It's not tinfoil crackpottery anymore, because they just want total power and control to peer into lives of their powerless subjects and be able to find evidence to use against anyone who challenges them. "Think of the children!" "Security demands it!" "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" and so it goes.

Except now it has taxpayer backing of crypto crooks to speculate and commit fraud.

"You're using electricity suspiciously! Where are the drugs?"

They don't have a true external auditor, have never passed an audit, and don't have a viable internal auditor either. Legislatively, they're required to pass an audit by 2028 but still lack a proper asset tracking system, functional inventory and accounting controls, or an exhaustive subcontractor tracing database. SIGAR was totally toothless to do anything about the trillions wasted in Afghanistan and served to give cover to corruption. See also: pre-Brooklyn VICE "Afghan Money Pit".

So THIS is how Nvidia is keeping the AI and GPU bubble inflated... giving away some limited time cocaine cloud GPU-backed servers to rug pull on users later with huge subscription prices. Own nothing and perpetually pay more and more.

Not news. Nothing to see here. Also, the Samsung SolarCell can be recharged by USB-C too.

That is Mexico Cancún-level bait-and-switch without the curtain-clad "negotiation" rooms.

Did they patent transparent aluminum?

The raises will disproportionately hit people in deregulated markets who can least afford them: residential neighbors of giga-DCs who pay retail rates while DCs pay wholesale rates. And you can bet the DCs have tax credits and subsidies too, also known as socialism for capital.

And water rates aren't far behind for similar reasons.

So much for trickle-down voodoo economics.

Windows iterates by doing more and more unnecessary work inefficiently, slowing down, and dropping compatibility to sell more hardware. Apple was historically better somewhat in not precisely following this with a 7 year hardware support lifetime cycle, but with OS 26 versions, they've definitely embraced greater planned enshitsolescence too. FOSS must hold the line by not treating computing resources as infinite nor compatibility or UX as optional.

I begrudgingly use a cracked Windows 11 Enterprise box to drive an oscilloscope data collection/interfacing machine because there's a stack of specialized software that has only winDOwS support.

AI is going to look really dot com hype shark jumping in 2-3 years after the bubble bursts, and AI features recklessly shoved into products requiring backend infrastructure to function will go dark. Although neither NVIDIA nor Microsoft may become the next WebVan, but OpenAI (Microsoft's investment) and CodeWeave sure look like it because they're un-diversified, niche businesses. And their industry is buying basically all of the HDDs and loads of GPUs, and building DCs faster than any customer demand can materialize to support them. That screams reckless over-expansion of productive capacity chasing competitive one-upsmanship landrace between billionaires who forgot how a business works and stays a business. At this point, they're setting their investors' money on fire while spinning 12 plates to distract from all of the money being pissed away.

Around 1995-1997, I worked at a nuclear engineering consulting company where there was a thermo engineer VP who was also a professor of thermodynamics in microgravity research. Several times, he opined heat pipes would be amazing for cooling the new generation of very hot PC CPUs in desktops and laptops because these were what were used in satellites to remove heat from systems that needed to radiate heat away from point heat sources to cold sources elsewhere. And, sure enough, not a year later did Zalman have a giant copper block heatsink with a heatpipe for cooling Socket A CPUs.

If someone weren't familiar, heat pipes are typically self-starting, passive cooling loops that use a sub-atmospheric sealed pressure chamber filled a very high latent of vaporization coolant (i.e., water or ammonia) and usually a wick core or channelized piping surface to make the journey from cold to hot without gravity assistance. (Passive two-phase fluid flow, even with gravity, is very painful.) Mobile phone vapor chambers are basically extremely short heat pipes. I guess one could make an aluminum or lithium as coolant heat pipe for rocket engines, scramjets, reactors, or blast furnaces if they had exotic enough materials to contain them.

Yup. I thought about alternatives to LEO: MEO, GEO, VLEO, GSO, SSO but realized the economics for each case is even worse.

In the meantime, gigaDCs are invading unincorporated and small towns driving up the local cost of water and electricity while adding to traffic and noise pollution to mine BTC or fulfill Zuck's and Sama's fanciful mirage of stonks going up forever by virtue of "if you build it, they will come". It's billionaires and corrupt politicians having Great Gatsby parties and sticking random people with the "check" in the form of externalities; socialism for them and austerity for everyone else.

Servers without racks and cases are still heavy; even cutting to $500/kg, that's still $500k/mt just for the initial orbit without maintenance burns. Cosmic ray shielding is really fucking heavy. And then it must also haul up solar panels good only for ~50% duty cycle, which is even heavier. What goes up, must come down.

"Disentangling" supply chains, planting malware in consumer and IT infrastructure gear, banning brands, and building a fleet of invasion barges with comically-large drawbridges to drop tanks over Taiwan's anti-invasion perimeter wall.