I don't agree with the logic that "something is hard/can't be done right now" is equivalent to "this is a terrible idea and won't work."
There are dozens of companies solving each problem outlined here; if we never attempt the 'hard' thing we will never progress. The author could have easily taken a tone of 'these are all the things that are hard that we will need to solve first' but actively chose to take the 'catastrophically bad idea' angle.
From a more positive angle, I'm a big fan of Northwood Space and they're tackling the 'Communications' problem outlined in this article pretty well.
It's not that it's hard, it's that it's stupid - it's based on a misunderstanding of the physics involved which completely negates any of the benefits.
It's the opposite of engineering, where you understand a problem space and then try to determine the optimal solution given the constraints. This starts with an assumption that the solution is correct, and then tries to engineer fixes to gaps in the solution, without ever reevaluating the solution choice.
What reason is there to build datacenters in space, though? Literally, what limitation do we face in building datacenters on Earth would building them in space improve?
The surface area of the earth is the limit (which only gets sunlight half the time) and only gets 1 billionth the energy emitted by the sun vs relatively unlimited surface area of solar panels in space
There are things which are difficult and have unsolved problems, and there are things that just fundamentally make no sense.
Nobody is proposing data centers at the South Pole. This isn’t because it’s difficult. It is difficult, but that’s not the reason it’s not being looked at. Nobody’s doing it because it’s pointless. It’s a massive hassle for very little gain. It’s never going to be worth the cost no matter what problems get solved.
Data centers in space are like that. It’s not that it’s difficult. It’s that the downsides are fundamentally much worse than the advantages, because the advantages aren’t very significant. Ok, you get somewhat more consistent solar power and you can reach a wider ground area by radio or laser. And in exchange for that, you get to deal with cooling in a near perfect insulator, a significantly increased radiation environment, and difficult-to-impossible maintenance. Those challenges can be overcome, sure, but why?
This whole thing makes no sense. Maybe there’s something we just aren’t seeing, or maybe this is what happens when people are able to accumulate far too much money and nobody is willing to tell them they’re being stupid.
That's not the argument though. The argument is "it can be done, the methods to do it are known, but the claims about space being an optimal location to locate our AI datacenters are false and the tradeoffs and unit economics of doing it makes no sense compared with building a data centre on earth somewhere with power and water, preferably not too hot.
(TLDR: the actual use cases for datacentres in space rely on the exact opposite assumption from visions of space clouds for LLMs: most of space is far away and has data transmission latency and throughput issues so you want to do a certain amount of processing for your space data collection and infrastructure and autonomous systems on the edge)
Unless thermodynamics suddenly changes, how exactly is the cooling problem being solved? Yeeting hot chunks of matter out the back? On a planetary body you have an entire massive system of matter to reject your heat into. In space, you have nothing.
The obvious solution is for half of the hardware to run on dark energy, counteracting the heat generated by the other half. Venture capitalists, use my gofundme site to give me the millions needed to research this, thanks.
A fascist takeover of a country that had bred so much innovation is kind of a big deal, even if it's already been discussed to death. Also there are a lot of people still in straight up denial, thinking this is about whichever longstanding gripe of theirs Trump has dredged up as justification for trashing individual Liberty and our Constitution. And yes, I know the guy himself is mainly just a brash troll tip of the spear for the latest round, and the rot goes much deeper.
Not to just say “skill issue” but… isn’t this just a skill issue?
The main negative impact seems to be trade but the UK already has free trade agreements post-Brexit with the EU. Most of the remaining differences in hurdles are paperwork, which seems like an opportunity for automation that should be almost trivial with AI. The US has successfully automated most compliance based hurdles in the last couple years from finance to law to contracting.
Looking at the positive impacts and lack of growth from those… also skill issue?
Not having to follow regulations from the EU is also a huge boon yet the UK seems to have taken no advantage of this. Which to me is especially concerning because for years we have been hearing that Europe is lagging behind in development because of over-regulation in fields like AI, yet when freed of those shackles the UK seems to be lagging just the same.
The other positive impact heavily touted was reduced net immigration. This >could< have had a short term positive impact (heavily debatable long term cutting off access to talent pools) yet they have almost 3x’ed the reduction in immigration from the EU with an increase in immigration from other sources. The effects of this are pretty palpable as the UK now has its own flavor of nationalist movement, has not seen wage increases in advanced sectors due to supply forces in their labor market, and universities are relying on overseas students to increase tuition revenue - training a labor force that will largely churn.
The last one I’ll hit is not having to follow EU laws. After Brexit, instead of taking advantage of legislative sovereignty, the UK temporarily codified all EU law to avoid disruption. Parliament has had ~5 years to review the laws but from what I can tell has made almost no progress (~10%) and extended the expiration because… they haven’t had time to read the other laws.
So overall while I’m no type of economic analyst it would seem the problems of Brexit are not actually Brexit, but almost all competency issues. If there’s British tech talent in this thread there’s probably a billion pound opportunity in just easily automating trade paperwork or helping UKG review the remaining EU laws.
Regulatory divergence is a cost all of its own. The main impact of Brexit is that manufacturers have to check three sets of rules rather than two and print "UKCA" next to "CE" on goods. As well as all the customs checks which appear because of divergence, including those within the UK because of the NI farming question.
The idea of growth through liberalization should have been subject to the question "which rules, exactly" before getting to the point of the referendum.
This again seems like something trivially automated (and is in other developed countries outside the EU like the US, JP, CN, etc). Why is nobody tackling this in the UK?
Sure it would have been better to do it before the referendum but it seems everyone on that side of the pond has been wallowing in grief for the better part of a decade which should have been more than enough time to remedy the issues. Moving _slower_ than regulation is… certainly a choice.
No American citizens’ rights have been taken away or can be taken away by a President.
We have whistleblowers and leakers from the administration itself on a literal weekly basis, our own Department of State actively funds Signal and Tor, our media has been heavily criticizing Trump and his allies for years. A couple organizations got hit with lawsuits for publishing misinformation or skirting campaign law, but that’s about it.
They tried to make flag burning illegal - which is illegal in Mexico, most of South America, all of Asia, and most of Europe - and it was shot down almost immediately as even that comes under 1st amendment rights.
Please don’t lump us into the same bucket as the UK. We may have a sharply divided electorate but we don’t have a failing state!
Cloudflare is the last party that should be running this for two reasons.
1. THey have already proven to be a bad faith actor with their "DDoS protection."
2. This is pretty much the typical Cloudflare HN playbook. They release soemthing targeted at the current wave and hide behind an ideological barrier; meanwhile if you try to use them for anything serious they require a call with sales who jumps you with absurdly high pricing.
Do other cloud providers charge high fees for things they have no business charging for? Absolutely. But they typically tell you upfront and don't run ideological narratives.
This is not a company we should be putting much trust in, especially not with their continued plays to become the gatekeepers of the internet.
1) how so? Pretty much everything they do for DDoS protection is at their customers choice. You might not like what people want for their site but lets not pretend that most companies aren't very happy with it.
2) Then don't use them? Either they provide enough value to pay them or they don't.
There is a whole segment of tech designed around helping you understand and manage cloud costs, through consultations, automations, etc. It has spawned companies and career paths!
Ime, cloud cost centres are intentionally confusing and annoying. I get emails telling me to check their dashboard for billing info which I inevitably never do. It’s designed that way.
Automation is not replacing sweatshops, they've just made the sweatshop workers more productive (economically) while requiring them to be less productive (in activity).
So all that's happened is an exponential increase in the output volume of sweatshops :/
There’s many industries that have moved beyond sweatshops due to automation.
Pepsi can’t get glass bottles from 3rd world sweatshops at anything competitive with a highly automated factory. In the vast majority of industries it’s just a question of levels of automation and climate control inherently makes automation easier by reducing variability in temperature and humidity. Of course the original distinction around climate control that created the term sweatshops is dying as such operations are largely dying out, but that only reinforces the notion of automation killing off the inherent advantages of unskilled cheap labor.
Everyone has been repeating this for months but inflation remains relatively normal so prices are not rising. Maybe it's a delayed effect that we won't see until later in the year, but at this point it is a theory and far from a fact, not something that needs to be repeated.
We have already observed that the opposite does not hold - in 2017 we slashed corporate income tax by 14% across the board, roughly the same as the tariffs but with far more surface area, and yet prices did not react and the benefits were not passed along to the consumer.
All we _know_ right now is that this is going to negatively impact economic growth by hitting corporations, the same way slashing corporate income tax positively impacted economic growth by benefitting corporations.
The noise about inflation is very likely propaganda trying to focus people on something that the government can control. (Yet, it looks like the US government is giving up on controlling it.)
Instead, tariffs have complex effects on the real economy. Universal tariffs do cause the concentration of wealth the GP was talking about (but it's way worse than the GP's claim) and deindustrialization. Inflation may or may not happen, it's not a given.
We will definitely see but it's still a theory at this point, and one that has not played out the other way in the past with a reduction on corporate tax _across the board_
> Fixed prices are a bet on TACO
Having been part of some of these conversations it's mostly a bet that democrats will win back control sometime in the next decade and do a full reversal. When that happens, you don't want to be caught out with less market share because you adjusted your prices to maintain your bottom line. Same logic as startups burning VC cash on offering free compute, 80% discounts on tokens, etc. to grab market share.
If you're in an elastic market, your priority is not to maximize profit, it's to make the market inelastic.
It's not a theory -- every business that imports product from international sellers is staring at their current import prices and their remaining pre-tariff inventory numbers right now. (See the huge import volume burst pre-tariffs)
What they're trying to decide is (a) do they eat the cost of tariffs in margin or (b) do they raise prices?
That's a decision that doesn't need to be made until they burn through warehoused inventory, but for high-volume businesses (read: retail) it's measured in months at most.
Once that hits, either (a) or (b) will be chosen, and neither is great for equities markets / the economy.
Moreover, there's no "hiding this under the rug" once publicly traded companies begin to report quarterly financial results AFTER burning through their pre-tariff inventory. They can't not explain to their shareholders why they've taken a hit to profitability.
Best possible case is retail prices rise, once, by the amount of tariffs, and that's that.
But a 15%+ price hike is going to be an uncomfortable narrative for those in power who insist tariffs won't raise prices... so I'm not betting that conversation goes logically.*
* See the reaction part of Amazon got when they "accidentally" line-itemed tariff charges as evidence on how dangerous the administration sees transparency around tariff costs
> But a 15%+ price hike is going to be an uncomfortable narrative for those in power who insist tariffs won't raise prices... so I'm not betting that conversation goes logically.
As someone selling on eBay from notUSA, the cost increases won’t just be the tariff, but some additional fixed and variable fee for the privilege of determining the tariff and potential loss of the cheapest shipping options.
There are dozens of companies solving each problem outlined here; if we never attempt the 'hard' thing we will never progress. The author could have easily taken a tone of 'these are all the things that are hard that we will need to solve first' but actively chose to take the 'catastrophically bad idea' angle.
From a more positive angle, I'm a big fan of Northwood Space and they're tackling the 'Communications' problem outlined in this article pretty well.