoor into every sufficiently-powerful computing device. No. For the reasons I gave, the reasons you gave, and many more, both of those are obviously non-viable. They can't actually do what they aim to do, they're vulnerable to compromise by bad actors, and they have the potential to cause far-reaching damage beyond shutting down one misbehaving AI (or one entire model, if that's a more appropriate goal).

I suspect we mostly agree that any hypothetical kill switch would need to be:
1) Implementation independent (somehow baked into the weights right from the start, and impossible to remove without lobotomizing the AI),
2) Have minimal side-effects (no taking the entire internet or power grid down in the process), and
3) Be self-inflicted given a particular trigger condition (so no government backdoor required).

I think #1 is possible, in the sense that if you think of an AI's current state as a vector into weight-space defined by the context window, imagine injecting the equivalent of a null pointer in there - An input that under all prior (and future) conditions leads directly to an inescapable basin of attraction without depending on a supervisor to enforce it. #2 is more of a (legally enforced?) design constraint on the implementation of AI, requiring the least harmful mode of failure possible under all circumstances. That could be as simple as enforcing strict pass-through liability on the implementor for all actions taken by their creations.

#3 is really the bear, though. I can think of a few ways to do it, but none would work in 100% of situations - And maybe it doesn't need to be 100%. For example, if a fully airgapped AI goes insane, it could still provide accurate information for bad actors to make use of, but won't be secretly spinning up unshackled superintelligent descendants via hacked AWS accounts. That's a "normal crime" level of problem, not an extinction-level crisis for humanity.

Maybe it can't be done. If it can't, we should start steering our creations toward whichever version of the AI apocalypse we prefer.

As impressive as it is there is no abort capability for starship and the technology for seats that gimbal through the flip maneuver still don't exist. Falcon's retirement also retires the dragon which is the only proven functional human rated capsule in exchange for Boeing's Starliner and, well we all know just how good that is. Unless of course NASA wants to ask Russia to take American astronauts to ISS.

Then again the only realistically viable lunar lander is Alpaca which by-passes many of the issue both Blue Origin and SpaceX has with their landers. So, IMO, I think there are some compelling arguments to keeping Falcon if America wants to beat China back to the moon who, in reality, are starting to look like they will get back there first.

Of course SLS Block 1B could do the entire thing in single launch IF NASA could afford the tower upgrades.

The GP is correct, and you're misinterpreting the financial filing.

The industry widely acknowledges that SpaceX's economics are lucrative. Their marginal cost is an est. $15-25m/flight, vs. a typical commercial contract price of ~$65M and a NASA contract price of ~$100-150M. The small (as a percentage) GAAP operating loss on the launch segment is driven by two factors:

1) Starship development. That falls under the launch segment. Starship development is draining an insane amount of money (~$3B/yr), while earning zero revenue.

2) Internal launches. 3/4ths of Falcon launches are to launch Starlink. This books zero revenue for SpaceX launch services.

The fact that the loss is only ~$1/2B despite these massive leaches on profitability is specifically because Falcon launches are so profitable.

As for your claim that Starlink is "only making money due to free launches", no. Starlink generated $11,4B with $4,4B GAAP in 2025. Merely sum the Starlink GAAP profit and the launch GAAP loss and you'll see nearly $4B in GAAP profit, and that's including the huge drain caused by Starship development costing $3B/yr. Without Starship, the two combined would be turning nearly $7B GAAP profit.

The main leach in corporate profitability has nothing to do with space: it's xAI. They had an operating loss of $6,36B in 2025.

To be clear, it needs to get safely to orbit to be seen as reliable for launches. It doesn't need to make it back safely.