Society needs art. Artists produce art. There a pantheon of greats that had no commercial success in their lives but moved our culture, we’d be so much more culturally impoverished if we’d insisted they become shit plumbers.
The bigger issue: datacenters in space are disposable. All the extremely recyclable aluminum, silica - you extract it, manufacture it and instead of recycling it when it’s done you incinerate it in the atmosphere and scatter the ashes far and wide across the earth, the harder to recapture later.
You do this when the most fragile part in the system fails. Solar panels good for 25 years but the SSDs burn out after 2? Incinerate the lot!
This kind of thinking is late capitalist brain rot. This kind of waste should be a crime.
No, rockets landing themselves is just controlling the mechanism you use to have them take off, and builds on trust vectoring technology from 1970s jet fighters based on sound physics.
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.
This is a classic case of listing all the problems but none of the benefits. If you had horses and someone told you they had a Tesla, you'd be complaining that a Tesla requires you to dig minerals where a horse can just be born!
It's a matter of deploying it for cheaper or with fewer downsides than what can be done on earth. Launching things to space is expensive even with reusable rockets, and a single server blade would need a lot of accompanying tech to power it, cool it, and connect to other satellites and earth.
Right now only upsides an expensive satellite acting as a server node would be physical security and avoiding various local environmental laws and effects
Lower latency is a major one. And not having to buy land and water to power/cool it. Both are fairly limited as far as resources go, and gets exponentially expensive with competition.
The major downside is, of course, cost. In my opinion, this has never really stopped humans from building and scaling up things until the economies of scale work out.
> connect to other satellites and earth
If only there was a large number of satellites in low earth orbit and a company with expertise building these ;)
> And not having to buy land and water to power/cool it.
It's interesting that you bring that up as a benfit. If waterless cooling (i.e. closed cooling system) works in space, wouldn't it work even better on Earth?
You need to understand more of basic physics and thermodynamics. Fighting thermodynamics is a losing race by every measure of what we understand of the physical world.
From what I understand, very, very large radiators every few racks. Almost as much solar panels every few racks. Radiation shielding to avoid transient errors or damage to the hardware. Then some form of propulsion for orbital corrections, I suppose. Then hauling all of this stuff to space (on a high orbit, otherwise they'd be in shade at night), where no maintenance whatsoever is possible. Then watching your hardware progressively fail and/or become obsolete every few years and having to rebuild everything from scratch again.
The difference is that it was mostly clueless people like Thunderf00t who said it was impossible, who nobody took seriously. I don’t remember that basically all relevant experts claimed it was near impossible with current technology. That’s the situation now.
There’s also fairly clear distinction with how insane Elons plan has become since the first plans he laid for Tesla and SpaceX and the plans he has now. He has clearly become a megalomaniac.
Funnily enough, some of the things people said about Tesla is coming true, because Elon simply got bored of making cars. It’s now plausible that Tesla may die as a car company which I would not have imagined a few years ago. They’re arguably not even winning the self driving and robotics race.
No, people made fun of Elon for years because he kept attempting it unsafely, skirting regulations and rules, and failing repeatedly in very public ways.
The idea itself was proven by NASA with the DC-X but the project was canceled due to funding. Now instead of having NASA run it we SpaceX pay more than we'd ever have paid NASA for the same thing.
SpaceX is heavily subsidized and has extremely lucrative contracts with the US government. Not to mention they get to rely on the public research NASA produces.
He also said he could save the us a trillion dollars per year with DOGE, and basically just caused a lot data exfiltration and killed hundreds of thousands of people, without saving any money at all
Not to be crass, but as much as I dislike Musk US taxpayers are not responsible for the lives of children half a world away. Why is the US the only country held to this standard? No one ever complains that Turkey is killing thousands of children by not funding healthcare initiatives in Africa.
It is our money and we're not obligated to give it away if we think it's needed for something else. I'd note though, that in terms of the budget, USAID was like change in the couch cushions and nothing else in the world was even close in terms of lives saved per dollar. Why the man tasked with saving the government trillions of dollars went there at all was nonsensical to begin with.
Nevertheless, it is fully within our rights to pull back aid if we (collectively) decide it's best thing to do. But the only legal way to do that is through the democratic process. Elected can legislators take up the issue, have their debates, and vote.
If congress had canceled these programs through the democratic process, there almost certainly would've been a gradual draw down. Notice and time would be given for other organizations to step in and provide continuity where they could.
And since our aid programs had been so reliable and trusted, in many cases they became a logistics backbone for all sorts of other aid programs and charities. Shutting it all down so abruptly caused widespread disruption far beyond own aid programs. Food rotting in warehouses as people starved. Medications sitting in warehouses while people who needed them urgently died. The absolute waste of life and resources caused by the sudden disruption of the aid is a true atrocity.
Neither Elon or Trump had legal authority to unilaterally destroy those programs outside of the democratic process the way they did, so they are most directly morally responsible for the resulting death.
To add insult-to-injury, Elon was all over twitter justifying all of it with utterly deranged, insane conspiracy theories. He was either lying cynically or is so far gone mentally that he believed them. I'm not sure which is worse.
Currently SpaceX have managed to land the booster only, not the rocket itself, if you are thinking about Starship. And reusability of said rocket is also missing (collecting blown up pieces from the bottom of the ocean doesn't count!).
Your snipping is making it look broader than it is: you can’t misrepresent someone as being supportive of your product or cause, and you can’t distribute software that makes, or make yourself, likenesses of other people without their prior consent.
It doesn’t constrain what you do in contexts other than where you use someone’s likeness to misrepresent their position.
"or to influence elections or referenda" has quite a wide scope and was what concerned me. Publishing a political in a negative light absolutely could influence an election! But yes I should have included that part, not good by me, sorry.
So if I draw a caricature of a politician in Illustrator, then Adobe goes to prison?
What if I draw a caricature of my own friends, in Illustrator, without first getting their consent? Does Adobe go to prison?
What if I captioned my illustration with my friend saying "It's my round!" (which is misrepresenting their position because it's never their bloody round), would Adobe go to prison then?
Having looked up the text, I can now answer my own questions.
1. As "the production of an individual’s photograph, voice, or likeness" is not Illustrator's "primary purpose or function", Adobe are off the hook. So is anyone else if they argue that the "primary purpose or function" is not the production of an individual's photograph, voice, or likeness. So if Grok can be prompted to produce any image, including porn of individuals, provided it's not the primary purpose of Grok, they're untouchable.
2. Even if the bill weren't worded that way, a legal person in Ireland allows for corporate personhood (https://legalguide.ie/corporate-identity/#separate-legal-per...), so Adobe Corporation, as the legal person who "distributes, transmits, or otherwise makes available an algorithm, software, tool, or other technology, service, or device" (Illustrator) would not be subject to "imprisonment for a term not exceeding seven years", but it would be subject to "a fine" (maximum amount not specified)
3. Misrepresenting someone or not is irrelevant. The offense is when you either use the depicted person without their consent (regardless of how you represent them) or you intend to harm them (or recklessly don't consider the harm you might cause them), whether you have their consent or not. Harm specifically is {interfering "with the other person’s peace and privacy" or causing "alarm or distress" to them} _AND_ "a reasonable person would realise" that. It would be pretty difficult for a reasonable person (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person) to think misrepresenting a politician would cause them "alarm or distress" or interfere with their "peace and privacy", so you'd probably be fine producing images of politician XYZ saying they hate freedom, want to take your guns away, eat babies, etc., as they get that day-in, day-out and it hasn't stopped them yet.
> Your snipping is making it look broader than it is: you can’t misrepresent someone as being supportive of your product or cause, and you can’t distribute software that makes, or make yourself, likenesses of other people without their prior consent.
This sounds like it would effectively ban photography in public places. Or at least ban the manufacture/sale of cameras or software that takes photos.
> It’s a story about how humans can’t help personifying language generators,
There should be a word for the misunderstanding that the pervasively common use of anthropomorphic or teleological rhetorical modes to talk about undirected natural or designed for purpose artifacts, actually indicates that anthropomorphic/free-will/teleological assertions or assumptions are being made.
Language-bending tropes, just like tricky-wicked theorems, are the indispensable shortcuts that help us get to a point.
(I think the much more common danger is people over-anthropomorphizing people. I.e. all the stories of clear motivations and intents we tell ourselves, about ourselves and others, and credulously believe, after the fact.)
People treat LLMs as sentient, not realizing they are the worlds most sophisticated talking parrots. They can very convincingly argue both sides for any given argument you throw at it. They are incredible for research & discovery, not wisdom or decision making.
And a mere piece of wood banged up by the right type of rock is? If books can impart wisdom via the technology writing, why would a more complicated rock design infused with electricity but hsingyt same technology be any different?
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